Friday Reads: The Hell-to-all-ya Chorus
Posted: February 14, 2014 Filed under: morning reads, religious extremists, The Right Wing, Women's Rights 33 CommentsThe most ridiculous meme to come out of the right wing recently is that the Constitution supports the right to ruin other people’s lives 
because of one’s narrow grasp on reality coming from one fairly narrow view of one very specific religion. Those of us that don’t want to adhere to their delusions are persecuting them! No matter how many times these people couch their bigotry, suspension of belief in science, and greed agenda in their religious beliefs, most of us know that it’s simply an agenda of narrow minded hatred that demands conformity from all. The sad thing is that one political party in a two party state has been completely railroaded by these religious extremists who confuse the establishment clause of our Constitution with their right to ramrod everything they label the correct”religion” down every one else’s throat.
One of the worst examples of blatant pandering to this crowd comes from this speech by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal who professes to be a Catholic, has a degree in biology from a good school, and seems to wander one day from the message of not being the stupid party to being its main spokesperson. Why does Politico give this loser–who has no chance at ever being President and will never hold another elected office in Louisiana because we all royally disapprove of him–a voice? Which Billionaire Asshat has paid for the virtual column space? Bobby Jindal is obviously going for the Bachmann contingent in Iowa’s weird republican caucuses. He’s picked up Sarah Palin’s War on Christmas book and read straight from it.
In a Thursday night speech at Ronald Reagan’s presidential library, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal will warn of a “silent war” on religious liberty in America and urge states to pass laws designed to block overreach by the Obama administration.
The 4,500-word address, shared first with POLITICO, touches on several hot-button issues, including same-sex marriage and contraception. Jindal, a potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate trying to woo social conservatives, argues that liberals will use the mantra of anti-discrimination to force people to violate their religious beliefs.
“The American people, whether they know it or not, are mired in a silent war,” Jindal will say at the Simi Valley, Calif., event. “It threatens the fabric of our communities, the health of our public square and the endurance of our constitutional governance.”
“This war is waged in our courts and in the halls of political power,” he adds, according to the prepared remarks. “It is pursued with grim and relentless determination by a group of like-minded elites, determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith into a land where faith is silenced, privatized and circumscribed.”
The 42-year-old governor calls the upcoming Supreme Court decision on whether government can force Hobby Lobby craft stores to cover contraception through their health insurance plans just one of the battles being fought over religious liberty.
Citing a piece of failed legislation in Illinois, Jindal suggests that liberals will eventually try to pass laws designed to pressure churches to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies against their will. He also will blast the New Mexico Supreme Court for ruling last August that a wedding photography business violated the state’s Human Rights Act by refusing to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony.
“This is the next stage of the assault, and it is only beginning,” Jindal plans to say. “Today, an overwhelming majority of those who belong to a religious denomination in America — that’s more than half the country — are members of organizations that affirm the traditional definition of marriage. All of those denominations will be targeted in large and small degrees in the coming years.”
This is pure nonsense and is obviously Jindal’s bid to get attention in the Iowa Caucuses. No one is doing anything to any one inside their churches. This so reminds me of watching the screaming mimis in front of schools being forced to segregate. None of us should have to endure their craziness in public spaces. PERIOD. No one should be treated like a second class citizen because some one selectively pulls a few lines out of a seriously edited, reedited, and badly translated bit of iron age fiction then screams it’s my right to do whatever I want to because BIBLE! That’s just so astoundingly unAmerican it’s not even funny. In that case, I’ll just suggest we all stand out there with stones in our hands and assert our right to stone them for wearing the wrong hair style, eating shellfish and pigs, and sporting polyblend clothing. It’s our gawdamned religious rights!!!
Unfortunately, Jindal’s delusions are the new crazy republican legislative push. Kansas continues to be at the epicenter of insanity and hatred. Opposing marriage equality by way of screaming religious freedom is the new refuge of the narrow minded. It was the same refuge used to justify slavery and stop interracial mixing and marrying back in the day. It’s also being used on women who overwhelmingly use birth control. A few folks think all women should live within the bounds of their weird ethos. This group that seems to have no idea that forcing you religious beliefs on birth control or abortion on your employees or your neighbors is the religious bigotry. These religious views should not get to trump every one else’s ethos.
Virtually all secularists and even the vast majority of American Catholics see no problem with the use of artificial birth control, so the issue doesn’t generate much sympathy in the public at large. Then there’s the fact that the Obama administration created a contraception exemption for churches and at least some other religiously based organizations. Isn’t that good enough?
Apparently it isn’t for the numerous groups that have filed suit in the matter. And sorry, but their concerns can’t just be waved away by linking to a column by Linda Greenhouse that expresses contemptuous condescension for the plaintiffs in one of the cases (an order of nuns called the Little Sisters of the Poor). The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, but Greenhouse thinks the suit is ridiculous; therefore, the justices have been brainwashed by a seductive “story.” That’s really all there is to her argument.
As Lyle Denniston explains in a helpful post at SCOTUSblog, the issues raised by the case — and by the other mandate-related cases before the court this term — are real, though they will inevitably appear to be trivial to those who regularly view religious truth claims as trivial.
As for gay marriage and anti-discrimination, Chotiner appears not to recognize that his own flippant views — which are very widely held among secular liberals — pose a very real threat to the religious freedom of millions of his fellow citizens. As countless liberals have done before him, Chotiner breezily equates those believers who once appealed to Scripture in defense of racism and those who currently reject gay marriage. The first position has been socially, morally, and legally marginalized with no negative consequences for faith, Chotiner asserts, and the same will soon be true about the second. So what’s the big deal?
The big deal is that strictures against homosexuality are rooted far more deeply in the Judeo-Christian tradition than racism ever was. Yes, slavery is found throughout the Scriptures and comes in for criticism only, at best, by implication. But race-based slavery — and the racism that made it possible and continues to infect ideas and institutions throughout the West to this day — receives no explicit endorsement from the Bible.
Which isn’t to say that those seeking to justify race-based slavery or racism couldn’t, and didn’t, twist biblical passages to make them provide such justification. But the Hebrew Bible and New Testament clearly do not teach (either explicitly or implicitly) that buying, owning, and selling African slaves is next to godliness.
Yes, folks, separate and unequal may become the law in Kansas if the religious kooks get their way.
Denying services to same-sex couples may soon become legal in Kansas.
House Bill 2453 explicitly protects religious individuals, groups and businesses that refuse services to same-sex couples, particularly those looking to tie the knot.
It passed the state’s Republican-dominated House on Wednesdaywith a vote of 72-49, and has gone to the Senate for a vote.Such a law may seem unnecessary in a state where same-sex marriage is banned, but some Kansas lawmakers think different.
