An essay on little Johnny’s two mommies could be tossed in the trash bin before it ever gets the chance to bask in school hallway-display prominence.
Newly proposed state legislation would ban anything from being taught in schools that exposes students in prekindergarten through eighth grade to homosexuality.
"Homosexuality, bisexuality, that’s something that should be left to be taught at home and not at our schools," said Rep. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, author of the legislation.
The bill, however, would allow for the teaching of heterosexuality.
"Without heterosexuality you wouldn’t be able to teach biology," Campfield explained.
He added that keeping heterosexuality on the books would protect schools from litigation. "’Jack and Jill went up the hill’ – some organizations say you can’t teach that because it pushes a heterosexual agenda," he said.
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you’ll know by…
An Oxnard junior high student who was shot in the head by a classmate earlier this week was declared brain dead Wednesday, and the 14-year-old male suspect now faces a first-degree murder charge, authorities said.
Lawrence King, 15, was declared brain dead by two neurosurgeons about 2 p.m. at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, said Craig Stevens, senior deputy Ventura County medical examiner. King’s body remains on a ventilator for possible organ donation, he said. He was shot early Tuesday in a classroom at E.O. Green Junior High School.
Authorities initially believed that King was improving. But the boy’s condition worsened early Wednesday, and he was placed on a ventilator a few hours later with his family nearby, said an official, who asked not to be named.
their privacy.
Police said the suspect, whose identity was not disclosed because of his age, shot King at least twice at the beginning of the school day and then fled the campus. The boy was apprehended by police a few blocks away and is being held in Juvenile Hall. He is scheduled to appear in court today.
…
Police have not determined a motive in the slaying but said it appeared to stem from a personal dispute between King and the suspect…
But several students at the south Oxnard campus said King and his alleged assailant had a falling out stemming from King’s sexual orientation.
The teenager sometimes wore feminine clothing and makeup, and proclaimed he was gay, students said.
"He would come to school in high-heeled boots, makeup, jewelry and painted nails — the whole thing," said Michael Sweeney, 13, an eighth-grader. "That was freaking the guys out."
Student Juan Sandoval, 14, said he shared a fourth-period algebra class with the suspect, whom he described as a calm, smart student who played on the basketball team. "I didn’t think he was that kind of kid," Sandoval said. "I guess you never know. He made a big mistake."
"Their lives are both destroyed now," said student Hansley Rivera, 12
Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you…
The problem has been well known for years: Ever since the mid-1990s, young Eastern Germans have been fleeing the region due to a lack of economic opportunity, hoping to find jobs in the western part of the country. Some 1.5 million have already left the region — roughly 10 percent of the population of East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. Even worse, most of those who leave are under 35 and many of them have above average education or training.
But according to a new study released by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, there is another problem that accompanies the migration. Since 1991, more than two-thirds of all those who have left Eastern Germany have been women. The result is that in many towns in the region, there are simply not enough to go around — some places are missing up to 25 percent of their young women. Even worse, the young men who stay behind are often poorly educated, unemployed and frustrated — perfect fodder for neo-Nazi groups looking for members.
"In general," the study finds, "right-wing radical parties receive more votes in those areas where the most young women have left."
…
The study comes on the heels of a report that right-wing violence rose in Germany in 2006, with many of the neo-Nazi-related incidents occurring in Eastern Germany. Additionally, the neo-Nazi party NPD has seen increasing success at the polls in Eastern German states. In state elections in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the NPD captured fully 7.3 percent of the vote, meaning that the right wingers now hold seats in three German state parliaments, all of them in former East Germany.
The study recommends a greater focus on educating the region’s young men, but admits that solving the problem is a difficult challenge. After all, there is no one to turn to for advice: nowhere in Europe is the disappearance of women as severe as it is in Eastern Germany.
"The lack of women in former East Germany has no equal anywhere in Europe," the study says. "Even Polar regions in northern Sweden and Finland, where young women have for years been leaving in droves, don’t come close to the problem in Eastern Germany."
I don’t think education is going to do anything for those guys except make them smarter neo-Nazis, and who wants that? You want to make this world a better place? Universal education would help…sure. Feeding the hungry helps. Creating jobs and opportunities for economic improvement helps. Working for peace and reconciliation helps. But nothing, Nothing, will do more to make this world a better, more peaceful and secure place, then making sure that love has a chance to take root and grow, in every heart. Yet we persist in isolating the lonely…turning away from their misery…blaming them for their own loneliness… You just need to get out more…
You see it in every totalitarian state, in every theocratic pest hole, in every babbling right wing crank who just can’t seem to get enough of waging war on their neighbor’s private lives. The war on sex…which is a war on human intimacy…which is a war on love…which becomes a generalized war on all humanity, on everything that a human being can be. When love dies inside of a person, the void that’s left is all too often filled with the only thing left to fill it with. Hate.
