Republicans have enjoyed a state-level resurgence even as they have lost — and lost big — their once commanding national majority. The GOP was once the landslide party, the party of Eisenhower ’52 and ’56, Nixon ’72, and Reagan ’84. Even Bush I’s 53.4 percent in 1988 was very respectable. Reagan’s 50.7 percent in 1980 wasn’t a landslide but still demonstrated that an outright popular majority supported the Republican. In the five elections before ’92, the GOP won popular majorities in four.
You should go read this article in full. It’s a take down on today’s republican party, not bitter, but clearly ticked off. He comes close to saying it outright: the republican party is now the party of southern christianists and wall street financial barons, locked in a deadly embrace of money and highly motivated southern tribalists each demanding fealty from republican politicians…one for their money, the other for their votes.
Because the world view of each is so self-centered, insular and disconnected they have made the nation nearly ungovernable. They have their own facts, their own news channel, their own pundits all telling them their deranged conceits are the highest wisdom. There was a time when I could hope the money guys would eventually come to their senses: economic disaster has a way of making you pay attention to reality. But as their world has become more and more infected with Ayn Rand’s poison that seems a lost hope too.
They’ll let it all burn down: the christianists because Armageddon means Jesus is coming…the financiers because they won’t stop believing in their own Atlas-like infallibility until they’re jumping out their wall street windows because they’ve lost everything and this time there isn’t any money left in anyone’s pockets to bail them out.
I really wish I knew what the answer was. But it seems all there is left to do now is ride it out to wherever it’s going, and maybe grab whatever small piece of America you can as the pieces all float past and hang on to it.
Unbelievable. Barack Obama called Libyan President Mohamed Yusuf al-Magariaf today to thank him for his support.
This is the day after US Ambassador Stevens was murdered at the consulate.
And, the Islamist killers may have been tipped off by elements within Libya’s security forces
Media Matters reports in regard to the above:
As USA Todayreported, the White House said in a statement that Obama called Magariaf to thank him “for extending his condolences for the tragic deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, and two other State Department officers in Benghazi.”
You see now, in the information network streams, decent people all across the political spectrum looking at all of this in disgust. What you need to understand is it doesn’t matter anymore. They’ve lost all concern for how they appear to people outside the bubble. All they care about now is whipping up the rubes, and themselves. But here’s the thing…the rubes know they’re being played and they don’t particularly care. It’s all about dancing the tribal war dance now. Because the lizard brain is all they have left of themselves inside.
This is what hate does to people. Your gay neighbors have seen it for decades now. Hate does not share power within a person’s heart. It will make you throw everything fine and decent inside of you overboard, the minute, the second any of it gets in its way. And then all that is left inside is the steady beat beat beat of the tribal war drums. You have stopped being a person. Now you are just a tool of hate…dancing, jerking, stumbling onward to its drumbeat.
Rep. Steve King, one of the most staunchly conservative members of the House, was one of the few Republicans who did not strongly condemn Rep. Todd Akin Monday for his remarks regarding pregnancy and rape. King also signaled why — he might agree with parts of Akin’s assertion.
King told an Iowa reporter he’s never heard of a child getting pregnant from statutory rape or incest.
“Well I just haven’t heard of that being a circumstance that’s been brought to me in any personal way,” King told KMEG-TV Monday, “and I’d be open to discussion about that subject matter.”
A Democratic source flagged King’s praise of Akin in the KMEG interview to TPM. But potentially more controversial for King is his suggestion that pregnancies from statutory rape or incest don’t exist or happen rarely. A 1996 review by the Guttmacher Institute found “at least half of all babies born to minor women are fathered by adult men.”
And so it goes…
Don’t assume he’s merely nuts. Of course he’s heard of minor girls getting pregnant. He isn’t stupid…at least not in that sense. This is how you fight a culture war. In this discussion the only fact that matters, the only fact that is real, is that women cannot be allowed control over their own bodies. That is the prerogative of men. That is the only fact that matters.
Facts are either your soldiers or theirs. When confronted by opposing facts, you kill them. It’s war after all.
Pissing On Edward R. Murrow’s Grave…(continued)
Via friend and fellow Truth Wins Out Blogger Michael Airhart I get this link to John Aravosis going on a righteous tear as to why the Family Research Council isn’t merely a pious group of conservative christians who just happen to disagree with same-sex marriage but is, in fact, an organization of calculating hate mongers who will shrink from no lie they think they can get away with. And thanks to useful tools like The Washington Post and Dana Milbank they can get away with a lot of them.
At one point, I had the Congressional Research Service send me a copy of every single document the Family Research Council had written about gays, and then I had CRS get me every single document listed in the FRC doc’s footnotes. I.e., all the “original sources” for the Family Research Council’s anti-gay claims.
And there were a lot of them. At the time, FRC’s list of footnotes could be nearly as long as the written part of the document itself.
What did I find when I went through the original sources cited in the footnotes? I found that nearly every single footnote was a lie. Not a lie in the conventional sense – meaning, they didn’t make up a source that didn’t exist. Rather, they did things like quoting a damning opinion from a judge in a court case without mention that the judge was in the minority, that the gays had actually won the case they were citing.
Or they’d quote a study with a hideous conclusion about gays and lesbians, only for you to realize later that the actual quote in the study was rather benign – instead, FRC “forgot” to put and end-quotation mark on the quote, added an ellipse, and then put their own damning conclusion. Let me give you a made-up example of a quote about gays to who you how the family research council did this.
“This study looked at 45 gay men, and 35 lesbians. It was clear from the subjects that gay men and lesbians face greater societal pressures in their day to day lives… which makes gays and lesbians much more likely to rip the heads off small bunnies.
