Compassion.  There’s the genuine variety, and then there’s the self-serving one.  For a healthy serving of the latter, the religious right is always a good source :

Like I said the other day when certain readers groused about the attention this blog gives to homosexuality, it is one of the central issues of our time, and the response to it is cleaving the Christian churches. People who complain about the time conservatives spend on the issue wouldn’t complain if we were taking the Andrew Sullivan gay liberationist line. It’s that we don’t do so that they dislike. If we can’t say something nice and cheerful, we shouldn’t say anything at all.

But the issue — the issues — won’t go away.

No shit Sherlock.  That’s because knuckle dragging jackasses like you can’t let go if it.  It matters to you, that somewhere, someway, somehow, there are gay people in this world who don’t fear and loath their sexual nature, the way louts like you think they should.

Rod Dreher, he who knows that homosexuals can pray the gay away because he himself was cleansed by God (or was it just getting old) of his lustful feelings toward…no, not men, but Betty Blue (no…I’m not kidding…just read his article), wants us to know he feels Compassion for all those poor suffering gay Evangelicals The New York Times profiled the other day.  Not that he feels any particular need to treat them as if they were as human as he is mind you, with the same basic human needs for love and intimate companionship that gutter crawling louts like him need to stop demonizing.  He has Compassion…Compassion I tell you.

Whatever your stance on homosexuality and religion, you have to have a heart of stone not to feel for men and women caught in this dilemma. For me, it brought to mind something my friend David Morrison told me over a decade ago, about the world he found as he left gay activism and committed himself to living as a chaste Christian faithful to Scripture and tradition.

As it happens, David Morrison was once a friend of mine too.  But that was back in his gay activist days, when we were both volunteers on Jon Larimore’s Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS system (David was mostly a theoretical volunteer, since I ended up doing 90 percent of the work he’d also volunteered for).  In those days he wore his pride like, as he once said, "an anthem".  But over the years we all watched him fall, first into a profoundly reactionary brand of conservatism, and then (surprise, surprise) into an even more reactionary brand of religion.  I remember vividly the day he posted to the general forum, that as far as God was concerned none of us were any better then Hitler.  He had a boyfriend back then, or so he always claimed.  I’ve often wondered how the boyfriend took David’s bellyflop into the gutter.  When he later wrote a column for the New York Post, titled "What Crime Of Hate And Anger?" (issue of November 5, 1998) in which he averred that Matthew Shepard had it coming, because he had a history of risky sexual flirting with strangers, I couldn’t have been less surprised:

Newsweek called what happened in Cody last summer a miscalculation on Shepard’s part and it may turn out that he similarly miscalculated in Laramie.  But whether he did or did not miscalculate, Americans should think long and hard about the making the feeling of repugnance at an unwanted sexual advance subject to additional penalties under the law. 

Angry, yes.  But not surprised.  You can read the article in full here on Eutopia.  (There is also a response in that issue of Eutopia to my letter to the Post.  Note the theocrat’s reliable retort that "certitude of experience" must answer to "certitude of truth".) 

That was the David we’d all come to know and loath on GLIB.  If he’d said the Pink Triangles were a sensible reaction to the repugnance of unwanted sexual advances I couldn’t have been less surprised.

But Dreher thinks David is a fine young man, because David is the only kind of homosexual a moral runt like Dreher can tolerate: a self castrating one.

Looking back, after eight years of seeking to live chastely as a Christian, I believe my time at Trinity represented a turning point in my early Christian life. While I had accepted intellectually the claims of the historic Christian creeds and experienced a deep emotional conviction of Christ’s reality and love, Christianity’s doctrines and disciplines remained merely concepts. It was the witness of the Christians at Trinity Church that put flesh onto the bones of biblical phrases like "love thy neighbor" and "seventy times seven times."

You can love your neighbor, so long as you don’t love yourself…right David?

Sadly, most men and women living with same-sex attraction have had experiences more akin to Gail’s than mine….

Actually David, what a lot of us have had is experience being in love, and being loved, and sharing with the one you love all the wonderful, awesome, life affirming joy of sexual intimacy.  And we resent it, when a gutter crawling slimeball like you, who just had to put another cigarette out on a dead gay kid’s body for the sake of your own cheapshit self hatreds, decides to lecture us on how sinful that perfectly human joy is.

Of course, Mr Thank You Jesus For Saving Me From The Clutches Of Betty Blue sees it differently…

In my view, that Episcopal church’s response to David, and to homosexuality, was authentically and beautifully Christian. 

An authentic and beautifully Christian approach to homosexuality.  Sorta like the one the Catholic Bishops took last month here in Baltimore:

How…beautiful…

Via This Modern World…a glance back at how utterly wrong all those dirty anti-war hippies were…

AREN’T YOU PROUD of us? For most of this past week, as an overwhelmingly successful, lightning-quick Anglo-American military assault liberated Iraq’s capital city, and ordinary Baghdadis poured into the streets to kiss our GIs and stomp on pictures of Saddam Hussein, THE SCRAPBOOK has remained the soul of magnanimity and restraint.

