Category: Politics

For those (and you know who you are!) who might opine that atheists should just shut up, or who might bring up the old canard that goes something like, “If you don’t believe in God, why are you so afraid of him?”, I offer, in reply, this article by Frank Schaeffer:

As a former Religious Right leader, who was raised (and home-schooled by my Evangelical-leader parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer) in the movement, let me explain just why the ordinary rules of decency don’t apply to the right these days.

He goes on to talk about the home schooling and private Christian schooling movements that took off in the 50s:

In the early 1970s the evangelicals like my late father and James Dobson decided that the our society had fallen so far “away from God” and so far from “America’s Christian history” that it was time to metaphorically decamp to not just another country but to another planet:. In other words virtually unnoticed by the media and mainstream political operatives, a big chunk of American society seceded from the union in all but name.
[…]
Hating the USA became next to godliness.

He quotes evangelical leaders to reveal a theocratic agenda – non-Christians shouldn’t be allowed to vote in this supposed “covenanted Christian nation”, and “The Christian goal for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics, in which every area of life is redeemed and placed under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the rule of God’s law.”

Whether the world wants it or not, one would assume, and even if said goal has to be achieved at gunpoint.

The fact of the matter is we now know what the experiment in raising children outside of the American mainstream means. It means that there’s a whole subculture within American culture that mistrusts facts precisely because they are facts. They glory an alternative view of not just politics but of reality.

Those damned facts must be tools of Satan, because they’re always rearing their ugly heads to contradict our faith.

Most chilling is Schaeffer’s insistence that this movement, though it has suffered a tremendous loss of political power in the last few years, is still going strong and working tirelessly to incrementally, gradually influence every aspect of our society.

There’s no arguing with such people and no winning against them using mere elections. They are not playing by American rules. Their idea of winning is not fair elections but Armageddon.

Got that? When we hell-bound militant godless heathen speak up about why we’re hell-bound militant godless heathen, it’s these people – and often their more moderate enablers – we’re railing against.

… it might be due at least in part to the need to cover the rising incidence of teen pregnancy and STDs under the auspices of the Bush/Republican/right-wing/holier-than-thou “abstinence only” sex education programs.

Yes, it seems that in 2005, just about the time when effects of the Bush-era policies of enforced ignorance might start to be seen, there was a sharp reversal of a long downward trend in the very kinds of teen issues that sex ed classes are supposed to help prevent:

According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but are up sharply in more than half of American states since 2005. The study also revealed that the number of teenage females with syphilis has risen by nearly half after a significant decrease while a two-decade fall in the gonorrhea infection rate is being reversed. The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.

The report becomes more interesting when we take a look at where in the country the biggest upswings in these statistics have happened:

The CDC says that southern states, where there is often the greatest emphasis on abstinence and religion, tend to have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs.

Now of course correlation is not proof of causation. Just because teens seem more likely to have unprotected nookie in communities where “sex before marriage makes the baby Jesus cry” is deemed a superior alternative to… oh, let’s call it… “reality” – doesn’t mean they’re boinking in large numbers simply because they’re uninformed. But those who might tout the effectiveness or righteousness or whatever of the ignorance-only plan need to give us some evidence that it actually works, and based on this study, that’s clearly not the case.

“Oh”, one might argue, if one was an evangelical nutcase, “the problem is that our abstinence-only efforts aren’t widespread enough to counter the effects of our sinful society!” And, in fact, that’s exactly the argument being made against these statistics:

Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for American Values, which describes itself as a supporter of traditional marriage and “against liberal education and cultural forces”, said the abstinence message is overwhelmed by a culture obsessed with sex.

If there was some truth to this statement, wouldn’t we expect to see significantly higher pregnancy and STD numbers outside Sarah Palin’s “real America”? You know, all those cities packed with them thar commie-lovin’ godless islamo-fascist America-hatin’ inneleck’shul libruls, those places where Christianity is illegal and gay sex is mandated by law and the president isn’t really a Kenyan spy bent on dictatorship?

Aren’t those the folks God is supposed to be punishing with AIDS?

Right way to express disapproval of a culture, tradtion, religion, etc:
Orally or in writing in an appropriate venue, inviting discussion and criticism, and using the interplay as means to refine or revise your argument.

Wrong way:
Murder practitioners of the offending creed. Human beings can sink to some very low depths in the name of glorified tribalism, and the deliberate murder of a pregnant woman and her husband simply because you don’t like the implications of her clothing is a few fathoms down on that scale. (Not so bad as, for instance, killing and/or displacing millions through a misguided invasion of an entire country, just to pick a theoretical example, but a horrible crime nonetheless.)

Muslims are justified in their outrage, in this case, both over the crime itself and the tepid media response to it. They are correct in saying that had a Muslim attacked a member of some other ethnic or religious group, news tickers on every TV news network would have reported the killing over and over at the bottom of the screen during the 24 hour Michael Jackson coverage.