Wow, rip the heads off small bunnies – that’s pretty bad. But hey, it’s a real study in a real journal, so it has to be true. Except of course that the real quote from the actual study ends at the ellipse, while the FRC added its own opinion after the ellipse, while “forgetting” to put the end quote, so it looks like the FRC’s opinion is part of the official quote from the reputable study.
Gosh, I wonder how that happened?
It went on and on like this, through hundreds of footnotes. I went through the original research of the various studies they cited and found that the study reached no such conclusion like the FRC claimed it did. And on and on and on.
These are not honest people simply expressing a contrarian view of politics, like Democrats and Republicans do every day in Washington.
Tony Perkins, FRC’s head, got on TV a few months ago to debate whether gay parents were as good as straight parents. Perkins said “no,” and he had the study to prove it. Perkins explained how studies have proven that kids need a mom and a dad. What Perkins didn’t bother telling you was that those studies compared kids with a mom and a dad to kids with a single parent. The studies never looked at the relative merits of gay parents. Gay parents might have been just as good, or heck, even better than straight parents. The study didn’t even look at it. But Perkins cited the study as proof that straight parents were better than gay parents, when the study had nothing to do with it.
And again, Dana, if you actually go through the FRC’s “research,” you will find this kind of “mistake” happening again and again. It happens so often, it’s happened for twenty years now that I’ve been tracking them, that you come to realize that lying for the Family Research Council isn’t a flaw, it’s a feature.
There’s more…you should read it. That the beltway media has a habit of looking the other way at conservative hate groups so long as their talking heads dress nicely and refrain from wearing hoods, never gets any less repulsive no matter how often you see it. But it stopped long ago being just a problem for the gay community. This endemic disdain for what used to be journalism’s basic function, to get the facts, get them right and get them out to the public, is a big reason why one of our two major parties has walked off the crazy cliff, and now threatens to take the United States of America with it.
As your gay neighbors have watched the fanatics in the course of waging their scorched earth culture war shove any pretense of honor, reason and morality from their way, so we have watched one news organization after another, one journalist after another, tuck their tails between their legs and run, run away from democracy’s front lines. Speaking truth to fanaticism, let alone to power, will never get you the big bucks. When calling a fact a fact and a lie a lie means raising the ire of the rich and powerful, or perhaps one or more of their batshit crazy friends, it’s safer on the paycheck to just stick to stenography. There are two sides to every story, but never a factual side to any story. Print the controversy, pass along the press releases and hit the bar at days end. It’s only a job. Remember how, in the aftermath of the Proposition 8 trial, so many mainstream journalmalists were shocked, shocked, to discover there was so little substance to the opposition to same-sex marriage? What did we know…it’s not like our job is digging up and reporting the facts or anything…
The thing that began nudging me away from Rand was seeing how people who embraced her values system actually behaved. Years later and well after she had passed away, some biographies began to appear and I got a glimpse into the behavior of the person herself. Unsurprisingly these random sickening glimpses of the person within are to be found everywhere she went. In her novel The Charioteer, Mary Renault wrote that “some events are crucial from their very slightness; because circumstances have used no force on them, they are unequivocally what they are, test-tube reactions of personality.” We leave our mark sometimes where we are least aware of it. But these light little footsteps on our world are the most authentically us.
For an eyewitness portrait of Ayn Rand in the flesh, in the prime of her celebrity, you can’t improve on the “Ubermensch” chapter in Tobias Wolff’s autobiographical novel Old School.
Invited to meet with the faculty and student writers at the narrator’s boarding school, Rand arrives with an entourage of chain-smoking idolaters in black and behaves so repellently that her audience of innocents gets a life lesson in what kind of adult to avoid, and to avoid becoming. Rude, dismissive, vain and self-infatuated to the point of obtuseness — she names Atlas Shrugged as the only great American novel — Rand and her hissing chorus in black manage to alienate the entire school, even the rich board member who had admired and invited her.
What strikes Wolff’s narrator most forcefully is her utter lack of charity or empathy, her transparent disgust with everything she views as disfiguring or disabling: a huge wen on the headmaster’s forehead, the narrator’s running head cold, the war injury that emasculated Hemingway’s Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.
To the boy, she appears to be exactly the sort of merciless egotist who might have designed a fascist philosophy that exalts power and disparages altruism. Rand is wearing a gold pin in the shape of a dollar sign. After meeting her, he can no longer read a word of The Fountainhead, which as an adolescent romantic he had enjoyed.
The thing that still distresses me most to this day is how she treated her husband, Frank O’Connor, who became a painter after his acting career declined. He did the dust jacket illustration for the first hardbound editions of Atlas Shrugged…the one with the train tracks leading into the tunnel with the huge red stop light above the entrance (if you’ve read the novel you know what it refers to). Rand’s affair with the younger Nathanial Brandon destroyed both their marriages (never of course, causing her to check her premises about the nature of human emotions), and O’Connor became a recluse in his own little apartment studio. After he died some friends of Rand entered his studio and found it littered with empty bottles of booze scattered everywhere, and a lot of unfinished paintings.
“The reason I got into public service, by and large, if I had to credit on thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” -Paul Ryan
“Our rights come from nature and God, not government.” – Paul Ryan.
Let others bust on Romney’s VB choice for his let the rich eat the middle class and have the poor for dessert politics. I want to point out something that’s irritated me about him and all the Who Is John Galt tea-ed off jackasses that want government out of their Medicare. Seriously…Rand would chew all of you to shreds and spit you out in disgust.
