By now you’ve probably heard about the nine year old Brazilian girl who was sexually abused and raped by her step-father. She became pregnant with twins. Her mother arranged an abortion to save her life. Doctors were found to do the procedure and the little girl’s life was saved.
The danger to a little nine year old girl’s life under those circumstances isn’t something you’d think a rational person would even question, let alone condemn the adults who took the measures they had to in order to save her life.
A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication in Brazil of the mother and doctors of a young girl who had an abortion with their help.
The nine-year-old had conceived twins after alleged abuse by her stepfather.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re told Italian paper La Stampa that the twins "had the right to live" and attacks on Brazil’s Catholic Church were unfair.
…
The girl, who lives in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, was allegedly sexually assaulted over a number of years by her stepfather, possibly since she was six.
The fact that she was four months pregnant with twins was only discovered after she was taken to hospital in Pernambuco complaining of stomach pains.
…
Brazil only permits abortions in cases of rape or health risks to the mother.
Doctors said the girl’s case met both these conditions, but the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho said the law of God was above any human law.
He said the excommunication would apply to the child’s mother and the doctors, but not to the girl because of her age.
Upon learning of the abortion, the regional archbishop excommunicated the doctors, as well as the girl’s mother. He did not excommunicate the step-father, saying the crime he is alleged to have committed, although deplorable, was not as bad as ending a fetus’s life.
Emphasis mine. As Andrew Sullivan said today, "I guess the Vatican is used to finding ways to see the lesser evil of raping and molesting children."
Sullivan also notes today that Rod Dreher is shocked, shocked to learn that there are bisexual teenagers in East Texas. Here’s the Dallas News story that fairly curdled poor Dreher’s blood…
Terry Caffey awoke to gunshots and his wife’s guttural screams.Instinctively, he threw his right arm over her body – taking three bullets in the forearm and three in the shoulder – before a seventh round caught him in the right cheek and exploded through his ear.
That one blew him out of bed, face down.
Moments later, someone shot Caffey three more times in the back.
"He came up and kicked my foot to make sure I was dead," he said. "There was heavy breathing, and I could hear them reloading. I was basically just waiting for them to shoot me in the back of the head. But it got very quiet, and he walked off."
Caffey passed out.
When he regained consciousness, furniture crashed, glass shattered and footsteps marched upstairs toward his children’s bedroom.
His right arm hung limp because a bullet had severed a nerve. He scrambled to his knees.
Then he heard his 13-year-old son Bubba cry out – "No, Charlie! No! Why? Why are you doing this?"
Caffey collapsed again…
No, No…wait just a moment… That’s not the part of the story that shocked Rod Dreher. This is:
Penny home-schooled the children soon after the family moved from Celeste, population 800, to Emory, population 1,200, about three years ago.
The transition to a larger school district was bumpy.
"I guess you’d call it culture shock," Caffey said. "Emory has a lot of bisexual kids; it’s like it was almost cool to be bisexual. One of the first things that happened was some girl wanted to be Erin’s little girlfriend. And I was like, ‘That ain’t happenin’.’ "
But after three years of home schooling and much discussion, the children re-enrolled in public schools in 2008. The boys seemed to thrive, but Caffey and his wife were concerned about Erin.
Emphasis mine. No, really, Dreher wrote an entire post off of this news story about a man surviving the home invasion massacre that killed his entire family, about how shocked he was to discover "a bisexual culture" in East Texas. If you think I’m exaggerating that, let Rod tell you all about it himself…
…the killings aren’t what shocked me about this story. What got me was this: This is a tiny East Texas town — and there’s a bisexual culture in one of them, among the teenagers? WTF? What do I not get about teenage life these days? What do I not get about the cultural air kids breathe?
And now of course, he’s getting all pissy because people are questioning his sanity in the post’s comments…
UPDATE: To clarify: I’m not saying that the teenage culture of bisexuality is worse morally than murder, for heaven’s sake. Obviously murder — and murder of one’s own family — is about the worst thing imaginable.. I’m simply saying that I was more shocked by this tidbit about the decadent teenage culture in a tiny Texas town than I was by the foul crime itself. Big difference.
UPDATE.2: Reading the comments, what on earth is wrong with some of you? I’m not saying bisexuals killed that family.Good grief. It’s obvious that the murderers include the daughter and her boyfriend. The bisexuality thing was a mere aside that I found more startling than the murders, given the small-town culture where this crime took place. I freely admit that I am out of touch with teenage culture today. If you’re bound and determined to conclude that I think bisexuality is worse than murder, you’re completely wrong, and you’re willfully misreading my post for whatever reason. At least understand what you’re doing, and the bad faith in which you’re doing it.
A pastor was shot dead in his pulpit today in Illinois. That appalls me. It doesn’t shock me. This kind of thing happens these days. Sad but true. You don’t hear every day about a tiny Texas town whose teenagers are engaged in a culture of bisexuality. At least I don’t.
UPDATE.3 Ah, so now I get where the unusual traffic has been coming from.
Andrew Sullivan linked to this post, calling my point of view "clinical." So it must be to someone with his values. I think I have said five times here that murder is incomparable to bisexuality in terms of moral meaning, but why let that clarification get in the way of a good snit? The point of my post was not that one thing is worse than the other, but that I personally found one thing more shocking than the other. Shocking, in the sense of being surprised by something.
