Tag Archives: wingnuts

Weekend Update 10/10/2015 – Buds, Bullets, and Bullies

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Another of my posts mostly about news that came out after I queued up the Friday Links.

Bring out the buds!

Thursday before last was the first day of legal recreational marijuana sales in Oregon. The big news out of Oregon that day should have been about the triumph of de-criminalization over the myths of the war on drugs, et cetera. Instead we had a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College. Despite that, legal marijuana did move forward, and in a really big way: Oregon’s first week of recreational pot sales tops $11 million.

Wish we could just dodge the bullets

The Upmqua Community College shooting was the 32nd mass murder (using the FBI’s definition) in the United States of 2015. Lots of news organizations were reporting that it was the 32nd mass shooting, but the FBI doesn’t have a definition for mass shooting, only for mass murder, which is when four or more people are killed in a single incident. But the media keeps reporting these as mass shooting statistics, and I think that that affects how people perceive the problem, because by the FBI’s statistics, the Lafeyette theatre shooting in July, in which eleven people total were shot, but only two died, isn’t being counted in that statistic.

A more reasonable statistic would be the define a mass shooting as any time 4 or more people were struck by a bullet in a single incident, regardless of how many of them survived. By that metric, The Umpqua Community College shooting was the the 295th mass shooting of the year. Read that again: 295 mass shootings for far this year in the U.S. as of October 1—that’s more than one a day. That’s more mass shootings in a year than other countries have in decades. Heck, that’s more mass shootings a day in the U.S. than most countries experience in a decade! Yet, some people keep insisting that these things can’t be prevented. They are right only in the sense that as long as we let them use that nonsense argument to prevent us from doing anything about it we won’t reduce the number of shootings.

It shouldn’t have surprised us that on Friday morning there was news of yet another school shooting: Arizona Campus Shooting Came After Fight Between Two Groups of Students. Four people shot, only one of whom died. So it won’t be counted as a mass murder, but it certainly was a mass shooting. And we shouldn’t be surprised at this revelation: SHOCKER: The Northern Arizona University Shooter Is a Patriot and a Gun Nut.

As if one school shooting on Friday wasn’t enough, we had two! TWO IN CUSTODY IN FATAL TEXAS SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY SHOOTING. Since I made a big deal in the earlier paragraphs about definitions, it would be misleading of me to refer to the Texas Southern shooting as a mass shooting: only two people were shot, of which only one died. However, the Texas Southern shooting is worth mentioning because it was the third shooting on that campus within the space of a week! There are been another incident on Tuesday night, and they mention just casually an incident the previous weekend where someone fired two shots but didn’t hit anyone.

CQVBjUXUcAAxPuCBut Congress doesn’t have time to close any loopholes in existing gun laws (such as a fact that it is not a federal crime to knowingly purchase a gun on behalf of someone who is legally barred from owning a gun!). They’re too busy conducting a witchhunt against Planned Parenthood and coming up with nothing. Republicans Admit Planned Parenthood Did Nothing Wrong.

Billionaire bully

Fortunately, not all of the news late on Friday was bad: We Were Sued by a Billionaire Political Donor. We Won. Here’s What Happened. Billionaire donates millions to anti-gay causes, a magazine reports the fact, and he sues them for defamation. This is a variant of a problem we deal with with these rightwing nut jobs all the time: if you don’t want to be called a bigot, stop doing bigoted things! Especially when you’re a co-finance chairman of not one, but two presidential campaigns (which means you are no longer considered under the law a private citizen, you’re now a public figure) who buys dozens of billboards to put up anti-gay messages, purchased full-page ads in major newspapers to run anti-gay slogans, go on Fox News to describe how awful it is to institute anti-bullying campaigns that try to protect gay children from harassment and bullying, et cetera.

That’s enough of the Friday news…

National Coming Out Day

On a much more pleasant topic, tomorrow is National Coming Out Day: What You Need to Know: National Coming Out Day 2015.

