The National Day of Prayer: Encouraging Christian Supremacists Since 1952

[Cross-posted at Shakesville]  Today, May 5th, is the National Day of Prayer here in the U.S.  By law, enacted by Congress in 1952 (and amended in 1988 to fix the date on the first Thursday in May every year), the President is required to issue a proclamation declaring a national day of prayer.  Obama's proclamation for this year can be found here.  The main organization promoting the NDoP, and which organizes the vast majority of NDoP events throughout the country, is the National Day of Prayer Task Force (NDoPTF) chaired by none other than Shirley Dobson, the wife of James Dobson, founders of Focus on Your Own Damn Family, a nationally-known fundie Christian org.  Which kind of makes it hard to believe that the NDoP is *not* a sectarian act of government-sanctioned proselytism, as its backers insist.  When the main organization organizing events for a government-sanctioned observance is a fundamentalist Christian organization, and the events themselves are themed around a quotation from Christian scripture, well.  Suffice to say the quacking is getting awfully loud, despite protestations that it is not, in fact, a duck.

The theme NDOoPTF has chosen for this year is "A Mighty Fortress is Our God", taken from Psalm 91:2, which reads: “I will say to the Lord, my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust.”  They make the usual noise about the terrible state America is in - which, I agree with them, but I rather suspect our reasons for that belief wildly diverge - and have even given us the thoughtful gift of an absolutely terribad promo video:


[Calm but faintly ominous-sounding instrumental music over a montage of "heartland" shots: a farmhouse, a windmill over waving grain fields, a white one-room-schoolhouse style church, with the sky above all these showing gathering roiling clouds oddly lit from within.  Panning across a carefully-planned-to-look-multicultural group of people (black guy, Asian woman, white child, but with all older white people in the background pews) sitting in a church pew with blank but attentive faces. Cuts to a black man standing at the pulpit of the church, gesturing and reading from the Bible.  A shadow falls over his face and he looks up as if startled.  The music suddenly shifts to full-on ominous disaster-movie-trailer and cuts to a dark cloudy background with all-caps text in gold reading "What if we didn't respond to the call to prayer?"  The cloudy background flickers with reddish lightning.  Cuts to wide shot of grassy plain with a single run-down-looking old house to one side, the sky increasingly full of those weirdly-lit boiling clouds.  Then to a white teenaged girl sitting on her bed, picking up a Bible from the bed beside her as if going to read from it.  She looks up consideringly, the room darkens suddenly and she looks worried.  She gets up and walks to the narrow window in the room.  This whole time, the music is sounding like it's been ripped straight from a 90's disaster movie trailer.  She looks out at the weird, tumultuous clouds.  Cut back to cloudy background with all-caps gold text: "What if we forgot the God of our fathers?"  More reddish lightning.  Cut to a Latino-looking young teenaged boy sitting on a couch with a Wiimote in hand as if playing a video game.  The room darkens suddenly.  He looks up, gets up and goes to the window to look at more weird clouds.  Back to cloudy background and all-caps gold text: "What if we didn't care?"  The music is really getting into it, adding wordless female chorus voices in descant over the throbbing drumbeat.  This would be the part where the plane is plummeting in flames, or the earthquake opens a jagged canyon in the earth and people start falling in, in the trailer the music probably came from.  Cuts back to the Latino boy, going to a table and picking up a Bible.  Then to the white teen girl, opening her Bible.  The music abruptly stops as she looks down, and it shows the page she's opened to in Psalms.  Psalm 91 is shown up-close, then the page gets all weird and blurry and streams of light seem to be coming out from behind verse 2 "I will say to the Lord, my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust.", obscuring everything else.  The music fades in again on a single-note crescendo until it bursts back into full disaster-movie glory and the video cuts to a blue sky with passing clouds and some odd dissolve-text effects resolving to read "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" in white.  Cut to the one-room-schoolhouse church interior, pews cleared and a semicircle of white people kneeling on the wood floor with black guy and Asian woman strategically positioned off to one side.  The two teens enter and go to the empty space in the center and both kneel, clasping their hands in their laps and bowing their heads with everyone else.  Scene pans across the room of kneeling people, and we see that the Latino teen, black guy and Asian woman were the only non-white people there - yay, tokens!  Cuts to the Capitol building, backlit by those dark roiling lighning-filled clouds.  Then the Golden Gate Bridge, looking inward toward the Bay, also topped by those weird clouds.  Fades to the kneeling teens, then immediately fades to the outside of the white church, where a hole slowly opens in the dark clouds, seeming filled with white light.  Quick fade to a white family kneeling in prayer inside the church, then to a steeple with beams of white light breaking up the dark cloud behind it.  The Golden Gate Bridge again with those beams of light starting to break through the clouds.  Cuts to a time-lapse shot of some city on a body of water at dusk, clouds streaming over the sky and lights coming on along the shore, with white text reading, "He Created the Heavens."  Text dissolves, image fades to a time-lapse shot of a mountain peak covered in snow with white text reading, "He Set the Mountains in Place".  Cuts to a shot of an older white man who looks suspiciously like Dubya, face upraised in either a serious prayerful expression or an expression of constipation (it's kind of hard to tell.  Can't the religious reich afford decent actors?), and hands clasped before his face, light shining on him.  Text beside him reads, "There is Hope...In Prayer!"  He bows his head, text dissolves.  Cut to a loltastic created shot involving the Capitol, the White House, and the Jefferson Memorial all side-by-side and sort of layered over each other where they overlap, a pair of disembodied hands reaching up from the bottom of the frame and slowly grasping each other in interlocked-fingers-prayer-position, while an American flag with no apparent means of support waves from the left side of the frame, and lightning flickers across a strip of dark clouds above the Representing Washington DC building mashup.  Text falls into place reading "Join With Millions in Prayer", then the NDoPTF logo reverse-dissolves into place below that, superimposed over the mashup.  The music comes to a dramatic climax, cuts off for a dramatic moment, then comes slamming back as the screen goes black and "05.05.2011" written in glowy disaster-movie font zooms in, then flashes to "www.NationalDayofPrayer.org" backlit by a lens flare.  The music finishes with a dramatic flourish and the whole thing fades to black.  Fin.]

