Posted: March 30, 2018 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: bigotry |
Good Afternoon!
I’m a little late on this. Keely and I hopped on the St Claude Avenue bus and headed to the Vet at The Healing Center! It’s been part of a Main Street revitalization program and has really come to life. This place is a shopping centre of very small and eclectic local businesses.
There are at least two distinct Americas these days and I have come to the point I want nothing to do with the other one. I’m always looking over at posts and tweets from people I grew up with that didn’t flee as fast as they could like most of my friends who couldn’t get out fast enough. The folks that stayed are physically aging in the same hermetically sealed (sigh, white people) bottle.
I point out some thing really isn’t funny but quite racist and try to explain things like the historical roots of saggin’ and it falls on deaf ears and instead of being told I’m a humorless feminist, I get told I need to just lighten up and the fact the preschooler in that picture is a white boy telling a young black man that he can teach him how to pull his pants up would mean the same if the races of the individuals were flipped. Just like when I’m sitting on a crowded bus with my 8 lb kitten in a very secure cat carrier the only person who asks me if that’s a small dog in there and are they allowed on the buses is a bottle dyed red middle aged white woman all up in my business. All I say is “it’s a kitten” and “ask the bus driver”. Then, I shake my head and sigh. “White people.” I mumble and the black man behind me pulls off his earphones and says “what?” I repeat it louder and he laughs like crazy.
We need conversations with each other. I hear folks say that all the time. But, when these conversation start up, I realize we live in completely different realities. I’m the racial minority in my city. My dissertation chair is a devout Muslim. My eldest daughter married an American of Indian descent who was raised Hindu. I’m not threatened by “other”. I ruffle at stupidity. I present examples.
“Hillary Clinton fires back at critics: No one told a man who lost an election to shut up” (but I sure wish they’d try it on Mitt Romney.)
Hillary Clinton is striking back at critics telling her to “shut up” following her 2016 loss, saying, “They never said that to any man who was not elected.”
“I was really struck by how people said that to me – you know, mostly people in the press, for whatever reason – mostly, ‘Go away, go away,'” Clinton said Thursday during an event at Rutgers University.
“And I had one of the young people who works for me go back and do a bit of research. They never said that to any man who was not elected. I was kind of struck by that,” Clinton said.
Clinton’s remarks came in response to a question from Eagleton Institute of Politics’ director Ruth Mandel about the former Democratic presidential nominee’s reaction to those who say she should “get off the public stage and shut up.”
“I’m really glad that, you know, Al Gore didn’t stop talking about climate change,” Clinton said to applause.
“And I’m really glad John Kerry went to the Senate and became an excellent secretary of State,” the former first lady continued. “And I’m really glad John McCain kept speaking out and standing up and saying what he had to say. And for heavens sakes, Mitt Romney is running for the Senate,” Clinton said.
And that would be sexism. Guess that makes me humorless and too PC these days. Truth seems ethereal these days for some people. It’s too abstract. Truth is only what they desperately want it to be. Hence, lying, crooked, racist, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic KKKremlin Caligula.
In Trump’s America, half the population lives in a world where the “crooked media” tells “fake news” made up of “alternative facts,” while the other half fights to maintain public trust in traditional media.
Much of the conflict stems from the parallel online universe that led up to the 2016 election: Clinton and Trump supporters really don’t listen to each otheron Twitter, according to an analysis from the Electome project at the MIT Media Lab provided exclusively to VICE News.
“At least on Twitter, we see that there is a separation of where the journalists, and who the journalists are following, and no one is really listening or plugged into this Trump supporter graph.” Eugene Yi, a data-scientists at the lab told VICE News.
Political opinions have always been polarizing, but the 2016 election saw the divide grow as formerly fringe bloggers, like Milo Yiannopolus and Mike Cernovich, seized the golden opportunity to speak directly to Trump supporters, flooding the internet with false information.
And on a larger level, the now-infamous data targeting company Cambridge Analytica allegedly used mass amounts of personal information on the internet to manipulate voters and spread pro-Trump news, no matter the factual evidence, which may have helped win the election for him.
With Trump in office, the conservative news media and the mainstream are now at war over who constitutes “fake news,” as Americans’ trust the press hit a record low of 32 percent. And President Trump’s personal crusade against the traditional press is only deepening the public divide.
The background to Harris’s shot at me is that last year, Harris had Charles Murray on his podcast. Murray is a popular conservative intellectual best known for co-writing The Bell Curve, which posited, in a controversial section, a genetic basis for the observed difference between black and white IQs.
Harris’s invitation came in the aftermath of Murray being shouted down, and his academic chaperone assaulted, as he tried to give an invited address on an unrelated topic at Middlebury College. The aftermath of the incident had made Murray a martyr for free speech, and Harris brought him on the show in part as a statement of disgust with the illiberalism that had greeted Murray on campus.
And enter churlish Andrew Sullivan in response to all of the above if you follow that link to Klein and Vox and read.
Klein cannot seem to hold the following two thoughts in his brain at the same time: that past racism and sexism are foul, disgusting, and have wrought enormous damage and pain and that unavoidable natural differences between races and genders can still exist.
I know this is a touchy, fraught, difficult subject. I completely understand the reluctance to discuss it, and the hideous history of similar ideas in the past. But when people seeking the truth are immediately targeted for abuse and stigma, it matters. When genetics are in a golden age, when neuroscience is maturing as a discipline, and when the truth about these things will emerge soon enough, it matters that we establish a liberalism that is immune to such genetic revelations, that can strive for equality of opportunity, and can affirm the moral and civic equality of every human being on the planet. Liberalism has never promised equality of outcomes, merely equality of rights. It’s a procedural political philosophy rooted in means, not a substantive one justified by achieving certain ends.
That liberalism is integral to our future as a free society — and it should not falsely be made contingent on something that can be empirically disproven. It must allow for the truth of genetics to be embraced, while drawing the firmest of lines against any moral or political abuse of it. When that classical liberalism is tarred as inherently racist because it cannot guarantee equality of outcomes, and when scientific research is under attack for revealing the fuller truth about our world, we are in deep trouble. Because we are robbing liberalism of the knowledge and the moderation it will soon desperately need to defend itself.
And let’s just jump in it all over at the NYT: “Anti-Semitism Is Rising.”
When the Anti-Defamation League, a century-old institution founded to combat anti-Semitism, released its guide to the “Alt Right and Alt Lite” last year, Ohio’s Republican state treasurer, Josh Mandel, who is Jewish, actually expressed support for two of the people on the list: Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, conservative provocateurs who have found notoriety in the Trump era. “Sad to see @ADL_National become a partisan witch hunt group targeting people for political beliefs. I stand with @Cernovich & @JackPosobiec,” Mr. Mandel proclaimed on Twitter above a link to Mr. Cernovich’s screed charging that the league was trying to have him killed
Mr. Cernovich advocates I.Q. tests for immigrants and “no white guilt,” and is an unapologetic misogynist. Last summer, he circulated a cartoon depicting H. R. McMaster, the White House national security adviser, as a dancing marionette with George Soros pulling his strings and a disembodied, wrinkled hand labeled “Rothschilds” controlling strings attached to Mr. Soros.