I will admit to being a Randoid back in my twenties. In my defense it was something Ronald Reagan cured me of, which means I can look back on it with some relief and a little pride that, whatever ideology I would have become hooked on at that age I was never the sort to let a belief stop me from seeing what is right in front of my eyes. But before Reagan managed to convincingly show me how people who equate money with morality actually behave in real life, and what a government comprised of such people really looked like, I delved into Rand’s books and her writings hungrily. Some say Randism is a kind of petulant ego trip, but for me it was my inner teenage geek thinking she had the simple elegant answer to all the problems of society and government. Simple is better…right? H.L. Mencken once said that for every complex problem there is an answer that is simple, neat and wrong.
I still have all those books of her’s I bought way back when, and even some of the newsletters. Give me a sentence or two of dialogue from Atlas Shrugged and well worn hardbound copy in hand I’ll put my fingers on the pages it came from in under a minute. I’m not exactly proud of this…but it’s come in handy from time to time whenever I get into an argument with someone who is still eating at Hugh Akston’s rancid diner.
So let me take this opportunity to say, as someone who has been there and can claim some experience with the territory, its culture, and its charming little village church…Ryan is shitting you. Twice. He’s shitting you when he says he admires Ayn Rand, and shitting you when he says he believes rights come from God, both. The magnitude of the mendacity here is you can’t even believe he’s at least being honest about one of those statements. To say both of these things is to basically say you believe neither one.
Anyone who so much as skims the John Galt speech knows what Rand thought of Christianity and God worship. Her take is so absolutely venomous it is just not possible to reconcile any form of Christianity, even the ersatz republican christianity of war, wealth, power and contempt for the poor and outcast, with Rand. Rand and Christianity do not fit together in any possible way. Not even in The Twilight Zone do they fit together. Here…just take a wee taste…
What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge – he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil – he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor – he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire – he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy – all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was – that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love – he was not man.
Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.
And so on… But take note: Ryan’s mendacity is eminently typical of modern republicans. They pick ideas from Rand and from her hated bastard offspring, libertarianism, the way they pick from the bible, like they’re populating the window display of an antique shop with any pretty junk that might get the passers-by to stop and look. Their admiration of Rand is intellectual the way a bank robber admires a well made shotgun and getaway car is intellectual, and to the same exact kind and degree that their religiosity is deeply spiritual. It isn’t just about waging culture war. When you’re busy plundering one of history’s great democracies, it’s good to be able to look in a mirror and convince yourself it isn’t a thief looking back. The bible merely gives them a few handy clobber verses. They have to skim over all the parts about loving your neighbor and getting camels through the eyes of needles. Rand told them outright that theirs is the power and the glory and that even a little mustard seed of compassion toward your neighbors is anti-life. She set them free, free at last from the loathsome work of forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to anyone but themselves.
Paul Ryan has a highly consistent legislative record. He has voted against regulations of all kinds—environmental protections, work safety laws, controls on the banking, credit card, and health care industries—and against spending on things like food stamps, arts funding, Medicare, and infrastructure. He wants to decimate Pell Grants and he votes against education funding almost every time. He’s strongly anti-abortion. He votes against protecting minorities and women—against The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, for example—but he votes for religion, arguing against the separation of church and state whenever possible. He claims to be for small government, but he votes for military spending a whole lot. He was against drawing down in Afghanistan, and he’s for government wiretapping and the PATRIOT Act. The only real divergence from that record comes from his votes to bail out GM and his support for TARP, when the entire country was teetering on the edge of a Bush-inspired collapse.
Something that worries me, though, is Ryan has a disconcerting habit of completely denying the reality of his record, in a very convincing way. If a senior citizen asks Ryan about privatizing Medicare, he will toss a word salad that leaves the senior disoriented and convinced that he’s actually for a stronger Medicare. He will force his interns to read Ayn Rand novels, tell everyone we’re “living in an Ayn Rand novel,” and even credit his entire life of public service to Ayn Rand, and then he will tell a crowded room with a straight face that his love for Ayn Rand is an “urban legend.” Both of these contradictory truths are on the record.
I think Rand would have understood at some level, even as she would have despised his bows to right wing fundamentalists. She yapped a lot about the rights of the individual but for her it was all about the will to power. Her beef with religion, Christianity specifically, was almost certainly in all that stuff about being a neighbor and doing unto others. I think she saw religion as a cousin to communism, and so even a religion that exalted the rich and powerful would have drawn her contempt, because to some degree all religion involves fellowship of some kind and Rand acknowledged no interhuman connections of any sort beyond transactions that are engaged in purely for self benefit. She despised the idea that love could be unconditional and selfless.
It’s a view of human society citizens of the nation of Wall Street can see the rapture in. A morality in which all that matters is acquiring and holding onto power makes the concept of neighbor pointless. Everyone is responsible only to themselves and harm is something you do only to yourself. There is no neighbor. And without neighbor there is no shame. The people you meet are nothing more than potential sources of profit or loss. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are not contradicting themselves and they don’t view what they are doing as lying per se, let alone immoral. Business after all, is business. They are selling you a product under the rules of a marketplace where the only thing that matters is did they get your money. And that is exactly how they will govern. Because theirs is the power and the glory, and Atlas don’t feel shame.
The Thing About Running Up To The Edge And Barking Is Sometimes The Edge Collapses Underneath You
Bryan Fischer does a pivot from supporting a christian (in his opinion) parent who defies a judgment giving her lesbian co-parent custody, to supporting the wholesale kidnapping of children from gay parents…
This tweet followed one about Mennonite minister Kenneth Miller, charged with aiding and abetting the kidnapping of the child Isabella Miller-Jenkins in a custody battle between a lesbian and her now ex-gay partner who fled to Nicaragua with the girl rather then obey a court order giving custody of the girl to her former partner. But the link below the tweet, to a story posted on the blog of The Witherspoon Institute…one of Mark Regnerus’ big money teats, by a man who blames his difficulties growing up on the fact that he was raised by a lesbian couple. (Naturally he ends his story with a big round of applause for Regnerus’ work and you can be sure that has no bearing at all on why the people who dropped a giant wad of cash on Regnerus saw fit to publish his story…) So Fischer here isn’t tweeting that an underground railroad is needed to support good christian parents when they decide to flee their homosexual past and take the kids with them. He’s saying that any kid being raised by homosexuals is in danger, and needs a few good christian child snatchers to get them out of it.