Coming out is scary. It doesn’t always go well. I’ve written before about some of the issues I’ve had (and sometimes continue to have) with family members and old friends. But I firmly believe that, unless you are a kid living at home or otherwise still dependent on your parents for financial support, or unless you live in a place where it is illegal to admit to being queer, coming out is better than continuing to live the lie. There will be some surprises when you come out. Some people that you are certain will never come around, will become your biggest defenders. Some people who you thought might understand will disown you and go to their grave without reaching out. You will definitely learn which people really love you, and which only love the idea of who they think you ought to be.

But living the lie carries a heavy price, because you live in constant fear of being found out, and you expend a lot more energy than you realize trying to cover things up all the time. Second-guessing yourself, keeping track of cover stories you’ve told, the constant worry damages both your mental and physical health. And all of that goes away once you stop hiding in the closet. Once you’re free of that you’ll be able to fill your life with people who really love and respect the real you for who you are. And that is a much happier and healthier way to live!

‘Define Me’ – Ryan Amador (featuring Jo Lampert):

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Weekend Update 9/26/2015: in the land of crazy

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Click to embiggen.
Click to embiggen.
People have been predicting John Boehner’s resignation or ouster as Speaker of the House of Representatives for a while. He’s never had the whole-hearted support of the teabagger wing of his party, who perceive his attempts to actually govern (i.e., do the job Congress is supposed to do) as collaborating with the enemy. But I think it’s wrong to blame his failure on the crazies in his party (the “crazies” is rumored to be the term Boehner himself uses while speaking with other more traditional conservative colleagues). The teabaggers only have about 80 seats in the Congress, which is far from a majority out of 435 members total, and not even a a majority of the Republican caucus (247 members). Half the problem is how much he and the so-called non-crazy members of his party coddle the crazy bullies: Speaker Boehner’s Resignation Highlights Problems with Coddling Nativist Wing.

But that’s only half the problem. The other half is that the alleged sane branch of the party believe enough of the same crazy things as the teabaggers that what they see as compromise is still skewed way over in crazy land. This is merely a subset of another phenomenon that infects most Americans about the political spectrum in general. I’ve pointed out before that a majority of Americans are in favor of more liberal positions than the vast majority of Democratic politicians are. In other words, the Democratic Party isn’t liberal, it’s slightly on the conservative side of moderate, compared to the country as a whole.

Some of it is a perception problem. I can’t count the number of times I’ve tried to explain to some of my wingnut relatives, for instance, that Social Security is a socialist program, just as Medicare is. They love Social Security and Medicare, and they believe that Ronald Reagan was absolutely right to push through the law that allows people who have no insurance to get needed medical care at emergency rooms—but hate anything anything socialist, especially socialized medicine. And don’t get me started on everyone’s misunderstanding of how wealth is currently distributed. If you want to talk about crazy misperceptions, that’s a doozy!

Speaking of crazy, it’s been a while since I wrote about Pastor Manning (he of the hateful church sign). His ministry was long ago designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and he’s been clashing with his other neighbors in Harlem for some time. To the point that he occasionally draws protesters. Which happened earlier this week. And as anyone who has read or heard any of his homophobic rants before could have predicted, he doesn’t respond to it with the sort of love and kindness that Christ commanded: Harlem Hate Pastor Has Must-Watch Manic Meltdown at Protestors Outside His Church: VIDEO. By the way, I disagree with the headline, it’s not a must-watch. The quotes in the article give you a good idea of what went down.

Weekend Update 9/12/15: It’s about ethics…

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Florida: So, twitter and other places lit up with the news that a notorious GamerGate person has been arrested by the FBI for terrorism. The Florida Man twitter account had the best take: Florida Man Plots Fake Terrorist Attack Because, I Don’t Know, Ethics in Games Journalism…Or Something? Other sites have a few details to add: GamerGate supporter arrested by FBI over terror threats. I understand, and even share a teeny bit of, all the schadenfreude that’s happening on the internet over this. But I’m having trouble actually applauding.

The thing is, people have been calling for investigations into the swatting and doxing and death threats that shut down events for a long time. There have been rumors that the feds were looking into those things at least since last year: #Gamergate Is Reportedly Being Investigated by the FBI.