Here in our office there’s this giant archive of newsclips, transcripts, and Internet postings we collected in the months preceding the war, wherein a world community of jackasses confidently predicted that the events lately unfolding on our television screens could not and would not ever take place. And you can imagine the temptation, we’re sure: A lesser SCRAPBOOK would throw open the file boxes and run through the streets with treasures like these, laughing hysterically.

"This invasion of Iraq, if it goes off, will join the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Desert One, Beirut, and Somalia in the history of military catastrophe. What will set it apart, distinguishing it for all time, is the immense–and transparent–political stupidity."

–Chris Matthews, San Francisco Chronicle, August 25, 2002

"Iraqis hate the United States government even more than they hate Saddam, and they are even more distrustful of America’s intentions than Saddam’s. . . . [I]f President Bush thinks our invasion and occupation will go smoothly because Iraqis will welcome us, then [he] is deluding himself."

–New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, October 4, 2002

ut being the soul of magnanimity and restraint, we’re not going to do any such thing. Instead, THE SCRAPBOOK is going to run through the streets, laughing hysterically at all the people who were so blinded by hatred of President Bush–or general anti-Americanism, or their own sheer foolishness–that they continued to prophesy doom even after the war had begun and was already being won. People like a certain former U.N. weapons inspector turned Baath party apologist turned peace-movement celebrity:

"The United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated….We do not have the military means to take over Baghdad and for this reason I believe the defeat of the United States in this war is inevitable. . . . [W]e will not be able to win this war, which in my opinion is already lost."

–Scott Ritter, on a South African radio station, March 25, 2003

t takes all kinds, of course. You’ve got your late-career journalist gasbag, phoning it in from the dinner-party front lines:

"With every passing day, it is more evident that the allies made . . . gross military misjudgments. . . . The very term ‘shock and awe’ has a swagger to it, no doubt because it was intended to discourage Mr. Hussein and his circle. But it rings hollow now."

–New York Times "news analyst" R.W. Apple Jr., March 30, 2003

You’ve got your war novelist, phoning it in from his experiences in Vietnam, 30 years ago:

"Visions of cheering throngs welcoming them as liberators have vanished in the wake of a bloody engagement whose full casualties are still unknown. . . . Welcome to hell. Many of us lived it in another era. And don’t expect it to get any better for a while."

–James Webb, in the New York Times, March 30, 2003

And you’ve got your usefully idiotic, broadcast-media war correspondent, phoning it in from wherever his Baath party minders want him to:

"The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. . . . Clearly the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces. And I personally do not understand how that happened, because I’ve been here many times and in my commentaries on television I would tell the Americans about the determination of the Iraqi forces. . . . But me, and others who felt the same way, were not listened to by the Bush administration."

–Peter Arnett on Iraqi state television, March 30, 2003

How stupid those dirty anti-war hippies all were…

Do you see it there, in that Weekly Standard article?  The bar stool swagger?  The ritual chest thumping?  The loutish bragging about how they were right and everyone else was wrong?  It’s tempting for some folks to wonder why so many people misjudged the measure of George Bush.  They didn’t.  They had his measure exactly.  He was their boy…full of the same toxic mix of cheapshit conceits and resentments they were.  Imagine any one of these bloviating cretins in the White House instead of George Bush, ask yourself if it would make any difference whatever in the outcome, and you have the picture.  They’re all cut from the same cloth.  That’s why they supported him back in 2000.  That’s why they still support him.  He achieved the fantasy they’ve all dreamed of…being the  one everyone has to take orders from, the one everyone has to listen to, the one nobody can ever contradict, because their word is law.  The decider.  If Junior fails now, then what does that make them?

The problem with brick brain louts like this is that you can rub their noses in their own shit forever and they’ll never admit it stinks.  They’ll just dig in their heels and whine that they’re not to blame for anything, because it’s always, always, everyone else’s fault.  Atrios is right.  As long as Junior is in the White House, we’re not leaving Iraq, no matter how many American soldiers die, no matter how many innocent Iraqis die, no matter how many  back doors the Wise Men Of Washington give him.  Remember this?

"There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again."

He can’t end this war, any more then he could physically make himself say the words, "shame on me". 

Oh look…

Well-known GOP activist held in sex-predator sting

Larry Corrigan, a well-known activist in local Republican politics as a backer of U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert and King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng, was arrested Wednesday in an Internet sting for allegedly trying to arrange sex with a 13-year-old girl.

And Reichert…?

Reichert is pro-life and opposes the use of federal money for sex education. Reichert is against gay marriage and has promised to support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay marriage.

Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  And a sexually ignorant thirteen year old girl, is a good thirteen year old girl…

Card 18 – Milt Romney:

Milt – while running against Ted Kennedy in the 1994 Massachusetts senate race…

When Romney ran…for the Senate in 1994, he wrote a letter to the Mass Log Cabin Club in which he pledged: “[A]s we seek to establish full equality for America’s gay and lesbian citizens, I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent.” During the same campaign, when he was accused of having once described gay people as “perverse” during a religious meeting of Mormons, Romney’s campaign issued a forceful statement decrying the accusation as false and reiterating that Romney respected “all people regardless of their race, creed, or sexual orientation.”