This is where the culture war can take a turn for the very worst, and if you think these people are not capable of wholesale child snatching you need to refresh your memory as to what they’ve been capable of in the fight over abortion.
No kidnapping involved in Lisa Miller case. She left the US to keep her natural, biological daughter FROM BEING KIDNAPPPED. In Lisa Miller case, I’m advocating AGAINST JUDICIAL KIDNAPPING, in favor of keeping daughter with her own mother. In Lisa Miller case, lesbian who wanted sole custody of the daughter had NO legal or biological relationship to the girl. If any kidnapping involved in Lisa Miller case, it’s judges stealing a child from her mother and giving her to a stranger.
This is a standard technique of the kook pews, when cornered to pick a distraction and try to drag the conversation down and away from whatever was getting them mainstream static. But Fischer’s tweet about “Why we need an Underground Railroad to deliver innocent children from same-sex households” didn’t link to a story about the Miller case, but to the story of a man raised in a same-sex household which he blames for his life problems, published by The Witherspoon Institute which funded the Regnerus “study”. Never mind for a moment that even in the Miller case Fischer is claiming a right to ignore the rule of law wherever it gets in the way of his holy war on Teh Gay, there was no custody battle issue in the story he linked to, no issue of gay verses christian parent. Fischer was saying that Every household headed by same-sex parents is a danger to the children in them.
At minimum, it was a dog whistle endorsement of snatching these kids from their homes and Fischer isn’t walking back any of that, he’s merely waving the Miller case around as if that was all he was talking about. It wasn’t. Be assured that the right ears will have heard Fischer’s dog whistle, and nodded their heads approvingly.
And…If you thought the work of Mark Regnerus would only be used by the culture warriors to deny gay people the right to marry, you have been painfully naive.
No…Not “Goodbye Dad.” A Dad Loves His Son. You Are Not A Dad.
This is making the rounds on Facebook and over at Truth Wins Out…
My own Dad ended his life badly, by way of robbing banks. I’ve said before that if I had to choose between being raised by him and being raised by any of these self styled godly men, I would unhesitatingly choose to be raised by the honest crook.
Strangers can gay bash you, they can take your life from you, but only family can chew your heart up and spit it out. But consider not only the man who wrote this. Take a moment to wonder about the person, most likely but not necessarily someone who gets up behind a pulpit every Sunday, who taught this man to hate his own son so terribly much.
Put aside for a moment if you can, your feelings toward this man. Think about the kind of person who teaches parents to hate their children and considers it righteous. Think about the kind of person who does it as a campaign strategy and considers it patriotic. What do you say to someone like that when they tell you about their deeply held moral values?
It’s important to know just what this zealotry from Bryan Fisher, Maggie Gallagher, Dan Cathy, et al., does to everyday people. I’ve never done drugs, was an excellent student, an obedient child (far less trouble than many of my classmates), didn’t drink until I was 22 because it terrified me, and have had just 1 speeding ticket in my life. Yet I am still seemingly deserving of this terrible act of hate and cowardice that one person can place on another. 5 years on and I am still doing fine, though this letter saunters into my mind every once in a while. When it does, I say without hesitation: F**k you, Dad.
There was a poem I read many years ago…I just tried to Google it and couldn’t…I think it was about a PFLAG mother attending a gay pride march with her son, seeing all the other lost children standing on the sidelines, watching the march go past, and upon seeing her their faces light up with a painful joy at the sight of a parent proud enough of their gay child to walk with them publicly. But behind that joy she saw also a hopeless longing. Would you be my mother…? So many lost children she sees as she walks with her own son, and she could not take them all in. It isn’t just the children who have to be carefully taught to hate, it’s the parents too. When the likes of Bryan Fischer, Maggie Gallaher, Dan Cathy, et al., speak of family values, laugh in their face.
[Update…] Fixed the Towleroad link.
[Update…] In the comments, Alsafi found the poem I was referring to, Here. Amazing how it stuck with me so long, even after I’d forgotten nearly all of its words. Which I guess just goes to show that words are just the stepping stones a poem takes you somewhere on. It’s the somewhere that’s the thing, the imagery it conjures up, not the words.
[Update…] The link the reader sent me is broken now. Luckily the Wayback Machine is there to help. Whoever it was that wrote this…thank you…it is pure gold
San Diego Pride Parade – July 18, 1992 – author unknown
There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them
and only a handful of us.
The screamed and they shrieked and they cheered as we passed
yelling, “Thank you. It’s great that you care!”
Loudest of all and clearest of all
were the screams that emerged from the eyes
of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them
who watched as we marched down the street.
I carried a sign that stated most clear
my love for my son who is gay.
She stared at my sign
piercing my heart
with her pain.
I left the parade and moved to her side.
I held her in both of my arms.
Her sobs were intense and I tightened my grip
as she whispered her secret to me.
“My mom has disowned me since she found out.
She says I’m not right in the head.
She says that I’m weird
that I’m one to be feared
that I’ve caused her to suffer such pain.
Do you think that you could
Do you think that you might
Just be my mom for today?”
There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them
looking for parents they’d lost.
There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.
But only a handful of us.
Ladies and gentlemen, who was it that abolished the institution of slavery? It was the Republican Party, it was a Republican President, it was a conservative who abolished the institution of slavery.