But this isn’t about any of that. An FBI informant contacted this 20-year-old douche, claimed he wanted to set off a bomb at a 9/11 memorial, and convinced the douche to send him bomb-making instructions. In other words, like every other domestic terrorism arrest in the last decade and a half in America, it’s a case of entrapment. No actual terrorist plot existed. No actual people were in danger. That’s why I’m having trouble applauding. There are actual terrorists active in America right now. But they’re not plotting to bomb 9/11 memorials. They’re burning down Planned Parenthood clinics, burning down mosques and churches, shooting people in temples and churches, murdering doctors who have performed abortions, or threaten to burn down an entire town in upstate New York because muslims live there… and they are never investigated as terrorists. Their support groups and organizations are never investigated as terrorist groups because they all share two convenient traits: their membership is predominantly white, and they claim to be Christian.

So, while I am happy that at least one douche who has threatened and harassed people is getting some legal punishment, I wish it wasn’t on these sort of trumped-up/entrapped terrorist charges instead of things he and others like him are actually doing on their own.

Michigan: I posted in Friday links a few weeks ago about the virulently anti-gay and emphatically “Christian” legislator in Michigan who attempted to frame himself for having a drug problem and having hired male prostitutes as part of a really ill-thought-out plan to cover up the fact that he and another anti-gay legislator had been having an old-fashioned opposite-sex affair (while they were both traditionally holy matrimonied to other people). This week an ethics committee voted to recommend that the two of them should be removed from office. One resigned, and the other refused, so a 14-hour series of votes ensued before she was officially removed from office: 1 Michigan legislator expelled; 1 resigns. It took so long and so many votes, by the way, because liberal democratic legislators kept voting no on the principal that conservative hypocrisy and adultery shouldn’t be reasons to remove someone from office (the only democrats on the ethics committee abstained on the vote to recommend removal).

The two of them had co-sponsored several anti-gay bills, so again there is a bit of schadenfreude going around. I have absolutely no problem applauding this outcome, because they are being expelled for things that they actually did, and I disagree with the liberal lawmakers precisely because these are public officials who used their office to attempt to pry into, criminalize, marginalize, and deny the basic civil rights of their fellow citizens based on sexual orientation—in the name of their religion—while they themselves engaged in sexual conduct that is at least just as wrong according to said religion. When people in authority use their official power to condemn and attempt to police other people’s sexual activities, their own sexual activities become germane to any discussion. Also, there is more going on than just the affair. As this story notes: Disgraced lawmakers, out of office, now face criminal probe, investigation is also underway as to violations of campaign finance laws, official misconduct, and a misuse of public resources.

I didn’t save the link to the most infuriating article I read, and now I can’t find it. But Cindy Gamrat, the one who wouldn’t resign, was trying to paint herself as a victim. She told the interviewer how humiliating it was to have people in public talk about her private shame, passing judgment on her private conduct, and voting on her future because of it. Right. And her bill to make it legal only for “minister of the Gospel, cleric, or religious practitioner” to issue marriage licenses and to revoke all the privileges of marriage from people who hadn’t been married by such a clergyman wasn’t at all invasive of citizen’s private lives. And none of the rest of her actions opposing civil rights protections for queer people had anything to do with passing judgment on citizen’s private conduct.

tumblr_nugs6s2rbg1s5wv6vo1_540Kentucky: And you may have thought the Kim Davis issue was over, since she promised the judge she wouldn’t interfere in the issuing of marriage licenses to gay couples, but no: the Associate Press reports Kentucky clerk again asks for delay on gay-marriage licenses. Her attorneys argue that the only couples she denied licenses to before she was sent to jail all got licenses while she was in jail, and now she should be free to refuse any others who come along because those people got thiers. In other words, she’ll refuse licenses until the next couple sues and judges order her to give that couple the license.

Except she doesn’t think that will happen, not because she doesn’t think there aren’t any more queer people in her county, but because Oath Keepers offers Kentucky’s Kim Davis a ‘security detail’ and Oath Keepers Send Armed Guards To Protect Kim Davis From US Marshals – See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/oath-keepers-send-armed-guards-protect-kim-davis-us-marshals#sthash.p5Exjxbp.dpufThese gun-totin’ good ol’ boys have vowed to protect Davis from any federal marshals or judges who attempt to arrest her or otherwise punish her for denying queer people their legal rights.

