This is bouncing around on the schadenfreude channel…

Go read it Here. You wouldn’t need to have Mentor of Arisia’s visualization of The Cosmic All to know this was going to happen eventually. But you would have had to know where Dreher was getting his money from. Now we do. We can adjust our visualizations accordingly.

Seriously…what’s really significant about this article is something the public really needs to be more aware of. A good many of these high profile right wing republican pundits are funded entirely by a single hyper rich benefactor. Usually those benefactors stay behind the curtains and the pudit is seen to be paid for their work by the publications their columns appear in. But…no, and Dreher’s case is instructive. Most if not all of the right wing swamp publications operate at a loss. They get funding in various discrete ways from those same hyper extreme, hyper rich benefactors. Now we know those same benefactors also pay the columnists they love outright as well. Dreher’s columns appeared in The American Conservative, but his paycheck came exclusively from the hyper rich and hyper extreme Howard Ahmanson.

Ahmanson came across my radar long ago as a source of funding for anti-gay and religious extremist politicians and political action groups. Back then he was a supporter of R.J. Rushdoony’s “Christian Reconstructionism” movement, an offshoot of Calvinism, which holds that the second coming doesn’t happen until after God’s kingdom is established here on earth, neatly reversing what evangelicals believe the end times timeline to be. Reconstructionists intend the world to be governed by Mosaic law wherein blasphemers, adulterers, homosexuals and disobedient children, among others, would be stoned to death. Ahmanson almost never gives interviews…apparently he suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome…but as I recall, in one he averred he had moved on from Rushdoony. But who really knows?

That Ahmanson found joy in Dreher’s writing is highly unsurprising. That the breakup came when Dreher couldn’t stop himself from talking about black men’s dicks is also in its way unsurprising, given the rumors surrounding Dreher which I won’t repeat here. It You could say it was preordained.

This is making the rounds. I’m pretty sure what her religious reasons are for not wanting to use Windows and Apple computers. I used to joke that Leviticus forbids operating systems that support multiple threads, but this is about the LGBT friendliness of these companies, and perhaps to a degree the progressive/democratic politics of their boardrooms.

Employee claims she can’t use Microsoft Windows for “Religious Reasons”

I recently hired a new employee for my team. Everyone thinks she is a great addition, and she is clearly very talented as demonstrated in her interviews.

The problem came up during on-boarding when we supplied her with her company laptop. She said she would need it configured in a Linux based operating system because her religion does not allow use of Apple or Microsoft owned operating systems. We only currently have hardware configurations for MacOs/Windows and our expectation was that she will use Windows along with the rest of our team.

She says that she can fulfill all job duties without Windows and I am inclined to believe her but corporate policy dictates WINDOWS and my management is not on board with her request for Linux.

What actions can either (1) I take as a manager to protect her rights and get upper management onboard with her religion or (2) I take against her with management for failing to fulfill her job duties?

I’ve never come across any situation like this and am completely confounded as to how I should handle this.

Tell her your transgender IT support person will set her up with the computer of her choice. Then see what happens.

Speaking of that joke about how, with the advent of self driving cars, the day is coming when someone writes a country western song about a man whose truck left him…  It seems the gay mayor of Fort Lauderdale Florida has stepped into it…

Antigay Florida Activist: Same-Sex Marriage Like Marrying a Volkswagen

After Fort Lauderdale, Fla.’s gay mayor honored an anti-LGBTQ+ church on its 60th anniversary, an activist who has a relationship with the church has likened same-sex marriage to marrying a Volkswagen.

At Tuesday’s City Commission meeting, Mayor Dean Trantalis presented a proclamation recognizing the 60th anniversary of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and the 50th anniversary of its affiliated private school, Westminster Academy. Both were founded by D. James Kennedy, an anti-LGBTQ+ minister, and are located in Fort Lauderdale.

Kennedy died in 2007, but his D. James Kennedy Ministries continues spreading homophobia and transphobia…

You have to wonder what Trantalis was thinking. Well no…we know what he was thinking because he said it when it hit the gay news networks earlier…

It’s time to build a future based on love and not hate. And it’s time for those who still harbor resentment to let go of it. I know I have. And I know our community is better off for it.

And just who would that community be Dean? Anyone who never walked among the Names Project quilt, terrified of spotting one someone made for their high school crush? Someone who doesn’t bother to read the newspaper stories about gay bashings and murders by young heterosexual males all hopped up on the religious hate fed to them by churches like Coral Ridge, because they know it will never happen to respectible and discreet homosexuals such as themselves?

But it gets better. When the wholly predictable torrent of criticism from the rest of the gay community came rushing in, naturally Coral Ridge just couldn’t keep its mouth shut…

Wright claimed that gay activists are pawns in a socialist plot to destroy marriage and the family, and make everyone dependent on government. “I hate to break it to them, but many of our gay and lesbian friends, they’ve just been used by the left to destroy the historic definition of marriage and changed the criteria to only be that of love,” he said. “If two people love each other, or some guy and his Volkswagen, he loves his Volkswagen, he ought to be able to marry his Volkswagen.”

I know how difficult it must have been for you to break it to us Frank. On a scale of 1 to 10 how painful was it? Less than zero?

I swear there are days when you start thinking that everything old is new again. But no…it’s still old. This is such an old trope among the kook pews. If a man can marry another man, why not let him marry a car…or a TV set…or a toaster…or his dog…? You say you love each other? Well I love my dog but it doesn’t mean I can marry it. I’ve been hearing this one ever since my days on USENET. And never mind how it speaks to their total dehumanization of the homosexual Other. Pull it apart and you find that it’s instructive as to how they themselves perceive marriage. If love isn’t critical to marriage, as it turns out neither is consent.

Automobiles can’t consent. They’re not living things, as often as we owners anthropomorphize them all the same. Yes, I’ve even given my car a name. I’ve given names to all my cars. But…hear me out now…they’re cars. Machines. Machines can’t consent. Nor can any other inanimate object or animal or child. And it seems in that subset of American religiosity, neither do wives. What wives do is gracefully submit to their husbands.

Real men take wives…they don’t do something as sissified as ask for their hand in marriage. That is why love cannot be the central fact of marriage. The central fact of marriage is the authority of the man over the woman. Nothing else matters. Certainly not love.