Via Pam’s House Blend… This from The Opine Editorials…which bills itself as "Defending marriage on the firm ground of reason and respect for human dignity".
I was reading an article on National Review Online recently and ran across an inspirational passage that made me realize the tremendous contributions of so many of our fellow defenders of the institution of marriage.
The article’s author is David French, a soldier in America’s Army Reserve fighting in Iraq, as well as a soldier in the war to protect traditional marriage!
“As a bit of background, I’m a mobilized reservist (in my civilian life, I’m a senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund and regularly contribute to NRO’s “Phi Beta Cons” blog) supporting 2nd (Sabre) Squadron, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, one of the Army’s most storied units. I serve as the squadron’s judge advocate (lawyer), and I’ve been pushed forward as part of “Operation Raider Harvest.””
Alliance Defense Fund is on the forefront of the battle against same-sex “marriage”.
I found the specter of a man who spends half his time fighting America’s enemies within & the other half fighting Americas enemies abroad to be truly inspirational!
"Freedom of Speech" carries the obligation to speak THE Truth, with the implication that righteous Americans also have a right to freedom from from untruths.
There are no such words in the constitution as "Freedom of Thought". Righteous Americans, however, do have the right to be free from having untruths shoved in their face and down their throats, and they do have the right to protect innocents’ freedom from exposure to these untruths.
"Making a case for change" is not the same thing as petitioning for a redress of grievances. "Grievances" connotes that there is something that is immoral that must be corrected in order to bring this country closer to the ideal of the moral straight, true and narrow. "Change" can be whatever you like even if it is immoral. There is no ‘freedom’ to make a case for allowing paedophelia, but a freedom FROM such immorality.
America is built on the metaphor of ‘Family’. Thus, that which mocks the moral wholesomeness of the family which is the bedrock of America’s moral superiority is an EMEMY of America.
Dig it. According to this true blue American patriot, there is no such thing as freedom of thought, let alone freedom of speech. And he was promptly followed up by this…
Anyone pushing such an agenda acts against the family and the dignity of the human being, and as such is not merely an enemy of America but an enemy of humanity itself, because the acts that he/she wants society to affirm and condone are clearly “acts of grave depravity.”
Human dignity anyone? There is no freedom of thought. Homosexuals are the enemy within. Homosexuals are the enemies of America. Homosexuals are the enemies of humanity. Some days I wonder if this was how it felt to be a Jew in Europe during the late 1920s. Oh…don’t worry about them…they’re just a bunch of fringe lunatics. Crazies. Nobody takes them seriously…
[Update…] Another commenter adds:
It appears to me that the vast majority of LGBT folks have a selfish and single-minded "what’s in it for me" attitude towards the +/- 5% of LGBT folks who are actiist and actively working to undermine the family, religion, and the institution of marriage.
So long as they are promised their "special rights", the vast majority is perfectly willing to let the nihilists run the larger agenda of evil.
…so in addition to all of the above, homosexuals are also part of a larger agenda of evil.
Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.
The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer’s assessment of their physiological state.
Technology allowing constant monitoring of workers was previously limited to pilots, firefighters and Nasa astronauts. This is believed to be the first time a company has proposed developing such software for mainstream workplaces.
Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.
The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker’s weight, age and health. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help.
Can’t you just see how Microsoft is going to market this? Oh…we’re just trying to Help make your office experience more enjoyable…
The saving grace of it is that any technology capable of producing tiny devices to monitor your every breath with is also capable of producing tiny devices to fuck with the monitoring devices. But still…this is beyond sad. It’s disgusting. Next time Bill, or anyone in the Microsoft boardroom is testifying before congress about something, someone should ask them if they plan to sell this technology to totalitarian states. Because of course, if a U.S. company doesn’t sell police state technology to police states, someone else will and that’s money out of our pockets isn’t it?
I sure hope nobody asks me to work on the software for crap like this. I’ll work on it alright…
I was raised a Baptist. And in my family’s particular strain of the faith, I was pretty much constantly taught that the human race is no damn good. My maternal grandmother was the most sour person you could imagine growing up with. As long as I knew her, I never once saw her smile, unless it was at someone else’s misfortune. But make no mistake, her pleasure did not arise from the sight of someone being brought down. To her it was always more a matter of misfortune reminding us that we were all no good in the eyes of the Lord. The instant you find yourself enjoying life, it could only have been because you were doing something wrong, and you needed to repent. So…obviously my memories of her aren’t exactly joyful. But one memory sticks in my mind as a time when I actually saw myself, very reluctantly, admiring her.