They want to prevent religious individuals and organizations from getting sued, or otherwise punished, for not providing goods or services to gay couples — or for not recognizing their marriages or committed relationship as valid.
This includes employees of the state.
The law claims to protect the rights of religious people, but gender rights advocates such as Equality Kansas are dismayed.
“Kansans across the state are rightly appalled that legislators are spending their efforts to pass yet another piece of legislation that seeks to enshrine discrimination against gay and lesbian people into law,” state chairwoman Sandra Meade said.
“HB 2453 is a blatant attempt to maintain second-class citizen status for taxpaying gay and lesbian Kansans.”
Despite the blowback, its chances of passing seem pretty good.
Republicans dominate the state’s Senate and Gov. Sam Brownback is a conservative Christian known for taking a public stand against same-sex marriage.
Brownback has already praised the bill in an interview with a local newspaper.
“Americans have constitutional rights, among them the right to exercise their religious beliefs and the right for every human life to be treated with respect and dignity,” he told The Topeka Capital-Journal.
Yes. If you offend some one’s religious “sensibilities” in Kansas, it is perfectly alright for them to persecute you, deny you service, and basically turn you into third class citizen. How can any of this be remotely legal let alone put into law? How can your employers religion or the religion of the Subway franchise owner on the corner trump your right to avoid their prescriptions and proscriptions?
Let’s start, though, with the argument most people have focused on during the run-up to the contraceptive-mandate cases—that being for-profit corporations, the challengers cannot assert a “free exercise” claim at all. It’s a strong argument, but one that takes more subtlety to assert than most published comments seem to display.
That’s because it is routine to say that free exercise is an individual right, and that “corporations are not people.” But in this context, the argument is flawed at the outset. Free exercise is actually primarily a group right, extended to religious bodies, in corporate form or other wise. The term “free exercise” in fact originally referred to a right held only by groups. It dates back at least to the 17th Century, and is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the right or permission to celebrate the observances (of a religion)”—that is, a privilege granted by monarchs to specific faiths to hold their services in public.
Religion, Emile Durkheim wrote, is primarily a set of “beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” Most religious “exercise” can’t be done alone. One of the earliest—and most embarrassing—cases brought under the Free Exercise Clause was entitled Late Corporation of the Presiding Bishop v. United States, which upheld an Act of Congress dissolving the Mormon Church and seizing all its property ($3,000,000 in 1887 dollars). The Mormons argued that punishing their church for polygamous beliefs violated the First Amendment, but the Court ridiculed the idea. “No doubt the Thugs of India imagined that their belief in the right of assassination was a religious belief,” the justices briskly reasoned, “but their thinking so did not make it so.”
Can anyone imagine this case coming out the same way in 2014, on the grounds that a corporation has no religious rights? Or that the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ parent company, The Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of Pennsylvania, Inc., has no rights except the individual rights of its members?
The important distinction here, of course, is that Hobby Lobby and the other challengers are for-profit corporations. The Mormon Church, like a lot of religious bodies, is a religious corporation. And despite the disinformation floating around about the Little Sisters of the Poor case, religious corporations have a very firm exemption to the contraceptive mandate. Would the Court want to rewrite the statute—and possibly make corporate law into a teeming mess of exemptions and inquisitions?
There’s a way out, of course; and that is to rely on precedents like Lee and say that the “for profit issue” doesn’t need to be decided, because in any case the government’s interest in uniform application of the mandate trumps whatever burden it may place on any secular employer, corporation or not. If Congress disagrees, it knows how to write a limited exemption to the mandate, the way it did for Edwin Lee. That would be the best all around; the Tenth Circuit opinion upholding Hobby Lobby’s claims is such a wretched piece of work that a sane justice might not want to touch it, much less affirm it.
Let’s put all this enforced public piousness in light of a changing USA and a changed Europe. What seems to drive these pious folks is fear and insecurity.
Just last year, the Princeton economist Angus Deaton, in his book “The Great Escape,” demonstrated that the enlargement of well-being in at least the northern half of the planet during the past couple of centuries is discontinuous with all previous times. The daily miseries of the Age of Faith scarcely exist in our Western Age of Fatuity. The horrors of normal life in times past, enumerated, are now almost inconceivable: women died in agony in childbirth, and their babies died, too; operations were performed without anesthesia. (The novelist Fanny Burney, recounting her surgery for a breast tumor: “I began a scream that lasted unremittingly during the whole time of the incision. . . . I felt the knife rackling against the breast bone, scraping it while I remained in torture.”) If God became the opiate of the many, it was because so many were in need of a drug.
As incomes go up, steeples come down. Matisse’s “Red Studio” may represent the room the artist retreats to after the churches close—but it is also a pleasant place to pass the time, with an Oriental carpet and central heating and space to work. Happiness arrives and God gets gone. “Happiness!” the Super-Naturalist cries. “Surely not just the animal happiness of more stuff!” But by happiness we need mean only less of pain. You don’t really have to pursue happiness; it is a subtractive quality. Anyone who has had a bad headache or a kidney stone or a toothache, and then hasn’t had it, knows what happiness is. The world had a toothache and a headache and a kidney stone for millennia. Not having them any longer is a very nice feeling. On much of the planet, we need no longer hold an invisible hand or bite an invisible bullet to get by.
Yet the wondering never quite comes to an end. Relatively peaceful and prosperous societies, we can establish, tend to have a declining belief in a deity. But did we first give up on God and so become calm and rich? Or did we become calm and rich, and so give up on God?
Here’s yet another attempt at trying to free up religious practice while making certain only the right religion gets it’s due. This is a law 
offered up in Georgia.
A prime example is the proposed Senate Bill 283, sponsored by state Sen. Mike Dugan, R-Carrollton.
The bill, if passed, would allow local school systems that chose to do so to “educate students about the history of traditional winter celebrations and allow students and school system staff to offer traditional greetings regarding the celebrations, including … ‘Merry Christmas’; … ‘Happy Hanukkah’; and … ‘Happy holidays.’”
Senate Bill 283 also would allow “scenes or symbols associated with traditional winter celebrations, including a menorah or a Christmas image, such as a nativity scene or Christmas tree” to be displayed on school property, as long as the display “includes a scene or symbol of … more than one religion; or … one religion and at least one secular scene or symbol.”
Such displays could be put in place under the condition that they “shall not include a message that encourages adherence to a particular religious belief.”