It has been reported that Davis has declined the offer, and that the Oath Keepers leader has told his men to stand down… but apparently they aren’t leaving Rowan County. And given that Davis has clearly stated in her new filing to the appeals court that she has no intention of keeping the promise she made to the judge to get released from jail, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to contemplate that she may un-decline the offer from the Oath Keepers when things don’t go her way with the appeals court.

We’ve always been here, even in a galaxy far, far away…

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A few weeks back when one of the serious news sites reported that people of color have only recently become involved in reading comics and science fiction, Arab-American past Hugo-nominated science fiction author Saladin Ahmed shared this historical photograph showing a bunch of African-American kids reading comics in the 1940s.
A few weeks back when one of the serious news sites reported that people of color have only recently become involved in reading comics and science fiction, Arab-American past Hugo-nominated science fiction author Saladin Ahmed shared this historical photograph showing a bunch of African-American kids reading comics in the 1940s.
So, one of the official new Star Wars universe novels came out last week, STAR WARS: AFTERMATH by Chuck Wendig, and it is getting flooded with one-star reviews. About a third of those reviews are along this line: “I don’t like the inclusion of so many gay characters because my personal opinion is that sodomy is not normal and I am tired of the liberal media trying to make me accept this lifestyle.”

Jim C. Hines has a post more thoroughly discussing the various negative comments, if you want to read it. But I think his best comment is:

Oh, dear. A galaxy that includes countless species and droids and races acknowledged the existence of homosexuality? WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? Can we PLEASE get back to giant slugs with a fetish for other species, green muppets, blue elephant people, and giant walking carpets? You know, characters who are normal.

Conservative pundit Earl Hall (here’s a DoNotLink link if you want to subject yourself to it) weighed in (including a really bad attempt to write some Yoda dialog), asking why there are suddenly so many gay characters everywhere: “Is there all of a sudden way more LGBT people in our population than we once thought? Is this really about diversity, or is it more about forcing a story line and lifestyle down our throats?”

First of all, yes, Mr Hall and all the bigoted one-star reviewers: there are more queer people in the population than you thought. But it isn’t suddenly. I’ve quoted before the CDC study in the 1990s about sexual activity that found that while Americans would rather admit to being heroin addicts than bisexual, if you just went by their sexual activity rather than asking them to identify their sexual orientation, about 45% of the population regularly engaged in sexual activity with both men and women. That and other studies indicate that only about 6% of the population engages primarily in sexual activity with members of the same gender. But that means that just (45% + 6 % = 51%) a bit over half the population of the planet is non-heterosexual.

That means that in the U.S. about 19,800,000 (that’s more than nineteen million) people are exclusively gay, while about another 148,500,000 (that’s over 148 million) people are bisexual/pansexual/whatever you want to call it.

And worldwide, the combined number would be 3,570,000,000 (that’s more than three-and-a-half billion) non-heterosexual people.

So, yes, a lot more than you think. And we’ve always been here. There was a wonderful scholarly article I read once that was dissecting clues in various documents and diaries and so forth from the 1890s that put forward a really good argument that men were having sex with other men more often in the U.S. in the 1890s for at least part of their adult lives than was happening in the 1990s. Just as an example.

Wendig has a couple of great responses:

If you can imagine a world where Luke Skywalker would be irritated that there were gay people around him, you completely missed the point of Star Wars. It’s like trying to picture Jesus kicking lepers in the throat instead of curing them. Stop being the Empire. Join the Rebel Alliance. We have love and inclusion and great music and cute droids.

And a bit later in the post:

And if you’re upset because I put gay characters and a gay protagonist in the book, I got nothing for you. Sorry, you squawking saurian — meteor’s coming. And it’s a fabulously gay Nyan Cat meteor with a rainbow trailing behind it and your mode of thought will be extinct. You’re not the Rebel Alliance. You’re not the good guys. You’re the fucking Empire, man. You’re the shitty, oppressive, totalitarian Empire.

Wendig also points out all the women and people of color appearing prominently in the trailers for the new movie, in case that kind of inclusion also upsets the one-star reviewers.