Milt – February 2006…while campaigning for the 2008 GOP nomination for President of the United State…

SALT LAKE CITY — Speaking before an adoring audience of Utah Republicans last night, Governor Mitt Romney drew a link between America’s prestige around the world and the legalization of same-sex marriages in Massachusetts.

”America cannot continue to lead the family of nations around the world if we suffer the collapse of the family here at home," Romney said, calling the Supreme Judicial Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts ”a blow to the family."

Milt – while running for governor of Massachusetts in 2001…

During his 2001 run for governor, his campaign distributed bright pink flyers at the June Pride parade declaring “Mitt and Kerry wish you a great Pride weekend!” During his inaugural speech, he said it was important to defend civil rights “regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or race.” He appointed eight openly gay and lesbian people to high profile positions in his administration. And before he decided to run for president — that is to say, before he needed to establish some strong anti-gay bonafides — Romney doubled the budget line item for the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth.

Milt – Last May…while campaigning for the 2008 GOP nomination for President of the United State…

This would be the same commission, mind you, that Romney tried to disband in highly public fashion last May.

So Orson Scott Card has written a book about a new American Civil War…

When the president and vice-president are killed by domestic terrorists (of unknown political identity), a radical leftist army calling itself the Progressive Restoration takes over New York City and declares itself the rightful government of the United States. Other blue states officially recognize the legitimacy of the group, thus starting a second civil war. Card’s heroic red-state protagonists, Maj. Reuben "Rube" Malek and Capt. Bartholomew "Cole" Coleman, draw on their Special Ops training to take down the extremist leftists and restore peace to the nation. The action is overshadowed by the novel’s polemical message, which Card tops off with an afterword decrying his own politically-motivated exclusion from various conventions and campuses, the "national media elite" and the divisive excesses of both the right and the left.

Well I can’t imagine why someone who once wrote that for most homosexuals, "…their highest allegiance was to their membership in the community that gave them access to sex", and  "However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. Nor does society benefit in any way from treating it as if it were", might find himself being shunned as if he were some kind of gutter crawling bigot. 

It is chilling to note that this man, who detests homosexuals down to the bedrock of his being, wrote the Hugo Award winning novel Ender’s Game, which as it happens, attempts to elicit sympathy for someone who commits genocide (he didn’t really mean to, you see…) against an alien race that just happens to be called throughout the novel "the buggers".  Gosh…I guess I shouldn’t read anything into that.  And here he is now, thumping a novel that begins with the premise that liberals and progressives intend to start a civil war.  You can read the first few chapters online Here.  Have a sample, via Alicublog:

"You look pissed off," said Malich.

"Yeah," said Cole. "The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy."

"They won’t be so happy when they see where it leads. They’ve already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders."

"I bet they’re already ‘advising’ Americans that this is where our military ‘aggression’ inevitably leads, so we should take this as a sign that we need to change our policies and retreat from the world."

"And maybe we will," said Malich. "A lot of Americans would love to slam the doors shut and let the rest of the world go hang."

"And if we did," said Cole, "who would save Europe then? How long before they find out that negotiations only work if the other guy is scared of the consequences of not negotiating? Everybody hates America till they need us to liberate them."

"You’re forgetting that nobody cares what Europeans think except a handful of American intellectuals who are every bit as anti-American as the French," said Malich.

But Card, who is apparently planning an entire media empire of his own on this new novel, with tie-in video games and everything, wants everyone to know that he really, honestly, honestly doesn’t look forward to civil war with the liberals and homos…

What the good guys are fighting for is to get the war stopped before it’s fully started. To enable the country to bind its wounds and end this horrible division, so one of the key decisions I made was having Maj. Reuben "Rube" Malek be a true-blue, red-state soldier, but he’s married to a committed blue-stater who is politically active and involved in Congress but is able to speak the language of both sides. She’s a conciliator. In the novel, her sensibility becomes vital to establishing the nature of the resolution, so that we have a happy ending no matter which camp you’re in.

It’s the same way in the game. When you’re fighting, you’re definitely fighting one side against the other. There are situations that you’re only fighting that way because they’re shooting at you. And all along, you want this sucker to end. It’s a war between brothers, it’s a civil war, but our people never forget that they’re brothers with the people on the other side.

Oh really?  Bind its wounds did you say?  Brothers is it?  Well here’s what brother Card was saying when the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled for same sex marriage…

If America becomes a place where the laws of the nation declare that marriage no longer exists – which is what the Massachusetts decision actually does – then our allegiance to America will become zero. We will transfer our allegiance to a society that does protect marriage

So much for binding wounds and brotherhood.  But it’s not civil war, or genocide for that matter if you thought it was just a game.