Mr. Posobiec has been one of the promulgators of fake news, including the “Pizzagate” story that claimed that Hillary Clinton helped run a child sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor and the claim that a young Democratic National Committee staff member, Seth Rich, was murdered by the Clinton campaign.
And, yet, David Hogg successfully bit back at hate shark Laura Ingraham.
Republican strategist Steve Schmidt said it came down to one characteristic that led Parkland, Florida, school shooting survivor and gun control activist David Hogg to get an apology from Fox News host Laura Ingraham: fearlessness.
“Maybe that’s what happens after you’ve been down range of an AR-15 that kills your classmates and comes close to killing you,” Schmidt said Thursday on Nicolle Wallace’s MSNBC show.
“You lose all fear. Because this kid’s not scared. He’s not scared of the NRA. He’s not intimidated and scared by Laura Ingraham.”Schmidt said that Hogg and his classmates are not like the elected Republican officials who are “scared to death of Fox News, of Laura Ingraham, of Rush Limbaugh.
”Schmidt’s comments came as several advertisers announced they would pull their commercials from Ingraham’s Fox News show after she mocked Hogg on Twitter for not getting into certain colleges.
Hogg and his 14-year-old sister, Lauren, responded to Ingraham’s attackWednesday night, calling out the Fox News host for cyberbullying students.“Coming from a 14-year-old, please grow up,” Lauren tweeted, while her brother called for an advertiser boycott.
I’m going to harken back to 2016 and a study: “Who You Hate Depends on How Smart You Are, Study Finds. According to a new study, people with both high and low intelligence are prejudiced—the difference is just who they are prejudiced against.”
Past researchers have found that people of lower cognitive ability are more likely to be prejudiced, but prejudice isn’t exclusive to dim bulbs. A new study finds that people at both high and low ends of the intelligence spectrum actually express equal levels of prejudice—the difference is just what they’re prejudiced against.
The researchers, social psychologists Mark Brandt and Jarret Crawford, analyzed 5,914 subjects in their experiment, “Answering Unresolved Questions About the Relationship Between Cognitive Ability and Prejudice.” Removing value judgments about whether a specific prejudice is justified or not, they measured the amount of prejudice present in groups of higher cognitive ability and lower cognitive ability. They gauged the cognitive ability of their subjects using a wordsum test, which is considered to be correlated to an individual’s intelligence quotient (IQ). Brandt and Crawford replicated previous findings that people of low cognitive ability tend to be prejudiced against non-conventional or liberal groups, as well as groups that have “low choice” in their status—groups defined by their race or gender or sexual orientation, for example. According to their research, this tendency inverted among people of high cognitive ability. In other words, the smarter subjects in their study were likely to be prejudiced against groups considered conventional or conservative—groups perceived to have “high choice” in their associations.”
I fully embrace my bigotry against the mean and the stupid. That study is my justification and I’m sticking with it.
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Posted: November 27, 2015 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: 2016 elections, morning reads | Tags: bigotry, Donald Trump, fascism, intolerance, Racism, Republican Party, Trump mania, xenophobia |
It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving and hopefully, you’re able to rest and relax!
It’s the official start of Crass Consumerism Season so the throngs of the junk-driven are out buying cheap worthless stuff today that will undoubtedly fill up landfills some time next year.
There are many things about US Society that are downright shameful. Our history of slavery, mass genocide of indigenous peoples, destruction of old growth forests, treatment of ethnic and religious minorities and women just are parts of the darkest parts of our history that we cannot deny and should not forget. Today we seem doomed to repeat bad behavior.
We live in a society where police mercilessly attack and kill unarmed citizens and the leading Republican Candidate stands before an enthralled audience making fun of disabled Americans and arguing that deeply harmed minority citizens get what they have coming to them. Meanwhile, they’ll spend this weekend being thankful for Murica! and exercising their right to trample others into the ground for the chance of getting a cheap shiny object. Some will probably be toting guns in full view because Murica! too.
And yet, many of us persevere in the basic values that established our country’s form of governance. That would be things like rule of law which is established by the people’s representatives, the nonestablishment of a government supported and enforced religion, and the rights of all of our citizens to life, liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness. These are our ongoing presents to ourselves and to humankind even though we tend to get lost in a mountain of shiny objects.
Why do we continue to bring out both the worst and the best of humanity?
One of the most horrifying thing about the cold-blooded shooting of LaQuan McDonald in Chicago last year is that it took a good-hearted, fair-minded public servant whistle blower to bring this atrocity of justice to the attention of the courts and the public. We could not catch nor fact check–let alone hold accountable–public servants without camera technology, cell phones, and the internet. Now, there is a call that cameras be omnipresent. It has always been their word against ours and they win because law and order Murica!. Believe me, I know this intimately. The police intimidate witnesses and manufacture evidence. The system believes them. But now, we have cameras and they have cameras. We are a nation of Big Brothers.
In other words, it took a highly non-standard series of events—a whistleblower and many lawsuits—for Chicagoans to learn of, and then get to see, the incident. (As recently as November 13, Rahm Emanuel, the city’s mayor, refused to put a hard date on the video’s release.) If a similar incident were to happen, and it was captured on a body cam, what would it take to make it public—another whistleblower?
It’s more than an academic question. The city of Chicago will soon spend $1 million in federal funds to purchase body cameras for its force. As I wrote last December, the campaign which got dashboard cameras installed in most American police cars last decade looks a lot like the one that currently seeks to get body cameras placed on most American police. Then, as now, a coalition of local chiefs and anti-police-violence activists rallied to support the technology. Then, as now, millions in federal funding soon followed.
But then, the story of police dash cams ground to a halt. There has never been a widespread study of whether dash cams reduced racial profiling or police abuse, though some smaller studies have found they they did not. (It’s highly likely that body-worn cameras will be better studied.) And as various cities limited access to dash-cam footage, it became difficult for citizens and activists to obtain video.
Will the story be the same with body cameras?