Finally, one last note about all those one-star reviews. Amazon’s algorithms push books to the top of recommendation queues based in part on the number of reviews, total. It does not take into account whether the reviews are good or bad. The algorithm cares only that lots of people feel strongly enough about a book to review it. And sales statistics seem to bear that out: readers are more willing to take a chance on a book that has lots of reviews, negative or positive.

I suspect a lot of those people read the negative reviews, see what the reasons a person dislikes a book are, and say, “Well, they may not like books like that, but I do!”

Regardless of that phenomenon, there’s an actual campaign on some conservative fan sites asking people who haven’t even read the book to go give it a one-star review. I don’t think the understand that just means that more people who haven’t heard of the book will have it recommended to them by Amazon.

But then, bigots have seldom been known for the brilliance.

Weekend Update 9/5/2015: Public trust

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The Washington State Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the citizen-passed initiative creating charter schools, allowing such schools to divert tax dollars from public schools to these schools, violates the state constitution: Late Friday surprise: Supreme Court says charter schools initiative is unconstitutional.

“We hold that the provisions of I-1240, that designate and treat charter schools as common schools violate article IX, section 2 of our state constitution and are void. This includes the Act’s funding provisions, which attempt to tap into and shift a portion of moneys allocated for common schools to the new charter schools authorized by the Act. Because the provisions designating and funding charter schools as common schools are integral to the Act, such void provisions are not severable, and that determination is dispositive of the present case.”
— Chief Justice Barbara Madsen

This is a big win. I know that some of my friends think that charter schools are wonderful. They aren’t. That’s not a matter of opinion. The only study that pro-charter school people always quote proves that they aren’t. People misquote the studies all the time, “Charter schools produce 20 percent better student outcomes than public schools.”

No. The studies actually find that between 15-18 percent of charter school students perform as good or better than the average public school student. That means the more than 80 percent perform worse. Also, what does “average” mean in these statistics? Well, as a matter of fact, when we determine a statistical mean (what most people call an average) of all the public schools, that means that 50% of public school students perform as well or better than the average. That’s how we calculate it. “What is the performance level that half the kids perform better than, and the others perform worse than.”

What’s worse, the charter schools get to exclude students who are difficult to teach. Public schools have to accept everyone. By excluding the more difficult students, the charter schools should have better outcomes just because they start with students more likely to be successful. Since that have significantly worse outcomes despite this advantage, that means they’re even worse at education than the statistics would have you believe.

Charter schools don’t work better than public schools, and they don’t even work as well as public schools. And they are stealing money from the public schools that are doing a better job (not perfect, but provably better) to do it.

In other news

In another story about people using public funds, facilities, and authority to further a private agenda: How Kim Davis’s Imprisonment Is A Win for Religious Liberty:

As soon as the news of Davis’s arrest broke, conservative Christians began referring to Davis as a “martyr”, claiming that her arrest crossed the line into persecution because of her Christian faith. As an evangelical myself, I want to suggest a different perspective than the one many of my other brothers and sisters have been offering. I believe that Kim Davis’s arrest is neither persecution or an impingement on her religious liberties. In fact, I believe her arrest actually strengthens religious liberty nation wide…

… Kim Davis posed a great threat to the religious liberties of our nation by refusing to carry out her duties as an agent of the state, issuing marriage licenses to all couples, regardless of their sexuality or gender identity. Davis forced her Christian faith on the people of Rowan County, and violated their right to be able to receive equal treatment from the government, regardless of their sexuality, race, religion, or values. If Davis was able to continue serving as the county clerk, she could, in theory, continue to refuse to grant marriages licenses or provide services to everyone she disagrees with, which would, in effect, completely dissolve the religious freedoms of the people in her county.

Related, Dan Savage has a nice take-down of the current claim that it isn’t fair or just for people to talk about Davis’ many divorces and related issues: The Federalist: Baptists Aren’t Christians

Yes, Davis has been divorced three times and is on her fourth marriage, Hemingway concedes, but not one Davis divorces “[took] place within the time period she was Christian.” It’s a miracle: Davis hasn’t divorced anyone since becoming a Christian. So it’s not fair and totally uncool for people to bring up Davis’s own not-the-least-bit-biblical marital history. Davis isn’t one of those “screw as I say, not as I screw” conservatives… because she wasn’t a Christian back when she was marrying and cheating and divorcing and marrying and divorcing and cheating and marrying and divorcing.