[Edited a tad…] 

There’s this ethical question that goes something along the lines of, If someone offered to give you a million dollars to kill some random person, with the certainty that you would get clean away with it…would you do it?  There was a time when I would have been shocked to hear people admit that they would. 

What I would like to do now is change the terms of the test a little…

If you were running for President of the United States…and someone offered you a million votes in a swing state to kill some completely random person, with complete certainty that your name would never be attached to that murder…would you do it…?

This is not a theoretical question.

Via Pam’s House Blend…  More anger from the kook pews…

Subject: re: you
From: "P. BELL"
Date: Wed, November 22, 2006 3:39 am
To: pam [at] pamspaulding.com

Why should you get the same privledges as we married couples do? I am not here to judge you. Love the person, hate the sin. But about you and Bush? I pray that law will be passed so you will NEVER be recognized in the US. Your beef will him is because he actually wants us to be more like we were when we first started this country-Chrisitian roots and all. I am not talking about the nutso Chrisitians out there who make a fool of themselves to be seen, I am talking about the people who really have a relationship with God, living the truth.

Did you know that homosexuality is specifically mentioned in the bible? Listed as ABNORMAL, DISCUSTING, and an ABOMANATION. You were not created to be this way, and so when you SLANDER a person who is againist you, mock their beliefs, and try to screw up this nation even more than it is for my children’s future, than you will deal with me.

I am not talking about the nutso Christians…  You know this is only going to get worse, now that their White House messiah has lost his rubber stamp congress.  And never mind the nutso Christians.  Take a long hard look at how Mitt Romney and John McCain are belly flopping into the fundamentalist gutter now that the next presidential election cycle is closing in on us.  

The problem the republicans face is that their policies are just not popular.  Make the rich, richer…make the poor and middle-class poorer…rape the environment…curtail civil liberties…war, war and more war…  There is no majority in America for any of that.  So for the past few decades the republicans have been cobbling together a rough coalition of faux libertarians, fascists, Me-First Americans and bigots and with the ascendancy of George Bush, it’s won them elections…barely.  Corruption and wild deficit spending cost them enough of the faux libertarians and the Me-Firsts that they lost last time.  But make  no mistake: the religious right and the rest of the bigot vote stuck with them.  They lost the voters who finally got fed up with the spending and the corruption and the war.  They loose the bigot vote now, and they’re done for decades to come and they know it.

The point being…don’t assume that as the Gay Bogyman looses it’s power to sway the independent voters that the republicans will stop using it.  They can’t take even a middle ground position on gay rights, without loosing the bigot vote.

So republicans running for president in the coming years are going to fall all over themselves in the coming election to prove that they’re bigger gay bashers then the other guys.  And in the process, they are going to deliberately rouse the passions of the mob.  Because that mob is a vital part of their political base.  Even long after it stops winning them elections.  Because there is loosing, and there is having the bottom fall out.  So they will keep inciting the mob.

And somewhere right here in America, some random gay people are going to die for the sake of giving those campaigning politicians some extra votes they wouldn’t otherwise have gotten.  Think about that, the next time you hear one of them talk about Morals, and Values and God and Country.

From Daniel Gonzales at Ex-Gay Watch…with an assist from Peterson Toscano. How the religious right talks out of both sides of its mouth…

But then again…if Exodus respects a person’s right to self determination, why do they oppose same sex marriage, and why do they support a state’s right to enact sodomy laws? It’s simple: they don’t mean what they say. It’s just rhetoric for popular consumption. Self determination is anathama to the religious right…and not just with regard to the rights of gay people. Heterosexuals could find themselves in an America where it is illegal to sell any and all forms of birth control, even to legally married heterosexual couples. You can tell everything you need to know about the religious right’s respect for a person’s right to self determination by the sexual abuse they’re perfectly willing to inflict on teenagers, who cannot legally say no. When the rest of us loose our right to tell them No, they’ll do the same to us, never doubt it. The ninth commandment after all, says not to bear false witness against your neighbor. It doesn’t say anything about lying To your neighbor.

Via Daily KOS… 

Next time some republican half-wit starts yapping at you about how Militiant Homosexual activists and Liberal Activist Judges hate the democratic process because they don’t want the voters to decide the issue of same sex marriage…laugh in their face.

Letting The Voters Decide anyone…?

Laura Ingraham has asked her listeners to call the Dem Voter protection hotline — and they are now being flooded with calls from crank callers.  Please call Laura and tell her what you think about this:  800.876.4123.  You can e-mail her here.  Apparently, voter intimidation and fraud are a joke to Laura Ingraham.  Let’s let her know that it is no joke […]

More on Laura Ingraham:  "caller indicated she is running a tape of Bill Clinton over and over saying "call 1-888 Dem Vote to report problems" — and then making fun of him, thus producing a spike in crank calls to the number" Protecting voter integrity is no joke.  And I am not laughing.  If anyone has audio of this, I’d love it.

Democracy anyone…?

The headquarters for Jay Fawcett’s campaign for Colorado’s 5th Congressional District was vandalized overnight and a death threat – the third such threat – was also emailed to Fawcett. Both incidents have been reported to the police.  