Similarly, Donald Trump has been caught on camera saying facist, outrageous, bigoted, and hateful things about people. He’s definitely one of those cheap, shiny objects chased by those easily distracted by cheap shiny objects. His latest attack included a mimicking the illness and related handicap of a NYT 
reporter whose only crime was providing evidence that he’s a big fat liar. This too was captured on camera and the evidence of his denial stands debunked by fact-checking and documentation also. However, the press follows leading presidential contenders and documents their every move and word. Have we arrived at the point where we have to similarly ensure that every elected official and public servant in a position of power is similarly hounded? Are most of our officials so corruptible that they can’t be trusted to freely move with out a public eye on them as suggested by Orwell in 1984? Think what it took to capture David Vitter’s calls to the DC Madam from the floor of the Senate or Anthony Weiner’s dick pix? Do we have to continually babysit them with cameras to ensure they don’t tap their toes in public restrooms, harass teenage pages, and threaten reporters with bodily harm?
A day after he was widely rebuked for mocking a reporter with a physical disability, business mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump on Thursday denied that he had done so and accused the reporter of “using his disability to grandstand.”
Trump also demanded an apology from the New York Times, the reporter’s employer, which earlier in the week issued a statement condemning Trump for ridiculing “the appearance of one of our reporters.”
The incident occurred Tuesday at a rally in South Carolina, as Trump was defending his recent claim that he had witnessed thousands of Muslims cheering in New Jersey on Sept. 11, 2001, as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. On stage, Trump berated Times investigative reporter Serge Kovaleski for his recent recollection of an article he wrote a few days after the attacks, which Trump has been citing to defend his claim.
Trump appeared to mock Kovaleski’s physical condition; the reporter has arthrogryposis, which visibly limits flexibility in his arms.
“Now, the poor guy — you’ve got to see this guy, ‘Ah, I don’t know what I said! I don’t remember!’ ” Trump said as he jerked his arms in front of his body.
Trump’s assertions about Muslims celebrating in 2001 have been fact-checked and discredited by law enforcement and government officials who were in New Jersey in the days and weeks after the terrorist attacks.
Trump has defended his recollections by citing a 2001 article by Kovaleski, who worked for The Washington Post at the time and wrote that “authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.”
Those allegations were never corroborated but have persisted in online rumors in the 14 years since the attacks. In an interview on CNN this week, Kovaleski said he did not recall “anyone saying there were thousands, or even hundreds, of people celebrating.”
My friend and fellow Louisiana Blogger Lamar White Jr. does a great job of tearing into The Donald’s excuse.
He launched his campaign by claiming the majority of undocumented immigrants from Mexico were rapists and drug dealers sent to the United States by the Mexican government. He believes it’s possible that Barack Obama forged his own birth certificate and lied about the identity of his own mother in order to eventually run for president (note: The only way Obama would not be eligible for office is if his mother wasn’t who he said she was; it doesn’t matter where he was born). He said that an American prisoner of war who spent five and a half years being tortured and has spent the rest of his life in public service was not a “war hero.” He suggested that Megyn Kelly of Fox News was critical of him at a debate because she was on her period. He thinks the United States should consider building a database of all Muslims in the country and an enormous wall on our border with Mexico. Apparently, he is the only person in the world who saw footage of “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in Jersey City, New Jersey cheering on the streets as the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11, 2001.
Amazingly, sadly, pathetically, none of this has made a dent in Donald Trump’s xenophobic, fascistic, and bigoted campaign to become the next President of the United States. But on Tuesday, at a rally in South Carolina, he unwittingly hit the detonate button on his campaign. This time, finally, Donald Trump can run but he can’t hide.
This time, he picked on the wrong person.
It’s funny, but several things converged to get me to the title of the post today. The first was thinking how do we get rid of this man? How far is too far? The second, was hearing a friend saying she was ashamed of that our country had so many people that could support him. What kind of person does that? The perfect storm happened when I’d already found the title, starting writing, and then up popped an update on Memorandum with this article in the Washington Monthly: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Trump-Mania?. Nancy LeTourneau and I must be seeking guidance from the same greater universal vibe.
When Republicans lost that race to Barack Obama, they tapped into all the energy Palin had stirred up in their base in an attempt to delegitimize the election and fuel their obstruction. Those are the same flames Donald Trump is exploiting today.
Greg Sargent expressed his skepticism that any of the attacks currently being planned or implemented against Trump will have an effect on his supporters. To demonstrate how right he is about that, take a look at this post one of them wroterecently. Obviously the writer has heard about the reports that some members of theGOP establishment are planning to launch a coordinated attack against Trump.
You truly Mr. GOP whatever, underestimated the voter here. In voter, I am speaking of the TRUMP VOTER . The one who knows the games, the drills, and will never vote for any other GOP candidate no matter what you do. I, myself will vote for Micky Mouse before I vote for any other than Trump!
You have just ruined the club you call a party. You are a private entity and it is now obvious what you all do. So puppet controllers for the puppet masters. Go to ….your elections on your own. I am done with you and America wants Trump and we will vote for Donald Trump either third party or on your lousy ticket. You, however, are done. Broken, and over. You have had your last party, enjoy it!Her commenters obviously agree. Here’s just the first one:
I knew the GOP wasn’t to be trusted, they hate Trump, they can’t control him because he is his own man. I know I am not the only one that will vote for him and no one else, whether he runs GOP or 3rd Party. He has the vision, the intelligence and the guts to do what is right for America and its people, he owes no one and he will make the tough decisions. He’s not interested in being PC he’s interested in saving this Nation. The GOP should be ashamed, they should be backing Trump all the way, but that would be against everything they believe in….their own self interests. Go Trump will be heard loud and clear across the land and this will backfire on you establishment GOP’rs!!!!!Nothing anyone says about Trump is going to change these people’s mind. Attacks on him only reinforce what they already believe – which is that the Republican Party has abandoned them and is terminally broken. The Grand Old Party created an insurgency that is now turning on them. That’s what Trump-mania is coming down to.
I was looking around for similar articles and came up with this analysis by Molly Ball writing at The Atlantic.
“I have got my mind made up, pretty much so,” says Michael Barnhill, a 67-year-old factory supervisor with a leathery complexion and yellow teeth. “The fact is, politicians have not done anything for our country in a lot of years.”
These people are not confused. They are sticking with Trump, the only candidate who gets it, who is man enough to show the enemy who’s boss.
Barnhill is wearing a button he just bought from a vender outside the convention center. It says “TRUMP 2016: FINALLY SOMEONE WITH BALLS.”
They seem so nice, your friends and neighbors. Your fellow Americans.
“In today’s time, if I’m a white person who’s proud to be white, I’m a racist,” says 44-year-old Kevin Stubbs, a land surveyor who shared his Marlboro Reds with an African American T-shirt vender on the way in. “Yet a minority can say that.”
“I do not feel safe,” says his fiancee, Loree Ballenberger, 42. “People are coming in across the border, and we have no idea where they are coming from.” She recently called her congressman to urge him to vote for a bill limiting Syrian refugees.
“I remember seeing Muslims around the world celebrating after 9/11,” says Chip Matthews, a 63-year-old retired carpentry teacher in glasses with tinted lenses. So what if it was the Mideast and not New Jersey? “The basic point, I think, is true,” he says.