Of course, Dugan’s bill owes as much to political considerations as to any particular concern that he or other lawmakers might have with regard to any inadequacy in public-school instruction on “winter celebrations.” It’s clear that the sole purpose of the bill is to allow Republican lawmakers, who comprise a majority of General Assembly members, to go back home claiming to have struck a blow against the alleged “war on Christmas” as part of their re-election bids.
If you’ll pardon the expression, though, the devil is in the details here. Let’s suppose the bill does become law. A couple of issues, which might be attractive to any litigiously minded heathen like the ACLU, or any number of godless liberals who might imprudently insist on an exact interpretation of a state law, immediately present themselves.
First, of course, is the broad phrase ‘traditional winter celebrations.’ In ancient times, it was traditional to celebrate the winter solstice, sometimes in debauched fashion. If, as the argument might go, students are to be educated about Christmas, should they not also be taught about other, arguably more problematic, winter observances?
There’s also the language in the bill prohibiting holiday displays from including “a message that encourages adherence to a particular religious belief.” Clearly, the intent here is to ensure that overtly religious phrases — “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” immediately springs to mind — don’t intrude into the public arena.
It would, however, certainly be possible to argue that even the presence of a holiday symbol — say, a Nativity scene — in a school display is “a message that encourages adherence to a particular religion.”
On Wednesday, the Metro Council voted on what was intended to be a symbolic gesture of support for a legislative proposal by state Rep. Patricia Smith, D-Baton Rouge, to remove the anti-sodomy laws from the books.
Such laws were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003, but the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office cited the state’s law in recent years when it arrested more than a dozen gay men in sting operations for consenting to sex. The District Attorney’s Office refused to prosecute the cases.
Ahead of the vote, groups such as the Louisiana Family Forum and the Baptist Association of Southern Baton Rouge expressed their strong opposition to the measure.
The Family Forum emailed residents urging them to voice their disapproval to the council, which prompted a flood of emails against the resolution.
However, some prominent local groups expressed disappointment Thursday with the Metro Council’s action, saying the council was continuing to project an image that Baton Rouge is intolerant toward gays and lesbians.
The Metro Council is “out of sync with the rest of the community,” according to John Davies, president of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, adding recent surveys show local and statewide residents are generally supportive of gay and lesbian rights.
There’s always been backlashes to progress and modernity. History is full of such examples and many of them are wrapped up in religious mantels. What is so amazing to me is how extremist pols seem to have crept into the halls of power in such unimaginable ways with such horrible legislation. The Republican Party seems to have sold its soul to extremists. Little wonder that so few people these days actually self-identify as Republican.
Forty-two percent of Americans, on average, identified as political independents in 2013, the highest Gallup has measured since it began conducting interviews by telephone 25 years ago. Meanwhile, Republican identification fell to 25%, the lowest over that time span. At 31%, Democratic identification is unchanged from the last four years but down from 36% in 2008.
Let’s just hope that more and more people know what this minority party has in store for us all.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
No, I don’t want Republican Son in Laws
Posted: January 17, 2014 Filed under: religious extremists, right wing hate grouups, War on Women, worker rights 66 Comments
I so badly want to write on your blog, Bob, or at NOLA.com about your op ed because it sounds so, well, reasonable. However, I’m going to do it here where I am totally surrounded by my friends. Yup, you’re reasonable, my friend, like most democrats I know. Y’all will compromise on just about anything because y’all so reasonable. I’ve got the President in mind when I say that one, actually, let alone most of the senators and congressmen in the democratic caucus. I’m a political independent, Because y’all tend to be so reasonable,
I don’t really mind that my oldest daughter grew up to be a democrat and that she married one. However, I would completely totally freak if either daughter registered republican or brought one home to me. I say this with the caveat that up until the Clinton years, I was a republican and I ran for office in Nebraska as a republican. You may be reasonable, but today’s republicans are not. There is no compromise with them. There is no one reasonable left in the party unless you count the people that don’t believe the dogma but enable it any way to either get re-elected or to have their businesses get preferential tax treatment and subsidies. I don’t want these folks in my home or near my daughters.
So you ask “Would you be troubled if your son married a Republican? What if your daughter married a Democrat?” and I’m answering you here because I don’t want to sully up the nola.com site or your blog site. My answer will be trolled beyond anything reasonable people can imagine and it won’t be by my fellow independents or your democrats. You can read my response here where I am surrounded by loving friends who will agree with me and will give you their own stories as Latinas, feminists, GLBTs, atheists or religious and racial minorities, and people that are not only reasonable but will stand up for what’s right.
According to a 2010 national survey, 40 percent of us would be “upset” with such a marriage. That’s worrisome, but almost as interesting as the historical trend. In 1960, when a pollster asked a similar question, only 5 percent said they would be “displeased” if a child married into the opposite party.
Doesn’t it feel some days that the entire, polarized country is obsessed with politics, down to the political affiliation of our children’s spouses?
I may have agreed that you were oh, so reasonable if I haven’t witnessed so much disrespect coming from the Republican Party towards women, gays, racial minorities and non-christians. I have the perspective of having been republican, having ran for office as a republican, and 
being basically drummed out of the republican party for being pro-choice and having “marched in the streets with lesbians” in support of an anniversary of women’s voting rights like it was some kind of immoral act.
As a matter of fact, I just had this conversation at a friend’s house last month. I met a woman who had a son undergoing gender reassignment surgery. I was telling her that one of my best friend’s nephews was having the same surgery and was a doctoral candidate at UC Berkley in the AI robotics program. We both laughed and said it could be worse, they could’ve become born again and republicans. I thought about it and decided that’s about the only thing that would cause me never to speak to either of my children. The idea of having a Michelle Bachmann as a daughter or a Ted Cruz, or a David Vitter or a Steve Scalise any where near my daughters let alone married to them would cause me to worry about their safety and their sanity.
Let’s check legislation proposed by today’s Republicans.
Here’s a new proposed law in Arizona.
A veteran state lawmaker is pushing legislation that would allow businesses to discriminate against gays — and maybe even women and Jews — as long as they were acting on sincerely held religious beliefs.
SB 1062 would allow those sued in civil cases to claim that they have a legal right to decide not to provide their services to any individual or group because it would “substantially burden” their freedom of religion. That specifically means doing something that the person feels is contrary to their religious teachings.
Sen. Steve Yarbrough, R-Chandler, said the measure is aimed specifically at preventing what happened in New Mexico where courts there said a gay couple could sue a wedding photographer who turned away their request to take pictures at their nuptials. He said that should not be allowed to happen here.But Yarbrough said his legislation could also be interpreted broader than that, allowing motel operators with vacant rooms to refuse to rent to gays.
Potentially more significant, Yarbrough acknowledged there may be individuals who have religious beliefs about unmarried women, or even employing people who do not share their same beliefs.