Well that sure clears things up doesn’t it. Rod…you’re done. Whatever humanity you may have once had within you…it’s gone now. Don’t even bother trying to figure out why your readers are appalled. You will never know.
You can wonder whether the culture war has utterly corrupted what might have otherwise been decent human beings, or whether they never actually took that belly flop into the gutter because they were there to begin with. But if nothing else the culture war has made it pretty plain that there is a difference between spirituality and religious dogma, and the two are not compatible. Dogma destroys the human spirit as surely as rust, because it demands we give it our conscience, our integrity, and eventually everything we are, and everything we might have become. Dogma fashions out of our living bodies and empty shell for it and it alone to fill, and we stop being the person we are, and we become dogma.
Jacob Bronowski put it perfectly in his series, The Ascent of Man…
There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts – obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.
It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. it was done by ignorance. When people believe they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken".
…We have to cure ourselves of the itch of absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.
But this is precisely what dogma demands we do not do. We cannot touch people, lest the scarecrow that dogma insists to us they must be, comes undone, and we see a human being not that much different from ourselves.
The state of mind, the state of society, is of a piece. When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, we discard in it what a man is.
Likewise, when we discard the test of fact in what a homosexual is, we also discard in it the human being that they, and we are. Integrity. Dogma will not share power with it. And that is the lesson people are learning…
When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers.
The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.
These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.
"More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself,’ " says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.
Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:
• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, "the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion," the report concludes.
• Catholic strongholds in New England and the Midwest have faded as immigrants, retirees and young job-seekers have moved to the Sun Belt. While bishops from the Midwest to Massachusetts close down or consolidate historic parishes, those in the South are scrambling to serve increasing numbers of worshipers.
• Baptists, 15.8% of those surveyed, are down from 19.3% in 1990. Mainline Protestant denominations, once socially dominant, have seen sharp declines: The percentage of Methodists, for example, dropped from 8% to 5%.
…
The ARIS research also led in quantifying and planting a label on the "Nones" — people who said "None" when asked the survey’s basic question: "What is your religious identity?"
The USA Today article goes on to postulate a number of causes, from increased mobility to sex abuse scandals in the clergy. But it doesn’t take on the most obvious one: culture war weariness. People are sick of it. They are sick of being told over and over again to hate their neighbor. Sick all the more, for being told to hate their neighbor in the name of love. And sick still more, for having that message of hate preached to them by the likes of this…
He did not excommunicate the step-father, saying the crime he is alleged to have committed, although deplorable, was not as bad as ending a fetus’s life.
I’m simply saying that I was more shocked by this tidbit about the decadent teenage culture in a tiny Texas town than I was by the foul crime itself.
Religion isn’t on the decline in America. People are just getting sick of being lectured by moral degenerates. Life is good. This good earth is a wonderful place to be living it. Our families and friends give it sweetness. Love and sex bring it joy and contentment. To ask questions, to search for knowledge is not only a good thing, it is a great adventure. Life is good. The gutter is no place to be living it.
Consider this a follow-up post to my They’d Be Crazy To Start A Second American Civil War post below. From Pam’s House Blend…a first hand account of how they love the sinner but hate the sin in the Aloha State…
…You know, it gets really tiresome to be called diseased and a pedophile and a rapist and an abomination and a threat to America three dozen times in one day. It infuriates me to hear that yes, heterosexuals have special rights (at least they admitted it finally!) and that is how it should be because The Big Book of Bronze Age Fairy Tales says so. To hear little old ladies screaming that they would rather see their grandchildren commit suicide than "be part of that disgusting, filthy, evil lifestyle", isn’t even remotely amusing anymore.
Even better is to, due to the concussion headache beginning to blind me, forget to take off my little green and gold "equality" sticker on the way out of the building, and be followed to the bus stop by a bunch of red shirts with signs. Three 6’5", 200 pound Islander guys with signs saying "Gay marriage is wrong" and "John 3:16" followed the lone little white girl with her laptop case across the street, yelling at me, "Repent!", calling me a bitch and a whore, telling me, "You just need a real man to fuck you straight." Nothing I haven’t heard before.
Then one of them said, "We know who you are now, and what you drive. We saw you last Thursday. You better watch yourself, fucking haole bitch." Not one of the 20 people standing around the bus stop said anything to them.
I got on the first bus that came along, got off three stops down the street, and caught my right bus a few minutes later. I rode home all alone, with my headphones on, praying no one bothered me.
I don’t actually believe there is going to be anything like a second American civil war coming out of cowardly louts like these. But the republican noise machine is deliberately egging them on and it’s an open question as to whether or not they understand the forces they’re witlessly playing with. What I expect is to see more Timothy McVeighs and Eric Rudolphs…more godly men like this one…
Progressives around the country can breathe a little easier today: James Adkisson has been sentenced to life behind bars for the deaths of Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger, the Unitarian Universalist martyrs who died during his assault on their church in Knoxville, TN last July.
Many of us intuited at the time that Adkisson’s rampage was exactly the kind of rancid fruit that would inevitably take root in an American countryside thickly composted with two decades of hate radio bullshit, freshly turned and watered with growing middle-class frustration over the failing economy. That suspicion that was verified in the days that followed, when police searched Adkisson’s apartment and found it filled with books and newsletters penned by Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and other right-wing hate talkers.