“I look at the pictures of those refugees and they all look like able-bodied young men, 18 to 30 years old,” says his wife, Patrice Matthews, a 62-year-old retired school-district worker. Matthews doesn’t see why we have to be the ones to help these people. “It’s their country—they need to take it back,” she says.
I hear versions of the point about able-bodied young men from five different people. I hear, over and over again, that illegal immigration is the biggest problem we face. Almost everyone says their second-choice candidate is Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas; many express a wish that he and Trump would run on the same ticket.
Barnhill, the man with the “balls” button, says, “Like he says, people have got to abide by the law. And unfortunately, a lot of minorities don’t.”
The deal is that it really does take balls to to tap your foot in a stall in a Minneapolis Airport to signal you’re up for sex, or post a profile on Tinder when you’re a values politician with a wife and family at home, or
Audience members listen as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop at the Burlington Memorial Auditorium, Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2015, in Burlington, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
sext out a dick pick. It takes balls to call the DC madam during a Senate vote from the floor of the US Senate. It certainly takes balls to send a bunch of aides off to steal papers from some one’s therapist or the office of the other party who opposes you. It takes balls to send investigators to spy on your political enemies and stalk a private blogger whose only sin was to interview one of your hookers. It takes balls to sexually harass teen pages and to suppress the findings of a police report that shows the cold blooded murder of citizen until after your re-election.
Most of our elected officials have plenty of that.
What’s the difference between that and the false bravado of The Donald whose exploits are basically that of a trust fund bully well versed in prep school mean?
Well, that appears to be the appeal bigotry. This is what really separates the ballsy from the fascist. That is also why we now see the move to remove coming from the Republicans themselves. The Donald’s brand is exposing the underlying bigotry of conservatism and the game they play with their base. It’s okay to play footsy, but we can’t have any cameras or it becomes as obvious as the Donald mimicking the hands of a man with a chronic muscle ailment.
Many say the populist crazy talk is typical of the White House primaries, but Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s increasingly incendiary remarks are leading some conservatives to brand him a “fascist” and party rivals to ramp up attacks against him.
Most spectacularly, the real estate tycoon recently said he would support registering Muslims in a database, and insisted — despite lacking any evidence — he saw Arabs in New Jersey cheer when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11.
His stance has become so belligerent that voices are asking, even inside his party, whether he is committed to democratic values.
Republican experts are warning that Trump could do lasting damage to the GOP, and that his nomination in the party primaries would essentially hand the presidency to Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
Several campaign teams in the primary race now appear to be coalescing around the need to oppose the celebrity billionaire’s candidacy.
Establishment conservatives even took the unfathomable step of using the F-word against a member of their own party.
“Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it,” Max Boot, a military historian and foreign policy advisor to Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio, posted on Twitter.
“Forced federal registration of US citizens, based on religious identity, is fascism. Period,” added John Noonan, a national security advisor to former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
In its Tuesday editorial the New York Times said the past week of the campaign had been “dominated by Donald Trump’s racist lies.”
The Seattle Times used similarly strong language in a Wednesday editorial that denounced Trump’s “button-pushing lie after button-pushing lie.”
“Trump’s campaign message reflects a kind of creeping fascism,” the paper said. “It needs to be rejected.”
Frankly, I think if you dress this shit up and code words–like Ronald Reagan announcing his presidency while hinting that he’ll go after ‘welfare queens’ by carefully choosing the location of the announcement–you’ll do just fine. The deal is that you can’t get caught. The problem is that the world of the internet, cameras, and citizen journalists make this all very difficult.
The problem is this. When do we see that people like Trump and officers that shoot unarmed black men are not really outliers in US society. There’s a bunch of them out there and they do find refuge in the Republican party and the nation’s press who portrays white, male, christian terrorists as “lone wolves” or dismisses the hard bigotry of a preacher politicians like Huckabee or Santorum simply because they don’t have the money to go far enough?
When do look at ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves why we tolerate this craziness? Why do we insist that all lives matter instead of recognizing the institutional murder of unarmed black citizens? Why do we shrug when Christians announce their persecuted then go after planned parenthood on religious grounds all while screaming Muslims want unAmerican sharia law? We’re a society who likes shiny things and we’re willing to trample a kid to get at a vegetable steamer all in the name of a holiday supposedly for the prince of peace.
Riddle me how so many of us can be that bigoted and that dumb and we can solve a problem like the Donald and the accompanying Trump mania some day. Yeah, what exactly do we do with stupid white people?
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Posted: September 18, 2015 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: 2016 primaries, bigotry, Fiorina, Islamophobia, Republican primary debate, Trump |
Well, I’ve had one of those days and I’m much later than I thought I would be getting to this post. I went to pick up a ‘script and some groceries which I expected to take an hour and a half tops. It turned into an all afternoon ordeal that’s left me crabby and behind on everything. At least Z Nation is on tonight and I have a good supply of red wine.
I’m still reeling from the absolute cock and bull show that was the three hour Republican Primary Debate. How can so many people tell so many lies and still have folks call some winners and losers. What ever happened to telling the truth and calling people out on absolute fantasy?
Stephanopoulus called Fiorna out on the whopper she told about Planned Parenthood but not until the next day.
Former Democratic activist turned journalist George Stephanopoulos on Thursday went after Carly Fiorina for attacking Planned Parenthood during Wednesday’s presidential debate. The Good Morning America co-host grilled, “Another powerful moment last night was when you talked about those Planned Parenthood tapes. But analysts who’ve watched all 12-plus hours say the scene you’ve described, that harrowing scene you described, actually isn’t in those tapes.”
He wondered, “did you misspeak?” Fiorina shot back at the man who secretly donated $75,000 to the Clintons: “I don’t know whether you’ve watched the tapes, George….Certainly none of the Democrats who are still defending Planned Parenthood have watched those tapes.”
I’m beginning to think they should just come out and ask them if they’re stupid or if they’ve just decided to just lie to every one if that’s what it takes to get attention.
None of the nonsense escaped the sharp eyes and tongue of Charles Pierce. He singled Fiorina out for the completley out-to-lunch comments of Fiorina who many pundits feel won the debate.
How do you win a debate by talking trash crisply?
There is a monumental question facing political journalists this morning. How do you cover a campaign in which 15 candidates are running on the basis of things that simply are not true, on the basis of things that simply do not exist? There are two choices: call bullshit for what it is, or just surrender to the unceasing barrage of truthless performance art. Here’s Ezra Klein, pretty much running up the white flag.
