FUCKING STOP: An open letter to Gov. Perry and the Texas GOP

Dear Gov. Perry, Lt. Gov. Dewhurst, and the Texas GOP,

You don't know me, and I'm not a Texan in any way, shape, form, or fashion.  So I'd say you won't care what I think about this fiasco - except that you've already made it abundantly clear that you don't care what anyone thinks of what you're doing here, whether they're a constituent, a politician with the opposition, or God Herself, so I know it's nothing personal.

Since my words, and indeed, my very existence mean nothing to you, I will feel free to speak my true mind on this in very blunt terms.

You are the biggest pack of filthy hypocrites I've ever seen.

You (the wider GOP) venerate the Founding Fathers, who fought a war and founded a nation over the right to be treated with respect and have a say in one's government - and yet you blatantly disrespect the modern people of that nation when they gather by the hundreds and thousands to tell you to STOP.  You idolize (and I mean that in the truest sense of idolatry, by the way) a group of men who are remembered for, among other things, decrying "taxation without representation" - and yet you will happily impose far more intimate regulations on your constituents' very bodies while silencing their representation, whether it be through their elected officials or through their own voices raised in protest.

You use procedural trick after procedural trick to try to force those elected voices to shut up, eventually forcing them from the floor under guise of respect for parliamentary procedure - and yet you're quite happy to blatantly violate the same rules you insist everyone else abide by as soon as it suits you, by altering documents and timestamps to literally rewrite history once it became clear you'd lost.

Do you know why I am political in the ways that I am, Mr. Perry (et al)?  Because I still believe in - still want to believe in - the the noble ideals I was told we as a country stood for, as a child growing up in America.  I want this country to offer liberty and justice to all.  I want a government that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people.

And you people claim to love the Constitution, love the Founders, love what this country "stands for" - that is, what we claim to stand for - and yet your actions tell a terrifyingly different story.

Because when you are faced with The People Themselves, in the flesh, by the hundreds, literally raising their voices to prevent you from making unjust laws that trample on their rights...

And your response, after every dirty trick and lie and machination you used failed you, is to say "That's fine, we'll just try it again next week"...

You are not acting in the spirit of the lofty goals of liberty and justice and freedom.  You are channeling King George.  (Hell, at this point, I'm inclined to say you're channeling Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine too, but that's my penchant for hyperbole and my geekishness sitting down for a drink together, so.)

You are liars.  You are hypocrites.  You are power-hungry tyrants unfit to wield authority over an ant colony, much less millions of human beings.  And you need to fucking stop.

With intense loathing,
J

The new "You're either with us, or with the enemy"

The rhetoric from the right has been getting more and more frenzied these past couple years.  I suppose that's what happens when your absurdly racist party is simultaneously confronted with a Scary Black Man President and increasing evidence of your slide into irrelevance as your single priority of "taking care of rich straight cis white Christian male businessmen" becomes ever-clearer at the same time that that particular demographic is shrinking compared to the size of every other demographic that you've made it quite obvious you hate.  So the bit I came across today isn't *surprising*, but it is, I think, something to note.

There's plenty to unpack in this particular off-the-rails screed from Don Feder of World Congress of [Cishet 2-Parent Unlimited-Children White Christian] Families about how Obama is totez gonna start rounding up conservatives and putting them in concentration camps any day now (and what IS it with these people and their Holocaust-appropriation fetish anyway?), but there was one line in particular that jumped out at me.

Recall Obama’s bitter-clinger remarks from the 2008 campaign – identifying resistance to his message primarily among those who cling to religion, guns and "anti-immigrant" sentiment. Think of his anti-nationalism (including the rejection of American exceptionalism) and attacks on the family, via same-sex "marriage" and taking medical decisions out of the family’s hands.

As an aside, "taking medical decisions out of the family's hands" is something to condemn when it's Democrats making it possible for people to even *consider* making medical decisions at all via expanded access to health insurance and health services, but taking medical decisions out of people's hands is awesome when it comes to Republicans legislating pregnancy and reproductive decisions? Uh huh. We see you, hypocrites.
But the part that got me here was the bit about "rejection of American exceptionalism" as equivalent to anti-nationalism.

If you don't believe the U.S. is inherently superior to all other nations on this planet, you are anti-nationalist.  If you do not believe we're better than everyone else, you hate America.  There is no middle ground.  There is no patriotism that allows for any understanding or critical examination of this nation's flaws.  If you don't uncritically laud everything America does as awesome simply because it was done by "the best country on Earth", it's a sign that you hate America and everything the country stands for.

(Considering that, if you look at our history, we have spent a lot of time and effort on standing for greed, corruption, imperialism, colonialism, warmongering, and genocide, I'm not sure why we *shouldn't* hate at least a solid portion of what this country "stands for", but that's a whole other conversation.)

Twelve years ago, Dubya famously said, "If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists."

They've put it in fancy euphemisms and made a dog-whistle of it, but it's the same sentiment.  If you fail to believe 100% that this is God's Country and we can do no wrong, if you fail to uncritically support everything this nation does, you are the enemy.

And they wonder why I'm far more afraid of conservatives in my own country than I've ever been of nebulous "terrorists" halfway across the world.

Anti-Choice Hypocrisy, Teens and Parents' Rights Edition

Let me start by saying I'm glad this case turned out the way it did.  I think what the parents were doing to her was despicable and fucked-up and crossing a line into outright abusive, and I'm happy that the court sided with her against her parents.

But I have one question.

What makes this case, where the parents were going to force a young woman to have an abortion, different from a situation in which parents force their teen to have a baby?