It's the music that really makes it, y'know?  A day of prayer - which, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't prayer supposed to be a quiet, meditative reflection on and connection with one's deity? - is totes the same as an actiony disaster movie, amirite?  Well, perhaps if you consider the NDoP to be a disaster.  *rimshot*

But whatever happened to the ruling from last year, wherein a judge in Wisconsin found the requirement of a NDoP to be unConstitutional?  If the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional, why is it still being celebrated?  Why has Obama issued the 2011 proclamation (aside from his terrible predilection for pandering to people who will never vote for him)?

Unfortunately, the 7th Circuit overturned the ruling on appeal last month.  They ruled that since the law requiring declaration of the NDoP each year only directly affects the President (by requiring hir to issue the proclamation), only the President has suffered sufficient injury from the statute to challenge it.  Thus, the Freedom From Religion Foundation has no standing to challenge the NDoP.  The decision, which was 3-0, declared:

Plaintiffs contend that they are injured because they feel excluded, or made unwelcome, when the President asks them to engage in a religious observance that is contrary to their own principles.... [However] offense at the behavior of the government, and a desire to have public officials comply with (plaintiffs’ view of) the Constitution, differs from a legal injury. The “psychological consequence presumably produced by observation of conduct with which one disagrees” is not an “injury” for the purpose of standing.

The concurring opinion defended the decision by saying SCOTUS hasn't defined "injury" in the context of Establishment Clause cases well enough yet to give FFRF and other non-religious (or religious but Constitutionally-inclined) citizens standing based on "psychological injury" resulting from the blatant Othering of non-belief a Presidentially-declared Day of Prayer foments.

And so we have it that, in 20-fucking-11, President Obama - the only President to ever consistently include the phrase "believers and non-believers" in his speeches, yet who attempted to have FFRF's case against the NDoP thrown out before the initial ruling was given - has issued the yearly National Day of Prayer proclamation asking "...all people of faith to join me in asking God for guidance, mercy, and protection for our Nation."