This is the second debate Fiorina won. She dominated the JV stage in the Fox News debate, forcing CNN to change the rules to ensure she made the main stage in their event. She validated their decision tonight. She had the crispest answers, received the biggest cheers, and proved the only candidate on the stage capable of standing against Trump. She made everyone else on the stage — especially Trump — look unprepared. But she did it in part by playing fast and loose with the facts. Her barrage of specifics often obscured a curious detachment from reality.
If a cop sees someone on the sidewalk evincing a “curious detachment to reality,” he will run that person in for medical observation, but read on, and Klein correctly points out that Fiorina doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. On foreign policy, and on immigration, and on a host of other issues, she simply asserts that which is not true.
This has become something of a habit for Fiorina, who has a notable facility for delivering answers that thrill conservatives but fall apart under close examination. In a recent interview with Katie Couric, for instance, Fiorina delivered a four-minute riff on climate change that the National Review enthused “shows how to address the left on climate change.” The only problem, as David Roberts pointed out, was that every single thing she said in it was wrong. But if presidential campaigns were decided by fact checkers, Al Gore would have won in a landslide.
Were I young Ezra, I would not use the events surrounding the Gore candidacy as precedent for how political reporters should cover presidential campaigns, and Gore did win by half-a-million votes nationwide. If the elite political press is going to treat fiction as fact as long as the fiction is delivered in a compelling, dramatic manner, then the country truly is lost. If Carly Fiorina is adjudged to be the winner of a debate simply because of how “crisply” she delivered lies about Planned Parenthood, or how “forcefully” she responded to a cartoon like Donald Trump, or how “sharply” she presented her nonsense about reining in Vladimir Putin with “aggressive military maneuvers” on his borders, then there is a problem in the political process that is metastasizing by the hour. Ronald Reagan was the index patient for that problem. They truly are his children now.
Paul Krugman followed up on this general topic in his op-ed today.
I’ve been going over what was said at Wednesday’s Republican debate, and I’m terrified. You should be, too. After all, given the vagaries of elections, there’s a pretty good chance that one of these people will end up in the White House.
Why is that scary? I would argue that all of the G.O.P. candidates are calling for policies that would be deeply destructive at home, abroad, or both. But even if you like the broad thrust of modern Republican policies, it should worry you that the men and woman on that stage are clearly living in a world of fantasies and fictions. And some seem willing to advance their ambitions with outright lies.
Let’s start at the shallow end, with the fantasy economics of the establishment candidates.
You’re probably tired of hearing this, but modern G.O.P. economic discourse is completely dominated by an economic doctrine — the sovereign importance of low taxes on the rich — that has failed completely and utterly in practice over the past generation.
Think about it. Bill Clinton’s tax hike was followed by a huge economic boom, the George W. Bush tax cuts by a weak recovery that ended in financial collapse. The tax increase of 2013 and the coming of Obamacare in 2014 were associated with the best job growth since the 1990s. Jerry Brown’s tax-raising, environmentally conscious California is growing fast; Sam Brownback’s tax- and spending-slashing Kansas isn’t.
Yet the hold of this failed dogma on Republican politics is stronger than ever, with no skeptics allowed. On Wednesday Jeb Bush claimed, once again, that his voodoo economics would double America’s growth rate, while Marco Rubio insisted that a tax on carbon emissions would “destroy the economy.”
The only candidate talking sense about economics was, yes, Donald Trump, who declared that “we’ve had a graduated tax system for many years, so it’s not a socialistic thing.”
If the discussion of economics was alarming, the discussion of foreign policy was practically demented. Almost all the candidates seem to believe that American military strength can shock-and-awe other countries into doing what we want without any need for negotiations, and that we shouldn’t even talk with foreign leaders we don’t like.
Trump, meawhile, took the spotlight today by taking a pass on the idea that Obama is a Muslim that wasn’t born in this
country unlike how Senator John McCain approached birthers during Obama’s first run at the presidency. Trump was an infamous birther so it’s not surprising he’d still be attracting them and playing off the meme.
Donald Trump came under fire Friday morning for his handling of a question at a town hall about when the U.S. can “get rid” of Muslims, for failing to take issue with that premise and an assertion that President Barack Obama is Muslim.
Trump, who has shaken off several high-profile controversies that would have ended other presidential campaigns, faced an immediate backlash from advocacy groups, and members of his own party distanced themselves from the GOP front-runner. The incident recalls Trump’s 2011 quest to challenge Obama on where he was born, which ended with Obama releasing his long-form birth certificate. It also follows a debate performance Wednesday that garnered mixed reviews for the billionaire businessman.
“We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims,” an unidentified man who spoke at a question-and-answer town hall event in Rochester, New Hampshire asked the mogul at a rally Thursday night. “You know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American.”
A seemingly bewildered Trump interrupted the man, chuckling, “We need this question. This is the first question.”
“Anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us,” the man, wearing a “Trump” T-shirt, continued. “That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?”
“We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things,” Trump replied. “You know, a lot of people are saying that and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening. We’re going to be looking at that and many other things.”
The real estate mogul did not correct the questioner about his claims about Obama before moving on to another audience member.
Meanwhile, most reporters seem to just keep mum while crap like this goes on. Anderson Cooper finally showed some shock and surprise during one particularly bad White Christian Supremacist Trump Supporter landed on his program. Can we expect any more of this? Probably not, because Coop apologized later.
CNN host Anderson Cooper got heated with a Donald Trump backer Thursday night, losing his famously calm disposition when the guest tried to explain Trump’s remarks about Muslims at a campaign event.
Cooper asked Andy Dean, former president of Trump Productions, about the Republican real estate mogul’s answer that “we’re going to be looking at that” after a man at a New Hampshire event said Muslims are “a problem in this country” and “we all know our current President is one.” Trump did not correct the supporter.
Dean said it’s “not accurate at all” to say that Trump said “we’re going to be looking at Muslims.” He said the GOP frontrunner meant he would be looking at potential radical Muslim training camps.
“You may laugh it off, but there are potential reports of Muslim radicals,” Dean said, before Cooper interrupted.
“Andy, I’ve spent more time overseas than you ever have in your little life, so don’t tell me about I’m laughing this stuff off,” Cooper said.
The conversation devolved into the two verbally comparing passports, as Cooper pressed Dean on how much time he had spent visiting Muslim countries in the Middle East.
“Not much in the Muslim world, because I don’t want to get killed,” Dean responded.
Anderson apologized for losing his temper later in the broadcast, and mentioned it again on Twitter.
Meanwhile, substance and fact free Fiorina has decided to attack Clinton by suggesting she has no real executive experience. Fiornia needs an attire army of fact checkers following her as she makes things up out of whole cloth. Hillary has no record of leadership or experience? WTF?
Hillary Clinton has dismissed attacks upon her during Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate as political rhetoric and defended her track record in government after it came in for the most fierce criticism of the night from the only other woman in the race for the White House, Carly Fiorina.