Because they are different.  Anti-choicers will applaud the fuck out of "parents' rights!" and such when it comes time to restrict a young person's ability to make their own decision about ending their pregnancy, when their decision is to have an abortion - witness anti-choicers' repeated and often-successful efforts to pass the most restrictive possible versions of parental consent/notification laws, which require a teenager to at least notify, and in many cases get a permission slip from, their parents before having an abortion.  Which gives the parents the opportunity to interfere, thus forcing the pregnant teen to give birth.*

Yet they're also applauding the fuck out of this case, where the court sided with the young woman in question to override the "parents' rights" in order to let her make her own decision about ending her pregnancy.

Good gods.  The malodorous stench of hypocrisy is so thick in here, I may need a gas mask.

Which is it, anti-choicers?  Do you support the rights of the parents to control which medical procedures a teenager may, may not, or must undergo?  If so, why are you viewing this court case as a victory?  It specifically placed an injunction against the parents' attempts to assert their "rights" to control their daughter's reproductive health.  It placed the teen's wishes and choices above the parents' "rights" to make fertility decisions for her.

And if you support the right of pregnant teens to make their own reproductive health decisions independently of their parents' wishes, as your behavior regarding this case suggests, then why have a large portion of your legislative efforts historically been dedicated to attempting to enact laws that require parental consent before a minor undergoes an abortion?  You'll take "notification" if that's all you can get, but you're always angling for "consent" whenever possible, and y'all have gotten pretty fucking stingy about those judicial bypass clauses too, putting as many obstacles as possible between a pregnant teen and their ability to make independent choices about their pregnancy.

So with one hand, you work to enact laws that take decisions about a minor's reproductive health and fertility out of that minor's hands and place them firmly under parental control, while with the other, you work to give those decisions back to the minor even if it means getting a court to overrule the parents' control.

And you do this based purely on which decision the teen is making and how that aligns with your opinion on how the situation should be handled.

Either you trust teens to make their own reproductive health choices, or you don't.  If you're going to help and be happy for this girl because she gained the legal ability to choose for herself how to manage her pregnancy, then you damn well ought to be extending that same courtesy to young people who need that legal ability to make their own decisions, even if you don't agree with the decision in question.

Because "More rights...for people who agree with me, and fuck the rest of you, I will legally force you to "agree" with me too!" is in no way a morally-sound position to take.  And since y'all are so attached to your notions of being on the moral high ground, you might want to attend to that little problem.

*And indeed, I've heard some horror stories about parents who refused to sign consent forms for epidurals or other pain medications during labor, to "teach her a lesson she won't forget".  It's not about "preventing abortion" - that's just the mechanism by which it works.  The true intent is to force them to give birth.*

Someone doesn't know the history of her (former) organization...

It seems Karen Handel, the woman responsible for Komen's withdrawal of funding for breast exams from Planned Parenthood because icky, abortion, has taken her anti-PP fervor with her after leaving Komen in the wake of the massive PR backlash they received. 

Only, she's making the most ridiculous claims now in criticism of PP, especially for a former Komen official who's still defending actions she took while a member of the organization.

[She] alleges that Planned Parenthood “literally co-opted the color pink” from Komen in a sinister “bait and switch.”

Gee, that's a funny accusation to make, coming from a former VP of an organization whose most recognizable symbol, the infamous pink ribbon, was itself co-opted from the woman who created the original breast cancer awareness ribbon in all but color, because she declined to participate in the commodification and corporatization of her work.  Hypocrite.

PS: People can copyright some really stupid stuff - DNA, anybody? - but I have yet to hear of anyone successfully copyrighting a color.  Komen didn't invent pink, and they don't own pink.  You're just mad because the public backed PP and you lost in the court of public opinion.  Take your ribbons and go home, please.

You Don't *Haaaave* To...

Ozz and I have a running joke, when one of us wants to playfully guilt the other into something.  I'll be up and about doing stuff, and he'll ask me to get him a soda, for example.  I'll get mock-exasperated with him, like "Oh, what, it's not enough that I [whatever I was doing at the time], now I have to get you your beverages, too?!"  And he gives me puppy-dog eyes and says "Well, you don't *haaaave* to..." and I roll my eyes and laugh and get him his stupid drink.

And I feel like that's sort of what this asshole is doing, only not cute or funny or playful at all, but spiteful and partisan and leveraging the full power of Catholic Guilt™ for political ends.  You don't *haaaave* to vote Republican...but you'll probably go to hell if you don't.

Because it's apparently far more important to reject policies addressing issues Jesus never saw fit to talk about, like abortion and teh gayz, in a way the Church dislikes, than to reject policies that specifically contradict Jesus' actual message of caring for the poor and helping those in need.

Cool story, bro.

(I hope someone brings action against him for using the power of the pulpit to tell people how to vote, in direct contravention of IRS rules about church tax exemptions.  He says "I'm not telling you how to vote," several times, but there's that whole letter of the law versus spirit of the law thing, and a child could tell that his "I'm not telling you how to vote" schtick is nothing more than a CYA.)

I hear that shoe pinches, when you put it on the other foot.

Or, that awkward moment when a member of a social group which doesn't give a shit who feels marginalized or excluded when they insist their beliefs be observed everywhere, suddenly finds himself feeling marginalized by having to make room for someone else's beliefs.

Via a friend of mine on tumblr, I found this story about a Christian high school student who's Very Upset Indeed that, as part of a multicultural music concert, the school choir is singing a song penned by a Muslim composer that includes the phrase "There is no truth but Allah".

It's not like it's the only song in the concert lineup that references religion, mind you.  They're also singing, for example, a Christian song called "Prayer of the Children", which has lines like "Jesus, help me to see the morning light of one more day".  Nor is the student's participation required; it's an after-school activity for no academic credit, so participating in the concert or not isn't going to affect his grades or anything.  But he was still so upset at the inclusion of a Muslim song in the program that he quit in protest.