FFRF has said they will seek en banc rehearing (review by the full court, not just the 3-judge panel).  Welp.  I know what I'm praying for today, then.  And it's sure as fuck not "asking God for guidance, mercy, and protection for our Nation."  If it comes to a contest between God as interpreted by Christian Dominionists, and "the forces of hell" as represented by those who would see the Constitution's Establishment Clause respected, well.  I'm gonna have to side with the forces of hell on this one.

Biology: 3, Anti-Fat Techniques: 0

So we know that diets don't work long-term.  And we know bariatric surgery doesn't work long-term.  Now, we know liposuction doesn't work long-term, either.  A study recently released showed that over the year following liposuction on the hips and thighs, new fat cells were created to replace the ones lost, distributed over different areas of the body (they're theorizing that it's because the liposuction destroys the supporting structure under the skin where the fat cells would normally grow).

Fat bodies cannot be willed, fooled, or altered thin.  When are we going to accept this?  When are we going to stop shaming people for a product of genetics and biology?  When are we, as a culture, going to take science seriously when it says, over and over again, No, this weight-loss thing just doesn't work, no matter how you do it?

But you know what the worst part of the linked article was?  The control group had been promised a reduced rate on their surgeries if they still wanted them, in exchange for waiting the time of the study before getting liposuction done. 

And when it was time, even after they had been told the study results, more than half of them went ahead and got the surgery anyway.

My heart breaks for them. 

Wednesday WTF: Real Men Go On Dates Edition

I haven't done a designated Wednesday WTF in a very long time - my WTF tag gets plenty of use as it is - but this seemed worthy of resurrecting it.

An ex of mine posted this on Facebook today (reminding me of *why* he's an ex [and dude, if you still read my blog, sorry, but yeah]): Stop Hanging Out With Women and Start Dating Them.

First of all, when the originating site is called The Art of Manliness, well.  That's a yellow alert right there, especially as it seems to take itself quite seriously. 

And then you read the article itself, which is chock-full of heteronormativity and marriage-pushing (it links to another article on the site called "The Case for Marriage", which hits the usual high notes of "married men are happier/wealthier/healthier" without noting why, and what that may be costing the wives in this equation, who are apparently invisible accessories one uses to gain happiness/wealth/health bonuses, not people with whom one has a fulfilling relationship).  It gets bonus points for lamenting how many guys are "just hanging out" with women these days - because gods know you would never want to just be friends with women - and playing the "young'uns today have had their social skills ruined by the internet!" card.  "Feminism makes boners sad" makes an appearance, too - damn us liberated women, making the questions of "who asks who out?" and "who pays?" a matter of conscious communication instead of assumptions!

The cure for these ills, of course, is a return to the days when men ask women out.  And that's pretty much it.  There's the "She secretly wants you to ask" bit, of course - "Despite the rhetoric you hear about the liberated woman, women still appreciate it when a guy asks her out on a date." - which...well, really.  First of all, what is "the rhetoric...about the liberated woman" even supposed to mean?  The idea that women are adults who are perfectly capable of approaching a stranger they'd like to get to know and asking him or her out, instead of helpless girls just waiting to be asked to dance?  This is just rhetoric that you should disregard?  Secondly, of course (most) women like to be asked out*.  So do (most) men, and I would venture, most people in general.  Being the askee is a confirmation that you are desirable and worth risking rejection for.  That's a nice feeling - assuming the ask was respectful and appropriate in timing/wording/approach, and the asker was actually okay with "no" if that was one's answer - which I don't think is exactly gender-dependent. 

"Be a man and ask these women out."

No.  Please don't.  Not if you're taking your advice from a shitty article on why gender norms ought to jump back a few decades. 

And of course it ends with "So what are you waiting for? Quit reading this post right now and pick up your cell phone. Call a woman and ask her on a date."  Just call a woman!  Any woman!  Doesn't matter if you're really interested in dating her or not!  Doesn't matter if you're happy being single!  By the transitive power of the uterus, all women are interchangeable, so just pick one and try to date her!