But Monday, Adkisson told us himself — in his own words — just how central right-wing eliminationism was in driving him to his shooting spree. Shortly after he was sentenced Monday, he released a four-page handwritten "manifesto" — which he’d intended to be his suicide note — to the Knoxville News (the full .pdf can be downloaded here). In it, he unleashes the full measure of his hatred for liberals — and encourages other would-be right-wing warriors to take up arms and follow him into battle.
Some choice excerpts:
"Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them….
"This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book. I’d like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn’t get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It’s the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence."
"I thought I’d do something good for this Country Kill Democrats til the cops kill me….Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I’d like to encourage other like minded people to do what I’ve done. If life aint worth living anymore don’t just kill yourself. do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.
No doubt this manifesto is being blogged, mailed, twittered, and otherwise littered across the far-right infosphere today, and Adkisson will likely emerge from this as a new hero of the extreme right wing. (He’s obviously articulate and literate, which means we may expect more of these bilious rants coming out of his cell in the years ahead.) It also seems likely that, probably sooner rather than later, other victims of our curdled economy will accept his charge, pick up their guns, and attempt to follow him into battle.
I have a feeling I know who is going to play the role that Jews played once upon a time when Germany was having its own little bout with economic chaos, and vitriolic class hatreds…
…After first establishing that God created Eve to be Adam’s “helper,” [Colorado State Senator] Renfroe explained why he opposed extending health care benefits to gay and lesbian partners of state employees:
Homosexuality is seen as a violation of this natural, created order and it is an offense to God, the Creator, who created men and women, male and female, for procreation.
Then came some passages from the Bible:
Leviticus 18:22 says, “You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a female, it is an abomination.”
and
Leviticus 20:13 says, “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act and they shall surely be put to death. Their blood guiltiness is upon them.”
You just need a real man to fuck you straight. We know who you are now, and what you drive.
If I had my way, that would be his name, as far as any rational person was concerned. (As in: “I was in my car listening to Crazy Glenn Beck …”) Because Crazy Glenn Beck has carved out his own niche in the talk radio/Fox News spectrum, and it is the Crazy niche. And these aren’t exactly venues known for their non-craziness to begin with.
Glenn Greenwald has a rundown of Crazy Glenn Beck’s latest lunacy — “war gaming” the, uh, coming civil war.
Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air blog links to Crazy Glenn Beck’s discussion of the coming civil war, but even there, the writer feels compelled to note:
There’s something “off” about Beck in a way that’s not true of other chat-show hosts, although that’s not necessarily a criticism: O’Reilly and Hannity can be tiresome in more than small doses but this guy I find watchable even at a stretch. Partly it’s the sheer bravado of the performance, partly it’s the challenge of trying to figure out what’s going on in his head to make him the way he is.
When a right winger is so crazy that one of Michelle Malkin’s bloggers finds it necessary to post a disclaimer, however mild — that’s some serious crazy!
Crazy Glenn Beck had a health incident a couple of Christmasses ago — somehow things went awry with his health care provider and he had at least one incredibly rough night, which he later described to his listeners as consisting of terrible visions, such as — I’m not making this up but I am paraphrasing from memory — children’s faces being chewed off by dogs.
I was listening that morning and I remember thinking, “Wow! Discussing visions of children’s faces being chewed off by dogs on a nationally syndicated morning radio program? That’s crazy, even for Crazy Glenn Beck!”
So to answer the Hot Air blogger’s question, I’ll tell you what’s going on in Crazy Glenn Beck’s head: he’s trying not to react to the invisible people shouting at him, the ones that only he can see and hear, because he knows he’s on camera and he has to hold it together. He’s trying not to let the demons crawl right out of his skin while he’s in front of the microphone, because his livelihood depends on walking up to the crazy line but not crossing over, and mostly he succeeds, but clearly the strain is taking its toll. Bill O’Reilly used to be my leading candidate for right wing blowhard most likely to have an on air meltdown, but since Fox gave him a live tv show, Crazy Glenn Beck has pulled way into the lead.
(Crazy Glenn Beck’s bizarre post-surgery YouTube video is here. And here — at about the fifty second mark — Crazy Glenn Beck “jokes” about specific and graphic ways he would like to kill Michael Moore. Ha ha ha.)
Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 gave rise to the American "militia movement": hordes of overwhelmingly white, middle-aged men from suburban and rural areas who convinced themselves they were defending the American way of life from the "liberals" and "leftists" running the country by dressing up in military costumes on weekends, wobbling around together with guns, and play-acting the role of patriot-warriors. Those theater groups — the cultural precursor to George Bush’s prancing 2003 performance dressed in a fighter pilot outfit on Mission Accomplished Day — spawned the decade of the so-called "Angry White Male," the movement behind the 1994 takeover of the U.S. Congress by Newt Gingrich and his band of federal-government-cursing, pseudo-revolutionary, play-acting tough guys.
What was most remarkable about this allegedly "anti-government" movement was that — with some isolated and principled exceptions — it completely vanished upon the election of Republican George Bush, and it stayed invisible even as Bush presided over the most extreme and invasive expansion of federal government power in memory. Even as Bush seized and used all of the powers which that movement claimed in the 1990s to find so tyrannical and unconstitutional — limitless, unchecked surveillance activities, detention powers with no oversight, expanding federal police powers, secret prison camps, even massively exploding and debt-financed domestic spending — they meekly submitted to all of it, even enthusiastically cheered it all on.