His quote to the local news is entertainingly honest:

This is worshipping another God, and even worshipping another prophet … I think there would be a lot of outrage if we made a Muslim choir say Jesus Christ is the only truth.

Except that you're not attending a Christian school, dude.  I looked up the high school in question, and it's a county-run public high school.  So this is nowhere near analogous to "making a Muslim choir say Jesus Christ is the only truth".  The fact that you're comparing it to that is a manifestation of your religious privilege, which makes you assume that everything in the world around you is de facto Christian until specified otherwise.  Not to damage your delicate worldview or anything, but it's not.  The school choir at a public school is not a Christian choir, even if some, many, or even all of its members are Christians.  That's sort of how public school works in this country.

I can't help but compare this self-righteous jackass to the recent situation with Jessica Ahlquist, the atheist teen who went to court to have her high school remove their giant "school prayer" banner, and who received rape and death threats, people threatening her family, and her fellow students threatening to jump her at school, for her trouble.  These threats all came from "Christians" who were so angry that she wasn't okay with having a Christian prayer in her face all day at school that they felt it was okay to threaten personal violence.  And yet the moment they have to make room for someone else's beliefs to take a tiny sliver of the spotlight, they want to whine and cry exclusion and quit the club in protest.

Really, people?  Really?

If you want religious content in school settings, then you need to be prepared for more religious content than just your own.  And if you're not okay with that, then maybe you all owe a fucking HUGE apology to Ms. Ahlquist and her family for subjecting her to such hate over doing the same thing you're supporting this boy in doing.

The Religious Right are Very Concerned About Violations of the Separation of Church and State, Guys.

No, really, they are!  Stop laughing!  Why are you all giggle-snorting into your hands about this?

They really are!  It's just that they have a very special definition of what violates the separation of church and state, that's all.

The National Day of Prayer doesn't violate the separation of church and state.  Having "In God We Trust" as our national motto is totally cool.  The Lord's Prayer is generic enough not to violate the separation of church and state, and declaring the Year of the Bible is in no way endorsing a particular religion.

The Environmental Protection Agency partnering with Universal Studios to promote the movie based on Dr. Seuss's classic story The Lorax ("I speak for the trees!"), on the other hand, is an impermissible use of government funds to "[promote] a clear ideology that has a particular religious flavor to it," in clear violation of the separation of church and state, and that is absolutely unacceptable!

The only conclusion that can reasonably be drawn from this - aside from "these people are fucking ridiculous", of course - is that they genuinely believe that they are entirely exempt from the concept of separation of church and state, but liberals aren't.  (This is also supported by their collective panty-wad over Obama quoting the Bible to support his economic policies at the Annual Prayer Breakfast a couple weeks ago, which they called "over the line", lol.)

D'you think their copy of the Constitution reads "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion other than fundamentalist conservative Christianity"?

Quote of the Day, Republican Irony Edition

Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, on the anti-contraception campaign right-wingers are currently waging, because the idea of women* having the ability to control their fertility and thus not be quite as subject to the dictates and power of the men around them scares the everloving fuckbubbles out of these people:

"In this country the government doesn't get to tell you or your organization what your religious views are – and they could well be minority views – but the Bill of Rights is designed to protect the minority from the will of the majority," McConnell said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

AHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHA

HA

HA.

*clears throat*  I'm sorry, where was I?  Before I started laughing maniacally, I mean?

Mitch, ol' buddy ol' pal, I'm glad you said that - positively giddy! - because I am going to be referring back to this quote every. goddamn. time. some conservative asshat tries to further enshrine/defends the status of Christian dogma in/to the laws of this country (see: the marriage equality debate, personhood amendments).  "You can't do that!  Your very own Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, stood up to say that the Constitution is designed to protect the rights of the minority from the will of the majority!"  I will also quote you every time your party refuses to use the law to actually protect the actual minority from the will of the Christian-supremacists around them (see: violent anti-Muslim protests, the high school atheist who received rape and death threats for suing to have her school's giant prayer banner taken down).  

Oh, and by the way, in what fever dream is Christianity a "minority" needing protected from the will of the majority at this point in this country?  

If they all keep trying to out-hyperbole and out-hypocrite each other like this, we're going to reach some kind of horrible singularity, where it all becomes unstable and dissolves into a vortex of Faux News headlines forever.

Please, Republicans.  Don't entrap us all in a hypocrisy vortex.  That would be terribly rude of you.

*Women are not the only ones who will benefit from the rules around providing hormonal contraception; however, Republicans are not nearly so nuanced in their understanding of gender as to be aware of this, and at its core they are doing this for reasons of misogyny.

No, he did not "ask for an open relationship"

It seems we have yet another Republican Sexual Hypocrite in Newt Gingrich.  The interview with his ex-wife (video autoplays at link) has been all over the place, and while I am all for calling out RSHs on their hypocrisy, loudly and repeatedly (look, if you're going to run on a platform of "family values", you should probably have some yourself, y'know?), I am really not okay with the way it's being reported by most news outlets.

Newt Gingrich did not "ask for an open relationship."  He had an affair - he cheated on his wife, who had thought they were having a monogamous relationship - and then asked his wife to immediately get over it and accept that he was going to continue having said affair while remaining married to her.  That is not the same thing.  Not even a little bit.

See, I have had a partner ask me for an open relationship before.  The difference between a partner asking for an open relationship, and what Newt did, is that when my then-boyfriend approached me to talk about an open relationship, he did it BEFORE HE SLEPT WITH SOMEONE ELSE.  He came to me and said he had an interest in trying non-monogamy in a relationship (which we'd talked about a little bit before, so it came as no huge surprise) and he had met someone he was interested in pursuing this with, and he wanted to know how I would feel about that.  We talked, I agreed to give it a try, and when after a couple weeks I realize I just couldn't handle it with where we were at in our relationship, I told him, and he broke things off with her.  (We later gave it another shot, and the three of us ended up in a triad relationship, anyway.  All's well that ends well, I guess?)