*Although not necessarily, and even if they do, not necessarily by men.  Which this whole article completely disregards.

Jon Kyl Does Not Understand The Internet

Jon Kyl, he of the infamous "not intended to be a factual statement" retraction after claiming 90% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion, has scrubbed the Congressional record of his 90% claim.  Instead of reading "If you want an abortion you go to Planned Parenthood and that's well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does," it now reads, "If you want an abortion you go to Planned Parenthood and that is what Planned Parenthood does."

All this proves is the man has no idea how the internet works, or how the world's memory works in the age of the internet.

Dear Senator Kyl: When your misstatement and hilariously bungled attempt at retracting it have spawned a whole internet meme, complete with Twitter hashtag (#notintendedtobeafactualstatement, still going strong days after the incident) egged on by Stephen Colbert, no amount of scrubbing the official record is going to make people forget.  It's like taking down a really dumb or offensive post.  Google Cache will remember, and all you end up doing is looking like an ass who's trying to cover your tracks.

Which, of course, you are, but you don't want to draw attention to it by trying to hide it.  Is it really so hard to admit you were exaggerating wildly for the sake of scoring rhetorical points in your ideological war on reproductive-care services for low-income Americans?

Too much honesty for you?

Want A Student Loan? Show Us Your Finances First.

But of course, because low-income students really need more hoops to jump through before they can get government assistance to get an education.  Tidewater Community College in Virginia is planning to implement a system whereby students seeking government loans for schooling will have to fill out and turn in two "budget worksheets" - one assuming their current income and financial situation "in case they leave school unexpectedly", and the other a projected budget for after graduation based on the starting salary for a job they can expect to get with the degree they're working on - before the financial aid office will disburse their federal student loans to them.

The plan itself sounds pretty fucked up, to me.  I personally don't think the college's budget office - who is not providing the loan money themselves, mind you, just taking federal money and disbursing it to students who have already applied and been approved for it - has any goddamn business seeing my budget.  Offering budget counseling or workshops for students who want it?  A good idea.  Making it mandatory to fill out worksheets and disclose the details of your finances to the loan office before they'll give you the money you've already been approved for?  Not cool.  Especially since "the college also plans to identify high-risk borrowers who are still enrolled and summon them for financial counseling."  So if your budget doesn't meet with approval, you're going to be "summoned" to talk to someone about it, whether you really want to discuss the details of your financial situation with a total stranger at your college or not.

Further, the second budget worksheet assumes the student will have a job after graduation.  Lolwut?  Unemployment is still at nearly 10% nationwide, people.  It's not like jobs are thick on the ground.  I'm not sure I like the idea of having students work up a projected budget based on a job that may or may not be there when they've anticipated having it.

But the real fun part of this is the display of privilege in the comments thread.  Right in the first few comments, someone pointed out the problematic nature of assuming immediate employment upon graduation, and the response was basically "Well, then maybe they shouldn't be taking out money to go to school."  Effectively implying that the only people who deserve an education, which is pretty much necessary at this point to get ahead, are those who can already afford to pay for it out of pocket.

And when someone else pointed out that adding more work and required disclosure like this is putting further barriers in front of those people who need the help most, the answer from a few other commenters was basically "Good!"  ...what?

Education is already a privilege in this country far more than it should be.  Low-income students are already struggling, and to put further barriers between them and the help they need is reprehensible.  It smacks of deliberately replicating and perpetuating the already-widening class divide by reserving all the bootstraps for people who own the bootstraps factory.

Cruel And Unusual "Pro-Life" Tactics

This is just sick.  A 14-year-old girl got pregnant - circumstances were not specified, so for all we know the baby was a product of rape or incest or other forms of coercion - and on her way into the clinic, a "pro-life" "activist" tried to talk her out of getting an abortion, got her phone number, and while she was in the waiting room, texted her to say "If you go through with this, we've named your baby Britney."  When the girl went through with the abortion, the "activist" put up a pink cross with the name on it.

