Category Archives: Makes me want to go out and beat someone with a stick

The Patriarchy is real. Only you (and you, and you, and you) can stop it.

Here’s a woman who Gets It:

“In the United States last week there were people who wouldn’t let boys play a baseball championship final because a girl was on the opposing team. She’d already had to sit out two games because of their demands. Why? Did she, a competitive athlete and a member of her team, chose to? Was she being good and respectful when she acceded to their demands? Why were they not asked to forfeit their games? What messages were sent to her and her teammates? This is not complicated. It sent the wrong messages. Confusing messages. Incoherent messages. You need to know that she should have been allowed to play and not have had to sit out two games. These people, and others like them, all over the world, led exclusively by religious men, are scared of you and will not let you be.”

and

“…whereas [not playing a baseball game because there is a girl playing for the opposition] is a type of daily, seemingly harmless micro-aggression and the other [honor killings] is a lethal macro-aggression they share the same roots. The basis of both, and escalating actions in between, is the same: To teach you, and all girls subject to these men and their authority, a lesson: “Know your place.”

This author, Soraya Chemaly, really really does get it. She sees the connections, both large and small, that make the Patriarchy such a pervasive, corrupting influence on women. Almost everything she says also applies to minorities. And LGBT folk. And anyone who isn’t a middle-aged well-to-do white male.

Read this article. Pay attention to it. Like so many other injustices and unpleasantries in this world, you must start fighting them at your local level, one-on-one.

“Ignorance: the root and stem of all evil”

Yesterday North Carolina travelled back in time to 1875, and here is the state constitutional amendment that was added:

As ThinkProgress points out, 137 years later North Carolina passed its next amendment dealing with marriage, with just as little foresight and just as much fear and hate.

An old acquaintance reminded Facebook readers last night of Plato’s comment: “Ignorance: the root and stem of all evil.”

…and people wonder why I won’t read Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card, author, member of the board of the National Organization for Marriage, and poorly-disguised closet case, is at it again:

Those signs on people’s lawns, warning you that the [North Carolina] pro-marriage Amendment One will harm children.

Of course it’s a lie – in fact, it’s really designed to fool careless people into thinking that the amendment is against traditional marriage. They’re co–opting the language of conservatives in order to trick conservatives into voting against their moral values.

But they’re inadvertently tipping their hand; they’re letting us see what’s really at stake.

There’s no need to legalize gay marriage. I have plenty of gay friends who are committed couples; some of them call themselves married, some don’t, but their friends treat them as married. Anybody who doesn’t like it just doesn’t hang out with them.

It’s just like heterosexual couples who are living together without marriage. Their friends still treat them like married couples, inviting them places together; they’re a social unit. Those who strongly disapprove leave them alone.

There are no laws left standing that discriminate against gay couples. They can visit each other in the hospital. They can benefit from each other’s insurance.

No, legalizing gay marriage is not about making it possible for gay people to become couples.

It’s about giving the left the power to force anti-religious values on our children. Once they legalize gay marriage, it will be the bludgeon they use to make sure that it becomes illegal to teach traditional values in the schools.

Our children will be barraged with the deceptions of the left. Parents will be forbidden to remove their children from the propaganda.

Any child with any gender or sexual confusion will be pushed inexorably away from the decision to establish a traditional family. They’ll be told, again and again, that any sign of effeminacy or gender confusion or same-sex attraction is an irrevocable, lifelong compulsion and they might as well shape their lives accordingly.

The left is at war with the family, and they want control of our children’s education. That’s what those signs on the lawns are about.

I’m not making this up – it’s already happening wherever the left has complete control of education. Parents in those places are already forbidden to opt out of sexual and gender propaganda.

And with the teachers’ unions absolutely under the control of the extreme left, don’t kid yourselves: Legalizing gay marriage will make the false claims of the gay lobby the established religion of the American school system.

If there were even a shred of science behind the absurd claims about gender and sexuality coming from the left, there might be a case for allowing this to happen. But there is no science behind it.