We were waiting in a train station for my mom to come back from some trip…I forget what it was for. It was sometime in the late 1950s and I was a very young child, holding on to grandma’s hand as we sat waiting for mom. In those days there was still legalized and enforced race segregation and the station had separate areas for "whites" and "coloreds." But grandma was tired that day, and had decided to take us to the first seats she saw available…in the colored section.
A kindly station manager came over and politely told grandma she had to move, she was in the wrong part of the station. I forget now what exactly he said to her, only that it provoked one of grandma’s stock in trade fire and brimstone sermons. How dare he, she thundered, set himself above anyone for the color of their skin! How dare he tell people where they could sit because of the color of their skin! I suppose if we were both black the police would have been promptly called and we’d have both gone off to jail. But this guy just shook his head and walked away with grandma still sniping at him as he left. The station was mostly empty anyway.
It was years later before I finally realized what it was that had so deeply offended grandma. She wasn’t angry that this guy thought that black people were inferior. What had pissed her off was that he thought because he was white, he wasn’t.
I’m telling you this, because of an amazing book of history I’m reading now. And like all truly amazing history books, this one is a personal account, told by an average everyday person who actually lived it, who saw it with his own eyes.
How I came to find it: In comments to my post a few days ago on Why American News Sucks In A Nutshell, Peterson Toscano linked to this article on AlterNet, Creeping Fascism: From Nazi Germany to Post 9/11 America. That article by Ray McGovern begins thusly:
Americans today are seeing the same sheepish submissiveness that characterized Germany after the burning of the Reichstag.
"There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater … Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later …"
These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a firsthand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as "Geschichte eines Deutschen" (The Story of a German). The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages — in English as "Defying Hitler."
I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and emailed to ask me to "write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America … this is almost unbelievable."
At the end of the article, which mostly recounts the passivity of the press and congressional democrats to the Bush republicans in-your-face violations of constitutional law in order to spy on American citizens, McGovern turns finally to Haffner’s book and the parallels to what Haffner saw as the Nazis rose to power become scary…
In his journal Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the "sheepish submissiveness" with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German parliament building (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933. Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances "saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened and one’s desk might be broken into."
But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. Do you see any contemporary parallels here?
In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the "cowardly treachery" of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power. Haffner adds:
"It is in the final analysis only that betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight."
The Social Democratic leaders betrayed their followers — "for the most part decent, unimportant individuals." In May they sang the Nazi anthem; in June the Social Democratic party was dissolved.
The middle-class Catholic party Zentrum folded in less than a month and in the end supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that "legalized" Hitler’s dictatorship.
As for the right-wing conservatives and German nationalists: "Oh God," writes Haffner, "what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward. … They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews. … They were not even bothered when their own party was banned and their own members arrested." In sum:
"There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion. In March 1933 millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders. … At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown. … The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world."
This is what can happen when virtually all are intimidated.
Our founding fathers were not oblivious to this; thus, James Madison wrote:
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. … The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."
Haffner’s words spoke to me…they grabbed me by the collar…
"There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion…millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders. … At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown. … The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world."
…and I had to get a copy of his book. I’m reading it now. I’m only into the opening chapters, where he relates his experiences growing up during the first world war, as a necessary background to understanding what came later. But it is already an absorbing, disturbing read. I find myself devouring it.
As usual, when reading a firsthand account of a period of history that you thought you knew from the books and grainy black and white newsreel footage, you discover quickly that what you thought you knew was only a small slice of the whole, and that you were missing things, many things, especially those little commonplace day-to-day things that fade with time and memory, allowing you to keep history’s terrible events at a safe distance from the present. Oh…that could Never happen nowadays. Already just a few chapters into his book, Haffner has obliterated that distance for me, and his past becomes all too real, all too immediate…
I need to show you this, from the third chapter of his book. Here, Haffner is describing how the first world war affected him, and his childhood companions…
For a schoolboy in Berlin, the war was something very unreal; it was like a game. There were no air raids and no bombs. There were the wounded, but you saw them only at a distance. One had relatives at the front, of course, and now and then one heard of a death. But being a child, one quickly got used to their absence, and the fact that this absence sometimes became irrevocable did not seem to matter. As to the real hardships and privations, they were of small account. Naturally the food was poor. Later there was too little food, and our shoes had clattering wooden soles, our suits were turned, there were school collections for bones and cherry pits and surprisingly frequent illnesses. I must admit, all that made little impression. Not that I bore it all "like a little hero". It’s just that there was nothing very special to bear. I thought as little about food as a soccer enthusiast at a cup final. The army bulletins interested me far more then the menu.