So what was Kim Davis back then? Was she a Zoroastrian? Was she a Rastafarian? Was she a Rosicrucian?

Kim Davis was a f–ing Baptist.

kimemembr-300x166Her first three marriages were performed in a Baptist Church of which she was a member. Her first three marriage licenses (issued by the county) were signed by a Baptist minister. I was raised Baptist. You do not become a member of a Baptist Church until you make a declaration of faith, said declaration is accepted by the congregation (“all in favor signify by saying ‘Amen'”), and being Baptized into the faith (or providing proof that you had been Baptized in another Baptist church). That acceptance from the congregation is required, in part, because Baptists don’t believe it is right to Baptise children who are too young to understand what they are doing. The congregation is collectively saying they believe your declaration is sincere.

So Davis’ defenders who are claiming she wasn’t Christian back when she was doing all this stuff that is actually explicitly prohibited by the same Jesus she claims told her not to issue civil marriage licenses to gay couples are essentially claiming that Baptists aren’t Christian.

If the words of Jesus are a legitimate reason to withhold a marriage certificate from a pair of consenting adults, than Kim Davis should not have received her second, third, and fourth licenses. If the argument is that a later “cleansing by the blood of Christ” makes all of that okay, then logically it is wrong to withhold the licenses from otherwise legally qualified people because who can say whether or not they may have an epiphany and a literal “come to Jesus” moment later?

Delusions, discrimination, and hitting pay dirt, part 1

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1441134991-cn0wr7muaaa8xv8I had a half-written post about the county clerk in Kentucky who is steadfastly refusing to obey the Supreme Court and issue marriage licenses because (and this is from her official statement yesterday): “I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage.” One of the issues I have with this is that, actually, Jesus only ever said one thing about marriage, and it wasn’t that gay people aren’t allowed to do it. Jesus never mentioned homosexuality at all. What Jesus did say about marriage is that Moses was wrong to allow for divorce, because divorce is wrong.

Why is it that so many of the politicians (and Davis is a politician: she’s an elected official, which is why no one can simply fire her for not doing her job) who are most virulently opposed to marriage equality, et al, on religious grounds, also the ones with a lot of divorces and infidelity in their past? (Gingrich, Trump, and Davis have ten remarriages between them… and at least one of those remarriages for each of them was to someone that they had an affair with while married to a previous spouse.)

I started a long post about this, but then Dan Savage made most of my points better than I was: And Now I Have to Say Something About Kim Davis. Like Dan, I don’t believe this is really about her sincere beliefs. I think it is far more likely that she is trying to become a public martyr so that she can sell her book, go on the hateful rightwing speaking tour, and in other ways get showered in the “sweet, sweet bigotry money.” Heck, a pizza parlor owner managed to rake in a million bucks for religious rightwingers just by saying that he wouldn’t cater a gay wedding if anyone asked him to, even though nobody was.

I have other issues with Davis and her argument, which I don’t have time to go into because I wound up debating the very topic with a friend on line (though he helped me see a few aspects of this better, so it’s all good). But for me, Davis’s real crime is summed up by Dan in a section that I think a lot of other people are ignoring:

I say this with sadness, I say this as the son of a preacher, I say this as a former seminarian: This pathetic bullshit is what passes for Christianity in America today. Thanks to the efforts of hate groups like the American Family Association, the Family Research Council (co-founded by a tortured closet case and lately the employer of a kid-diddling serial adulterer), the 700 Club, the Moral Majority, the National Organization for Marriage, the National Association of Evangelicals, etc., and the mousy, near-complicit silence of left-wing and progressive Christians, “Christian” is now synonymous with “anti-gay bigot.”