“I’m very proud of it,” Clinton said of her time as secretary of state in the Obama administration, in an interview on Thursday on CNN.
Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, mocked Clinton at the debate in California on Wednesday by saying: “If you want to stump a Democrat, ask them about Hillary Clinton’s accomplishments as secretary of state.”
It raised a chuckle from the audience, but only a wry smile from Clinton on Thursday.
“If anyone is interested, there is a long list of what I’ve done and I’m very proud of it,” she said.
Clinton itemized: “orchestrating a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and putting together the coalition that led to international sanctions against Iran” as the top items on her list.
She noted that the 11 candidates on the main stage of the debate on Wednesday did not talk about subjects that she prioritizes, such as affordable college fees, equal pay for women and “raising the incomes of hard-working people.”
She told CNN that she had not watched the entire debate, which lasted an unusually long three hours, but had seen enough to know she was unimpressed.
“This was just the usual back and forth political attacks. The kind of things you get when you are on a debate stage and you don’t have much to say. This was just the silly season,” she said.
Why can’t journalists actually tell folks that an outright lie is not just a difference of opinion? Sheesh!
Meanwhile, I’ll be watching Z Nation tonight with a nice chianti. No fava beans.
What have you been reading today?
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Posted: March 27, 2015 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: GLBT Rights, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: bigotry, Indiana, Mike Pence, religious freedom |
Good Morning!
Right wing religious extremists in the US continue their incredible movement to ignore our Constitution’s separation of church and state to push hate agendas throughout various states in the country. The hate was front and center in Indiana as Governor Mike Pence signed a bill that basically labels bigotry as “religious freedom.” We continue to see Jim Crow type laws established so bigot business owners can openly refuse service to GLBT Americans.
The Indiana bill is part of a wave of recent legislation seeking to guarantee “religious freedom” on the part of organizations or businesses who want to retain the right to discriminate against gay people. While the advocates usually posit a baker who doesn’t want to have to take business from a gay couple seeking a wedding cake as the person the law would protect, the laws are often written so vaguely that they would allow almost any kind of discrimination, so long as the discriminator justifies it on the basis of their religious beliefs.
The bill in Indiana doesn’t mention words like “gay” at all. It merely says that the government can’t “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion.” And a key element of the conservative Christian argument about religious freedom is that “exercise” of religion isn’t just about rituals and prayer and worship; it extends to everything, including commerce.
The implications are therefore enormous. Forget about the baker — what if you own a restaurant and think homosexuality is an abomination, and therefore you want to hang a “No gays allowed” sign in your window? Under this law, you’d be able to. Or what if you’re a Muslim who owns an auto repair shop, and you want to refuse to serve women, because you say your religion tells you that women shouldn’t drive?
Those kinds of concerns are what led former governor Jan Brewer to veto a similar bill in Arizona, after she got all kinds of pressure from the state’s business community, which feared boycotts of the state. That same pressure has been building in Indiana, though it doesn’t seem to have moved Governor Pence.
The more news this Indiana law gets, the more likely it is that it will become an issue in the presidential primaries. And it fits neatly within the key divide among Republicans: on one side you could have business groups that are nervous about negative economic impacts and strategists who don’t want the GOP to be known as the party of discrimination, while on the other side you have candidates eager for the votes of religious right primary voters.
Pence signed the bill in private and against the outcry of many in the business community who are now pulling business from the state. This is from the 
Indianapolis Star. This includes a video of his statement and a presser with Q&A.
The nation’s latest legislative battle over religious freedom and gay rights came to a close Thursday when Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed a controversial “religious freedom” bill into law.
His action followed two days of intense pressure from opponents — including technology company executives and convention organizers — who fear the measure could allow discrimination, particularly against gays and lesbians.
Pence and leaders of the Republican-controlled General Assembly called those concerns a “misunderstanding.”
“This bill is not about discrimination,” Pence said, “and if I thought it legalized discrimination I would have vetoed it.”
Senate Bill 101 prohibits state or local governments from substantially burdening a person’s ability to exercise their religion — unless the government can show that it has a compelling interest and that the action is the least-restrictive means of achieving it. It takes effect July 1.
Although the bill does not mention sexual orientation, opponents fear it could allow business owners to deny services to gays and lesbians for religious reasons.
Pence signed the bill during a private ceremony in his Statehouse office just before 10 a.m. Thursday. He was joined by supportive lawmakers, Franciscan monks and nuns, orthodox Jews, and some of the state’s most powerful lobbyists on conservative social issues.
The event was closed to the public and the press.
As I said, the response from businesses was swift and drastic.
The CEO of major U.S. corporation is following through on his warning to the State of Indiana to not pass a discriminatory “religious freedom” bill.
Salesforce, founded in 1999, has grown into a $4 billion software corporation. It is a component of the prestigious S&P 500, and boasts 12,000 employees.
50-year old CEO, founder, and chairman Marc Benioff (photo), who started the company in San Francisco, and his wife Lynne Krilich, have given millions to children’s hospitals.
Recently, Salesforce came out strongly against Indiana’s discriminatory Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
“We have been an active member of the Indiana business community and a key job creator for more than a decade,” Scott McCorkle, CEO of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud division, wrote in a letter to Indiana lawmakers. “Our success is fundamentally based on our ability to attract and retain the best and most diverse pool of highly skilled employees, regardless of gender, religious affiliation, ethnicity or sexual orientation.”
“Without an open business environment that welcomes all residents and visitors,” he warned, “Salesforce will be unable to continue building on its tradition of marketing innovation in Indianapolis.”
Benioff has cancelled all business travel to Indiana. 
Already, the gamer convention Gen Con and the Disciples of Christ church group had threatened to pull their conventions out of Indianapolis. Tech giant Salesforce said it would halt its plans to expand in the state, too.
The NCAA had hinted for days that the bill — which has the effect of allowing businesses to challenge local laws that forbid discriminating against customers based on sexual orientation in court — could damage the city’s reputation as a host of major sporting events.
Jason Collins, who last year became the first openly gay active NBA player, asked Pence in a tweet whether it is “going to be legal for someone to discriminate against me & others when we come” to the Final Four.
Still, Pence signed the bill in his office Thursday. In a statement explaining his decision, he pointed to President Barack Obama’s health care law — which triggered a lawsuit by Hobby Lobby to ensure the company wasn’t required to cover birth control through its employees’ health insurance plans.
Of course, the War on Women continues too with the Republican’s whackadoodle religious right taking the lead. Arizona proves its once again the place where medical science can be damned when it gets in the way of fetus fever.
Doctors in Arizona might soon be required to tell women that abortions can be “reversed.” As the Washington Post reports, the Arizona legislature just passed a bill that is the latest in state-based attempts to ban women from using their own health insurance to pay for abortion. What makes this bill especially Orwellian is this attempt to force doctors to put the stamp of medical authority on the fantastical belief that women en masse are regretting their abortions hours after getting them and are miraculously getting them reversed through heroic interventions by Christian doctors.