The analogy with the soccer fan can be carried further. In those childhood days, I was a war fan just as one is a soccer fan. I would be making myself out worse then I was if I were to claim that I was caught up in the hate propaganda that, from 1915 to 1918, sought to whip up the flagging enthusiasm of the first few months of the war. I hated the French, the English and the Russians as little as the Portsmouth supporters detest Wolverhampton fans. Of course, I prayed for their defeat and humiliation, but only because those were the necessary counterparts of my side’s victory and triumph.
What counted was the fascination with the game of war, in which, according to certain mysterious rules, the number of prisoners taken, miles advanced, fortifications seized, and ships sunk played almost the same as goals in soccer and points in boxing. I never wearied of keeping internal scorecards. I was a zealous reader of the army bulletins, which I would proceed to recalculate in my own fashion, according to my own mysterious, irrational rules: thus, for instance, ten Russian prisoners were equivalent to one English or French prisoner, and fifty airplanes to one cruiser. If there had been statistics of those killed, I would certainly not have hesitated to "recalculate" the dead. I would not have stopped to think what the objects of my arithmetic looked like in reality. It was a dark, mysterious game and it’s never-ending, wicked lure eclipsed everything else, making daily life seem trite. It was addictive, like roulette and opium. My friends and I played it all through the war: four long years unpunished and undisturbed. It is this game, and not the harmless battle games we organized in the streets and playgrounds nearby, that has left its dangerous mark on all of us.
Sound familiar? Haffner goes on to say later, that the Nazi base came mostly from his middle class generation, untouched by war except as a series of army bulletins, seeing it only in the abstract, somewhat like a soccer game.
From 1914 to 1918 a generation of German schoolboys daily experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction then anything peace could offer; and that has now become the underlying vision of Nazism. That is where it draws its allure from: its simplicity, its appeal to the imagination, and its zest for action; but also its intolerance and its cruelty toward internal opponents. Anyone who does not join in is a spoilsport. Ultimately that is the source of Nazism’s belligerent attitude toward neighboring states. Other countries are not regarded as neighbors but must be opponents, whether they like it or not. Otherwise the match would have to be called off!
Many things later bolstered Nazism and modified its character, but its roots lie here: in the experience of war – not by German soldiers, but by German schoolboys at home. Indeed, the front line generation has produced relatively few genuine Nazis, and is better known for its critics and carpers. That is easy to understand. Men who have experienced the reality of war tend to view it differently. Granted there are exceptions: the eternal warriors, who found their vocation in war, with all its terrors and continue to do so; and the eternal failures, who welcome its horrors and its destruction as a revenge on a life that has proved too much for them. Göring perhaps belongs to the former type; Hitler certainly to the latter. The truly Nazi generation was formed by those born in the decade from 1900 to 1910, who experienced war as a great game and were untouched by its realities.
Sound Familiar?
All my grade school life, and for decades after, I’ve been told that Hitler rose to power because of a character flaw of the German people, something specific to the German soul that the rest of humanity somehow naturally rose above. I’ve never believed it. Never. Thanks I’m certain, to that Baptist upbringing I had, and my church’s constant drumming into my head that the human race was a pretty sad, sorry, good-for-nothing thing that no amount of fixing could improve, and the best we could do was beg God for forgiveness. I’ve never believed that either I’m pleased to say, but at least I seem to have absorbed the lesson that, for good or ill, we’re all pretty much the same deep down inside. The irrational passions that move your neighbors one day, might just as easily grab you by the collar the next if you’re not careful. We are not fallen angels, but risen apes. Our line is legitimate, and thoroughly anchored to the natural world, and to that ancient past from which we emerged so many millions of years ago. Old…very old…tides pull and tug at our consciousness. We are capable of great things, but also terrible things. All of us. What happened to the German people could just as easily happen to us. Maybe it already is.
I’ll probably be posting more about Haffner’s book as I continue reading it. But you should go buy it. Sit down with it and read it. Let it transport you back to a time and place you only think you know about. Then lift your eyes from its pages, and look around.
Alex Shevchenko has been arraigned for a hate crime tied to the assault and eventual death of Satender Singh in July. According to prosecutors, Mr. Shevchenko and Andrey Vusik taunted Mr. Singh in a park because they thought he was gay. Mr. Vusik eventually threw a punch that toppled Singh, dashing his head, they charge.
Gay leaders in Sacramento say the incident followed several years of escalating tensions with some Slavic immigrants.
"The gut feeling of the [gay] community is that preaching among the local Russian evangelical community is breeding hate and that something would happen. And Satender was the something that happened," says Ed Bennett, a gay Democratic activist.