Who was it that filibustered the Civil Rights Acts in the Sixties? It was liberals, it was progressives. It was conservative Republicans that voted in greater percentages that voted for the Civil Rights Act then Democrats did.
Who where the ones that were standing hosing people off with fire hoses? Those were Democrats, those were liberals that were doing that.
But Fischer is no ignoramus. He knows his history, he knows the subtle as a serpent lie he’s telling his listeners. The slight of hand here is when he says, correctly, that it was democrats who manned the fire hoses against civil rights protestors back in the 1950s and 60s. What he conveniently fails to mention is how they switched parties in droves after LBJ signed the civil rights act. Yes, they were democrats. No, they weren’t liberals.
And the Nixon republicans welcomed them in, seeing a path to breaking up the New Deal coalition and winning elections finally. When LBJ said after signing the civil rights act into law that democrats had lost the south for a generation he was only foretelling part of the tragedy. The democratic party lost the south, and the republican party lost its soul.
On My Honor, I Will Do My Best, To Hate The Stranger…
Bill Browning argues that there was no secret committee…that it was just a hastily assembled pile of bullshit they threw together because they were getting pressure from some pretty big sources to rethink their cheapshit prejudices.
I don’t believe them. Their story has too many holes in it to be remotely believable. This is a spin put in place to cover their ass at the recent blowback they’ve been getting as opinions change on gays and lesbians. There’s more holes in their statements than a block of Swiss cheese.
I’m inclined to agree…this was the first thing that crossed my mind this afternoon when I saw the stories about this go by in the news stream. But it makes no difference. You had to know this organization, whatever noble work it initially set itself out to do, had become corrupted by hate long ago when they started in earnest kicking good kids out of their ranks when they dared to be honest about themselves. Prejudice and morality do not co-exist within the same heart. Whether or not the BSA leadership is lying through its teeth about this secret committee is beside the point. They are lying to every kid they take into their ranks now, and to their parents, and to their country.
I would like to point out since it seems to be getting lost in the conversation here that it’s not just gay kids that the BSA deems unworthy but also atheist kids. Basically what BSA is pushing is a mindset that gay kids and non believing kids cannot aspire to the moral character of a boy scout. It’s a mindset they’re determined to keep pushing on kids, both straight and gay, believing and non-believing. Picture a Cub Scout happy to belong to his troop, working hard for his badges, winning the approval of his parents and troop leaders. Picture that kid as a teenage Scout, at the threshold of adulthood, coming to terms with his sexual orientation. He’s gay, he knows it, he’s not sure what it means for him and the adult life ahead of him but he’s at the point now where he knows he is gay. And because a Scout is brave and a Scout is trustworthy and a Scout is honest he comes out to those he trusts most. And for his trouble he’s kicked out of the organization that taught him the moral values he now holds. What’s the message here? The message is obvious: you are not worthy to wear this uniform, because you are a homosexual. And homosexuals Are Not And Can Never Be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.
Forget all the values we have taught you. You have failed them all. You are not worthy to bear them in your heart. That’s an absolutely disgusting attack on the self worth of children, but also on American society. It is enforcing, under the guise of teaching important moral values, nothing more noble then cheap bar stool prejudices, teaching fear and loathing of neighbor against neighbor, and starting it young. You’ve got to be carefully taught…
Prejudice and morality do not co-exist within the same heart. One will eventually drive out the other. As long as Scouting teaches kids to distrust if not hate each other outright, whatever other moral values they claim to teach are rendered moot in the process. You cannot teach both moral character and prejudice at the same time.
And finally, he grants interviews to conservative outlets, claiming that his study shows the harm of same-sex parenting, even though his own words, in his own study, demonstrate that he knows his sample size is just too damn small to say anything with confidence.
The funding for the study came from the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation. Not only are both of these major hard right money teats, National Organization For Marriage (NOM) co-founder Robert (Super Genius) George is a Senior Fellow at Witherspoon and a Board member of the Bradley Foundation. So the study is also intimately tied to NOM and NOM’s political anti-gay, anti same-sex marriage agenda. And…surprise, surprise, George is also on the editorial board of the Mormon Church owned Deseret News, which ran with Regnerus’ conclusions in both its news and editorial pages. The Mormon church is widely suspected of being the power behind the founding and bankrolling of NOM. If that’s not enough, the study’s author (“of record”, as opposed to “of funding”), Mark Regnerus is a graduate of Trinity Christian College, a former professor at Calvin College, now a sociologist at the University of Texas, with a track record of pushing religious right propaganda posing as research into mainstream news outlets. George knew perfectly well what he was buying with Witherspoon and Bradley money.
What the hell…the motivation here could not be clearer if it was written in neon lights. How does anyone not know why Regnerus is saying his three quarter of a million right wing dollar study proves that gay parents damage children regardless of what the data actually says? It’s Anita Bryant and Save Our Children again for the zillianth time because that’s the song they know works when the polls start tilting in favor of Teh Gay and push comes to shove. Didn’t NOM play that song over and over during the proposition 8 campaign? The homos are coming for our children! We must Save Our Children from the homos!
I recognize, with Paul and Cynthia, that organizations may utilize these findings to press a political program. And I concur with them that that is not what data come prepared to do. Paul offers wise words of caution against it, as did I in the body of the text. Implying causation here—to parental sexual orientation or anything else, for that matter—is a bridge too far.
Well, in the generation that are adults now, kids raised in a same-sex household were more likely to experience instability and shifting household arrangements. For example, 14 percent of kids whose moms had a lesbian relationship reported spending more time in foster care, well above the average of 2 percent among all respondents.