They’re the same people who embraced and justified full-scale, impenetrable federal government secrecy and comprehensive domestic spying databases conducted in the dark and against the law when perpetrated by a Republican President — but have spent the last week flamboyantly pretending to be scandalized and outraged by the snooping which Bill Moyers did 45 years ago (literally) as part of a Democratic administration. They’re the people who relentlessly opposed and impugned Clinton’s military deployments and then turned around and insisted that only those who are anti-American would question or oppose Bush’s decision to start wars.
They’re the same people who believed that Bill Clinton’s use of the FISA court to obtain warrants to eavesdrop on Americans was a grave threat to liberty, but believed that George Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law was a profound defense of freedom. In sum, they dressed up in warrior clothing to fight against Bill Clinton’s supposed tyranny, and then underwent a major costume change on January 20, 2001, thereafter dressing up in cheerleader costumes to glorify George Bush’s far more extreme acquisitions of federal power.
In doing so, they revealed themselves as motivated by no ideological principles or political values of any kind. It was a purely tribalistic movement motivated by fear of losing its cultural and demographic supremacy. In that sense — the only sense that mattered — George Bush was one of them, even though, with his actions, he did everything they long claimed to fear and despise. Nonetheless, his mere occupancy of the White House was sufficient to pacify them and convert them almost overnight from limited-government militants into foot soldiers supporting the endless expansion of federal government power.
But now, only four weeks into the presidency of Barack Obama, they are back — angrier and more chest-beating than ever. Actually, the mere threat of an Obama presidency was enough to revitalize them from their eight-year slumber, awaken them from their camouflaged, well-armed suburban caves. The disturbingly ugly atmosphere that marked virtually every Sarah Palin rally had its roots in this cultural resentment, which is why her fear-mongering cultural warnings about Obama’s exotic, threatening otherness — he’s a Muslim-loving, Terrorist-embracing, Rev.-Wright-following Marxist: who is the real Barack Obama? — resonated so stingingly with the rabid lynch mobs that cheered her on.
With Obama now actually in the Oval Office — and a financial crisis in full force that is generating the exact type of widespread, intense anxiety that typically inflames these cultural resentments — their mask is dropping, has dropped, and they’ve suddenly re-discovered their righteous "principles." The week-long CNBC Revolt of the Traders led by McCain voter Rick Santelli and the fledgling little Tea Party movement promoted by the Michelle Malkins of the world are obvious outgrowths of this 1990s mentality, now fortified by the most powerful fuel: deep economic fear. But as feisty and fire-breathing as those outbursts are, nothing can match — for pure, illustrative derangement — the discussion below from Glenn Beck’s new Fox show this week, in which he and an array of ex-military and CIA guests ponder (and plot and plan) "war games" for the coming Civil War against Obama-led tyranny. It really has to be seen to be believed.
…
That’s the context for this Glenn Beck "War Games" show on Fox News this week — one promoted, with some mild and obligatory caveats, by Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air. In the segment below, he convened a panel that includes former CIA officer Michael Scheuer and Ret. U.S. Army Sgt. Major Tim Strong. They discuss a coming "civil war" led by American "Bubba" militias — Beck says he "believes we’re on this road" — and they contemplate whether the U.S. military would follow the President’s orders to subdue civil unrest or would instead join with "the people" in defense of their Constitutional rights against the Government (they agree that the U.S. military would be with "the people")…
He called the gay-rights movement "probably the greatest threat to America," likened gay activists to Muslim radicals and dubbed same-sex relationships "abominations."
…
Buttars’ latest remarks come from an interview with documentary filmmaker Reed Cowan that aired on ABC 4 this week. Buttars told Cowan the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community doesn’t want "equality, they want superiority."
"It’s the beginning of the end," the West Jordan Republican said. "Oh, it’s worse than that. Sure. Sodom and Gomorrah was localized. This is worldwide
The state Senate passed SB 88 — sponsored by the Legislature’s two openly gay members, Sen. Jennifer Veiga and Rep. Mark Ferrandino, both Denver Democrats — on a voice vote after Renfroe spoke, and then gave final approval to the bill Tuesday morning by a margin of 22-12, with Republican Sens. Ken Kester and Al White joining Democrats voting in favor. The bill moves on to the House for consideration.
The bill, which also came under fire from Focus on the Family in an advertising campaign last week, roused Renfroe to pull out a Bible and thump it during debate Monday. After first establishing that God created Eve to be Adam’s “helper,” Renfroe explained why he opposed extending health care benefits to gay and lesbian partners of state employees:
Homosexuality is seen as a violation of this natural, created order and it is an offense to God, the Creator, who created men and women, male and female, for procreation.
Then came some passages from the Bible:
Leviticus 18:22 says, “You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a female, it is an abomination.”
and
Leviticus 20:13 says, “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act and they shall surely be put to death. Their blood guiltiness is upon them.”
And I still can’t get this dream out of my head…
In this dream I’m driving to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to visit some gay friends.