In fact, the scientific evidence we have points in the opposite direction: Same-sex attraction is not a strait jacket; people’s desires change over time; gay people still have choices; a reproductive dysfunction like same-sex attraction is not a death sentence for your DNA or for your desire to have a family in which children grow up with male and female parents to model appropriate gender roles.

Heterosexual pair-bonding has been at the heart of human evolution from the time we divided off from the chimps. Normalizing a dysfunction will only make ours into a society that corrodes any loyalty to it, as parents see that our laws and institutions now work against the reproductive success (not to mention happiness) of the next generation.

But your children will never hear any of that information, true as it is, because it contradicts the dogmas of the left.

Legalizing gay marriage is about driving all contrary evidence or argument out of the public discussion. That’s why the gay-marriage lobby tries to stifle discussion – they have no arguments that stand up to serious investigation.

They brand their opponents’ arguments as religious, and therefore illegitimate; but in fact their own arguments are just as faith-based, just as lacking in evidence, as any Bible-based argument.

So a vote for the amendment is a vote to keep alive the possibility of educating our children without having the false dogmas of the extreme left drilled into them, while contrary arguments are barred.

It’s a vote to allow actual research into human sexuality to continue (or begin again), because the question will remain open.

It’s a vote for freedom of religion – the only right that is in serious danger in America today.

Like black people, gays are reeeeeally reeeeeally scary to some people.

I wouldn’t demand that people not buy Card’s books or read his stories.

But I sure as hell won’t.

Same shit, different day

Everyone over the age of 40 should remember this magazine cover:

(I bet you hid your copies of NatLamp from your mom, didn’t you?)

Today, the Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives did something that was similar but  not quite so funny:

Can you say “the Republican War on Women”?

Side note: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi nicely summed up the situation when she referred to the Democratic party’s proposal, which was to generate money for the student loan fund with an additional tax on oil and gas companies (that don’t pay their fair share of taxes anyway):

“We [Democrats] prefer tax subsidies for big oil rather than the health of America’s women.”

Since when do we vote on civil rights?

It is currently against the law in Minnesota for anyone to get married save one man and one woman. That law has existed since the 1970s.

However, that’s just not enough for a bunch of out-of-state interests. They want to make sure that the law cannot change, even if demanded by legislation.

Minnesota will have an entry on the November ballot to make one-man-one-woman a state constitutional requirement. The measure was passed by the Republican-led state legislature, and will be put before the voters this year.

Needless to say, there is a lot of lobbying and campaigning on the issue. One of the biggest visible groups supporting the amendment is the Minnesota Family Council. Formerly known as the Berean League, this is the same group that fought tooth-and-nail for years to keep anti-sodomy laws on the state books. It’s interesting to note that not a single straight person was ever brought up on such charges; the laws were only used to prosecute gays and lesbians.

Here is only the latest in a series of expensively-produced video ads supporting the amendment:

It’s also worth noting that the MFC has raised over a million dollars for their effort, almost all of it from seven wealthy out-of-state donors. ($100 bet says that one or more of them are closely affiliated with the Catholic Church, just as NOM is.) Minnesotans United for All Families, one of the largest groups opposing the amendment, has also raised about a million dollars from over 50,000 supporters.

Guess which group is the real grassroots effort. (The Spouse and I went canvassing for them last Saturday.)

The saddest thing about this amendment is that it is not even necessary; existing statutes prevent gay marriage in the state. The proposed amendment is a move by homophobic bigots and religious haters to ensure that the state never has gay marriage.

How can “Limited government!” and “No abortions!” be stated in the same (Republican) political platform?

Here’s one of the Doonesbury cartoons recently censored by several newspapers, and a message your friendly neighborhood white, middle-aged male Republican legislator doesn’t want you to read:

The Kansas City Star was one of the newspapers which refused to run the current comic thread concerning a new Texas law, heartily supported by Governor Rick Good Hair Perry, that requires intrusive sonogram examinations prior to receiving an abortion.

What’s sauce for the goose isn’t necessarily sauce for the gander. Right?