I elected NOT to make this about orientation or self-identity. You suggest more ominous motivation, but I assure you that was not true.
Your accusations are getting more heated, and I’m afraid unless we can correspond civilly, I may have to call a conclusion to this.
Hang tight…we’ll be hearing shortly about all the gay friends Regnerus has.
I have a wee suggestion for mainstream news media journalmalists, bloggers, folks who may just be a tad curious about it all: if you want to know what the motivations are behind this study, don’t bother asking the parties involved directly. Go listen to what they say to each other. In their publications, on their talk radio stations, on their blogs and newspapers and magazines. Go to the hard right, where they talk to each other, and just…listen. It’s all there…everything you need to know about what motivates them and what they hope to achieve. If you ask them straight up they will look you right in the face with a warm and friendly smile and lie through their teeth. If you just sit back and listen to them talk to each other you will get the hard cold brutal truth of it. Animus does not even begin to describe how they feel toward gay people. Or toward you, for that matter.
We went through this yesterday, but it’s a stark reminder of where we are.
The deal, though, fails to address a fundamental issue that has been spooking markets: This is the worst possible time for Spain to borrow 100 billion euros. Under the agreement, any amount used to bail out Spain’s banks will be added to the country’s government debt, potentially pushing it to a net 70 percent of gross domestic product, from about 60 percent today.
According to Our Galtian Overlords, austerity is necessary. Except, of course, when it comes to massive failing companies known as banks. Just keep lighting billions of taxpayer money on fire, paying massive salaries to the people who are destroying the world. And nobody mention moral hazard, because that’s what happens when you give someone an extra $10/week in food stamps.
There are lots of reasons the banks are having problems, but one reason is that people have no jobs and no money. And the Galtian Overlords are determined to keep people broke and unemployed, while extracting everything possible from the economy to give to the banks.
There’s stupid, but also a whole lot of evil. Bad people run the world.
-Atrios
This has been another edition of What Atrios Said…
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” -H. L. Mencken
These are the times that try men’s souls. Also their charity. Granted Walker was swimming in corporate money. Granted he outspent his democratic opponent 30 to 1. But the buck stops with the voters and at some point you just have to accept that more of them would rather cut their own throats then live in a state of peace and prosperity with people they despise.
Fine. I won’t help you cut your own throat but I’ll be happy to stand here and watch. I might even applaud if you’re good. Just don’t call me “neighbor” if I do. Don’t use that word in my presence. Don’t even think of me that way. My neighbor is the guy whose face you’re kicking.
This post on his blog is apparently a talk he gave at the second Berkeley Faculty Club symposium on American Politics and Democracy. He begins by noting he is out of his comfort zone discussing these matters, being an economist and not a political scientist. You should read it anyway because he brings to it the same thoughtful, insightful thinking he brings to economics.
I want to quote some of its passages…
An economist is going to start thinking about democracy with Tony Downs’s economic theory of same. First-past-the-post electoral systems and office-seeking politicians should produce a two-party system. Office-seeking candidates simply won’t join any third party because their chances of election will be too small. Only those who want to make some ideological or demonstrative point rather than to actually win office and then make policy–cough, Ralph Nader, cough–will do so. Hence the stable configuration has two parties. And then the two parties hug the center and follow policies attractive to the median voter.
Ideology will matter–politicians do not run purely for love of office but rather to then make the country into what they regard as a better place. There will be swings to the left, to the right, to the up, to the down, to the forward, to the back. But the policy views of the median voter ought, according to Tony Downs, function as a strong attractor and we should not expect the policies implemented by the politicians who get elected to deviate far from them.
Now there are qualifications. It is the median voter, not the median citizen.George W. Bush became president not because his policies came closer to the preferences of the median person who voted on that Tuesday in November but because his policies came closer to the preferences of the median Supreme Court justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor. Gerrymandering and misapportionment–cough, the Senate, cough–matter a lot. But these are qualifications. Tony Downs made a very strong case that first-past-the-post electoral systems will produce policies that the median voter likes. Thus in this sense the electorate gets the government it deserves. If there are problems, the problems are in the minds of the voters rather than in the Democratic system.
That is the economist’s not theory, not analysis, but rather prejudice. theory. Political scientists will scorn it as hopelessly naïve. But it is the benchmark from which I start.
In a democracy…in a healthy functional democracy, the middle will act as a check on the extremes. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, like when the middle position still favors segregation of the races and the second class status of women as it did here in the 1950s. But the point is the voters generally get the government they asked for, or in H.L. Mencken’s lovely phrase, “Democracy is based on the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
But the middle does not like republican policies. I could go on and on about that but it’s basically a fact that the polls show next to no public support for republican economic policies, which are generally understood to benefit only the richest of the rich. Yet those are the policies we get, often with lackluster democratic opposition, if any. So what happened?
Now let me shift and talk about our experience here in America since I got to Washington in early 1993, carrying spears for Alicia Munnell in Lloyd Benson’s Treasury Department in the Clinton administration.
Clinton was a centrist Democrat. The Clinton administration’s priorities were by and large, with exceptions–gays in the military–what you might call “Eisenhower Republican” priorities. Expand healthcare coverage so there were fewer uninsured and fewer people dumped by ambulances on the corners of the Tenderloin. But also control government healthcare cost which were then ballooning out of control–even though we didn’t know what “ballooning out of control” really meant. Balance the budget. End welfare as we know it–thus buying into the Republican critique of the Depression-era belief that raising children was real work–even if you were not married to a rich husband who was the chief executive of Bain Capital–and a socially-valuable task. Passing NAFTA. Creating the World Trade Organization. Strengthening Social Security through a combination of tax increases, benefit cuts, retirement=age increases, mandated private accounts requiring individuals to contribute their own money over and above Social Security (as an add-on but not a carve-out, as a supplement to and not a substitute for Roosevelt’s New Deal’s Social Security).