As voters headed to the polls, Fawcett campaign volunteers arriving at campaign offices were greeted with a vile "Skunk" aroma, making it virtually impossible to conduct work there.  The campaign is expecting more than 200 people to come through the offices today to help with Get Out The Vote and Poll Watching efforts.  

"Don’t let these hooligans deter you from exercising your Constitutional right to vote," said Fawcett.  "It’s time to take a stand against these attacks."

This is the second time the Fawcett Campaign has been vandalized. Last Tuesday the Campaign Finance Director’s car was covered in the skunk smell, while parked out front of the El Paso County Republican Office.  

"I find it disgusting that, as we are fighting for Democracy in Iraq, people are besmirching Democracy here in Colorado Springs," said Fawcett Campaign Manager Wanda James. "Death threats and childish illegal activities will not deter us from getting out the vote to victory today."

Bush republicans.  They love America.  Really.  It’s just democracy they hate.

Via Pam’s House Blend…   I see the wingnuts are on again about God’s Grand Design as revealed in our bodies…

There are attributes of marriage that same-sex couples will never achieve. But in the minds of radical activists, getting the label and a piece of paper saying so will be close enough.

For instance, a woman who engages in lesbianism will never know the joy of lovemaking that creates within her the product of that union — an actual human life. She will never know the security of a true man protecting her from the dragons of the world and providing for her an environment where she can nurture and give love to that little life once it arrives, or the stamp of approval that God puts on such an experience. And because she and her partner know this, they must defy reason, biology and sexual function to create children and experiences that serve as faulty substitutes for that God-ordained picture.

You have to figure a true man is someone who prefers his women helpless, which somehow doesn’t make any sense but then expecting sense from a brick brained idiot like Kevin McCullough (the author) is a bit like expecting a pig to shit pearls.  McCallough isn’t just pissing on the happy couplehood of lesbians there, but also every heterosexual couple that cannot have children of their own too.  So any children they manage to have must also serve only as faulty substitutes for the God-ordained picture thing. 

You need to notice this: What McCullough is saying there, is that Any Child not naturally brought into a family can only be a faulty substitute for the Real Thing.  Adopted children cannot be loved and cherished like Real Children can.  Children conceived by various medical means likewise cannot be loved and cherished like Real Children.  Their families can never be as loving, as caring, as nurturing as Real Families can…they can only be faulty substitutes for the God Ordained picture thing.  You have to love how, in attacking the households of gay couples, these gutter crawling maggots show just how much they regard themselves as holier then…well…just about everyone else, not just gays.  And if you think they don’t mean their rhetoric to apply equally to childless heterosexual couples too, think again. 

But even when it comes to reason, biology, and sexual function, McCullough doesn’t get it right.

Likewise, a man who seeks his perverse kicks by depositing the seed of life in, shall we say, non-life-giving cavities, may know orgasm, but never complete union, as he uses anatomy in ways for which the Creator did not create it.

It’s called the prostate gland Kevin.  Massaging the prostate gland, which is what happens during a certain kind of male to male sex, can bring a human male to a right dandy orgasm.  Now…I am unaware of any other gland in the human body that will produce such a result when it’s rubbed.  In fact, most of them will probably produce a sharp stab of pain when you do that to them.  But not that particular gland, in that particular location in the male anatomy.  The conclusion is obvious.  God did, in fact, intend for males to be fucked.  It probably helps if they’re gay though.

I keep bringing up the prostate because it’s something worth paying attention to.  It wasn’t lax moral standards that did that.  It wasn’t hedonism.  It wasn’t Godlessness.  It was millions of years of adaptive evolution that gave that to human males, even the ones with absolutely no use for it at all.  Or, if you don’t believe in evolution, fine.  Then God did it.  But there it is.  If you’re going to go on a pulpit thumping rant about God’s design, the fucking take some notice of God’s design willya?  Open your goddamn eyes every now and then and fucking take a look at what God hath wrought…okay?  Just a suggestion.

By coincidence I came across this article in the Economist just prior to reading that Pam’s House Blend post, which seems to do nothing more then idly wonder why homosexuality exists in nature.  It starts off with a pretty good observation though…

WHAT is taught in a country’s schools reveals much about the national psyche. The Norwegian curriculum requires that all 14-year-olds learn about homosexuality. Assisting with this education, the National History Museum at the University of Oslo has just opened an exhibition of gay animals.

“Against Nature?” does not tell zoologists anything new. Homosexuality has been recorded in some 1,500 species so far, and been well documented in about a third of these cases; it has been known since the time of Aristotle, who thought he witnessed two male hyenas having sex with one another. But the exhibition’s purpose is not to educate zoologists. It is to persuade the public that, as there are gay whales and worms, gay humans do not disturb the natural order.

And ends with another…

Taking lessons on sexuality from the birds and the bees itself requires first accepting something not taught ubiquitously outside Norway—that evolution occurs by natural selection.

Ya think?  Well that leaves a large swath of the United States out.  We have crackpots here who can’t even divine God’s will from the evidence of our own bodies, let alone the workings of nature.