That is how you do an open relationship.  Not "cheat for years, then admit to it and be like "but I don't want to have to choose between you so I'm just gonna keep fucking you both.  That's cool, right?""

I'm just sick of seeing headlines, articles, and comments, all moralizing and disapproving about Newt's "request for an open relationship" as if that's what's wrong with this situation.  Because it isn't.  Open relationships can be done ethically and with full knowing consent of all involved parties (although admittedly, if your relationship is non-normative in structure, you should probably not be spending a great deal of time and energy judging, condemning, and trying to make discrimination against those of different non-normative relationships even more prevalent and enforced in law), and in an ideal world, having requested an open relationship in a prior situation wouldn't be some sordid mark against you in the public eye.  But the media is presenting this in a way that conflates open relationships with cheating, which is disingenuous and flat-out incorrect.

Newt Gingrich cheated, then tried to weasel out of it.  He did not ask for an open relationship, in any meaningful sense of the phrase.  Period.

This Is A Real Question That Has Really Been Asked, For Realsies

For the "I could not make this shit up even if I tried" files, a judge in Delaware has asked:

"Is the Lord's Prayer Christian?"

Just...go ahead and let that sink in for a minute.  Read the question again if you need to.  I'll wait.

We are talking here about the Lord's Prayer, one of the most recognizable of the standard-issue Christian prayers, shared in some form or other across nearly all denominations, one of the first prayers Christian children learn - both Ozz, raised Catholic, and I, raised Methodist, can rattle it off without thinking, even now, a decade out of our respective Christian upbringings.  And they are asking if it is specifically a Christian prayer, or if it could be considered "generic" and "not advancing a specific faith".

Are.  You.  Fucking.  Kidding me?

How is this even a question?

The context of it, if you don't want to click through, is a case on whether the legislative prayer used to open sessions of Sussex County Council meetings is Constitutional or not.  They apparently open their sessions with a recitation of the Lord's Prayer.  Legislative prayer has been certified by the Supreme Court as Constitutional so long as it does not advance any particular faith; Sussex County's lawyers are arguing that the Lord's Prayer is "generic", so therefore, it should be considered Constitutional.

More specifically, when questioned on whether the Lord's Prayer is specifically Christian, one of the attorneys for Sussex County replied that "[Jesus] was not offering a Christian prayer in the Christian tradition because no Christian tradition existed."

...

...............

Whut.

So you're talking about a very specific prayer, laid out by the founder of your religion, lifted word-for-word from passages in the holy book of your religion (Matthew 6:9-13; Luke 11:2-4)...but you want to claim it's "not a Christian prayer" because at the time that your founder uttered it the religion had not actually been formed yet?

I just can't even believe they're arguing this with a straight face in a court of law.  Nor can I believe that the judge has said it might be "a difficult case" because there is no mention of Jesus by name, as if that's the final arbiter of whether or not a prayer is Christian in nature.  If it's taken from your scriptures, used in your churches (and only in your churches, as I can't think of any other religious group that uses the Lord's Prayer, ever), I don't care if it explicitly names a deity or not, it's a Christian prayer.

But hey, if that's the logic we're using here, perhaps I should see if I can get my local City Council to start opening legislative sessions with the Charge of the Goddess.  It names, like, ten deities - that's more inclusive than the Lord's Prayer! - and obviously that means it's not advancing any one deity and therefore should be totally cool as a "generic" prayer that "doesn't advance any particular religion", amirite?

If you can't beat them, take credit for what they forced you to do!

Via Calitics, it seems Anthem Blue Cross (one of the health-insurance giants) is running an ad touting "100% free annual checkups" that they "offer".

A full-page ad from a magazine, showing a smiling doctor using a stethoscope on his patient; text reads "Anthem Blue Cross Free Annual Checkups" with further copy below explaining how "annual checkups help keep you healthy and that's why Anthem Blue Cross covers them at 'no extra cost to you'."

Well, this is awkward.  Because those free checkups that they're talking about like it's some kind of magnanimous caring gesture on their part to take care of their customers?  It's actually a requirement, part of one of the more popular provisions in Obama's health insurance reform bill that requires insurance companies to cover preventative care with no copay or other upfront cost to the patient.  And it's a requirement that the insurance companies, including Blue Cross, fought viciously against. 

Which makes it more than a little duplicitous to, once it turns out to be very popular with the unwashed masses, run big ol' ads saying "HEY LOOK HOW NICE WE ARE TO COVER THIS PREVENTATIVE CARE FOR YOU please ignore the fact that we had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing so".

But I suppose, in this era of Faux News and Tea Party absurdity, it's perfectly logical to attempt to reap public goodwill by pretending it was your idea all along.  After all, depending on where people get their news, all they know about "Obamacare" is that it's for commies and something about death panels.

Of course, we all know the "liberal media" won't bother to call them out on it.  And thus, the cycle of misinformation continues...

USCCB says "Help, help, we're bein' repressed!"

The USCCB = US Conference of Catholic Bishops, meaning a collective of old celibate (unless they're abusing children, that is) men who think Jesus has given them a special license to boss everyone else around, no matter what everyone else believes about Jesus or anything else.

And right now, the USCCB want us to know they are Very Seriously Concerned for religious liberty in this country, because their will is not being implemented on the rest of us speedily enough, which is a violation of their religious liberty to be the boss of everyone.  If your beliefs include that you should be in charge, I guess not putting you in charge is a violation of your religious liberty, right?  The USCCB thinks so, anyway!  Check out the horror show of quotes from them this past week or so...