All of these seemed to us in the early 1990s to be bang-on the median voter’s preferences, Eisenhower Republicans. Clinton Democrats. We in the Bentsen Treasury at the start of 1993 looked forward to doing an awful lot of technocratic work–cranking out centrist legislation approved by large bipartisan majorities.
We found Republicans cooperative on NAFTA.
We found Republicans pushing for welfare reform–but only to the extent of passing things that were so highly punitive that they could not believe any Democratic president could in good conscience sign them. But Clinton fooled them. He signed welfare reform–and then spent some time in 1996 campaigning on the message: “re-elect me because only I can undo some of the damage that I have done to the welfare system”. Which was true. And which he did.
Otherwise…
That was the old game. Hammer out compromise legislation and move on because at the end of the day what was important to both sides was keeping the country strong and prosperous, even if they had different ideas of how to go about that, even if it meant their individual constituencies didn’t get everything they wanted. Everyone agreed at the end of the day that the government still had to function and it’s work needed to get done.
But notice how the center as defined by Bill Clinton was by then way further to the right on economic policy then it was at any time since The New Deal. What was happening was since Watergate the republicans had become more radicalized and the democrats just kept playing the old game of Find The Center. And over a span of just a few elections that had moved the center way to the right. What happened next was the logical outcome of that.
Otherwise the Republicans when I got to Washington at the start of 1993 decided that they were going to adopt the Gingrich strategy: oppose everything the Democratic president proposes, especially if it had previously been a Republican proposal and priority. That is not a strategy that would ever be adopted by anybody who wants to see their name written in the Book of Life.
But Gingrich found followers.
And so things that we in the Bentsen Treasury all expected to happen, did not happen. We had expected that sometime between January and June 1994 Lloyd Bentsen’s chief healthcare aide would sit down with Bob Dole’s chief healthcare aide. We had expected that they would hammer out a deal so that people in the future would never be as dependent on on charity for their healthcare as Bob Dole was when he returned injured from World War II.
That meeting never happened. Bob Dole decided he would rather join Gingrich to try to portray Clinton as a failure. So Bob Dole never got a legislative accomplishment out of his years in Congress. Instead, he got to lose a presidential election. And I now remember Bob Dole not as the co-architect of health care reform in 1994 but as somebody who denounced Roosevelt and Truman for getting us into those Democrat wars that saved Europe from the Nazis, China and the rest of Asia from Imperial Japan, and that have allowed South Koreans to grow five inches taller than their North Korean cousins.
As my friend Mark Schmitt wrote in his review of Geoffrey Kabaservice’s book about the moderate Republicans, Rule and Ruin, the moderate Republicans were partisan Republicans first and Americans second…
Exactly. He goes on to give an account of this just getting worse and worse, first with Clinton and the impeachment circus, then, massively so, with president Obama.
Then came Obama in 2009 and 2010. My friends–Christina Romer, Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, and company–headed off to Washington to plan a Recovery Act that they thought would get 25 Republican votes in the Senate. It was a squarely bipartisan fiscal stimulus: this tax cut to make the Republicans stand up and applaud, this infrastructure increase to make the Democrats applaud, this increase in aid to the states to make the governors and state legislators applaud.
It didn’t get 25 Republican votes in the Senate. It got 3.
On healthcare reform, Barrack Obama’s opening bid was the highly-Republican Heritage Foundation plan, the plan that George Romney had chosen for Massachusetts.
RomneyCare got zero republican votes.
On budget balance Obama’s proposals have not been the one-to-one equal amounts of tax increases and spending cuts to balance the budget of Clinton 1993 or Bush 1990. Obama’s proposals have been more along the lines of $1 of tax increases for every $5 of spending cuts.
And the Republicans rejected them
And so on… DeLong starts the time of the breaking of our democracy with Gingrich. That’s likely because he saw it first hand there in Washington. But Gingrich was the next logical outcome down a course the republicans have been relentlessly following since Nixon and the Southern Strategy.
In the years after the civil war and the first and second world wars, we thought of ourselves as one country. Regardless of where people stood on the left/right spectrum there was this general sense that at the end of the day we were all Americans and there was a love of country that moderated all but the lunatic fringe. Nixon understood that this e pluribus unum mindset would leave a party that by then existed simply to represent the interests of big business, the rich and the powerful in a permanent minority status.
Working Americans were fine with The New Deal. As long as the prosperity of the working class was rising the tide for the upper classes too the republican establishment was fine with just tinkering around the edges. But it couldn’t last. Eisenhower was conservative on many social issues, weak on civil rights and civil liberties, but not overtly hostile as the Nixon/McCarty branch of the party was. He was the last of the moderate republicans who believed that a healthy middle class was necessary to the vitality of the economy and the security of the United States.
Nixon hated the elites, the intellectuals, the liberals. He positioned himself as the champion of the common man against the elites. But it was those elites who had improved the status of the common man, and now threatened to do the same for women and minorities. Nixon was no great friend to the rich and powerful either, but as they would decades later in a man called Dubya they saw in Nixon’s paranoia and bottomless hatred someone who might just break the New Deal coalition of labor, rural and urban voters. And then they could go back to what they were doing back in Hoover’s Day…getting rich quick in the Wall Street casino.
Divide the country and we’ll have the bigger half Pat Buchanan told Nixon. But without a doubt Nixon took that advice because he was already considering it. Divisive pit American against American campaigning had been his method of winning elections since his first run for congress. They simply scaled the Nixon technique up and made it a permanent American against American cold war. Very deliberately they sought to replace in the working class voter love of country with love of tribe. No more of this e pluribus unum communist socialist nonsense. And like Gingrich would decades later, they found allies. White blue collar workers who hated black people. Males resentful toward independent women. Rural voters who loathed big city people with their big city morals and ideas. Poor people jealous of union workers with their union paychecks. Christian fundamentalists who loath the people in the church across the street.