In old Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman. She innocently opened a buried urn she had found and released the evils of the world that the gods had purposely confined and buried. (Sounds like Eve, doesn’t it?) This was part in parcel with the gods’ efforts to punish humanity for receiving the gift of fire given to them by Prometheus.

Pandora is now a member of the Kentucky state legislature. She’s in the guise of state senator Jimmy Higdon (a Republican, naturally). Higdon is sponsoring Senate Bill 158, which is a proposed state amendment designed to

“…prohibit any human authority from burdening actions that are based on religious beliefs, except in support of a compelling governmental interest using the least restrictive means to further that interest.”

The Family Foundation of Kentucky and the Catholic Conference of Kentucky both endorse this attempt to add an amendment to the Kentucky state constitution that would allow people to legally perform actions based upon religious belief, even if those actions are illegal.

Isn’t it ironic that this same bunch of self-congratulatory nincompoops who want to “expand” religious freedoms (presumably for fundie Christians and Catholics) don’t want those same freedoms allowed for fundie Muslims? All groups would presumably be allowed to arrange for forced marriages, prevent women from owning property, and even presumably allow for “honor” killings.

Karen Santorum: no longer a mystery

I’ve been curious about Karen Santorum as an entity in the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination process.

Most potential First Ladies are first and foremost political non-entities. They generally strive to present a pleasantly female harmony to their husbands’ melody.

Not Karen Garver Santorum.

First of all, she looks like hell. She makes appearances with her hair looking like it hasn’t been washed in weeks. She dresses very drably, and makes statements that exactly parallel those of her spouse Frothy Mix Santorum. (She has asked the Holy Spirit to speak through her husband.)

She and Frothy claim to be devout Catholics, and as such they condemn abortion (for any reason) and sex outside marital procreation.

However, in the 1980s Karen Garver lived with her boyfriend for six years.

The man she lived with was a doctor who ran a medical practice that included abortion procedures.

But wait! The creepiest part of this little exercise in hypocrisy? Dr. Tom Allen, Garver’s paramour, was the obstetrician that attended her mother when Karen Garver was born.

But wait! Now we have the full picture here. Media clown Glenn Beck recently interviewed the Santorums, and here’s where it gets truly despicable:

K. Santorum: What did it for me, though, was Obamacare; Because we have, as you know, a little precious, a little angel, little Bella, a special needs little girl, and when Obamacare passed, that was it, that put the fire in my belly.

Beck: How much of a danger are the most vulnerable in our society if Obamacare actually kicks in and the whole bell curve…

R. Santorum: It’s all about utilization, right? It’s all about how do we best allocate resources where they are most effectively used?…Government allocating resources best on how to get the best bang for your dollars and it’s all about utility. It’s all about the usefulness of the person to society, instead of the dignity of every human life and the opportunity for people who love and care for people to give them the best possibility to have the best possible life.

The Santorums break not a single blush at the attempt to use their daughter Bella (born with Trisomy 18) in an effort to vilify universal health care. They do this in the face of the undeniable fact that if the Santorums had been a couple struggling financially with no job-related health benefits, or if either had been a single parent faced with an insurance company that refused to cover “pre-existing conditions” like Trisomy 18, that little Bella would likely not have survived birth.

Yet here they are deriding the Affordable Health Care Act from their teeny tiny pedestals of privilege. And using a sick child (hear this, Sarah Palin?) to parade their anti-woman, anti-life beliefs in public is loathsome.

You still want to vote for Rick “Frothy Mix” Santorum?

Words are insufficient

Here is a couple of the videos from PETA’s new advertising campaign. Some gibberish about the “BWVAKTBOOM” phenomenon…

I cannot fathom the depth of depravity required to think that these videos portray anything positive, or something that any sane human would find desirable. Sexual violence isn’t funny, or entertaining, or enviable.

Not one tiny bit.

UPDATE: the gay video for this campaign, while it implies violence (“got the plastic tarp and duct tape…just in case”), it shows no violence unlike the ones featuring women.

Figures.

Sharia by any other name…

United Christian States-The Lord’s News — February 12, 2024

Police confirmed to US-TLN that Joseph Green was sent back to the United Christian States on Sunday despite protests from human rights groups.