While Slavic leaders say their community is being unfairly scapegoated for legitimate political protests and deeply held religious beliefs, some monitors warn that an emerging group called the Watchmen on the Walls may be fomenting a dangerous atmosphere within the ranks of Slavic immigrants here.
I’ll say it’s dangerous. Scott Lively, one of the group’s founders, is also the author of The Pink Triangle…a Holocaust revisionist book that argues that the Nazis were basically a homosexual movement and that rather then being among the victims of the Holocaust, homosexuals were the primary instigators of it. Consider that Lively is now preaching this message to Slavs in what was the eastern Soviet bloc at one time…a people who suffered a staggering loss of life at the hands of the Nazis during world war two…
Videos of Watchmen conferences abroad suggest some leaders are less modulated, and their audience less against violence. One video shows Lively giving a version of Singh’s killing different from reported facts, including the notion that Singh was undressing in front of children. The audience cheered twice as Lively recounted the punch and the death of Singh – a reaction Lively rebuked, saying: "We don’t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved."
The camera was on and Lively knew it. There is no way on God’s green earth Lively doesn’t know the impact his message that the Nazis were homosexuals and homosexuals are all basically Nazis has on this particular group of people. He knows Exactly what he’s doing. He has never publicly condemned the killing of Satender Singh by a group of young Slav men in Sacramento. There’s a reason for that.
Evangelical pastors are helping to create a terrible new campaign of violence against young Nigerians. Children and babies branded as evil are being abused, abandoned and even murdered while the preachers make money out of the fear of their parents and their communities.
The rainy season is over and the Niger Delta is lush and humid. This southern edge of West Africa, where Nigeria’s wealth pumps out of oil and gas fields to bypass millions of its poorest people, is a restless place. In the small delta state of Akwa Ibom, the tension and the poverty has delivered an opportunity for a new and terrible phenomenon that is leading to the abuse and the murder of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children. And it is being done in the name of Christianity.
Almost everyone goes to church here. Driving through the town of Esit Eket, the rust-streaked signs, tarpaulins hung between trees and posters on boulders, advertise a church for every third or fourth house along the road. Such names as New Testament Assembly, Church of God Mission, Mount Zion Gospel, Glory of God, Brotherhood of the Cross, Redeemed, Apostalistic. Behind the smartly painted doors pastors make a living by ‘deliverances’ – exorcisms – for people beset by witchcraft, something seen to cause anything from divorce, disease, accidents or job losses. With so many churches it’s a competitive market, but by local standards a lucrative one.
But an exploitative situation has now grown into something much more sinister as preachers are turning their attentions to children – naming them as witches. In a maddened state of terror, parents and whole villages turn on the child. They are burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush.
Some parents scrape together sums needed to pay for a deliverance – sometimes as much as three or four months’ salary for the average working man – although the pastor will explain that the witch might return and a second deliverance will be needed. Even if the parent wants to keep the child, their neighbours may attack it in the street.
This is not just a few cases. This is becoming commonplace. In Esit Eket, up a nameless, puddled-and-potholed path is a concrete shack stuffed to its fetid rafters with roughly made bunk beds. Here, three to a bed like battery chickens, sleep victims of the besuited Christian pastors and their hours-long, late-night services. Ostracised and abandoned, these are the children a whole community believes fervently are witches.
Sam Ikpe-Itauma is one of the few people in this area who does not believe what the evangelical ‘prophets’ are preaching. He opened his house to a few homeless waifs he came across, and now he tries his best to look after 131.
‘The neighbours were not happy with me and tell me "you are supporting witches". This project was an accident, I saw children being abandoned and it was very worrying. I started with three children, then every day it increased up to 15, so we had to open this new place,’ he says. ‘For every maybe five children we see on the streets, we believe one has been killed, although it could be more as neighbours turn a blind eye when a witch child disappears.
This is the country that’s posturing to the world about being more godly and righteous then those liberal American Episcopalians who are rewriting the bible to excuse sexual deviancy. This is what the "conservative" American Episcopalian churches that are aligning themselves with Akinola are buying into so they don’t have to treat their homosexual neighbors as anything other then human garbage. Without a doubt it’s what the billionaire Ahmanson wants the Anglican Church he’s paying for to look like. Ahmanson you may recall, is the billionaire "former" Christian Reconstuctionist who once said that stoning homosexuals to death was all part of God’s plan.
When you start inciting mob religious passions against your neighbors you are walking down a path that leads right into the Pit and what you need to understand about that is that the fall has no speed limit, and there is no bottom to stop you. It just gets worse and worse and worse until every last shred of human nobility and decency is gone and all that is left is the jungle and screams in the night.
Mary Sudnad, 10, grimaces as her hair is pulled into corn rows by Agnes, 11, but the scalp just above her forehead is bald and blistered. Mary tells her story fast, in staccato, staring fixedly at the ground.