“We see in our culture a drive to neuter religion,” Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the bishops conference, said in a news conference Monday at the bishops’ annual meeting in Baltimore. He added that “well-financed, well-oiled sectors” were trying “to push religion back into the sacristy.” (via)

Oh noes!  How dare we try to maintain our separation of church and state by making sure religion remains in the church where it belongs?!  Don't we know that's Bad and Wrong and religion belongs in both the sacristy AND the Oval Office?!?!  Dirty little heathens be we, I suppose.

"There is no religious liberty if we are not free to express our faith in the public square and if we are not free to act on that faith through works of education, health care and charity," [Bishop William E.] Lori said in his first address to the bishops as chairman of the newly formed Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. (via)

"If we cannot get government subsidies and contracts to carry out our religious works while still being protected from having to follow the law within our organizations, we are being OPPRESSED I TELL YOU!  And we know about oppression.  We've been practicing on everyone else for centuries, so that we would recognize this moment when it came."

"For some time now we have viewed with growing alarm the ongoing erosion of religious liberty in our country.  Among the challenges we see is a pattern in culture and law to treat religion merely as a private matter between an individual and his or her God,"

...This is beyond even my considerable reservoir of snark.  I, um...yeah, I'm sorry, I got nothing.  When they're talking about "treating religion as a private matter between an individual and their god" like that's horribly, desperately inappropriate and oppressive, what is there to say?  Is it Opposite Day again or something?

But what caused this bout of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching, you ask?  Well, like all big corporations, the Catholic church is campaigning for a more favorable regulatory environment - that is to say, fewer or no regulations at all.  Specifically, they're upset because of the new HHS rule that, as part of the health insurance reform package, would require nearly all employers who offer healthcare plans to employees to cover hormonal contraception without a copay as "preventative care".  There is a religious exemption in the rule already - an organization which A: has religious values as its primary purpose, B: primarily employs people who share the religious tenets of the organization, and C: primarily serves people who share the religious tenets of the organization, would be exempt from the rule.  Meaning that churches themselves are safe from the horror of being forced to make it easier for their employees to access contraception under the employer-subsidized health-care plan.

The problem, of course, is that Catholic hospitals do NOT primarily serve people who share their religious tenets.  In many places, Catholic hospitals are the ONLY hospitals within a reasonable distance, and thus serve the entire general populace of the area, Catholics and non-Catholics alike.  Under the new rule, that would disqualify them from a religious exemption, and the health-care plans offered to employees of the hospitals would have to include the option of contraception.  That's the option, by the by, not a requirement; no person would be required or even encouraged to use it.  It would simply be made available to those who want or need it, free of copay.  (I'll remind everyone that even if Catholic hospitals did employ primarily Catholics, Catholic women use hormonal contraception at about the same rate as non-Catholic women, that is to say, almost universally (98%).  So it's not like making contraception cheaper to access is really controversial for anyone except the actual church hierarchy.)

The idea that they might have to make it easier for women in their employ to get ahold of hormonal contraceptives, instead of making it harder, is giving them all conniption fits, and they're doing their damndest to lobby President Obama to throw us under the bus again by widening the exemption to suit the USCCB.

Righteous fury at the fact that the President seems to be taking the USCCB's lobbying seriously aside for the moment, I just want to return to one of their ludicrous displays of pretzel-logic about "religious liberty" for a moment, as it's extremely telling of what's really going on here:

There is no religious liberty if we are not free to express our faith in the public square and if we are not free to act on that faith through works of education, health care and charity,

Because they are framing the issue so that it sounds like the government is going to force Catholic health care and education organizations to shut down, thus denying them the ability to act on their faith in that manner, when actually the government is in no way impeding their ability to act on their faith "through works of education, health care and charity".  It's simply saying that if they want to employ people to do those works, they need to provide those employees with access certain baseline services.  Which is a totally different thing.

Catholic organizations walk a strange line in this country.  They (ostensibly) employ and (ostensibly) serve the general public, not only Catholics, but they expect to be able to impose their religious doctrines on those members of the public who rely on their employment or services - and again, remember that in many areas there are no other options for some of the services Catholic organizations provide - and they expect to receive special dispensation from the government to restrict both employees and clientele in ways ordinary businesses aren't allowed to, because, in essence, "Jesus told us so".  Especially since they're claiming that their religious doctrine requires them to do certain works, they really are using the kind of argument I facetiously posited in the first paragraphs of the post: If my religion says I have to be in charge of things, not putting me in charge of things is violating my religion!

It follows logically, in the strictest interpretation of the statement, and yet it's clearly and obviously ridiculous to expect such treatment.  Why?  Because the government's sole purpose is not to protect religious liberty.  That is an important part of its duty, but it is still only *part*.  The government is of much wider scope, tasked with ensuring the welfare and well-being of all its people, and when push comes to shove and a single organization's doctrinal need to impose their views on other people - like, say, employees and clients - is harming members of the general public, religious liberty must give way to protecting the people.  It's called "compelling government interest", and it's why we wouldn't allow a person to go about murdering other people even if it was a legitimate requirement of their religion, because the safety and well-being of others has to come first when the two principles are in conflict.

Yet the USCCB isn't satisfied, and won't be satisfied, until their right to impose their doctrine on everyone within reach is enshrined in law as being of more importance than the needs and safety of the "everyone within reach" they're trying to impose their will on.

More Imaginary "Rights" from the Religious Right

The Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Respect for Marriage Act this week, allowing the bill to go to the full Senate where they will vote on this DOMA-repeal act (actually, they probably won't, given the broken filibuster rules and Republicans' willingness to abuse them to the fullest, but still).  The Religious Wrong have been predictably losing their shit over the vote, issuing forth hyperbolic blog posts and testerical "call to action" emails (with a "donate now!" link splashed in three places in the email, natch).  The chip-chip-chip of marriage equality activists undermining their stranglehold on conversations about "morality" and "family" is really getting to them at this point, it seems. 