Green’s controversial tweet last week sparked more than 30,000 responses and several death threats.

Insulting G*d is considered blasphemous in Dominionism and is punishable by death in America.

Green, 23, fled New York state last week and was detained upon his arrival in the Canadian capital Ottawa on Thursday.

He had tweeted his doubts about G*d at The Savior’s Birthday last week. American clergy rightly condemned his remarks as blasphemous.

Green apologized and deleted the tweet, but when he continued to receive threats, he left for Canada.

The two countries do not have a formal extradition treaty. but Canada has good relations with the United States as an associated Dominionism country, says the  US-TLN’s Robert Michaelson, in Ottawa.

Green’s lawyer obtained an injunction on Sunday to allow him to stay in Canada until his case was heard, but it was too late, our correspondent says.

“The nature of the charges against the individual in this case are a matter for the American authorities,” America’s domestic ministry said in a statement.

Amnesty International has warned that Green could be executed in the U.C.S. if he is found guilty of apostasy.

“If the Canadian authorities hand over Joseph Green to the U.C.S., they could end up complicit in any violations he suffers,” said William Brownstone of Amnesty’s North American division.

~~~

This was derived from this BBC story about a Saudi being deported from Malaya because he posted tweets casting doubts about Muhammed’s divinity. The accused will likely be dead by next week.

Sharia law is horrific (apostasy is punishable by death, FFS), but there’s not reason to think that following Levitican and Dominionist law would be any less immoral.

Couldn’t happen in America? How sure are you about that?

An object lesson in making the moral choice

Dan Savage nailed this one.

Jakob Spirig smuggled four Jewish women from Germany into Switzerland in 1942. Smuggling in Jewish refugees being a crime in Switzerland at the time, he was convicted and served time in prison. In 1994 the Swiss government pardoned him and all others who broke that law, because it was the right thing to do.

Last week the British House of Lords refused to consider pardoning Alan Turing. Turing was the preeminent cryptographer employed by the British government to break Nazi Germany’s military codes; his efforts laid the groundwork for modern-day computing.  Turing was convicted of being a homosexual in 1952, which at the time was a crime in Britain.  He lost his job, his clearances, and was publicly disgraced. Two years later he committed suicide.

In the words of Justice Minister Lord McNally:

“The law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.”

This is nothing but a blind refusal to do the moral thing, and a mealy-mouthed one at that.

Someecards hits the X-ring!

To tell the truth, it’s small surprise. The Komen Foundation, much like United Way, is infamous for wasting large percentages of donated moneys to staff salaries, administration, and overhead. Less than 15% of your donations go to cancer research, and now none of your donations go to fund breast cancer screenings for poor women — at least as far as Planned Parenthood is concerned.

Shame, shame on the Komen people, especially the chair of its board Alexine Clement Jackson, and its CEO Nancy Brinker.

The Komen Foundation corporate office number is 877-465-6636. Give them a call (be firm but polite, please.) Tell them exactly how you feel the next time you go to a women’s health event in which Komen has the nerve to raise its head. Let’s see if the anti-choice haters make up the difference from the millions in lost donations that will be needed to keep Jackson and Brinker in their phoney-baloney jobs (at $400K+/year, thanks for asking). [It seems Jackson took no salary for the position of board chair -- my bad.]

Side note: The Denver and Connecticut chapters of the Komen Foundation have broken with their national organization and told the board to go fuck itself. Those two groups didn’t break faith with those who need their services most.

Thanks to Joe for the Someecards barb, and thanks to The Spouse for this tip on Mr. Colbert’s take on the Komen litigations:

“Anybody who knows me knows I am a huge supporter of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, which raises millions of dollars a year in the fight against breast cancer . . . So I’m giving a big Tip of my Hat to the Komen foundation for spending almost a million dollars a year in donor funds to sue these other groups. If they don’t own the phrase “for the Cure,” then people might donate money thinking it’s going to an organization dedicated to curing cancer, when instead it’s wasted on organizations dedicated to curing cancer.”