To be a good American Christian like Kim Davis—or a good Alaskan Christian like Bristol Palin—you don’t have to stay in your first marriage, you don’t have to stop sitting on the dicks of randos who aren’t your husband, you don’t have to deny marriage licenses to straight people who are remarrying or marrying outside the faith or obtaining marriage licenses for Godless secular marriages. Nope. You just have to hate the homos. Hate the homos and you’re right with the God of Tony Perkins and Josh Duggar, hate the homos and you’re good with American Jesus. (Toss in support for capital gains tax cuts and American Jesus loves you even more.) You don’t have to feed the sick, clothe the naked, house the homeless—you don’t have to do any of that shit Jesus actually talked about—you just have to hate the homos hard enough to go to jail for for your beliefs cash in on your bigotry.

I do have more to say about other aspects of this (and I’ll probably use fewer swear words than Dan). But I’ll have to post them later.

Dan also links to an excellent (and profanity-free) op-ed piece by John Corvino from the Detroit Free Press which, coincidentally, I had already cued up for next Friday links before I found Dan’s piece: It’s time to remove Kentucky clerk Kim Davis. It’s worth a read.

Delusions and denial in the name of…

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fraudA lot of my life has involved the struggle not to be defined by the assumptions of bigots. Whether it was being called sissy, faggot, or worse while being bullied as a kid, or being called depraved, hell-bound, or worse while being denied legal equality as an adult.

As irritated as I get when someone tells me that I could stop being gay if I really wanted to, or that if I just met the right woman I would feel differently, or if I read the Bible and prayed hard enough it would all go away, you would think that I would never, ever say or imply that someone else is “really” something other than they claim, particularly in the area of sexual orientation.

You might think.

I have been called (somewhat angrily) a hypocrite for not believing at least one person who claimed to be ex-gay…

Continue reading Delusions and denial in the name of… →

Uphill battle or slippery slope? Depends on which side you’re on…

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nicecivilSlippery slope arguments get thrown around a lot. As a queer man I’ve been on the receiving end of more ridiculous slippery slope accusations than I can count. A surprisingly large number of them always end in something about man on dog sex (though the wingnut who kept typing in all caps about lesbian witches eating babies was actually giggle-worthy!).

The reason the slippery slope is considered a logical fallacy is because the predicted end result is usually an extreme event which would require a rather large number of increasingly improbable steps to get to from whatever current proposal is under discussion.

One of the reasons the slippery slope is so attractive to the anti-gay folks is because if you look at the struggle for queer equality from a very specific narrow angle, it has been a slide down a slope… Continue reading Uphill battle or slippery slope? Depends on which side you’re on… →

Leopard spots and sheep’s clothing, part 3

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I had something else entirely queued up to publish today, but I think this video, which I saw this morning thanks to a Towleroad post is a better use of your time:

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Televangelists:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Watching this, seeing the clips John plays of televangelists telling people god will erase their debt if the just charge another thousand dollars to their credit card to donate to the “church” made me angry, but also very sad. I remembered a specific family in one of the churches I attended as a child (this was about 1972 or so) who sent a lot of money to one of the television preachers because he told them if they give “with faith” god would send it back “a hundred-fold!”

They did not get any money back of any kind: no windfall, no spontaneous arrival of a big raise or whatever. What they did get was a lot more money problems.

Bigotry isn’t a bug or a put-on in the rightwing base

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MotherJones.Com
MotherJones.Com

In pieces such as Timothy Egan’s New York Times op-ed, Trump Is the Poison His Party Concocted, pundits act as if the rightwing activists have been whipping up toxic racism, sexism, and homophobia only during the last decade or so. The truth is that all of that bigotry has been part of the fabric of the religious right going back through the 70s, 60s, 50s, and much, much earlier. Randall Balmer wrote about some of this last year on Politico: The Real Origins of the Religious Right – They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.

I’ve seen a lot people, from reporters to pundits to ordinary folks, make the specific claim that Donald Trump is in the lead among Republican voters not because they agree with his crazy racist and misogynist comments, but because they know his comments drive “liberals” nuts. These folks usually go on to say that eventually the Republican voters will get serious and vote for one of the other candidates once they’re finished yanking our chains. The unspoken proposition in that reasoning is that some of the other candidates are less racist and/or less misogynist than Trump is.

And I can’t figure out how anyone who has actually heard any of them talk could think that.