From Baltimore, Gettysburg is not all that far away. This is a day trip I’m taking, and I have three gay friends with me…a full car. We chat easily as I drive with the windows down and the moon roof open through some very lovely Maryland, and then Pennsylvania countryside. It is a beautiful day. Perfect actually. Not too hot, not too cold. The air smells sweet and crisp and clear. The sky is a perfect blue, with just a few fluffy clouds in it here and there…just enough to make it beautiful, but not so many as to block the sun. A perfect day. My companions and I are feeling as sunny and cheerful as the weather. Peace and contentment and companionship. A perfect day.
Eventually we get to a small and cozy old cottage house in Gettysburg. Somehow I know it is not far from the battlefield nearby…somewhere over the rolling hills of grass and trees. But the sight of such a charming little house puts all thoughts of that terrible war out of my mind. It is so cozy and peaceful to look at. Like something out of a Currier and Ives print. There is a large plot of land around it, with a very nice stone walled garden on one side of the house. Inside we meet more friends, There is a table of lovely snacks and wine. Delicious. I chat with a few of the folks inside, get a few snacks from the table and a small crystal glass of wine, and walk out into the garden…back out into the perfect day.
I don’t recognize any of these people. But somehow in my dream I know that they are all gay friends of mine. We chat about this and that in the beautiful garden. The couple who owns the house has clearly done years of careful loving work on both house and garden. The garden is surrounded by a low stone walls that I think must date back hundreds of years. Inside the wall are so many beautiful bushes and flowers it just takes your breath away. A little paradise.
It is a very peaceful, tranquil setting, and I feel a warm, serene ease being there, and being in the company of these other gay folks. I don’t know any of them, yet I feel that we are all compatriots…comrades somehow. Kindred. I am sitting on one of the low stone walls. A guy about my age is sitting beside me on my right. Several other guys are standing in front of me. We are chatting easily about this and that.
As we chat, about a dozen bright yellow birds, American Goldfinches, land on the wall near us. We watch as they fly a short distance to one of the garden’s Azalea bushes, now in full rosy bloom. Yellow birds hopping around in a rose red bush, looking for some food I suppose. The sight is lovely. One of my companions remarks on how colorful they are, and I agree.
The goldfinches fly off, and almost immediately about a dozen or so starlings land on the stone wall a short distance away from us. My companions ignore them. Some people don’t like starlings, they’re not very pretty birds, but I like and even admire them in some ways. They can find homes in the most amazing of places in and around humankind’s structures. Their flocks make these spectacular air formations, that weave and turn and undulate in the sky as if the entire flock had a single mind. I’m told it’s behavior they evolved over time in their European homelands, to confuse and evade hawks and other air predators. And starlings make this cheerful, goofy song that sounds to my ear like the squeaky wheel noise of the old fax signals I used to hear on my shortwave radio when I was a kid. No other bird makes a song quite like a starling’s. It’s bizarre and goofy and cheerful and just brings a smile to my face whenever I hear it. But starlings are not welcome in most places because their flocks can get Huge and they make a lot of mess.
My companions ignore the small flock of starlings. As I watch it, one of the birds starts walking awkwardly over to me.
As it gets closer, I can see its feathers are unkempt…ruffled…disordered. Some look broken. It’s little pointy yellow beak is broken and bent in the middle. It comes closer, awkwardly waddling on little stubby bird legs. I can see eyes are just two black holes in its head…empty sockets in its little bird skull.
It walks over the stones to me, then it stops, fixes those empty socket eyes on mine, and in a little dry, gravelly voice, begins singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic to me.
Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage
where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning
of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.
Jim Burroway makes a good catch I’d missed when looking at the new anti-gay ad campaign created by Campaign Secrets…the one that shows an unseen gay sniper putting a family and more specifically their little children in the crosshairs. This one is good…it really says it all…
By the way, we also learn that public schools no longer celebrate Father’s Day. Wait a minute. That couldn’t be because it’s celebrated on the third Sunday in June while school’s out, could it? Naah, it’s a much better story when it’s all the gays’ fault.
Dig it. Never mind that Father’s Day happens after the school year ends…just remember that the homosexuals have forced schools to stop celebrating Father’s Day.
Now…this kind of crap may actually fool a lot of people, not all of whom necessarily want someone to feed them pre-fabricated lies about gays they can pass around without taking responsibility for it. Some people will actually hear this and think…Wow…the gays took Father’s Day out of the schools… But you know goddamned well the people who made that ad knew that it was horseshit, and almost certainly so did the folks who bought it. And it’s a safe bet that its target audience doesn’t care if it’s truthful or not.
There’s your moral crusade right there. There’s your righteousness.
I sat down when I came home from work today, and started writing a post about Maureen Mullarkey, the pretentious jackass of a painter slash art critic who painted gay pride parades and was discovered to have donated a thousand dollars to help pass Proposition 8. I have it all pretty well written out in my head just now. I actually started writing it a moment ago. And then I just go tired.
I’m sick of this fight. Just sick of it. I never wanted my life to be a war zone. I never wanted to be the scapegoat for every cheap character flaw that heterosexuals are ashamed of. I never wanted my hopes and dreams of love to be other people’s stepping stones to heaven. But this is the world I was born into.