I'm not going to bother with the roundup of reactions - RWW has that covered nicely.  But there was one line out of the statement given to the media by Catholics for the Common Good (for some value of "common" meaning "het Christian etc", of course), that caught my eye.

"Children have a right to know and be cared for by their mothers and fathers, and government has an obligation to promote the recognition of that right by encouraging men and woman to marry before having children."

No.  Just, no.  That is a "right" you are pulling out of your ass, as your type are so often wont to do.

Children have rights, absolutely and certainly.  Among them is the right to be raised and cared for by loving adults who will consistently and reliably act in the child's best interest.  That does not have shit fucking all to do with "mothers and fathers".  Not a goddamn thing.  Children may be very well cared for by a single parent of any gender; two parents of different genders; two parents of same gender; three or more parents and step-parents; three or more parents in a poly family; a parent and the parent's extended family (aunts, uncles, older cousins, grandparents); extended family alone; non-blood-related friends of the family; and all sorts of other various configurations. 

This insistence on "their mothers and fathers" is a slap in the face to "non-traditional" families everywhere.  It shits on every family who doesn't conform to the nuclear married-man-and-woman-with-biological-children standard.  It is arbitrary, and cruel, and unfair.

Children do have the right to a family, loosely defined.  They do not have a right to married parents.  They do not have a right to either or both biological parents.  (Although frankly, if the fundies would back up off the contraception and sex ed suppression tactics, more children *would* have access to their bio parents, because fewer people would be having kids they didn't want and either giving them up for adoption or choosing to be uninvolved with the kid.  People are more likely to hang onto/stick around with kids they *chose* to have, than ones they accidentally had or were forced to have because they had no other options.)   And personally, I believe the government has an obligation to butt the fuck out of people's private family-organization choices. 

Here's a novel idea: what if, instead of encouraging people to get married, we revamped the education system so that more people had the option for higher education and better salaries (kids and marriage are expensive, after all)?  What if, instead of encouraging people to get married, we ended the War on Poor People People of Color Drugs, which forcibly removes so many low-income and in particular, black men from their communities and families?  What if, instead of encouraging people to get married, we ensured that every child in this country, regardless of their family situation, had safe communities, good schools, good food, and health care?  What if we, y'know, actually gave a shit about the living situations of children in this country and worked to improve them, instead of shaming and browbeating their parents and/or guardians for not being the "right" kind of family unit or not being married first?

Oh, but I forget, those things would require money.  From the government.  Going to help its most vulnerable young citizens.  SOCIALISM I SAY!  And where would this money come from?  Are you suggesting making it impossible for this country's billionaires to make the payments on their seventh yacht in the Mediterranean by raising their taxes a fraction of a percent?  You MONSTER!  Suggesting that their hard-earned investment dividends and bonuses might be better used to feed, shelter, clothe, and educate children.  The NERVE.

As for the jackasses at Catholics for the Common Good, I will simply leave you with this: WWJD?  (Hint: I'm pretty sure it's not "attempt to police everyone's family structures and reproductive choices."  Just sayin'.)

That Awkward Moment When Anti-Choicers Attempt to Advance Fetal Personhood Laws by Condemning Paternalism in Government

It's a good thing I have that "Today in conservative hypocrisy" tag ready!

Via Right Wing Watch, I learned that the director of Personhood USA, the organization behind fetal personhood laws across the nation, had an editorial in USA Today yesterday which began,

Increasingly, the American people are being treated paternalistically by a government, media and public sector elite that stands in direct opposition to our traditional American values.

The only way I can make it make even a pretzel-logic-Glenn-Beckian sort of sense is by pulling another quote from later in the piece:

No greater example exists of this abuse of raw judicial power than Roe v. Wade, a decision by seven unelected men to impose abortion on all 50 states.

Ah.  So I guess I can sort of squint and tilt my head and make it out now.  If you accept the premise that Roe v. Wade "imposed" anything on anyone - as opposed to defining and protecting a fundamental right, which is what it actually did, but let's go with the right-wing bizarro-logic for now - then I guess I can sorta see it: the Ebil Gubmint unilaterally imposed this icky procedure on us because Father Knows Best, thus, paternalism.

Except that for those of us living in the reality-based community, who have not drunk unending gallons of anti-choice Kool-aid, it's flat-out hilarious that the organization operating at the far fringes of a movement whose sole goal is to tell other people what to do with their bodies is crying about government "paternalism". 

I mean, we're talking about anti-choicers here!  At its core, it's an explicitly paternalistic movement in which cis men spend lots of money and effort to be allowed to dictate what pregnancy-capable people can and can't do with their bodies.  And then to go further and hear it from not just any anti-choicers, but *personhood* advocates in particular, whose pet cause would open the door to banning not only abortion, but certain forms of contraception and in vitro fertilization, along with potentially criminalizing every single miscarriage that occurs, well!  "Hypocrisy" seems a mild and weak word to describe the epic whiplash you might get from trying to follow the abrupt about-face of logic they're employing.

PS: It's election day!  Go forth and vote if you can!  And if you're in Mississippi, for the love of all the gods, VOTE and VOTE NO ON 26. 

Religious Freedom! (Some restrictions apply; see conservative Christians for details)

A double-standard on which religions get religious freedom and social acceptance?  No, never; not in this country.  Right?

So I'm sure there's some other, totally reasonable explanation for why religious-freedom organizations constantly have to take government entities to court in order to get Christian religious symbols removed from government buildings*, but a statue of Ganesha in a county art gallery in Idaho provoked calls to protest against "idols" approved by the "godless group of individuals" who approved the art display. 