On the morning of December 11th, Gretchen Whitmer, the charismatic 42-year-old minority leader of the Michigan Senate, stood before her colleagues in the Statehouse in Lansing, and told them something she’d told almost no one before. “Over 20 years ago, I was a victim of rape,” she said. “And thank God it didn’t result in a pregnancy, because I can’t imagine going through what I went through and then having to consider what to do about an unwanted pregnancy from an attacker.”
No one in the gallery said a word. Instead, with just hours to go before it broke for Christmas recess, Michigan’s overwhelmingly male, Republican-dominated Legislature, having held no hearings nor even a substantive debate, voted to pass one of the most punishing pieces of anti-abortion legislation anywhere in the country: the Abortion Insurance Opt-Out Act, which would ban abortion coverage, even in cases of rape or incest, from virtually every health-insurance policy issued in the state. Women and their employers wanting this coverage will instead have to purchase a separate rider – often described as “rape insurance.” Whitmer, a Democrat known as a fierce advocate for women’s issues, described the new law as “by far one of the most misogynistic proposals I’ve seen in the Michigan Legislature.”
And it’s not just Michigan. Eight other states now have laws preventing abortion coverage under comprehensive private insurance plans – only one of them, Utah, makes an exception for rape. And 24 states, including such traditionally blue states as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, ban some forms of abortion coverage from policies purchased through the new health exchanges. While cutting insurance coverage of abortion in disparate states might seem to be a separate issue from the larger assault on reproductive rights, it is in fact part of a highly coordinated and so far chillingly successful nationwide campaign, often funded by the same people who fund the Tea Party, to make it harder and harder for women to terminate unwanted pregnancies, and also to limit their access to many forms of contraception.
Here’s a great list of what right wing, christianist republicans say about women and their bodies. They believe it’s perfectly acceptable to deem women property of the state and endanger their lives.
1. Texas State Senator Wendy Davis is a “terrorist” because she filibustered an anti-choice bill.
2. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
3. Who needs abortion when victims of sexual assault can just get “cleaned out” by a rape kit?
4. Women shouldn’t terminate pregnancies resulting from rape because it’s what God intended.
5. Women shouldn’t complain about forced transvaginal ultrasounds, because they’ve already had sex.
6. “If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted.”
7. “Abortion is much more serious than the rape of children by priests.”
8. Abortion rights caused the Sandy Hook massacre.
9. Ban abortions because of masturbating fetuses.
10. Abortion is just like the Holocaust.
I would worry about the safety of my daughters because of this: Virginia GOP candidate: Spousal rape isn’t a crime if she is ‘wearing a nightie’.
“I do not know how you could validly get a conviction of a husband-wife rape, when they’re living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie and so forth,” Black says. “There’s not injuries, there’s no separation or anything.”
or this: Medical Records Confirm The Pregnant Texas Woman On Life Support Is Actually Dead
Did I mention that my oldest is actually an ob/gyn and she went to practice some place where these folks aren’t second guessing her medical expertise? You’ll excuse me if I say that with their guns, their onward christian soldiers zealotry, and their anger/meanness that I believe that the only thing safe around these people might be a clump of cells called a zygote.
Then, there’s the laws they want enacted to teach specific creation mythology as science. Oh, and we taxpayers get to foot the bills for christianist madrassas.
When public-school students enrolled in Texas’ largest charter program open their biology workbooks, they will read that the fossil record is “sketchy.” That evolution is “dogma” and an “unproved theory” with no experimental basis. They will be told that leading scientists dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age of the Earth. These are all lies.
The more than 17,000 students in the Responsive Education Solutions charter system will learn in their history classes that some residents of the Philippines were “pagans in various levels of civilization.” They’ll read in a history textbook that feminism forced women to turn to the government as a “surrogate husband.”
Responsive Ed has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement and to far-right fundamentalists who seek to undermine the separation of church and state.
The opening line of the workbook section declares, “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
Infiltrating and subverting the charter-school movement has allowed Responsive Ed to carry out its religious agenda—and it is succeeding. Operating more than 65 campuses in Texas, Arkansas, and Indiana, Responsive Ed receives more than $82 million in taxpayer money annually, and it is expanding, with 20 more Texas campuses opening in 2014.
Charter schools may be run independently, but they are still public schools, and through an open records request, I was able to obtain a set of Responsive Ed’s biology “Knowledge Units,” workbooks that Responsive Ed students must complete to pass biology. These workbooks both overtly and underhandedly discredit evidence-based science and allow creationism into public-school classrooms.
I’m a political independent but frankly, if my daughters came home spouting this stuff or with some man in tow that thought it was okay, I frankly would see if they need to be institutionalized and thoroughly checked by a psychiatrist. Fortunately, my son-in-law is a nice registered Democrat and Hindu. My other potential son-in-law is also a democrat and is as agnostic as they get. My son in law is a doctor and my youngest’s SO has degrees in biological engineering so both of them are reality based.
However, I could go on and on and on about the climate change denial, the treatment of the poor in this country, the unemployed, and just about any one else who isn’t a big political donor to the Republican party and ask you to rethink your treatise. The leader of GOPround just quit because he couldn’t take the bigotry any more.
Jimmy LaSalvia co-founded political action group GOProud to prove to America that the Republican Party is a safe home for gay conservatives. But he no longer believes his own arguments. On Monday, he announced on his blog that he could no longer take his own party’s refusal to stand up to bigotry: he was leaving the Republican Party and had registered as an Independent. “I am every bit as conservative as I’ve always been, but I just can’t bring myself to carry the Republican label any longer,” he wrote.
His condemnation of the GOP was even stronger when he explained his decision to TIME on Wednesday. The Republican brand,
he says, is so tarnished that he no longer believes it is salvageable. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to pull the plug on the patient. It’s been brain-dead for a long, long time.”
In a wide-ranging interview with TIME, included before in an abbreviated form, LaSalvia explains the journey that led him to abandon the party ship:
TIME: You are someone who once had lots of hopes for the GOP. What happened?
LASALVIA: I have been my whole life the ultimate team player. I was ‘The Gay for Mitt’ last year. I think that what I did should cause the leadership in the Republican Party to ask themselves, How bad must it be if we’ve even lost Jimmy?
I spent my career working to create an atmosphere in the conservative movement where gay conservatives can be open and honest and live their lives and work within the conservative movement. I wanted it to be a place where straight conservatives could publicly support gay Americans and even eventually come to support civil marriage for gay couples. I feel like I have accomplished that. I had hoped that would be enough to melt the anti-gay bigotry that runs through the ranks of some in the Republican Party. I’ve come to realize that it is not, and that the leadership of the party tolerates bigotry, not just antigay bigotry, but anti-Muslim, any people who are not like us it seems like, because they are afraid of losing that sliver of their base who are anti-gay. And the truth is they are turning off millions more Americans by kowtowing to a group that frankly is losing and who most Americans think are wrong.