You can boil it down to watching one good person struggling with a devastating illness that science can finally see a cure for, that the religious right would rather he suffer, until it kills him…

Michael J. Fox asks the voters of Missouri
to support Claire McCaskill
(Click on image to go to website and view)

Digby says "As I look at all these issues that have come to the forefront in the last few years, I’m struck by how dumb it is to let the Republicans claim the mantle of values and morality."  And yet somehow we did.  It’s one thing for people to say they’re "pro-life" and another for those same people to champion war, excuse torture, and turn an indifferent eye to sickness and poverty, and the rape of the environment.  They call themselves "pro-family" and take every chance to put the screws to families all over America, and their elderly parents, for the sake of the profits of billionaires.  They demand the right to set standards of marriage and fidelity and sexual conduct for everyone, that they cannot live by themselves in their own private affairs. They lie through their teeth about gay people, and demand respect for their sincerely held faith.  It’s all bullshit.  It’s long past time for the rest of America to call them on it.

Via Atrios…

GOP refuses to pull its TV ads that call Brown a tax deadbeat

Washington – The Republican Party last night refused to cancel commercials that claim Sherrod Brown was a longtime tax scofflaw – even though the state of Ohio says the ad’s claim is untrue.

Brown, the Democrat running against incumbent Mike DeWine, paid the tax bill years ago, soon after receiving a tax lien, according to newly released records from the Brown campaign and authenticated by the state.

But the Republican National Committee, supporting DeWine’s reelection bid, is running commercials saying that Brown "didn’t pay his unemployment taxes for 13 years."

DeWine ran his own commercial all day Wednesday with a DeWine family friend saying that Brown didn’t pay "an outstanding tax bill for 12 years."

Hours after Brown campaign lawyers complained, DeWine spokesman Brian Seitchik said last night that the campaign would change its ad "as soon as possible," but that it still would reflect the fact that Brown "failed to pay a delinquent tax bill."

The RNC, however, said last night that it had no plans to change its ad.

Ninth commandment?  What ninth commandment?

Via Atrios…  Did you know that this is National Character Counts Week?  And who better to proclaim National Character Counts Week then the man who just signed into law a republican bill codifying his practice of torture…?

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim October 15 through October 21, 2006, as National Character Counts Week. I call upon public officials, educators, librarians, parents, students, and all Americans to observe this week with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs.

Hey…I have an idea for an appropriate activity during National Character Counts Week…   Let’s have a fundraiser for a fellow republican who cheated on his wife and then tried to choke his mistress…

President Bush’s appearance Oct. 19 in Northeastern Pennsylvania will be for a $350-per-person fundraiser for U.S. Rep. Don Sherwood at Keystone College, LaPlume Township.

Keystone spokesman Fran Calpin confirmed Mr. Bush’s appearance at the college but had no other details. However, a Republican source confirmed the ticket price and said the event will not be open to the public.

The visit will be Mr. Bush’s fifth to the region as president, by far the most of any president. He also visited once as Republican presidential nominee in 2000.

Mr. Sherwood, R-Tunkhannock Township, is locked in a tight battle with Democrat Chris Carney, of Dimock Township, for the 10th Congressional District seat.

Via Pam Spaulding over at Pandagon…

…In Pennsylvania this week, Representative Don Sherwood, a suddenly endangered Republican, bought time on television to offer an apology in response to allegations that he had abused his mistress. Analysts for both parties said the sweep of outrage over Congressional misbehavior had weakened Mr. Sherwood and forced him to deal directly with the issue.

Recipient of an 84% rating from Christian Coalition, Don Sherwood’s “backrub” was actually a chokehold, according to Cynthia Ore.

Character.  Character. 

Frank Rich in the New York Times the other day, gave the Mark Foley scandal some much needed, if incomplete perspective.  I’d link to it but they have it behind their subscriber only firewall…

If anything good has come out of the Foley scandal, it is surely this: The revelation that the political party fond of demonizing homosexuals each election year is as well-stocked with trusted and accomplished gay leaders as virtually every other power center in America. "What you’re really seeing is the Republican Party on the Hill," says Rich Tafel, the former leader of the gay Log Cabin Republicans whom George W. Bush refused to meet with during the 2000 campaign. "Across the board gay people are in leadership positions." Yet it is this same party’s Congressional leadership that in 2006 did almost nothing about government spending, Iraq, immigration or ethics reform, but did drop everything to focus on a doomed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

The split between the Republicans’ outward homophobia and inner gayness isn’t just hypocrisy; it’s pathology. Take the bizarre case of Karl Rove. Every one of his Bush campaigns has been marked by a dirty dealing of the gay card, dating back to the lesbian whispers that pursued Ann Richards when Mr. Bush ousted her as Texas governor in 1994. Yet we now learn from "The Architect," the recent book by the Texas journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater, that Mr. Rove’s own (and beloved) adoptive father, Louis Rove, was openly gay in the years before his death in 2004. This will be a future case study for psychiatric clinicians as well as historians.