So I’m sitting here listening to Debussy’s Reverie, and the world I thought I was going to grow up in, and the life I thought I was going to have, keeps coming back into view from between the notes, keeps floating out there in the melodies…just out of reach…and I just can’t keep on writing my post. I’m sick of it all. Just sick of it. I think of this monster with a paint brush using our lives to gratify her soulless ego…selling our lives in her art gallery…cutting our ring fingers off without compunction while selling her twisted vision of our lives to the highest bidder…and I just want to walk away from this world. I really do. Except there is nowhere to go.
There Can Be No Morality Without Religion…(continued)
Via Sullivan… Pope Ratzinger welcomes into his fold, a bishop who claims the Holocaust never happened…
Pope lifts excommunications of 4 bishops
Pope Benedict XVI has lifted the excommunications of four bishops consecrated without papal consent 20 years ago by the late French ultraconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the Vatican announced Saturday.
One of the four bishops was shown this week in an interview saying that the Nazi gas chambers probably didn’t exist. The report prompted Rome’s chief rabbi to ask the Vatican to halt plans to rehabilitate him.
Lefebvre rebelled against the Vatican’s modernizing reforms of the 1960s, including replacing Latin with local languages at Mass.
Benedict has already reached out to the rebels in the hopes of bringing them back into the Church by making it the old Mass more readily available.
"The Holy Father in this decision was inspired by the wish that full reconciliation and full communion can be achieved soon," the Vatican said.
Richard Williamson said in a Swedish state TV interview that historical evidence "is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed." The Vatican had no comment on the report.
Traditionalist bishop: ‘There were no gas chambers’
Bishop Richard Williamson is a hardline ultra-conservative bishop of the Society of St Pius X. He is excommunicated from the RC church, along with his three brother SSPX bishops but as we report, and also according to reports coming out of Rome, the excommunications could be lifted soon by the Pope. It could even be lifted by Sunday, according to the usually reliable Rorate Caeli. And that while he faces possible prosecution for Holocaust denial in Germany after an interview with a reporter from Swedish TV in which he claimed that six million Jews did not die in the Holocaust, merely a few thousand, and that the gas chambers did not exist. CathCon has the translation of the Der Spiegel report and more on the likely lifting of those excommunications. Could the clock really be turned back this far on Nostra Aetate and the teachings of Vatican II?
In an earlier story in the Catholic Herald, Bishop Williamson was exposed as endorsing the forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion…
…
If he brings them back in with Williamson on board, then truly it will be a disaster. Vatican II might as well never have happened and it won’t just be the Jewish community that would be justifiably disgusted. For many thousands of lay Catholics the world over, this could be the final proof that what the atheist bus campaign suggested was true: ‘There probably is no God.’ At least not the God that Williamson and his like believe in. Who could blame them, then, if they put traditionalist Catholic guilt aside, and get on and enjoy their lives.
I hope people don’t get it into their heads that this is merely Ratzinger’s German heritage coming to the fore because this sort of thing horrifies a lot of Germans. It’s his fascist soul that’s peeking out now. They say men don’t change, they just reveal themselves. Well…this is Ratzinger.
…and he’s eminently representative of that vein of fascism in the Catholic church that was not only on Hitler’s side once upon a time, and the Spanish dictator Franco, but actively helped many of his henchmen escape justice after the war. The reason strongly Catholic Spain can have same-sex marriage regardless of what the church thinks of it is because so many Spaniards remember how cozy the Catholic church was with Franco while Spain suffered under his thumb, and they care more about the church keeping its fingers the hell out of their government then what the Pope thinks about anything.
American protestants shouldn’t be feeling too smug about all this either because while there are folks in the Henry Ford heartland who think the Catholic church is the whore of Babylon, they also think Protocols is as literally true as the King James bible. The only reason the kook pews give a good goddamn about Israel is their nutty end times theology. They could care less about the fate of the Jews…they need Israel to exist so the world can end. Then American right wing Jesus will come back to earth and cast them all into the lake of fire along with the other non-believers. And…presumably Catholics. And Mormons for sure. And Unitarians. And Quakers. And the heathens in the church across the street. Especially them.
Hell’s a big place all right. As big as the human capacity to hate each other. As big as our ability to excuse ourselves for killing each other. And heaven is so very small. So very, very small. Just big enough for me…but probably not big enough for you too. And remember…there can be no morality without religion…
The Catholic church’s list of sins and their ranking is made public for the first time. Ever wonder why the church has a hard time fessing up to its role in the Holocaust? They’re not being obtuse. Genocide isn’t that big a deal compared with, say spitting out the Eucharist…
The Apostolic Penitentiary, or "tribunal of conscience", has been shrouded in secrecy ever since it was established by Pope Alexander III in 1179 and until now has never provided details of the cases it scrutinizes.
They are considered so heinous by the Catholic Church that only the Pope can grant absolution to those who perpetrate them.
Blah…blah…blah…
While priests and bishops can deal with confessions of sins as grave as murder or even genocide, the tribunal is reserved for crimes which are viewed by the Church as even more serious.
They include attempting to assassinate the Pope, a priest abusing the confidentiality of the confessional by revealing the nature of the sin and the person who admitted to it, or a priest who has sex with someone and then offers forgiveness for the act.
…
Defiling the Eucharist, which Catholics believe is the body and blood of Christ, is also considered a sin of extreme gravity and one which is on the increase, the high-ranking members of the tribunal said.