The entire party has become a safe haven and magnet for neoconfederates and bigots. Jimmy just came to the realization about 20 years later than me. I am sure there are some folks that seem like reasonable people. But try telling your conservative “friend” you’ve decided that you’re not a christian anymore and see what happens. Reasonable people do not tolerate and enable unreasonable and mean ideas, actions, and speech. My elderly father is the only Republican I allow near me any more and he just about does me in when he spouts all those Fox lies and Republican talking points that are about as far from the truth as they can be. Some times what he says horrifies me but he’s 90.
Our current democratic president and nearly all of his policies are just about as Nixonian as one can get. He’s pushing the new trade agreements. The Affordable Health Care Act was the republican response–called Chaffecare or Dolecare at the time–and the individual mandate is the cost demanded by private insurers for taking on people with pre-existing conditions like ovaries, HIV, or cancer. His budget and the level of government spending represents draconian cuts. His national security programs are still pretty extreme. Yet, every Republican sees him as a socialist. It’s total balderdash and racism!
Here’s a nice South Carolina Republican Senator advocating gun violence to get his views enacted.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s top-polling primary challenger, state Sen. Lee Bright, stood on the steps of the South Carolina statehouse (Confederate flags proudly displayed behind him) and said:
“If the Tenth Amendment won’t protect the Second, we might have to use the Second to protect the Tenth.”
Lee Bright’s insinuation being, if you don’t let South Carolina do as they want then South Carolinians will take up arms against you.
Go read some of the quotes from this darling of the Tea Party.
Let’s face it. It doesn’t take long for the congress and the U.S. Senate to come in and say, ‘Y’know what? These states are a lot of trouble. They’re gettin’ in the way. They’re organizing these people. They’re having these rallies. They got, you know, they got, some of them are even talking about militias. I mean, we gotta do something about this. So let’s just go ahead and dissolve them.
Today’s republicans and today’s republican party are no where near even Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan who had some pretty 
outrageous things to say in their day. They would hate Nixon, Ford, Eisenhower, and they dis Lincoln. All you have to do is talk to a Rand Paul follower and you’ll hear nothing but criticism of Lincoln. I don’t even have time to describe how absolutely crazy they are about regulation, the Federal Reserve Bank, balanced budget amendments, and policies that should be fairly noncontroversial that would get people back to work again.
Yes, Bob, I would absolutely say yes to your question: DEMOCRAT? REPUBLICAN? ARE WE REALLY ALL THAT DIFFERENT?
I wouldn’t let people like these near my home, let alone near my daughters. I wouldn’t even let Senator David Vitter near my home or near my daughters. Would you?
If you don’t believe me, ask another person who used to be a big reasonable republican party insider and is another economist. That would be Reagan advisor Bruce Bartlett. Hit him up on his facebook page or just watch his thread. He calls them all wankers now. Frankly, I’ve got worse words for them after my experiences trying to be pro-choice, pro-era, and pro-equal wages for equal work back in the day.
Anyway, that’s my rant illustriously peppered with republican rally signs. You know those great people that did things like boo at gay soldiers and believe in secession, they’re as reasonable as you so I’m sure I’m gonna hear from them here. That way, I wont sully your website.
Duck Disaster: Jindal Wades into the Blind
Posted: December 19, 2013 Filed under: religious extremists, The Right Wing 52 Comments
I’ve spent some time in Monroe, Louisiana. About ten years ago, I had to teach all over the state. I am just glad I spent some time in some other cities before getting sent to the Monroe area or I’d have never left the confines of Orleans parish again. Monroe is a place I’d rather not visit again. My first thought on wandering around was “Where are all the black people hiding?” Then, I wondered why they were obviously not around their white neighbors. That was before I read and found out that the KKK are live and kicking in that region of the state. I also begin hearing personal experiences like this one. A coworker and office mate of mine at the time–a young black woman of about 25–had gone to university up there. She told me that she learned that she couldn’t walk through the white frat section of the campus because she kept getting spit on. This was like the year 2000 so, we’re not talking way back in the day.
When I learned Duck Dynasty was being filmed in Monroe, I figured that you weren’t going to see a lot of black people in the show and that it was going to be yet another one of those reality shows where the rest of the world gets to learn about the backwater cultures of the South. These Hollywood reality shows like to entertain their city friends with the likes of our backwater rubes. They make them cute, fuzzy, eccentric, and gosh darn lovable. I’m not sure if you watched Swamp people or Axe Man or any number of other shows where they trot out our old white guys that hang in the woods, but it’s pretty formulaic. The problem is that the shows are pretty well edited and controlled. You can see, however, that whenever these Duck Dynasty guys go to the country club, the backwoods, or the kids’ schools, there are really no black people in the picture. Again, that’s my take away from every visit to Monroe. They are freaking insular up there. But then, just like no one noticed the tales of “happy darkies in the cotton fields” told by Phil Robertson until later today, no one has noticed the distinct lack of diversity or reality in the show. Well, maybe their core audience has and that’s why they like it. I guess it all was okay until Phill opened his big fat mouth and pointed out–like a bayou version of snowflake snookie–that gawd made women’s vaginas for men and gay men must be crazy and sinful to not take advantage of that.
Like all reality shows, Duck Dynasty is probably heavily edited. But, it’s a big old media world out there. The Duck Dynasty Paw Paw got interviewed sans handlers by GQ. His Monroe roots are now exposed. His Southern Baptist tirades don’t look so homespun any more. He’s not just a cuddly, curmudgeon who has a thing for killing what ever moves like Ned outta South Park. Phil Robertson is outta the closet now alot like Paula Dean got outted a while back. Wither the cash cow er duck?
There’s several things that have kind’ve intrigued me about this ever unfolding story. The first is that the response to the homophobic
comments are being played out a lot more than his appalling racist and sexist comments. Women are vaginas. All the black folk he grew up with were straight out of that old southern stereotype of the happy Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima brand. Ah, they were so happy and singing during them Jim Crow Days. Robertson had no apparent realization black folks were rightfully scared for their lives back then so they just put on that damn smile to protect themselves. They also are hard to find among white folks in Monroe today so I’m thinking there’s still some of that going on up there and they know it.