I said, half-jokingly, that I wasn’t going to watch the debates last week because I’d wind up drinking an unhealthy amount of alcohol to get through it. I have a much bigger reason not to listen to it: there is no policy differences between any of the 17 Republican candidates. None.

  • All of them want to de-fund Planned Parenthood.
  • All of them are opposed to marriage equality in particular and gay rights in general (yes, even former Governor Kasich, don’t let his sound byte about attending a “gay marriage” distract you from his decades of voting against and vetoing gay rights bills, funding for heatlh care for domestic partners of state employees, gay adoption, and so on).
  • All of them are opposed to a woman’s right to choose.
  • All of them are opposed to raising the minimum wage.
  • All of them are apposed to restrictions on the same banking and financial institutions that destroyed the economy.
  • All of them are in favor of more war.
  • All of them want to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
  • All of them want to cut taxes even further on the rich.
  • All of them want to take away the few remaining protections workers have in the work place.
  • None of them want to do anything about climate change.
  • All of them favor some flavor of “religious liberty” laws that allow people to discriminate.
  • All of them oppose anti-bullying programs in public schools that don’t have religious exemptions allowing Christian kids to bully their queer classmates.
  • All of them try to blame problems in the economy caused by some of their other policies on immigrants.
  • All of them want states to be able to enact more laws designed to keep poor and minority voters from voting…

I could keep going. But, seriously, the only thing that differentiates any of them is the tone of arguments they make on those issues, and which of those things they think is more important. But they’re all in favor of racist and misogynist policies. Each and every one of them. And they believe all of those things because the Republican base supports all of that.

To be fair, a lot of the base is sincere when they claim not to be bigots. This isn’t to say that they aren’t bigots, I’m just saying that they sincerely believe that they aren’t. It’s like one of my relatives who sends me sad messages wondering why my husband and I didn’t come to her Independence Day barbecue, the same day she was posting long tirades on Facebook about how god is going to destroy america because of marriage equality. She doesn’t see the contradiction between claiming she loves and respects us, her gay nephew and his husband, while also insisting that our love is an abomination that is going to cause an apocalypse.

Similarly, they have no qualms getting angry at the Black Lives Matter protestors by insisting “the blacks” should be grateful to the police for all the good they do. And “those blacks” shouldn’t be out protesting because of a “thug” who got what was coming to him. And if “those blacks” had real jobs instead of “taking welfare all the time” they wouldn’t have time to be protesting. But they insist they aren’t racist and it is a terrible slander for someone like me to point it out. Oh, and how dare I be offended about the confederate flag when “that damn president covered the white house in the immoral rainbow after the gay marriage ruling!”

But they aren’t bigots, no, not at all.

One of the local news people, when he expressed the hope that all this apparent support for the candidate saying the most obviously racist and misogynist things is some sort of put-on, said he did so because he hoped that the American people weren’t that bigoted. “The majority can’t really believe that stuff, can they?” The problem he’s having is the assumption that the Republican base represents the American population as a whole.

Let’s do some very rough math. In the last presidential election, the Republican candidate got only 47% of the vote. Less than a majority. And we know from other polling that the got less than a third of the so-called swing voters (that notion is worth its own blog post). So let’s say that roughly 45% of the population aligns with the Republicans. Other statistics show us that less than one-third of voters participate in primaries and caucuses. So that means that at most, 15% of the population falls into the category of “likely Republican primary voter.” And at most, 25% of those people support Donald Trump. So, 25% of 15% leaves us with 3.75%. In other words, less than 4% of all voters support the blatantly racist, misogynist b.s. that Trump is spewing.

Unfortunately, other polling indicates that at least 60% of likely Republican voters oppose gay rights, pro-choice policies, and civil rights protections. Which is why the other 16 clowns officially in the race for the nomination all have policies statements that align with Trump’s, they’re just a bit more genteel in their language (some times). But lest you despair, that’s 60% of the 45% mentioned earlier. So while these positions will continue to dominate the Republican party, by sticking to these ideas the candidates are only appealing to 27% of the entire electorate; in the process alienating most of the remaining 73%.

So it isn’t likely to be a winning strategy in the end. And while it’s scary to realize there are folks who feel that way, I think it’s good that things like this remind us who they are.