So will Kirk Fordham, the former Congressional aide who worked not only for Mark Foley but also for such gay-baiters as Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma (who gratuitously bragged this year that no one in his family’s "recorded history" was gay) and Senator Mel Martinez of Florida (who vilified his 2004 Republican primary opponent, a fellow conservative, as a tool of the "radical homosexual agenda"). Then again, even Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania senator who brought up incest and "man-on-dog" sex while decrying same-sex marriage, has employed a gay director of communications. In the G.O.P. such switch-hitting is as second nature as cutting taxes.

Just so.  When the Log Cabin republicans start yapping that the republican party isn’t as homophobic as the democrats paint it, they’re right as far as it goes.  In much of the party machine, the gay bashing is purely opportunistic.  But that doesn’t make it better.  It makes it worse.  They know gay people…they work with gay people every day.  They know what contributions we make to our country, to our communities, to our neighbors.  They know from first hand day to day experience the humanity of the people they are throwing to the wolves every election cycle for votes.  Yet they do it anyway.

And now the story in the news media is about how the republicans have been playing the religious right for votes all along.  Well imagine that…

“Tempting Faith’s” author is David Kuo, who served as special assistant to the president from 2001 to 2003. A self-described conservative Christian, Kuo’s previous experience includes work for prominent conservatives including former Education Secretary and federal drug czar Bill Bennett and former Attorney General John Ashcroft….

He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts.”

“National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.

But the hypocrisy doesn’t stop there, or rather, it doesn’t Begin there.  On a Sixty Minutes interview the other day, Kuo delicately as possible for someone in his position, cast a glance at it…

Part of the problem, he says, was indifference from "the base," the religious right. He took 60 Minutes to a convention of evangelical groups – his old stomping ground – and walked around the display booths, looking for any reference to the poor.

"You’ve got homosexuality in your kid’s school, and you’ve got human cloning, and partial birth abortion and divorce and stem cell," Kuo remarked. "Not a mention of the poor."

"This message that has been sent out to Christians for a long time now: that Jesus came primarily for a political agenda, and recently primarily a right-wing political agenda – as if this culture war is a war for God. And it’s not a war for God, it’s a war for politics. And that’s a huge difference," says Kuo

Via Pam’s House Blend, you can get an even better look.  Condi Rice recently swore in openly gay Mark Dybul as Global AIDS Coordinator.  What was all the more remarkable, coming from an administration that has cynically perfected the art of gay bashing for votes, the ceremony was conducted with Mark’s partner Jason right there next to him, and Jason’s mother in the audience, who Rice referred to in her remarks as Mark’s mother-in-law.

Pam gives us a link to the fit Donald Wildmon’s Agape Press had over it.  Hypocrisy anyone?

A spokesman for a family-advocacy group in Washington, DC, is expressing disgust with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s swearing in of an openly homosexual man as global AIDS coordinator 

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…

The ceremony involved Secretary of State Rice and the swearing in of Mark Dybul, an open homosexual, as the nation’s new global AIDS coordinator…

Blessed are they that morn: for they shall be comforted…

An Associated Press photo of the ceremony also shows a smiling First Lady Laura Bush and Dybul’s homosexual "partner," Jason Claire. During her comments, Rice referred to the presence of Claire’s mother and called her Dybul’s "mother-in-law," a term normally reserved for the heterosexuals who have been legally married.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth…

We have to face the fact that putting a homosexual in charge of AIDS policy is a bit like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse…

Bless them that curse you…

…for her to treat his partner like a spouse and treat the partner’s mother as a mother-in-law, which implies a marriage between the two partners, is a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the Defense of Marriage Act…

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself…

According to news reports, in all three cases the men’s homosexual partners held the Bible on which the oath of office was sworn.

And by chance there came a certain priest that same way, and when he saw him, he passed by.  And likewise a Levite…Then a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came nigh unto him, and when he saw him, had compassion on him…

The hypocrisy of the republican party angers me greatly.  But it doesn’t disgust me half as much as the braying herd in America’s suburban tract cathedrals, who would gladly have nailed the one who preached love and peace and concern for the poor and powerless hard to the cross themselves, if they had to spit the nails out of their mouths to do it.

It comes to this: The republican machine is going after the teenagers Mark Foley was sexually exploiting.  That’s right.  Not the leadership that did nothing.  Not the people who tried to cover it all up.  They’re going on the offensive against the kids, as though all of this is their fault. 

Well I guess we can put a fork in the republican party now…because it’s done.  For decades they waged a long bitter battle to gain total control of the federal government.  They told us the liberals were wicked, immoral, godless, anti-American, anti-family.  They said democrats were corrupt tax and spend big government pigs, lining their pockets with money taken from hard working people.  They waged a scorched earth campaign for power.  And then they got it.  And look at them now.