The wankstain who did it defends her actions and says she doesn't think she was being cruel, because "the sooner you deal with it the easier it is in the healing."  What the fucking fuck?  That girl might not have NEEDED any "healing" after the abortion, if that shitwad hadn't done her damndest to personalize and force an emotional connection to a pregnancy the girl didn't want, and emotionally abused her by trying to guilt her for "killing her baby" afterward!

Personal story time!  In the six months or so following my abortion, I had a strange emotional dilemma.  I felt guilty for not feeling guilty, if that makes any sense.  As someone who, with her first unrestricted internet connection at age 18, dove headfirst into the contentious abortion debate message board on Beliefnet.com and would spend hours there arguing with people who really did believe all women who had abortions were murderers, I'd been exposed to a lot of anti-choice nastiness even before it was a personal issue for me.  In the aftermath of it, although I didn't regret my choice, I had a tiny voice in the back of my mind asking what that said about me?  If I could have an abortion and feel nothing but relief and gladness at having the matter taken care of, didn't that make me a terrible person?  A terrible woman, specifically?  And this was me at 21, intelligent, well-educated, informed about the issue and very well-practiced in the arguments surrounding it, and I still was able to be made to feel like there was something wrong with me because I wasn't unhappy or regretful or grief-stricken.

So when I think of a 14-year-old girl, having to make the choice that would let her keep her life as it was or change it forever, being cruelly manipulated into feeling guilty because of a total stranger's opinion of her decision, it makes me sick.  Anti-choicers claim that abortion leads to guilt/regret/depression/etc - they've even named their made-up post-abortion condition "Post-Abortive Syndrome", despite the complete lack of evidence (and evidence to the contrary) that such a condition exists - but that's basically a self-fulfilling prophecy, isn't it?  How many people out there who've had abortions suffer and struggle with guilt and regret not because those feelings organically arose in them - and they do, for some people, I'm not trying to say all abortion decisions are as uncomplicated as mine was - but because they feel like they should feel bad?

Anyone who wants to call themselves "pro-life" needs to concern themselves with the woman's life, too.  That 14-year-old girl has a life, and trying to force her to feel guilty by forcing the pro-fetus framework onto her situation shows a distinct unconcern for the life of the girl.  

Michigan Republican: Foster Kids Don't Deserve New Clothes

This classist asshole takes the far-too-common rhetoric of "poor people deserve nothing nice ever" and steps it up another notch, by saying that foster children in his state should only be allowed to purchase clothes from Goodwill and Salvation Army.

You know, it's unfair enough to dump on poor adults and insist that adults struggling financially not ever spend a single penny on anything anyone watching might deem frivolous or pleasurable, but at least with adults in poverty there's a chance that it was their own choices that led them into poverty.  Maybe they gambled a lot or ran up credit-card debt on shopping sprees or whatever.  I still don't believe it's any of anyone's business to try to police their spending, as if the mere fact of their financial situation gives everyone better-off a right to pry and comment and judge.  But I can at least see some kind of internally-consistent logic in the kind of mindset that believes people should suffer for their irresponsibility, whether that irresponsibility is real or imagined, even while I think it's a bunch of judgmental bullshit.

But it's another thing entirely to take out one's resentment at having to let the government help those who need help on foster children, who are in the position they are because of the choices and fuckups of the adults around them, not because they did something wrong.

Much like Wisconsin's union-busting fiasco, where Walker couldn't say how much money his union-busting would actually save the state despite claiming it was all about the budget, Sen Caswell has yet to give hard evidence that his plan would save the state any money or how much, despite claiming it's about the budget. Which is basically the modus operandi of the slash-and-privatize GOP: wait for (or manufacture, ahem) a crisis, then use it as a boogeyman to force through cuts in the name of "what must be done right now" while people are willing to put up with more without demanding much justification.  Hand-wave in the direction of the Budget Gremlins, and most people will let it go.

So what it basically is, is Caswell using the excuse of the current economy to punish foster children for being foster children.  For absolutely no reason that I can see, except mean-spiritedness.  Because really, what's this going to save the state?  A few thousand dollars, perhaps?  Is a few thousand dollars really worth further stepping on children on whose necks Life has already stomped plenty hard?