As is clear in the profile in GQ, A&E has tried to walk a fine line between portraying the Robertsons as religious Christians without spotlighting the parts of their beliefs that have the potential to cause precisely the kind of firestorm that resulted yesterday. “There are more things Phil would like to say—’controversial’ things, as he puts it to me—that don’t make the cut,” Magary writes. This dilemma of wanting part of a reality television cast member’s personality, but only the parts that will make you money, is one that faced CBS’s Big Brother this year, too, after discovering that the ways in which a number of their controversial and colorful cast members were controversial and colorful was that they were enormously ignorant racists.
I absolutely understand the desire to make money off of either evangelical Christianity or American backwardness, which has increasingly been one of the staples of reality television. There is clearly a market for an underserved audience of religious Christians who would like to see themselves reflected in popular media more frequently. And there is clearly a market for being horrified by other people’s behavior. But it is exceptionally difficult, in a reality television context, to separate out and wall off the part of someone’s personality that is attractive and media-friendly from the parts that are less palatable to a mass audience. If you’re writing fiction for television, those attributes can get shaved off by the collective process of the writers’ room. But if you are, yourself, a reality television product, especially if you feel like you’re being suppressed or misrepresented, those parts of your personality and beliefs will inevitably out. Sometimes, the surprises are pleasant, as was the case on Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, where a family offered up as backwards and repellent proved to be tolerant, loving, and charming. But that is not often the case.
For the most part, reality television producers and the networks that air their work, have decided that these outbursts are worth the risk of continuing to sell highly specific personalities, precisely because the cycle of suspension, response, and temporary profit loss are so well-established at this point that it can probably be worked into a budget. I can’t imagine anyone at A&E is surprised that someone like Phil Robertson, who bills himself as a Bible-believing evangelical, believes that you can “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” or that he would say something like “It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.” The question was probably when, not if.
And when that when arrived, A&E had a well road-tested formula to use in its response, provided by the folks at GLAAD. GLAAD is the most effective media advocacy organization that I know of, on two levels: first, its ability to swiftly identify and condemn anti-LGBT speech and to get results, and second, in its deep, comprehensive, and intersectional research on the depiction of LGBT characters and figures in media. When Robertson’s remarks broke, Wilson Cruz of GLAAD responded quickly with a statement that hit on an incredible number of ideas in a clear, efficient way.
“Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe,” he said. “He clearly knows nothing about gay people or the majority of Louisianans — and Americans — who support legal recognition for loving and committed gay and lesbian couples. Phil’s decision to push vile and extreme stereotypes is a stain on A&E and his sponsors, who now need to re-examine their ties to someone with such public disdain for LGBT people and families.” It was a condemnation that positioned GLAAD as a more sophisticated and compassionate arbiter of Christian values than Robertson, drew a connection between culture and legal protection, and offered a reminder that GLAAD has plenty of experience influencing media sponsors.
And A&E knew immediately what it had to do to respond to GLAAD: Robertson was suspended for an indefinite period of time, a punishment that doesn’t just promise long-running financial losses to him, but because it has no end point, can’t be immediately decried as too short or too long. It’s action that effectively ends the news cycle, as far as A&E’s need to take action and appear responsive are concerned.
It’s also worth noting that because of GLAAD’s swift intervention, much of the media coverage has focused more on Robertson’s anti-gay remarks than his comments about African Americans and the Civil Rights movement, which weren’t worked into the narrative of the profile, but appeared as a pull quote in the online version of the piece. While Robertson’s views on homosexuality are presented as consistent with his religious beliefs, his remarks about African-Americans are actually more politically extreme, aimed at undermining the validity of the safety net.
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field,” Robertson said. “They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
That’s a vision of the American South and American racial history that’s in keeping with Paula Deen’s alleged plantation nostalgia. It’s an attempt to substitute Robertson’s own memories of his interactions with African American laborers, whose behavior around him may well have been influenced by his relative privilege as a white man, even a poor one, for the larger history of organizing against and resistance to the economically and racially ruinous consequences of the Jim Crow system. It’s a kind of narrative that’s aimed at retroactively manufacturing black consent for policies aimed at maintaining white supremacy.
The other equally appalling thing is that the right wing is playing this as some kind of first amendment rights issue. Since when do Republicans think employees get to ignore the wishes of their corporate overlords? Where was the outrage over Alec Baldwin or Martin Brashear? Robertson is now the right wing martyr for oppressed christians who are just expressing their traditional values and have a first amendment right to do so that we all just have to respect. WTF?
I woke to reading that my asshole governor had jumped in on that. My guess is he’s trying to get on the radar of the Republican base again for his endless wetdreams of being President. Did he actually read what this guy said about black people or was he just thinking the homophobic remarks would be the place he could pander those Iowan evangelical votes?
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on Thursday criticized the “politically correct crowd” following the suspension of “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson over comments he made about homosexuality and religion in a recent interview with GQ magazine.
“Phil Robertson and his family are great citizens of the State of Louisiana. The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints, except those they disagree with,” Jindal said in a statement released by his office. “I don’t agree with quite a bit of stuff I read in magazine interviews or see on TV. In fact, come to think of it, I find a good bit of it offensive. But I also acknowledge that this is a free country and everyone is entitled to express their views.”
A&E, which airs “Duck Dynasty,” put Robertson on indefinite suspension from the show on Wednesday because of a controversial interview with GQ, in which, he commented on his inability to comprehend homosexuality or societies “without Jesus.”
“That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical,” Robertson told Drew Magery in GQ.
When Magery asked him to define “sin,” Robertson responded, “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men.”
In another part of the interview, Robertson equated Shintoism and Islam with Nazism.
So, see? There’s a little bit more out there than just the horrid comments about homosexuality. There’s the comments on blacks, women, and nonchristians. It’s a smorgasbord of bigotry! And, my governor is defending his right to say all of it as an employee of a corporation that probably wants viewership from black people, women, and folks that are not christian. Why wouldn’t they fire his redneck ass? He probably is going to cost them as much money as he brought in over the last year if not more.
But, the bigger questions is what’s going to happen with all that Duck Dynasty merchandise that’s all over the place now? Are there enough bigoted rednecks in the country to keep the franchise going? Maybe the franchise should just consider moving to a slot before the Huckabee show and advertise on the likes of Hannity and Rush.
Well, there probably is enough of them in Northern Louisiana and Texas. Here’s the latest bit of ring wing furor or is that fuhrer?
Other conservatives are now weighing in as well, including the Family Research Council and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.)
Here’s Cruz’s comment: “If you believe in free speech or religious liberty, you should be deeply dismayed over the treatment of Phil Robertson. Phil expressed his personal views and his own religious faith; for that, he was suspended from his job. In a free society, anyone is free to disagree with him, but the mainstream media should not behave as the thought police censoring the views with which they disagree.”