‘My youngest brother died. The pastor told my mother it was because I was a witch. Three men came to my house. I didn’t know these men. My mother left the house. Left these men. They beat me.’ She pushes her fists under her chin to show how her father lay, stretched out on his stomach on the floor of their hut, watching. After the beating there was a trip to the church for ‘a deliverance’.
A day later there was a walk in the bush with her mother. They picked poisonous ‘asiri’ berries that were made into a draught and forced down Mary’s throat. If that didn’t kill her, her mother warned her, then it would be a barbed-wire hanging. Finally her mother threw boiling water and caustic soda over her head and body, and her father dumped his screaming daughter in a field. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she stayed near the house for a long time before finally slinking off into the bush. Mary was seven. She says she still doesn’t feel safe. She says: ‘My mother doesn’t love me.’ And, finally, a tear streaks down her beautiful face
The righteous men of god in Nigeria are killing children now as witches. If you thought all that would stop with the sinful wicked devil possessed homosexuals you have never opened a book of human history. There’s a reason why Jesus said the most important thing after loving God, is loving your neighbor.
ARCHBISHOP Desmond Tutu has accused the United States and Britain of pursuing policies like those of South Africa’s apartheid-era government by detaining terrorism suspects without trial.
At an event to commemorate the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDR) today, the Nobel laureate said the detention of suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a "huge blot on a democracy".
"Whoever imagined that you would hear from the United States and from Britain the same arguments for detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government," Archbishop Tutu said.
I take it you haven’t noticed yet that the Bush base here in America are the same folks who wholeheartedly supported Apartheid. And not just abroad…
Paul Krugman – Op-Ed Columnist – New York Times Blog: So, people ask why, in The Conscience of a Liberal, I downplay the role of issues other than race in swinging the political balance in favor of the GOP. The answer, basically, is the math: once you take the great southern switch into account, there isn’t much left to explain.
In some correspondence with Larry Bartels, whose “What’s the matter with “What’s the matter with Kansas?”" is must reading for anyone trying to understand modern American political, economy, the issue of how the Democrats lost white males came up. Larry points out that you really need to separate out the South. Here’s what he had to say:
Unless you have a peculiar nostalgia for the racially coercive Democratic monopoly of the Jim Crow era, it makes sense to focus on the rest of the country. There, the Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote among white men was 40% in 1952 and 39% in 2004.
White men didn’t turn against the Democrats; Southern white men turned against the Democrats. End of story.
Who would have imagined the the United States of America would one day piss on the Geneva conventions and laugh? The republican base…that’s who. The American gutter that came charging into politics after the hated Warren court told them to desegregate their schools, and allow their negros to vote. They’ve dreamed of it for decades. Reagan delivered that gutter into power. Bush told them they didn’t have to give a shit.
Mike Huckabee says he stands by his statements fifteen years ago about AIDS patients, though he concedes he might phrase them differently today.
How many different ways can you say "Death Camps" Mike…?
In some old candidate questionnaires the Associated Press has dug up, Huckabee suggested back then that AIDS patients should essentially be quarantined.
"Fifteen years ago, the AIDS crisis was just that. It was a crisis," Huckabee told reporters at a campaign stop in Asheville, N.C. this weekend. "There were a lot of questions back in that time as to just how the disease could be carried. There was just a real panic in this country."
A reader asks, “what’s the big deal?” After all, didn’t a lot of people advocate quarantine for AIDS patients early in the epidemic? Yeah, early in the epidemic some did advocate just that—and not just bigots salivating at the prospect of rounding up all gay people, diseased or not. But that was early in the epidemic, very early, 1984-86. By 1992 only raving bigots were still talking about quarantining people with AIDS or HIV. People like, you know, Mike Huckabee.
You need to pay attention to that, because even back in the early stages of the AIDS outbreak, people talking about rounding up and "quarantining" AIDS victims weren’t doing that out of concern with the spread of the disease itself, as with the ever growing visibility of the people they despised:
Huckabee said he also stands by his words that homosexuality is sinful.
What a coincidence, that. Huckabee was far from the only one still calling for an AIDS "quarantine" by the 1990s, and yes, the ones who were just also happened to have a bottomless bit of animus toward homosexual people. One they often dressed up in biblical rhetoric that was as cheap as it was transparent.
If AIDS had hit America in the early 1950s, the Huckabees of the world would have without a doubt gotten their wish and every homosexual the authorities could identify would have been rounded up and locked into concentration camps…and from there, isolated from the rest of the American community who didn’t have to see, didn’t have to care, didn’t have to know, a final solution to the sexual pervert problem would have been just one small step away. In 1986 William F. Buckley shocked even many of his fellow wingers by advocating the forcible tattooing of AIDS victims, once on the arm, and once on the buttocks, he claimed to prevent the spread of the disease via shared needles and sex. He only withdrew his suggestion after being forced to admit that the plan had an "unfortunate association" with the Holocaust.