Cardinal Stafford said there had been a rise in incidents in which people would receive Communion and then spit it out or otherwise desecrate it, sometimes in Satanic rituals.
…
Such sins, which can only be dealt with by the Pope, acting through the tribunal, bring automatic excommunication from the Church. If the Pope decides to grant absolution, the excommunication is lifted.
See…it’s all a matter of proportion. The punishment has to fit the crime. Forgiveness isn’t lightly meted out when the sin is grievous. Himmler could have been dealt with by the local parish priest. But only the Pope can forgive you for spitting out the Eucharist. And remember, there is no morality without religion.
There’s been some conversation over on SLOG today that the author of those threatening letters to gay bars in Seattle might actually be a gay man himself. I wasn’t convinced, until I saw this…
Remix in comments flagged an important clue about the author of the Ricin Letters. The line…
…is from a poem, "A Display of Mackerel", from a collection by poet Mark Doty. The poem appeared in Atlantis, a 1996 collection of poems that Doty wrote after the HIV-related death of his partner in 1994.
They don’t care they’re dead
and nearly frozen,
just as, presumably,
they didn’t care that they were living:
So whoever wrote the letter knows—and plagiarizes—his gay poets.
That’s…pretty telling. It’s not conclusive, but I’m not making any more assumptions about this guy until he’s caught. Let’s hope that happens before he actually kills someone…
A reader sends along this link, which he says is not a parody but is actually a serious statement by a guy named Matthew Stucky. He says that Santa Claus (which he spells Clause, for some reason) is satanic and is "corrupting people all over the world." Oh, and the reindeer are all gay. Seriously.
So I go take a look…
Santa Clause
1. He knows if a person has been naughty or nice. He is omniscient.
2. If a person has been nice then he will give them gifts.
3. If they have been naughty then they get a lump of coal.
4. Most people are good enough to receive gifts & few get a lump of coal.
5. Santa somehow has the ability to give gifts to the entire world in one time although that would be scientifically impossible. He is basically omnipresent and omniscient.
6. The word for Holy in Spanish is Santa. This gives the world the perception that a man can be a really good person & this makes Santa Clause a mock of God.
Okay…
Santa’s queer reindeer:
Take a look at the names of the 8 reindeer.
Blitzen, Comet, Cupid, Dancer, Dasher, Donder, Prancer and Vixen.
The person who originally came up with these names probably did not have this intent. They probably originally had some of the reindeer as male & some as female. However, the animated movie that was made in 1964 had a different idea. In the movie all 8 of these reindeer were male reindeer. Take a look at those names again. Male reindeer named Dancer, Prancer, Vixen & Cupid?!?!?!
Let’s start with Vixen in the dictionary:
1 : a shrewish ill-tempered woman 2 : a female fox 3 : a sexually attractive woman
So Vixen is a queer. It’s nice to know the creators of this sweet innocent cartoon were so concerned with young kids who would be watching.
Cupid
1: the Roman god of erotic love — compare eros 2 not capitalized : a figure that represents Cupid as a naked usually winged boy often holding a bow and arrow
Dancer & Prancer certainly sound like feminine terms as well.
I think from these names we know Vixen, Dancer, Prancer & Cupid are queer reindeer.
Let’s go back to the story from the animated movie with Rudolph. Rudolph gets shy around girls & his nose turns red. As a result, the other reindeer won’t let him play any reindeer games. That sounds sick, perverted & homosexual. Basically Rudolph like girls because he is straight & as a result they don’t let him participate in their homosexual games.
People are going to read this & say I’m crazy but hasn’t Hollywood always been trying to pump in homosexual themes into kids movies & cartoons. One of the teletubbies is gay. Bert & Ernie are gay. In Scooby Doo Greg is gay. Hollywood has always had agendas they are trying to push and one of those major agendas is homosexuality is ok. It’s no big deal. Another one they are trying to push is "It’s ok for women to work."
The truth is Santa Clause is being used by Satan to corrupt kids at a very young age. This is much like in the Disney movies which are littered with sexual content, homosexuality, etc… A woman falling in love with an animal(Beauty & the Beast). A grown man who wants to hang around little boys all day(Peter Pan). Peter Pan is also always played by women in plays because he is a long haired looking faggot in the movie.
We as Christians need to separate ourselves from this kind of garbage. You can say I’m crazy but Satan Clause is corrupting kids & we ought to have nothing to do with it. We ought to keep our kids away from these fun little animated shows that came from Hollywood. It came from the world so it’s not of God. 1 John 2:15-16 "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world."
Leviticus 20:13 "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."
According to the Bible homosexuality should be punishable by death. I would be overjoyed if every single queer in the entire world died today. The Bible makes it clear they are reprobates who are past the point of salvation. The Bible also makes it clear they are rapists & very wicked people. They have no chance to get saved and no saved person could ever become a queer. Therefore, I would be overjoyed if they all died tonight & our government would actually follow what the Bible states. The death penalty should be enacted for the queers.