But for the life of me, I cannot figure out what that reason might be...

*I only linked one example, but it is by far not the only one out there.  Or perhaps we could look to the atheist high school student in Louisiana who protested his high school's use of invocation/benediction prayers at the graduation ceremony, who then received death threats from fellow classmates and ended up not attending the graduation.  Just in case anyone was inclined to accuse me of cherry-picking examples and doubted the existence of Christian hegemony in this culture.

Scott Walker: Privatize ALL The Things!

(For those not familiar with the "___ ALL the things!" joke, I direct your attention here.)

Scott Walker, Wisconsin's asshole-in-chief, best known for his lying scumbag tactics* during the union-busting fight a couple months ago, is back hard at work on his job of undercutting the government's ability to provide services.  This time, it's through an expansion of the proven-to-be-a-failure school vouchers program in the state, while simultaneously cutting funding for public schools.  No, seriously.  Studies and testing have shown that the students in the voucher program actually did *worse* than their counterparts in public school.  And yet Walker wants to cut funding to the better-performing program and pump public funds into the worse-performing program.

But it gets better!  Not only does he want to cut funding and expand the failed voucher program, he wants to exempt voucher students from the testing and studies that revealed the program's failure!

Dear Republicans:  You are entitled to your own opinion.  You are not entitled to your own facts.  The proper response to a study showing that your pet project isn't working like you insisted it would, is not to say "Well FINE then, we just WON'T STUDY IT ANYMORE, OKAY?  (But let's give more money to it anyway.)"

*Sealing protesters inside the Capitol building, calling in the police, sheriff dept, and even the National fucking Guard to try to intimidate protesters, insisting the union-busting bill (I typed that "union-busting bull" the first time. Ahem, paging Freud.) was absolutely! necessary! for the budget! during this time of fiscal! crisis! and then, when it became clear that wasn't going to fly, blatantly violating procedural rules and forcing through a vote on the union-busting as a separate bill in less than 5 minutes in a secret meeting, among other abuses of power.

Bryan Fischer's Godwin on Steroids

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

              - Godwin's Law, the main corollary of which is that the first person to invoke a Nazi comparison loses by forfeit.  I also use it as a verb, as in "to Godwin a discussion".

If we were holding to that standard, Bryan Fischer (and indeed the whole Teabagger movement) would have lost the debate by Godwinning long ago.  However, on Tuesday Fischer, as he does with so many things, cranked the Godwin up to 11 with this epic screed [TW gratuitous Nazi comparisons and vicious anti-gay fearmongering]:

I mean, ladies and gentlemen, they are Nazis. Homosexual activists, when it comes to freedom of speech, are Nazis. When it comes to freedom of religion, they are Nazis. ... Ladies and gentlemen, they are Nazis. Do not be under any illusions about what homosexual activists will do with your freedoms and your religion if they have the opportunity. They'll do the same thing to you that the Nazis did to their opponents in Nazi Germany.

Wow.  Just...wow.  I mean, SIX instances of the word Nazi in six sentences.  Clearly Fischer means business.  Srs bizness.  Of the bearing-no-resemblance-to-reality-or-logic variety.

The AFA yet again tried to get its pet runaway train under control; of course, since it was on his radio show, they couldn't just edit it like they do to his blog posts.  So instead, they simply removed the video from their archive.  Unfortunately, as I keep trying to remind people, once you're on the internet as having said something, it's on the record forever, no matter how much deleting or redacting you try to do.

Of course, Fischer didn't help matters by going on another unhinged rant Wednesday about DADT, how the "homosexual lobby" (immaculately decorated, natch) is "just like the Nazis", and how any soldier who "[says] a word of complaint about homosexual behavior" will be, I'm not even fucking kidding, "sent to a reeducation camp ... to get your brain washed ... you're not getting out of that room until you crumble and admit you support sexual deviancy ... that's where it's going in the military."

How long before AFA finally wises up and drops this fuckbag like a ton of bricks?  How long before right-wing politicians stop appearing on his show?  Why the fuck is anyone fucking legitimizing such raw hatred and bigotry?

Congressional Republicans: Still Looking For Jobs In Uteruses

In contrast to their purported focus on the revitalizing the economy and creating jobs, Congressional Republicans continue to make the intimate details of uteruses and the decisions of those who have them their top priorities.  For bonus hypocrisy points, this attack comes in the form of an overriding federal-level piece of legislation designed to standardize [lack-of-]access laws across state borders, yet is proposed by a member of the party which loves squawking about states' rights when it comes to things like gun control and health insurance regulations.

So what is it they want to restrict this time? 

Minors' access to abortion services*.  This new bill, proposed by Republican senator John Boozman (AR) and five co-sponsors, would institute a nationwide requirement of parental notification before a minor may get an abortion.  According to the text of the bill, this means both parents, via certified mail with delivery receipt and "restricted delivery" (meaning the named recipient must be the one to sign for it; some quick googling tells me that means each notification would cost about $10, plus time for a staffer to handle the mailings and such), and a 4-day waiting period between notification and the abortion itself.  It would also require that, if the parent chooses to seek a court order preventing the abortion, the court issue an injunction against it, disallowing the abortion "until the issue has been adjudicated and the judgment is final."  How long does that take?  Anyone more familiar with court proceedings than I?  The bill also mandates a $1 million fine and 10 years imprisonment for any doctor found in violation.  There is a medical-emergency clause, and one for "clear and convincing evidence" of parental abuse - which as I read that, leaves it basically up to the doctor to determine what constitutes "convincing evidence" - but none for rape or molestation by someone other than the parent, not even a judicial-bypass option.