Update 3:47 p.m.: The National Organization for Marriage has launched a petitiondemanding that A&E reinstate Robertson and apologize for suspending him.
Let me just remind you that the Family Research Council is a bona fide hate group.
So, I thought I could just let this entire thing pass with comments down thread, but I couldn’t. I would just like you to know that almost every one I know south of the I-12–that would be the creole/cajun part of Louisiana–is talking about seceding from the state again.
Oh, look, it’s a photo of two blowhards!
I am just hoping we get rid of those Hollywood tax credits and that the reality show folks will go pick on some one else’s backwards hicks for awhile.
Why Doesn’t This Surprise Me?
Posted: December 16, 2013 Filed under: religious extremists, right wing hate grouups | Tags: Fundamentalist religions 14 CommentsJust saw this study reported at WAPO. It basically says there’s not much difference in fundamentalists Christians and Muslims. Don’t ask 
those two groups to acknowledge it however since all fundamentalist religions are based on seeing every one else as essentially hell-bound and wrong.
Religious fundamentalism among Muslim immigrants in Western Europe is dramatically greater than that among Christian Europeans, according to a recent study by Ruud Koopmans from the Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin discussed on the Monkey Cage last Friday. On the surface, these findings legitimize concerns surrounding the incompatibility of Western and Islamic values.
Like Europeans, Americans express fear over Muslim integration and Islamic fundamentalism, although very little is known about beliefs among Muslims living in the U.S. A recent nationwide survey of U.S. Muslims, which I designed, provides some insight — the Muslim-American National Opinion Survey (MANOS) reveals that levels of religious fundamentalism among Muslims and Christians in the U.S. are nearly identical.
As one of the few nationally representative surveys available of Muslim Americans, MANOS provides insight into the degree Muslim Americans hold fundamentalist views, as defined by Koopmans. Data from existing surveys of the general American population allow me to assess where Muslims stand relative to other Americans in believing that religious rules are more important than the laws of the country and the degree individuals hold literal interpretations of holy scriptures.
The weird thing is that in the US, our religious fundamentalists run for office and get elected. That doesn’t happen much in Western Europe. Witness the Texas Lt. Governor’s race where all four candidates are creationists. What on earth does it take to educate people in the basics of science compared to iron age mythology?
Current Lt. Gov. David “Impeach Obama but get my niece out of jail” Dewhurst is already a creationist, and just believes in fairness:
“I believe that in fairness we need to expose students to both sides of this,” he said. “That’s why I’ve supported including in our textbooks the discussion of the biblical account of life and creation, and I understand there are a lot of people who disagree with me, and believe in evolution.”
State Sen. Dan Patrick and Ag Commissioner Todd Staples also said that they think that, for freedom, schools should teach something that isn’t science in science classes because it is popular, also Christians are oppressed:
“Our students … must really be confused. They go to Sunday School on Sunday and then they go into school on Monday and we tell them they can’t talk about God,” said Patrick. “I’m sick and tired of a minority in our country who want us to turn our back on God.”
The one candidate who didn’t overtly advocate teaching creationism didn’t exactly sound hostile to it, either. Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson trotted out the astonishing revelation that the phrase “Separation of Church and State” does not appear in the Constitution, which obviously means that schools should have a lot more church in ‘em:
“Show me where that’s in the Constitution, because it’s not in the Constitution,” he said. “I see nothing wrong with standing up at least for a moment of silence, let those who wish to pray, pray in their own faith. I see nothing wrong with having a prayer before a high school football game.”
Just as long as they’re not, like, Muslim or anything.
The candidates may find implementing their pledges somewhat difficult, as the Loot Gov doesn’t actually set education policy in Texas, and the state school board has almost miraculously approved science texts that actually teach science.
I’m sure they don’t like the comparison, but American fundamentalists seem to be all the same. It really doesn’t matter which abrahamic cult they’ve attached themselves too.
Results from MANOS and the General Social Surveys reveal that the general American population holds nearly identical levels of fundamentalist beliefs as Muslims, if not slightly more. Just over 57 percent of the general American population believes that “right and wrong in U.S. law should be based on God’s laws,” compared to 49.3 percent of U.S.-born Muslims and 45.6 of foreign-born Muslims. About a third of each group believes that society should not be the one to determine right and wrong in U.S. law. Such numbers reveal that the general American population is more fundamentalist than the average European, and that Muslim Americans are less fundamentalist than European Muslims, according to the Koopmans study.
A large number of folks have a problem with reality and modernity. Their issues have become our issues. They create war. They pave the way for missionaries that spread hatred around the world. They run for office and attack all kinds of people’s rights based on somethings that do not hold up to any kind of sane scrutiny. It’s about time that those folks that don’t embrace the mindset of the iron age but embrace the beliefs that started there start doing something about the crazies. It’s just not fair to the rest of us to have these fundamentalist mindsets inflicted on civilization.
Btw, I’m not persecuting you. I’m laughing at your dumb asses. You have a right to believe it, but you certainly do not have a right to inflict such nonsense on the rest of us.
Monday Reads
Posted: July 22, 2013 Filed under: misogyny, morning reads, religious extremists, Reproductive Rights, SCOTUS, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: abortion, Anthony Scalia, anti-choice legislation, CIA black sites, economics, evangelicals, Poland, secret prisons, The Prisoner's Dilemma 45 CommentsGood Morning!
So, I’m still a little bit out of the loop at the moment. I’m not really reading much in the way of news or even watching TV so I had to do some searching for something interesting to read this morning. This will be a bit of a link dump. I promise I will do better by midweek.
Will we ever be rid of Fat Tony and his blatant hypocrisy?
With his own claims to originalism fading fast, Scalia suggests liberal judicial activism, practiced by some of colleagues on the Court, is part of what brought about the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. The speech was an address to the Utah State Bar Association.
From the Aspen Times …
Scalia opened his talk with a reference to the Holocaust, which happened to occur in a society that was, at the time, “the most advanced country in the world.” One of the many mistakes that Germany made in the 1930s was that judges began to interpret the law in ways that reflected “the spirit of the age.” When judges accept this sort of moral authority, as Scalia claims they’re doing now in the U.S., they get themselves and society into trouble.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is something we teach a lot in economics. You may remember the movie “A Beautiful Mind” and the invention of game theory. Well, there’s been an interesting test of the theory.
The “prisoner’s dilemma” is a familiar concept to just about anybody that took Econ 101.
The basic version goes like this. Two criminals are arrested, but police can’t convict either on the primary charge, so they plan to sentence them to a year in jail on a lesser charge. Each of the prisoners, who can’t communicate with each other, are given the option of testifying against their partner. If they testify, and their partner remains silent, the partner gets 3 years and they go free. If they both testify, both get two. If both remain silent, they each get one.