When you got right down to it, America was a country of the imagination only. It wasn’t a nation by blood and ancestry. Our shared history is very brief compared to what the peoples of Europe, Asia and South America see as their own. The United States is a nation based on a political ideal of liberty and justice for all. The social contract was simply that we had each others backs when it came to that liberty and justice for all thing. Your freedom in the pursuit of happiness is as dear to me as my own. We are all Americans. As long as that held true a party of the rich and powerful would never win very many elections or wield enough power to impose its will on the majority. But the New Deal majority was a coalition of many diverse parts of working America and the republicans became expert at playing them against each other, that they might rule over all.
When Scott Walker was caught talking about using a divide and conquer strategy he wasn’t just talking about himself or just breaking the unions: this has been the essential republican strategy for gaining and keeping power since Nixon. Divide the country, set working American against working American, and in the end the rich and powerful take all. And it’s worked.
One thing I have learned from watching the Wall Street boys run the country is they’re not very good at it, and at some level they might even know they’re not very good at it. But they don’t care about running the country, they just want to get it out of their way so they can chase some more money. It’s all about the money chase with them. When the economy tanks, when the stock market goes bust, when banks and businesses go bankrupt right and left, they blame everyone but themselves. They’re like a bunch of drunk drivers convinced they’re fit to drive because they haven’t killed anyone yet, and when they do it was an accident and it was dark and that pedestrian just jumped right out in front of them and they didn’t mean to do it so stop treating them like criminals. Once upon a time the nation had laws against their sort of drunk driving. Those laws were there to protect the rest of us. But those law got in their way. Who are you to tell me I can’t drink and drive…it’s my car and my taxes paid for the highway and if I can’t drink and drive then it’s not a free country and all you other drivers on the road are socialists.
The money chase is all they care about. The New Deal coalition got in their way so they set about busting it apart. If in the process of doing that they ripped America apart too and put the nation at risk of catastrophic social upheaval that isn’t important. If once the brakes are off their reckless driving crashes the economy to smithereens and the lives of honest hard working Americans are destroyed and the future strength and security of the nation is placed in jeopardy that isn’t important. They don’t care about America. They are citizens of the stock market.
The Friend And Mentor Who Helpfully Hands You That Little Bottle Of Pills
I’ve been meaning to post this since I saw it back in January…
Memories of a gay man’s suicide loom over Fremont Presbyterian Church
On July 23, 1992, Thomas Paniccia, an Air Force sergeant, announced he was gay on national television. On the anniversary of that day 15 years later, Paniccia drove to an undeveloped cul-de-sac in Roseville several blocks from his home and waited to die.
Paniccia, 43, had swallowed an overdose of prescription pills and placed a three-page letter on his dashboard.
The Rev. Donald Baird, pastor of Fremont Presbyterian Church, was one of the people who received copies of the letter. Baird was his mentor, friend and pastor…
Pastor. Mentor. Ahem. Yes. And such a good one.
Fremont, the largest Presbyterian congregation in the Sacramento area, has faced the biggest crisis in its 129-year history: the decision to leave the national church. Fremont leaders believe the national church has strayed from biblical teachings, and they decided to break ties after the denomination approved the ordination of openly gay clergy.
During the debate and following that decision, some church members raised Paniccia’s name. What about Tom, they asked. His death three years ago reminded them that the decision they made would affect people who called the church home.
Despite Paniccia’s struggle, he had felt accepted. They didn’t want that welcoming and inclusive environment to change.
Welcoming. Inclusive.
Outside of a small circle, Paniccia’s story has never been told, yet has weighed on many of those making decisions about the church’s future. They remembered a gay man who loved his church.
“He wasn’t open about it. It didn’t matter anyway,” said Donna Cavness, who was a friend and had worked with Paniccia. “He had a lot of wonderful gifts. He was good to be around.”
Paniccia’s close friends said he was conflicted about his faith and sexuality.
David Larson rented a room in his home to Paniccia and knew him for more than a decade. He also received a copy of Paniccia’s suicide note.
“As a close personal friend, I unfortunately realized Tom’s inability to accept being gay combined with his religious views is what I believe led to his suicide,” Larson said.
Welcoming. Inclusive. Now let’s talk about what it means to be a friend to a gay man…
Baird does not believe Paniccia’s struggle to reconcile his faith with his sexuality drove him to suicide and said that Paniccia would support the church’s decision to leave the national denomination.
Since the October vote, longtime members have left the congregation. As pastor, Baird has received hate mail. Church members may have to pay millions of dollars to the national church to keep the 5-acre church property across from California State University, Sacramento.
And next week, local Presbytery officials will call for an investigation of the Fremont vote to determine whether there are enough church members opposed to the split and who want to stay with the national denomination.
Still, Baird said Fremont must leave.
Following Christ is not supposed to be easy or convenient, he said. “If a church loses its integrity, it ceases to be a church,” Baird said. “The world changes. God’s word doesn’t.”
The pastor said Paniccia believed the same. He was committed to the teachings of his faith, Baird said. “Tom had the same beliefs, he understood.”
He sat in his office looking at a photo of Paniccia in the church directory.
“He was like a son to me.”
Consider for a moment, the horrifying possibility that this is true. Some parents of gay children throw their kids into the street with undisguised contempt. Others buy them the poison, the bottle of pills, buy the rope, hand them the gun, lovingly gift wrapped with a little card that says, I Love You Very Much…
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