Based on recent history, though, it should be pointed out to the more radical among the Muslim community: justifiable outrage is not an excuse to riot in the streets. Do that and you’re just lending credence to the lunatic fringe that might be inclined to support this man’s actions. Do that and you continue to perpetuate a justifiable-outrage circle-jerk that will keep on begetting violence and distrust on both sides long after you’ve gone off to meet your version of the invisible sky wizard. (Besides, it’s not as if the guy drew a picture of Mohammed or something…)

I should also point out that this man’s vile actions and the seeming lack of western interest in said actions are in no way a repudiation or validation of your repressive, misogynistic traditions. Your head scarves and burqas are the symptoms of a belief system in which women are little more than property, subject to beatings and execution if they, willingly or not, step outside the narrow, puritanical set of behaviors you have defined for them.

Ensign and Sanford are the latest in the GOP (your) Family (not mine) Values crowd to be embroiled in sex scandals. (Who will be next? These things always happen in threes, you know!) These latest are particularly interesting – in Ensign’s case, because it appears he may have used his position to arrange for financial reward and punishment for his mistress, and in Sanford’s case, because he apparently spontaneously abdicated his duties in pursuit of his South American love interest.

Maybe Sanford is smarter than we think – he left the country to have his affair, so he probably can’t be charged under South Carolina’s archaic anti-adultery law. However, that alleged higher law he brought up during his speech reserves a harsher punishment for him than the fine and/or prison time prescribed by state legislation:

The man who commits adultery with another man’s wife, even he who commits adultery with his neighbor’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death. (Leviticus 10:20)

Governor, are you sure it’s a good idea to be bringing up “God’s Law” right now, in a state that’s part of the literalist-leaning Bible Belt?

Well, God’s money, that is.

It seems that a bunch of ministers have decided risk losing their tax exempt status by endorsing a political candidate in a move they’ve dubbed Pulpit Freedom Sunday. Apparently the idea of church-state separation has been completely lost on these people (not that I’m shocked in the slightest).

Someone will have to challenge this action, of course, or political endorsements by religious organizations will become commonplace – as if they weren’t already, though now only in slightly-less-subtle-than-a-blow-to-the head, “unofficial” ways – and the challengers will of course be painted as evil god-hating pagan atheist devil-worshiping liberals who are waging a war on Christmas and want to outlaw Christianity, but hey, we alleged servants of Satan get that all the time anyway.

The thought of churches losing their tax exempt status over this is a pleasant one, though. Let ’em endorse all they want, but they’ve got to pay taxes. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if many of our financial problems couldn’t be solved by simply dropping those religious tax exemptions altogether. The down side would be of course that many of the charitable services provided by churches – soup kitchens, shelters, etc – might suffer, but there’s certainly no reason that such services couldn’t be moved to secular non-profit organizations that would retain their tax breaks.

I wanted to look into this matter a bit more, but recent, comprehensive statistics on church income seem to be sparse. I did find a report claiming that evangelicals in the US collected approximately 2.66 trillion dollars of income in 2000. That’s a figure that has probably risen since then, and leaves out, one would assume, the Catholic church, thousands of non-evangelical Christians, and organizations of the Jewish and Muslim faiths, as well as all the other groups out there who collect donations in support of mythological figures.

Taxing this income could pay for the entire Iraq war in only a few years, so our children and grandchildren (and so on) don’t have to. It would provide a vast new source of wealth for improving infrastructure, addressing health care costs, improving education, etc – in short, it could be put to much better use in improving the quality of life for all Americans than it currently does. Of course, a few preachers might have to sell their Jaguars.

I’m aware that barring some awesome breakthrough in anti-aging science, there won’t be an America within my lifetime with the political will to even try this. I suppose I could hope that, instead, these organizations could back up their tremendous electoral influence through the pushing of issues and platforms and all-but-open candidate endorsements by actually ponying up some cash to help pay for the actions our elected officials take in their names… but that, of course, would be asking for a bit too much of that personal responsibility stuff that the right-wingers always want everybody else to take.

Haven’t posted in a while despite the abundance of free time caused by my current state of unemployment in a stagnant market. There’s certainly been no shortage of material, what with the political conventions going on, but even the Palin mess hasn’t really inspired me to the requisite levels of cynicism and sarcasm to actually write something down.

So lieu of another collection of bad metaphors and worse puns from me, I present for your entertainment Mark Fiore’s Latest Cartoon.

Oh, and Roy Zimmerman – whose Delaware performance I sadly missed due to some last-minute babysitter issues – has a new song about McCain’s VP nomination:

… and by “behaving badly”, I don’t mean “being gay”, I mean “being hypocrites”, and not the ancient Greek doctor guy, either.

Yes, it seems that another Republican anti-gay crusader has been exposed as – you guessed it – gay. The “It’s a sin unless it’s me” party has a rather sordid recent history in that regards.

The alleged perpetrator this time is Alabama Attorney General Troy King, who it seems was caught in bed with his male lover by his wife. It’s all rumor at this point, of course, but Troy has not publically addressed the issue yet and there is rampant speculation that he’ll resign over the brewing scandal.

Is there anyone in the Grond Ole Homophobic Party who doesn’t have a gay lover?