Matthew Stucky
Just one screwy little blogger boy you say? Yes. Of course. But there’s your grass roots. Right there. The fertile soil decades of pulpit thumping against the Homosexual Threat was meant to take root in. Check out his goals for the new year…
Personal Physical Goals
1. Get my mile time under 5 minutes & keep it there for the entire year.
2. Run a marathon.
3. Bench 250 lbs.
4. Leg Press 900 lbs.
5. Get my 6 pack abs back before the end of January & keep it for the entire year.
6. Dunk a basketball.
7. Maintain my side to side split but be able to do one front to back both with left leg forward & right leg forward.
8. Learn how to do a front flip.
9. Learn how to do a back flip.
10. Be able to flat jump on the pulpit by the end of the year.
Nice. He also wants to "Personally lead 1000 people to the Lord" this year. No word on how many homosexuals he intends to kill. I suppose we’ll find that out eventually.
Good thing I’m not a Mormon though. Then I’d have to endure angry threats and rhetoric.
If you are a Proposition 8 supporter and you don’t like my attitude…I strongly suggest you don’t try to tell me about it here in the comments. This is my web site and I will endure a lot of things here but bile from gutter crawling bigots isn’t one of them.
I’m angry. At you. At all your pathetic self righteous excuses. At your absolute moral squalor. At your total inner depravity. At you. I’m angry. Want to see how angry? Once upon a time a writer named Harlen Ellison wrote a passage about what it is to hate that captures it…exactly:
Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live.
There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my
complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds
of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this
micro-instant for you. Hate. Hate.
A Federal Way megachurch won approval Monday to add a helicopter takeoff and landing area, called a helistop, on its property.
…Gimme that old time religion…
It will enable Pastors Casey and Wendy Treat of Christian Faith Center to shuttle by air between the 15-month-old Federal Way church and its Everett campus.
…Gimme that old time religion…
Federal Way hearing examiner Phil Olbrechts granted the helistop with limits: no more than four landings and/or takeoffs a week, no flying over adjacent residences, no takeoffs or landings after 10 p.m., and no night-time flying.
…
Church spokeswoman and board member Debbie Willis said Christian Faith Center has no immediate plans to use the helistop.
“We’re happy that it went through,” Willis said. “We’re glad to have the option if we need to at some point.”
You’ve read the press accounts in which the Pope allegedly spoke of protecting the rainforests from destruction in the same vein as protecting heterosexuals from homosexuality. The actual text, brought to us by Rocco, is more complex, but essentially argues that the forms of male and female as created by God can know of no complexity or variance.
Unlike…oh…rainforests. One of the major reasons why the civilized world wants to protect them is that we don’t know and are no where near knowing the full extent of the bio-diversity there is in those things, let alone exactly how all the pieces all fit together to make a whole. There is so much still waiting to be discovered, possibly so much those discoveries can provide to humanity in terms of curing sickness, feeding the hungry, and maintaining the environment of planet Earth. The richness of the diversity of the rainforests is what people are calling on the world’s powers to preserve, and that is the categorical opposite of what authoritarian institutions like pope Ratzinger’s church want to do for the human race. If the human race was the Amazon rainforest, Ratzinger would be bellyaching about the need to clear cut it, so he could put a Christmas tree farm in its place.
Dan Savage takes note of the case of the California teenager who escaped his captors with the chain still dangling from his ankle, and complains, thusly…
Paul linked this in Morning News, but more details are emerging…
A husband and wife have been charged with torture and other counts after a bruised, terrified 17-year-old showed up at a gym with a chain locked to his ankle, claiming he had just fled his captors, authorities said Tuesday.
Kelly Lau Schumacher, 30, and Michael Schumacher, 34, were arrested late Monday, said Matt Robinson, a spokesman for police in Tracy.
They had been taken into custody for questioning earlier in the day at their home in Tracy, where the emaciated boy was allegedly held against his will. A search of the home turned up evidence implicating the couple, Robinson said…. Robinson said the boy was confused when approached by detectives Monday, unsure where he had come from and how long had been held against his will. He was taken to a hospital.
"The wounds he had and his physical condition as well as having a chain around his leg corroborated his basic statement that he was being held against his will," Robinson said.
Kelly and Michael Schumacher are legally married—and they can stay legally married, even if they’re found to be guilty of this horrendous crime. They can stay legally married even if the decomposing remains of twenty other teenagers are found buried in their backyard. Their marriage license cannot be revoked. If Michael dies in prison, Kelly can remarry—even if she’s serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. If Kelly decides to divorce Michael, he can remarry—even if he’s sitting on death row. He can remarry and divorce and remarry and divorce and remarry and divorce until he runs out of prison pen pals. Because the courts have declared that marriage is so fundamental a right that it cannot be denied to convicted rapists or to serial killers.
But it’s a right that’s denied to me and my boyfriend. Because we’re both men and that ain’t right.
What you have to understand, and I’m sure Dan Savage understands this perfectly well, is that killing twenty teenagers isn’t nearly as big a sin as loving someone of your own sex. You can sit on death row for torturing, killing, and eating an entire classroom full of children and still get sympathy from the kook pews. They forgave Susan Smith the moment, the instant, it was discovered that she, and not the black man she’d claimed, killed her own two boys by locking them in the family car and pushing it into a lake and letting them drown. Her stepfather, Beverly Russell, who had abused her since she was 15, was a figure in the South Carolina republican party, and the Christian Coalition, and after all Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven. But if someone splits your head open because they saw you walking down the street with your boyfriend’s hand in yours, you had it coming.
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