It's not like foster kids are rolling in piles of state dough as it is.  When you talk about foster kids, you are by definition talking about people who have already been pretty badly screwed over by life.  Most of them have experienced some kind of abuse.  They're already trying to move through the world and negotiate the process of growing up without any reasonable sense of stability - they can get bounced from home to home on the whims of the families, relocated from one county to another for no particular reason except overcrowding, constantly having to start over in some new place.  What possible purpose could it serve to add another indignity by mandating that they buy hand-me-downs instead of spending a couple more dollars to buy a brand-new shirt at Walmart or Target? 

Sen. Caswell:  Your heartlessness is showing.  You might want to do something about that. 

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."

In Case You Weren't Convinced Yet That Koch Industries Is Evil...

Freed by the Citizens United case, which granted free speech rights to corporations (in related news, I've figured out what I want to be when I grow up!  A corporation.  I wouldn't have to pay taxes, the government would listen to me, I could get bailed out...yeah, life as a corporation sounds pretty good.), Koch Industries has begun politically proselytizing its employees.  A mailer was sent to the home addresses of all their U.S. employees this past fall, right before the election, containing a list of 19 Koch-approved candidates (16 Republicans and 3 "Blue Dog" Democrats, and a mix between state-level and national candidates) and urging employees to vote for those candidates.  Padded out with 14 pages of teabagger propaganda masquerading as economic theory and history lessons (did you know that FDR and the New Deal *prolonged* the Great Depression?  Me neither.  Probably because it's manifestly untrue revisionist history.), the whole thing has an ominous feel of "We're not saying you have to vote our way, but..."  Somehow I don't imagine anyone who complained about being told how to vote would have a job for long, y'know?

I don't even know what to say anymore.  Talk about a hostile workplace.  My sympathies to those employees who feel they have no choice but take this blatant political pressure quietly, or lose their jobs.

Texas' Rick Perry: Governor, or Priest?

Given the proclamation he's just issued, either he's not sure himself, or he's desperately misinformed about what elected leaders are supposed to do in a crisis.

Pop quiz!  When your state is in a long drought that's causing terrible fires and having bad effects on crops and livestock, what are appropriate responses a governor could undertake?

A:  Declare a state of emergency
B:  Redirect funds to additional firefighting equipment/personnel
C:  Ask for help from the federal goverment
D:  Issue an official proclamation declaring a three-day period as "Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas"

If you answered some combination of A, B, and C (or other paths of material help that I didn't think of), pat yourself on the back!  If you answered D, you're either Rick Perry, or just as deeply confused about appropriate uses of elected office.

Here's a hint for those who picked D: there is no appropriate place in the secular government of a highly diverse nation (or state) for proclamations, or declarations, or whatever the hell else, promoting religious practice.  Prayer, in case you're still confused, is a religious practice.  And even if you slip in the little "citizens of all faiths and traditions" line to try to make it less sectarian, you're still privileging belief over nonbelief.  This is, for obvious reasons, Not Okay.

Is it too much to hope that I might see an end to government promotion of religiosity in this country, in my lifetime?

Look, I get the desperation of long drought and bad wildfires.  I'm Californian born and raised.  As I used to joke with friends from other parts of the country about the difference in seasons from one place to another, "Sure, California has seasons.  Fire season and water season."  I live in a state in which fireworks are mostly banned because of the regular fire danger during the summer.  My family adopted a dog that had come to a rescue organization during the really nasty fire season in SoCal five years ago or so, when she quite literally just came trotting out of the burning areas alone as if her family had left her behind when they evacuated, who couldn't bark properly because of smoke inhalation.  So I really, truly do understand the devastation a bad wildfire season and a bad drought can cause to a state.  I sympathize with the people of Texas who are having to deal with this right now. 

That does not change the fact that declarations urging people to pray for rain are not an appropriate response from a supposedly-secular government in a supposedly-secular country.  People who are so inclined will pray for divine intervention in a time of crisis anyway.  To use an elected position of power to tell everyone they should be praying and what they should be praying for is deeply inappropriate.  Period.