I reported on this fantasy back in December, but to recap: Anti-choicers, backed by one particularly vocal doctor named George Delgado, are claiming that you can “reverse” medication abortions. A woman having a medication abortion takes two pill doses, one of mifepristone and then another of misoprostol. Proponents of “abortion reversal” would like you to believe it’s common for women to take the first dose and become wracked with guilt, desperate to save her pregnancy. To help these women, Delgado gives the woman progesterone shots, supposedly in an effort to reverse the effects of the mifepristone.
The problem is it’s almost certainly quackery. Mifepristone is not enough on its own to terminate a pregnancy some of the time, so you’re not “reversing” the abortion so much as interrupting the process before it’s complete. The progesterone shots reverse nothing—they are medically unnecessary theater, designed to portray anti-choicers as conquering heroes rescuing pregnant maidens from the clutches of abortionists. There’s no evidence of much demand from women to interrupt their abortions, and in the rare circumstances that someone is seized by regret, all she needs to do is contact her regular doctor about stopping the pills.
Forcing doctors to “inform” patients about an intervention that isn’t medically useful and isn’t really in demand serves no other purpose but to inject anti-choice histrionics into what is already a stressful situation for many patients. You should be able to get through an abortion without having to indulge a right-wing delusion.
I’ve had several friends travelling to Mississippi to defend the last standing abortion clinic there. The Fetus Fanatics have physically attacked the building and are doing all kinds of crazy things there in the name of Operation “Rescue”. So, here’s a little of that homegrown terrorism for you.
A couple nights ago, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the last standing abortion clinic in all of Mississippi, was attacked and vandalized by a masked intruder who destroyed security cameras and attempted to cut the power lines.
So I’ll just ice the cake with a little gratuitous Pat Robertson. You remember him, he ran for the Republican presidential nomination and did pretty well back in the 1980s? Ongoing investigations show that the co-pilot most likely downed that German Airliner in a murder/suicide action related to ongoing issues with depression. So, with that in mind … Here’s Patty!!!
Christian televangelist Pat Robertson suggested on Thursday that the co-pilot’s decision to crash Germanwings Flight 9525 could be explained if he was a Muslim.
French prosecutors concluded on Thursday that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had locked the pilot out of the cockpit, and then deliberately crashed the plane into the French Alps, killing 150 people.
“What happened to that plane that crashed into the French Alps?” Robertson asked on Thursday’s edition of The 700 Club. “Well, they’ve begun to find out. The pilot went to the lavatory and was soon locked out of the cockpit. He pounded on the door, begging to come in. But the door was not opened.”
“The co-pilot then takes the plane, pushes it into a dive and crashes it. The passengers are screaming as the plane went down. The pilot is yelling.”
“What a terrible tragedy,” the TV preacher continued. “Was that co-pilot a Muslim? Was he suicidal? What was it about him?”
Robertson later allowed for the possibility that Lubitz could have been “just psychotic.”
“What was it?” he wondered. “Why would he want to kill all those people?”
French prosecutor Brice Robin on Thursday described Lubitz as a 28-year-old German who was “not listed as a terrorist.”
Robin told reporters that he did not know Lubitz’s religion or ethnicity, but said, “I don’t think that’s where the answer to this lies.”
I’m still stunned by the murder fantasies of hyper-Christian and Duck seducer/murderer Daddy FuckBucks Robertson who seems to have replaced a smack addiction for talking religious smack.
Phil Robertson, the paterfamilias on A&E’sDuck Dynasty who also frequents the Christian speaking circuit, has stirred up controversy yet again by inventing a bizarre parable in which an atheist family is raped and murdered.
The conservative reality television star has a reputation for sounding off about controversial issues. In 2013, he came under fire for making homophobic remarks in an interview with GQ.This time, his focal point was atheists, whom—he asserted—have no moral compass because they do not believe in God. Here is the graphic story he told, per the audio from Right Wing Watch:
I’ll make a bet with you. Two guys break into an atheist’s home. He has a little atheist wife and two little atheist daughters. Two guys break into his home and tie him up in a chair and gag him. And then they take his two daughters in front of him and rape both of them and then shoot them and they take his wife and then decapitate her head off in front of him. And then they can look at him and say, ‘Isn’t it great that I don’t have to worry about being judged? Isn’t it great that there’s nothing wrong with this? There’s no right or wrong, now is it dude?’
Then you take a sharp knife and take his manhood and hold it in front of him and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if this [sic] was something wrong with this? But you’re the one who says there is no God, there’s no right, there’s no wrong, so we’re just having fun. We’re sick in the head, have a nice day.’
The moral of the tale? “If it happens to them, they probably would say, ‘Something about this just ain’t right,’” Robertson said.
Some fundamental Christians, like Robertson, believe that morality is dependent on the existence of God and by rejecting God, atheists also reject morals.
WTF is wrong with these people?!?!?! Dude, nonsociopaths do not have to have imaginary beings threaten them with hell to do the right thing. Doing the right thing is its own reward. We can ask BB, but I’d say the guy has a serious case of projectionitis.
But, here’s a better question … why are we enacting their hateful, bigoted crap into our laws? And, why do these people get a public platform?
There’s way too many of them and way too few lions for my taste.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Posted: August 17, 2012 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: abortion rights, Reproductive Rights, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: bigotry, Dana Millbank, false equivalency, Family Research Council, Floyd Lee Corkins II, Gary Bauer, Gay Marriage, hate groups, Human Rights Campaign, Paul Ryan, Southern Poverty Law Center, Tony Perkins |
If Tony Perkins is “mainstream,” we’re all in deep trouble
In his latest column, Dana Millbank takes the Village journalists’ “both sides do it” routine to such irrational extremes that he loses all credibility.
Human Rights Campaign [HRC], the nation’s largest gay rights organization, posted an alert on its blog Tuesday: “Paul Ryan Speaking at Hate Group’s Annual Conference.”
The “hate group” that the Republicans’ vice presidential candidate would be addressing? The Family Research Council [FRC], a mainstream conservative think tank founded by James Dobson and run for many years by Gary Bauer.
The day after the gay rights group’s alert went out, 28-year-old Floyd Lee Corkins II walked into the Family Research Council’s Washington headquarters and, according to an FBI affidavit, proclaimed words to the effect of “I don’t like your politics” — and shot the security guard. Corkins, who had recently volunteered at a gay community center, was carrying a 9mm handgun, a box of ammunition and a backpack full of Chick-fil-A — the company whose president recently spoke out against gay marriage.
Mercifully, the gunman was restrained, and nobody was killed.