AIDS didn’t happen in 1950, it happened in the early 80s, over a decade of gay rights activism after Stonewall, and the republican right wing theocratic base is deeply resentful to this day that they didn’t get their chance back then to let their hate run free and unfettered over the lives of all gay people, whether we had the disease or not, and gleefully stomp the human life out of us.
A mysterious group calling itself Iowans for Some Semblance of Christian Decency has begun waging a campaign against former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, insinuating that not only is the Republican presidential candidate not a true conservative, he’s not a real Christian.
In fliers put under the doors of reporters at the Marriott in Des Moines, where Huckabee was staying Monday night, the organization, whose members are unknown, lays out its interpretation of how the former Baptist minister’s views run contrary to the Bible.
Huckabee’s support of educational opportunities for the children of illegal immigrants is portrayed, for instance, as "justification for violating the 8th commandment (stealing from U.S. citizens)." A lighthearted video clip where he pretends to talk to the Lord (watch HERE) is portrayed as "sacrilegious mocking of God for political gain."
From this cesspool the republicans will pick their presidential candidate. The one who wins will be the one that floats to the top.
A 14-year-old Jehovah’s Witness sick with leukemia has the right to refuse a blood transfusion, even though doing so might kill him, a judge ruled today.
Skagit County Superior Court Judge John Meyer denied a motion by the state to force Dennis Lindberg, of Mount Vernon, to have a blood transfusion. The judge said the eighth-grader knows "he’s basically giving himself a death sentence."
Doctors diagnosed the boy with leukemia on Nov. 6 and began treating him with chemotherapy at Children’s Hospital in Seattle, but stopped a week ago because his blood count was too low, the Skagit Valley Herald reported. The boy refused the transfusion on religious grounds.
However, his birth parents, who do not have custody and flew from Idaho to be at the hearing, believe their son should have the transfusion and suggested he has been unduly influenced by his legal guardian, his aunt, who is also a Jehovah’s Witness.
Several friends of Lindberg and of his parents attended today’s hearing, and some ran out crying when the judge announced his decision.
"Dennis does present himself as a very mature man. But he really is just a child trying to please the adults around him," said Jan Curry, whose daughter, Morgan, is his friend.
On Tuesday, Lindberg’s doctor told the judge that the boy’s blood was hypoxic, or deficient in oxygen, and that he would not be surprised if the boy died overnight.
Well hold the surprise then, because that’s exactly what happened. The boy is dead.
So…let me get this straight… According to the religious right, a 14 year old can’t consent to sex…but they can consent to suicide. As long as they’re doing it for God. Well praise the Lord.
Via Atrios… In case you haven’t heard of it, Conservapedia is Wikipedia for culture warriors who want their reality filtered through the lens of their own bar stool prejudices. Or as Wikipedia puts it…
There are 45,009 total pages in the database. This includes "talk" pages, pages about Conservapedia, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don’t qualify as content pages. Excluding those, there are 19,565 pages that are probably legitimate content pages.
5,901 files have been uploaded.
There have been a total of 36,693,438 page views, and 334,231 page edits since the wiki was setup. That comes to 7.43 average edits per page, and 109.78 views per edit.
User statistics
There are 15,474 registered users, of which 27 (or 0.17%) are Administrators.
Well it ain’t economics. Geeze…I don’t think about homosexuality as much as these people and I’m a gay male.
Back when I was a teenager, this list would probably have been all about the International Communist Conspiracy. The top link would have been to an article on Communism, followed by a bunch of Communism and This, and Communism and Thats. Communism and Atheism…Communism and Jews…Communism and Liberalism…Communism and Democrats…Communism and Hollywood…Communism and Hippies…Communism and Feminism…Communism and Negroes… In my lifetime the American far right has gone from looking for communists under the bed to sniffing the underwear of gay men. That’s degeneracy for you.
Atrios points to this post on Lawyers, Guns and Money with the comment, Tiny Penis Syndrome…sadly, it does explain a lot. Yes, but not everything…
I just finished teaching an upper-division US history course in which my students read — and I swear I’m not making this up — Kim Du Toit’s repellant 2003 essay on "The Pussification of the Western Male". The class had just finished Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization (1995), a marvelous examination of the cultural transformations of gender between the 1880s and World War I. We used du Toit as a companion piece to the chapters on Teddy Roosevelt and the psychologist G. Stanley Hall — each of whom were, in their own ways, as anxious as du Toit about what they perceived to be the devaluation of masculinity.