[TW: mention of hypothetical rape and forced pregnancy scenario]

So.  Imagine a teenage girl, let's say 17.  Old enough to make her own decisions for the most part, in her senior year of high school, applying to colleges, all that fun stuff.  Mere months from crossing that mystical line that transforms one from a legal child to a legal adult overnight.  She is in a relationship, and her boyfriend rapes her.  (Sadly, this is not at all a far-fetched scenario; 24% of teens in dating relationships have experienced sexual violence therein.)  She broke up with him, but doesn't want to accuse him, for any one of a number of reasons.  Because she still loves him, or because she's ashamed, or her parents are deeply religious and would punish her for it, or she's seen the gauntlet survivors are forced to traverse in the public eye in this culture and wants no part of it.  For whatever reason, she doesn't feel she can or should report him.  But a few weeks later, she discovers she's pregnant.  Now what?  Being pregnant doesn't magically make her ready to report him, or willing to talk to her parents about what happened if she wasn't before. 

As things currently stand, she might live in a place that permits minors access to abortion services without requiring parental involvement.  If she doesn't, she might be lucky enough to live close to a border with a state that does, and/or have the resources and time to make it possible to cross to another state to access a legal abortion. 

And that is precisely the scenario Boozman and his cronies want to prevent, as they outright admit.  By god, there will be no crossing of borders to obtain services!  Those services will be the same level of inaccessible no matter where you try to go!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the major point of our system of governance, as a collection of semi-autonomous states able to make our own laws on a number of issues, largely about the ability to go somewhere else if you didn't like the laws of your area?  Isn't that what state-level opponents of legal abortion like to claim, as they slowly tighten the noose?  That if you don't like it you can go somewhere else where the laws are more permissive?  And now this explicit attempt to make that impossible.  Hypocrites; color me shocked.

Anyway, if this law passes, the girl of a few paragraphs ago will have no option.  She will either have to accuse her rapist and face the victim-blaming gauntlet, or let everyone think she's irresponsible and face the judge-and-shame-pregnant-teens gauntlet.  And if her parents so choose, they can force her to bear her rapist's child and there is not a damn thing she can do about it no matter where she goes.  In what world is this a moral thing to do to someone?

Or another scenario.  A teen gets pregnant via consensual intercourse when the condom breaks.  Zie wants an abortion.  Zie lives with hir mother, but hir father disappeared years ago and nobody has any idea where he went.  With no forwarding address and the requirement being that both parents are notified via mail, what is this teen supposed to do?  Again I'll point out that there is no provision for judicial bypass, as most parental-notification bills include.  If a minor cannot locate and notify *both* hir parents, there is no recourse, and zie will be forced to have the baby or resort to illegal and unsafe abortion methods.  Congratulations, Boozman: your fucked-up law could end up killing the pregnant person and, you do realize this, yes?  The fetus in that case dies too. 

I'll also add that (as has been pointed out many times before) by anti-choice logic on this issue, parents should be able to force pregnant teens to abort, too.  If the parent can step in and make the decision about what to do with the pregnancy, irrespective of the teen's decision, well...that sword cuts both ways.  Of course we all know pro-forced-birthers would be up in arms if a parent ever tried to use their parental override that way (and rightfully so; remember, pro-choice is not pro-abortion, and we respect the right of the pregnant person to decide, so *any* overriding of that in any direction is bad in our eyes), but again:  Hypocrites. 

Color me shocked. 

*Typical Republican politics, to target the least powerful; first the poor via H.R. 3 and associated legislation, now minors.

More GOP Hypocrisy...

Check this shit out...

Paul Ryan, who drafted the GOP's Road to Ruin budget for next fiscal year, was himself a recipient of federal Social Security money that he used to pay for college, which was the starting point of a career that has led him to a point where he has the power to draft a budget that would drastically cut the programs that helped him get his start.

What an epically clear case of the GOP's core value:  "I got mine, screw the rest of you."

Today In Conservative Hypocrisy: But The Children! Edition

There's a J. Crew ad that's been causing some nontroversy of late - a photo of J. Crew's creative director with her preschool-aged son, whose tiny toenails are painted neon pink:

The text reads "Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink.  Toenail painting is way more fun in neon."

Well, the usual suspects have been up in arms over this.  She's ruining him!  She'll turn him gay!  By the feminizing power of pink and nail polish, she's gender-confusing him!  Blah blah etc.  The gay agenda is at work here, whatever.

And then there's the recent, and growing, pushback from the self-proclaimed morality police against anti-bullying programs that try to teach kids not to beat up gay/trans/perceived-non-gender-conforming kids.  Gay agenda!  Indoctrination!  Brainwashing!  Alarmist nonsense!

I also distinctly remember a hue and cry when some same-gender couples in California brought their kids to anti-Prop H8 protests.  It was "shameful" that us pervs would "use our children this way".  No links, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers it.

So why are the bigots, who are so keen to label participation of young'uns in pro-gay and pro-equality movements as this horrible brainwashing abuse we're perpetuating on the innocent behbehs, okay with things like Peter LaBarbera's Youth Hate Camp?  And why has there been no terrible outcry against these fucknuggets, who have filed about 50 lawsuits against various school districts across Ohio, Kentucky, Florida, and other southern states, for banning t-shirts saying things like "God Hates Whores." and "God Hates Muslims Gays.", when they made their daughter wear those shirts to school?  That's a couple who is outright using their daughter to push their hateful right-wing agenda by making her wear controversial slogans and face punishment from her school administrators in order to give them cause to start another lawsuit.  I eagerly await the disavowal and condemnation from Faux News and One Million Moms, over this shameful example of brainwashing and exploitation of a child for a degenerate cause.

Bueller?  Bueller?


...*crickets*

Yeah.  That's what I thought.