In game theory, betraying your partner, or “defecting” is always the dominant strategy as it always has a slightly higher payoff in a simultaneous game. It’s what’s known as a “Nash Equilibrium,” after Nobel Prize winning mathematician and A Beautiful Mind subject John Nash.
In sequential games, where players know each other’s previous behaviour and have the opportunity to punish each other, defection is the dominant strategy as well.
However, on a Pareto basis, the best outcome for both players is mutual cooperation.
Yet no one’s ever actually run the experiment on real prisoners before, until two University of Hamburg economists tried it out in a recent study comparing the behaviour of inmates and students.
Surprisingly, for the classic version of the game, prisoners were far more cooperative than expected.
Menusch Khadjavi and Andreas Lange put the famous game to the test for the first time ever, putting a group of prisoners in Lower Saxony’s primary women’s prison, as well as students through both simultaneous and sequential versions of the game.The payoffs obviously weren’t years off sentences, but euros for students, and the equivalent value in coffee or cigarettes for prisoners.They expected, building off of game theory and behavioural economic research that show humans are more cooperative than the purely rational model that economists traditionally use, that there would be a fair amount of first-mover cooperation, even in the simultaneous simulation where there’s no way to react to the other player’s decisions.
And even in the sequential game, where you get a higher payoff for betraying a cooperative first mover, a fair amount will still reciprocate.
As for the difference between student and prisoner behaviour, you’d expect that a prison population might be more jaded and distrustful, and therefore more likely to defect.
The results went exactly the other way for the simultaneous game, only 37% of students cooperate. Inmates cooperated 56% of the time.
On a pair basis, only 13% of student pairs managed to get the best mutual outcome and cooperate, whereas 30% of prisoners do.
While America languishes in an economic depression, Republican officeholders are bending all their efforts… to ban abortion. In the last few weeks and months, we’ve seen a blizzard of anti-choice legislation in Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and many other places. These laws stall women seeking abortions with mandatory waiting periods, brutalize them with invasive and unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds, force doctors to read shaming scripts rife with falsehoods, and impose onerous regulatory requirements that are designed to be impossible to comply with so that family-planning clinics will be forced to close. At the federal level, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted for a bill banning all abortion after 20 weeks, without even putting up a pretense that this was constitutional.
One would think the drubbing taken by anti-choice zealots like Todd Akin in the last election would have given Republicans an incentive to step back and consider whether this is a winning strategy. Instead, it seems as if their losses have only inspired them to fight harder. For the right-wing Christian fundamentalists who dominate the Republican Party, banning abortion, or at least piling up pointless regulations to make it as burdensome and difficult to obtain as possible, has become an all-consuming obsession, akin to a religious crusade.
Given the amount of effort and political capital the religious right puts into trying to restrict abortion, you’d guess that opposition to women’s choice must take up a huge portion of the Bible. But the reality is that nothing could be further from the truth.
The Bible says nothing whatsoever about abortion. It never mentions the subject, not once, neither in the Old Testament nor the New. This isn’t because abortion was unknown in the ancient world. Much to the contrary, the ancient Greeks and Romans were well-acquainted with the idea. Surviving writings from these cultures recommend the use of herbs like pennyroyal, silphium and hellebore to induce abortion; others advise vigorous physical activity to cause a miscarriage, and some even discuss surgical methods.
Here’s an intriguing investigation of secret US prisons being carried out by Poland. What exactly do we and other countries know about these black ops sites run by the CIA?
The only sign of life at Szymany’s “international airport” are mosquitoes eager to suck blood out of a rare visitor. The gate is locked with a rusted chain and a padlock.
Evidence suggest that some of the last passengers at this site were CIA officers and their prisoners. That was in 2003. Soon after, the airport about 180 km north of Warsaw inside the picturesque Mazury forests went out of service.
Bounded by the Freedom of Information Act, Polish Airspace authorities have revealed that at least 11 CIA aircrafts landed at Szymany, and some of their passengers stayed on in Poland. The European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (Eurocontrol) was not informed about those flights.
From Szymany the prisoners were driven to a nearby intelligence academy in Stare Kiejkuty, where the CIA had a separated facility. In 2006, a few months after Poland was first identified as having hosted a secret CIA prison, Polish ombudsman Janusz Kochanowski visited the CIA villa – only to see that its chambers have been freshly renovated.
Two other European countries with known but unconfirmed black sites are Romania and Lithuania; the rest were in Asia and North Africa.
Human rights groups believe about eight terror suspects were held in Poland, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Two other men currently detained at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility have been granted “injured person” status in the ongoing investigation.
The first is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national alleged to have organised the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. He has claimed that he was often stripped naked, hooded, or shackled during seven months at Stare Kiejkuty, and subjected to mock execution with a gun and threats of sexual assault against his family members.
The second, a stateless Palestinian known as Abu Zubaydah, said he was subjected to extreme physical pain, psychological pressure and waterboarding – mock drowning.
Any Polish leaders who would have agreed to the U.S. programme would have been violating the constitution by giving a foreign power control over part of Polish territory, and allowing crimes to take place there.
Former prime minister Leszek Miller, now chairman of the opposition Democratic Left Alliance has been the prime target of criticism. There are demands he should face a special tribunal charged with trying state figures.
In March 2008, the Polish authorities opened a criminal investigation. “This indicates that Poland is a country with a rule of law,” Senator Jozef Pinior told IPS. “But the protraction is a reason for concern. The investigation has been moved to the third consecutive prosecutor’s office, in what looks like playing for time.”
Pinior, one of the leaders of the Solidarity opposition movement during the 1980s, and more recently a member of the European Parliament, has for long been lobbying for a full investigation into what the CIA was doing in Poland. Twice he was called in as witness in the investigation. He claims to have seen a document on a CIA prison with PM Miller’s signature.
“Poland is no banana republic, our security services do not do such things behind the back of the government.” — Polish Senator Jozef Pinior“The Polish government, especially Leszek Miller, must have had knowledge that such sites existed on Polish territory without any legal basis,” Pinior said. “They must have known about the torture too. Poland is no banana republic, our security services do not do such things behind the back of the government.”
It is still not clear how much knowledge the Polish leaders had about the black site in Stare Kiejkuty. Some have vehemently denied the prison’s existence, but some admit it between the lines, though denying responsibility.
“Of course, everything took place with my knowledge,” said former president Aleksander Kwasniewski in an interview with leading daily Gazeta Wyborcza.
So, that’s a few odds and ends to get us started today. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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