…
Hall, for his part, was preoccupied not with adult masculinity but rather with the incipient manhood of youth. Believing that developing children rehearsed the cultural evolution of the human race, he insisted that young boys should not be deterred from expressing "the instinct of the savage."
Boys are naturally robbers; they are bandits and fighters by nature. A scientific study has been made of boys’ societies . . . . In every instance these societies have been predatory. All of the members thirsted for blood, and all of their plans were for thievery and murder
Allow the young boy to beat the shit out of his companions, Hall suggested, and his mental and physical development will proceed in a smooth and healthy fashion. Divert him from his natural course Hall warned, and you will produce "a milk-sop, a lady-boy, or a sneak." Such a child "lacks virility, [and] his masculinity does not ring true." Perhaps he will — as Hall himself did — grow up to be a chronic masturbator, a helpless slave to "the lonely vice."
That passage of Hall’s rang familiar in my ear. Not so much for the words, as the sensibility that male youth is by its nature savage and brutal and that cultivating that savage, brutal nature is the task of every great civilization. I’d heard all that somewhere before. So I did a little digging and it wasn’t long before I found it…
"My teaching is hard. Weakness has to be knocked out of them. In my [elite schools] a youth will grow up before which the world will shrink back. A violently active dominating, intrepid, brutal youth – that is what I am after". Youth must be all those things. It must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness or tenderness in it.I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey. Strong and handsome must my young men be. I will have them fully trained in all physical exercises. I intend to have an athletic youth – that is the first and the chief thing. In this way I shall eradicate the thousands of years of human domestication. Then I shall have in front of me the pure and noble natural material. With that I can create the new order.
"I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men. I would have them learn only what takes their fancy. But one thing they must learn – self-command! They shall learn to overcome the fear of death, under the severest tests. That is the intrepid and heroic stage of youth. Out of it comes the stage of the free man, the man who is the substance and essence of the world, the creative man, the god-man. In my [elite schools] there will stand as a statue for worship the figure of the magnificent, self-ordaining god-man; it will prepare the young men for their coming period of ripe manhood."
Emphasis mine. I’d heard these words of Hitler’s first in my own youth, sitting in a junior high school history class watching a documentary produced in 1956 titled, The Twisted Cross. I was a bookish little kid even back then, and when the scenes of Nazi mobs burning books came on screen I was completely horrified. When the scenes of the concentraton camps came on screen later I felt that, yes, the one led right to the other. Where books are burned, people are soon after. But the scenes of Htiler and Himmler inspecting the ranks of young soldiers, while the narrator intoned those words from Hitler Speaks, chilled me to the bone. My junior high school years were when I experienced the worst bullying of my life, and I didn’t have to think hard about what living in Hitler’s Third Reich was like when I heard that. Great if you were part of the ruling thug caste…not so much if you were everyone else. I remembered that documentary so vividly that decades later when I saw a videotape of the if for sale and took it home to watch, I was amazed at how detailed my memory of it actually was after all those years.
Maybe it really is all about penis envy. But I don’t recall any of my childhood bullies feeling their threatened manhood by me. What I saw in their faces was contempt. Contempt for anyone they could beat the crap out of, whether by themselves or with the help of their gang. When you have no brains to speak of, when even a cinderblock could add 2 plus 2 more accurately then you, all you have left is brute force to live by, and for some that is the only standard of value they know for taking their measure, and everyone else’s too. The contempt for effete intellectuals is no envy. It really is contempt. So what if you can grow food. So what if you can turn dirt into steel. So what if you can cure disease. If I can beat the crap out of you, then I’m the better man. Because then I can simply take everything you have. That really is the thinking going on there.
And never mind that no amount of force, no advantage in weapons, no military superiority ever gave a single penny’s worth of value to a dollar. The criminal mindset, unable to distinguish between creating wealth and stealing it, regards all creation as theft, all theft as creation. All that matters in the end, is can you take it away from someone else. If you can, then it’s rightfully yours. If the other guy can’t hold onto it, then it was never his to begin with. Might makes right. Any other standard of morality is literally incomprehensible to them. When you’re too stupid to know how modern civilization really works, you’re also too stupid to know it.
That is the essential fascist mindset. When you hear some moron babbling on and on about…
The feminization of males
Effete Intellectualism
Military glory
…all rolled together in one tightly packed little ball of bitterness, you can be pretty sure of what you’re dealing with. What dimwits like Du Toit and all the other right wing kultar kampfers think they’re selling America is this…
…but what what you always get is this:
There’s what not deterring young men from expressing "the instinct of the savage" gets you, right there. Look at it. There’s your savage manly man’s promise land.
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