Apparently Millbank made the logical leap of assigning cause and effect to two unrelated events that are close in time. Corkins must have read the HRC website and rush out to shoot someone. Or maybe Corkins was browsing the internet and came across the Southern Poverty Law Center website where the FRC is listed as a hate group.
Millbank says
Human Rights Campaign isn’t responsible for the shooting. Neither should the organization that deemed the FRC a “hate group,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, be blamed for a madman’s act. But both are reckless in labeling as a “hate group” a policy shop that advocates for a full range of conservative Christian positions, on issues from stem cells to euthanasia.
I disagree with the Family Research Council’s views on gays and lesbians. But it’s absurd to put the group, as the law center does, in the same category as Aryan Nations, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Stormfront and the Westboro Baptist Church. The center says the FRC “often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science.” Exhibit A in its dossier is a quote by an FRC official from 1999 (!) saying that “gaining access to children has been a long-term goal of the homosexual movement.”
Millbank seems to believe that the FRC is “mainstream” because it has been headed by Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer, and with his exclamation point after “1999” he seems to be implying that there is some kind of statute of limitations on hate speech.
I can’t follow his reasoning at all. He’s twisting himself into a pretzel in order to defend an organization that clearly works overtime to drum up hate, not only against the LGBT community, but also against women and anyone involved in providing family planning or abortion. Perkins has even argued against anti-bullying policies in schools, claiming they are part of the “homosexual agenda” to “redefine families.”
Millbank even quotes the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) to support his arguments!
The National Organization for Marriage, which opposes gay marriage, is right to say that the attack “is the clearest sign we’ve seen that labeling pro-marriage groups as ‘hateful’ must end.”
Here’s a little background on the NOM from Mother Jones:
Spokespeople for the National Organization for Marriage, such as Rev. William Owens, who exaggerated his civil rights background to justify his opposition to same sex marriage, have compared homosexuality to bestiality and child abuse. NOM’s man in Maryland, Bishop Harry Jackson, has compared gay rights groups to Nazis whose actions recall “the times of Hitler.” Most of NOM’s more high-profile spokespersons are more careful with their words, but beyond rhetoric, NOM has argued that gay judges should be barred from ruling on LGBT rights issues and embraced junk science to argue that gays and lesbians make worse parents.
I guess “Pro-marriage” is like “pro-life”–supporting certain kinds of marriage like the anti-abortion crown supports only fetal life.
Millbank may not want to actually blame the SPLC for the shooting, but Tony Perkins didn’t hesitate to do so.
The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins accused the Southern Poverty Law Center — a civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry — of providing “license” for a man to shoot a security guard in the arm on Wednesday.
“Floyd Corkins was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center that have been reckless in labeling organizations hate groups because they disagree with them on public policy,” Perkins declared during a press conference on Thursday afternoon. “I believe the Southern Poverty Law Center should be held responsible that is leading to intimidation of what the FBI has characterized as domestic terrorism.” Corkins has since been charged for assault with a deadly weapon and could soon face federal charges. The guard, Leo Johnson, is in stable condition.
Asked by reporters why he thought the shooter was motivated by his distate for the group rather than mental incapacity, Perkins quipped, “How many unhinged individuals walk around with 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches?”
So does that make the FRC responsible for the murders of abortion doctors like George Tiller?
Here are just a few examples of statements from the FRC on gays and lesbians. You can go to the links to read more.
Mother Jones: What the Right Gets Wrong about the FRC Shooting.
Perkins’ Family Research Council has practically cornered the market on anti-gay junk science. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s classification of the FRC as a hate group stems from FRC’s more than decade-long insistence that gay people are more likely to molest children. Spokespeople for the FRC have said that homosexual sex should be outlawed, and Perkins himself has said as recently as 2010 that “the research is overwhelming that homosexuality poses a danger to children.” Research from non-ideological outfits is actually firm in concluding the opposite. Some of the FRC’s more outrageous “studies,” such as the 1999 paper claiming that “one of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order,” have been scrubbed from the group’s website, but the FRC has not disavowed their contents.
Anti-gay quotes from the FRC compiled by Mathew Shepard Online Resources.
Gays are like a gun to the head of America
“That’s what we’re talking about whenever you’re talking about gay rights. You’re talking about giving somebody a gun to put at the head of anybody who disagrees with them, whether it’s the Boy Scouts, whether it’s a local dry-cleaning establishment or a giant corporation like Shell Oil.” – Robert Knight, http://www.frc.org/net/st96d2.html
Gays oppose monogamy
“one thing that has been interesting to me is the gay literature has come right out and said we can’t keep monogamy in our definition of marriage. We may have a significant relationship we’ll call marriage, but things like monogamy and fidelity, faithfulness, and lifetime kind of till-death-do-us-part commitments are a little unrealistic. So we want it to be marriage, but we don’t want it to be monogamous.” – Kristi Hamrick , http://www.frc.org/net/st96d2.html
Gay parents lead to prison, voyeurism
“I know a guy who has just entered jail, tragically, because he grew up in a lesbian household. He still loves his mother and doesn’t really blame her, but he said, ‘You know, as a boy in a lesbian environment where it was intensely anti-male’ — that’s all he heard, this bitterness toward men — he said that he felt totally disenfranchised, began having sexual problems. He eventually became a voyeur, and he is in on a peeping Tom charge. He was so curious about how normal people have sex. We have other people that are cases like this.” – Robert Knight, http://www.frc.org/net/st96d2.html
See also this “Refresher on Tony Perkins’ Anti-Gay Hits.”
The SPLC posted a response to Perkins on its website, calling the FRC claims “outrageous.”
Perkins’ accusation is outrageous. The SPLC has listed the FRC as a hate group since 2010 because it has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people — not, as some claim, because it opposes same-sex marriage. The FRC and its allies on the religious right are saying, in effect, that offering legitimate and fact-based criticism in a democratic society is tantamount to suggesting that the objects of criticism should be the targets of criminal violence.
As the SPLC made clear at the time and in hundreds of subsequent statements and press interviews, we criticize the FRC for claiming, in Perkins’ words, that pedophilia is “a homosexual problem” — an utter falsehood, as every relevant scientific authority has stated. An FRC official has said he wanted to “export homosexuals from the United States.” The same official advocated the criminalizing of homosexuality.
Perkins and his allies, seeing an opportunity to score points, are using the attack on their offices to pose a false equivalency between the SPLC’s criticisms of the FRC and the FRC’s criticisms of LGBT people. The FRC routinely pushes out demonizing claims that gay people are child molesters and worse — claims that are provably false. It should stop the demonization and affirm the dignity of all people.
The Family Research Council is an extreme right wing organization. Dana Millbank should hang his head in shame. Perkins is trying to make his group look like the victim of bigotry instead of the proponent of it, and Millbank is working overtime to help him do it.
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