What most of us with a functional conscience and a sense of basic human decency see as the sexual exploitation of teenage congressional pages, the republicans now see only in terms of political warfare.  Their pathological hatred of anyone outside of the tribe has so completely gutted them of any sense of decency and humanity, of anything at all beyond the reflexive need to attack liberals and democrats, that they are utterly incapable of seeing the sexual exploitation of teenagers for what it is.  They cannot see, cannot even grasp, Mark Foley’s actions apart from the political war. 

And in the blogosphere, all those fine honorable men who once upon a time fancied themselves liberals, but then supposedly 9-11 changed everything, and who keep on yap, yap, yapping that they didn’t leave the democratic party, it left them…all those fine honorable men with all their ostentatious regard for America and virtue and civilized behavior.  What do they do when confronted with a man in their own party who regarded the congressional page pool as his own little sexual buffet?  What do they do when confronted with evidence that their party leadership covered up that man’s behavior so as not to rouse the ire of the voters? 

Well of course…they start attacking the teenagers Foley was hitting on…

Pajamas Media, Instapundit Facilitate Outing Of Foley Victim

An obscure right-wing blogger, Wild Bill, has outed one of Mark Foley’s victims, a former Congressional page. It is a despicable act. Wild Bill however, gets almost no traffic, so the damage done to the victim’s life could have been minimal.

All that ended, however, when some of the most highly-trafficked right-wing bloggers decided to direct their readers to Wild Bill’s site. First, Roger L. Simon, co-founder and CEO of Pajamas Media – a portal and advertising broker for nearly every major right-wing blog – posted a link to Wild Bill on his personal site. (The Pajamas Media portal also linked to Wild Bill.) Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit – probably the most highly-trafficked right-wing blog – followed suit by linking to Simon’s post and the Pajamas Media post.  

You may recall this is generally how the right wing smear machine works.  First the smear appears in some obscure nutcase’s blog.  Then someone like Drudge picks up on it.  Then Instapundit links to it.  Then it starts appearing in a few right wing tabloids and magazines.  Then the more respectable conservative press gets into it.  Then it goes mainstream.  Instapundit has been facilitating smear campaigns now for years, and it’s given him a high place in the right wing honor roll.  Recently the hack novelist Roger L. (I didn’t leave the democratic party, it left me) Simon formed Pajamas Media to share in some of that glory.  It now comes to this: Glenn Reynolds and Roger L. Simon are facilitating child sexual predators, if that’s what it takes to keep the republican party in power.

They both know perfectly well that outing this one teenager, will make other teens who have been victimized by congressmen, or anyone else holding a position of authority on Capital Hill think twice before coming forward.  It increases the pressure on the entire family to keep the kid’s mouth shut.  It Is Supposed To.

Atrios sums it all up…

The complete shitheads that are the leading lights of the conservative blogosphere.

No ethics, no scruples, no morals, no compassion, no sense. Just really bad people.

Brad DeLong likes to say that the Bush administration is worse then you think, even accounting for the fact that it is worse then you think.  But that’s true of all of them…every…single…one of them…in the Bush base. That 35 percent who will support the republican party no matter what.  Because there is nothing worse then the prospect of a democratic congress…not even the sexual exploitation of minors.  Not even covering up the sexual exploitation of minors.  Garrison Keiller was right…they are republicans first, and Americans second.  Every time you think you’ve found the bottom of that cesspool you soon realize that…no…there is no bottom.

Via Firedoglake…  Behold the open sewer that is the republican party today…

I…words simply fail me.

In the fine tradition of George W. Bush standing under the "Mission Accomplished" sign, or any one of the Katrina backdrops (where no expense was spared to bring power to an area for a photo op, and then just as quickly cut off), we now have the head of the NRCC, Tom Reynolds, using small prop children as set decoration in a press conference devoted to the topic of…yes, predatory online sexual solicitation of minors.

Even the reporters present could not contain themselves: 

Reporter:  Congressman, do you mind asking the children to leave the room so we can have a frank discussion of this, because it’s an adult topic.  It just doesn’t seem appropriate to me.

Reynolds:  I’ll take your questions, but I’m not going to ask any of my supporters to leave.

[]

Reporter:  Who are the children, Congressman?  Who are these children?

Reynolds:  Pardon me?

Reporter:  Who are these children? 

Reynolds:   Well, a number of them are from the community.  There are several of the "thirtysomething" set that are here and uh I’ve known them and I’ve known their children as they were born. 

Reporter:  Do you think it’s appropriate for them to be listening to the subject matter though?

Reynolds:  Sir, I’ll be happy to answer your questions, I’m still, uh…

Swell.  Just swell.  They have a uTube up of the press conference at Firedoglake, and the still clearly shows Reynolds surrounded by a room full of very small children and a few other adults.  So.  We have one congressional republican using kids for Internet sex, and another one using them as literally human shields to deflect hard questions from the press.  I don’t think America can take much more of all this Family Values stuff.

Years from now…when hopefully this episode in American history is just a bad dream…take this one thing away from it if you take away nothing else:  It isn’t the quest for virtue and morality and values that turns people into this.  It’s the belief that you embody those things.   It isn’t power that corrupts absolutely…it’s arrogance.