This is not your typical newsletter from Outsidepride.com, Inc. In fact, this is the first one in six years which is not business related. I apologize for cluttering your inbox with an unsolicited email; however you are free to unsubscribe just by clicking the link at the bottom.
I want to share with you my television viewing experience the other night on prime time television. I ask those of you who agree with me to go to www.cbs.com and go to the bottom of the page, click the feedback link and express your opinion. I know the vast majority of you will agree with me as all polls indicate. We are the majority, not the minority as the liberal media would lead you to believe.
My wife and I sat down to watch television the other night with our children. Cold Case was on which is normally a fairly enjoyable show to watch; however, the last half hour of the show dealt with a young man who wished he had asked his male friend to come with him (long story short). The show ended with the two men hugging and obvious intimation they had discovered their gay feelings towards each other. The very next show was Without A Trace. The whole last half hour of this show was about two lesbians who were struggling with their feelings of lesbianism. It ended with full acceptance from one father and the two lesbians making out. Yes, they were kissing right at the end of the show on public prime time television. So much for wholesome family television.
Now, I am NOT trying to bash homosexuals and I am not a bigot; however, I feel homosexuality is morally wrong and should not be "promoted" as what is the norm for society. Text books are being rewritten as I am writing this to "highlight" every homosexual who has made a contribution to society. There are teachers who have been asked to make sure students know that, "This person in history was a homosexual." History is being rewritten to promote homosexuality and prime time television is doing its best to make homosexuality a "normal" behavior. If homosexuality was the norm, civilization would have ceased to exist thousands of years ago. Procreation takes a man and a woman. There was Adam and then there was Eve, not Adam and Steve.
There are literally tens of thousand of you reading this email right now. If you are tired of the way public television is going let CBS know! It will only take about 1 minute of your time. Again, just go to www.cbs.com and click the feedback link at the bottom. It is time the majority speak up and not let the minority run this country. The majority can bring back the Christian heritage this country was founded on because it is, "In God We Trust."
Thank you for your time,
Troy Hake
President
Outsidepride.com, Inc.
No Troy…you’re not a bigot. You just assume that everyone who does business with you is heterosexual but you’re not a bigot. You just want gay people to live their lives in the closet safely out of the sight of normal people because even the simplest gesture of love and affection between them are "gay feelings" and not simply the feelings all human beings feel towards the ones they love, and you’re not a bigot. And those "gay feelings" are immoral whether or not they lift and sustain the lives of gay people in exactly the same ways that feelings of love and affection otherwise lift and sustain the lives of heterosexuals, and you’re not a bigot. And a kiss between two heterosexuals who love each other is wholesome but a kiss between a same sex couple who love each other just as much is not because that isn’t love it’s "gay feelings" and you’re not a bigot. And there are no gay kids in schools anywhere because no homosexual was ever a kid once who had to endure a relentless torrent of bullying and messages of disgust and loathing and shame and you’re not a bigot. And schools shouldn’t teach kids a few honest facts about homosexuality because schools exist only to enforce the worldview of you and your religion and you’re not a bigot. And anyone who doesn’t agree with you isn’t a Christian like you are and you’re not a bigot. Well…actually you are Troy.
What the fuck…you run a lawn and garden business and you don’t think you have any gay customers? You didn’t think you had any heterosexual customers with gay kids…or gay siblings…or gay friends? You just thought that spitting in your customer’s faces was a great way to do business? No…you’re a bigot, and bigots just can’t keep their goddamned knees from jerking can they Troy? Hey…you unwholesome destroyer of civilization…wanna buy some garden soil from me? I am not a bigot.
Support for a fair-housing ordinance that prohibits discrimination against gays and lesbians has cost Orange County [Florida] Mayor Rich Crotty the support of his biggest re-election backer.
The county Commission voted unanimously last month to expand the existing law to include gays. (story)
Last week Tom Hutchison, the chief executive officer of CNL Hotels & Resorts Inc., informed Crotty that he would have nothing more to do with the mayor’s re-election campaign. He had been a key fundraiser and had served on the campaign steering committee.
In an email to Crotty, Hutchinson attributed his decision to Crotty’s "favoring the absolutely ridiculous vote on legal protection for equal housing for gays."
"I am not interested in supporting candidates with seemingly zero Christian biblical principals on the issues regarding the alternative gay lifestyle," the email said.
After the email to the mayor became public CNL quickly disassociated itself from Hutchinson’s statements, saying he was speaking as a citizen and his views did not reflect those of the company.
Whoops! Kindly disregard that raving lunatic who happens to be our CEO…
Hutchinson also issued a public statement to the Orlando Sentinal which the paper noted appeared at odds with the email he sent to the mayor
"I do not believe in discrimination of any kind, for any reason – period," it said. "I am thankful that this is a community that embraces the individual views of all its citizens."
I don’t believe in discrimination of any kind, I just support discrimination of some kinds. And if you oppose the discrimination of any kind that I don’t believe in I will withdraw my support for you. And please don’t hold me accountable for the discrimination I support, but don’t believe in.
Please Know From My Heart That I Am Not An Anti-Semite. I Am Not A Bigot.
Sure thing Mel…
"For 1,950 years [the church] does one thing and then in the ’60s, all of a sudden they turn everything inside out and begin to do strange things that go against the rules. Everything that had been heresy is no longer heresy, according to the [new] rules. We [Catholics] are being cheated… The church has stopped being critical. It has relaxed. I don’t believe them, and I have no intention of following their trends.It’s the church that has abandoned me, not me who has abandoned it."
Mel Gibson, in an interview with El Pais in January 1992, discussing why his brand of Traditionalist Catholicism does not subscribe to the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 rulings on various subjects including who was responsible for the death of Jesus Christ.
"Why are they calling her a Nazi? …Because modern secular Judaism wants to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church. And it’s a lie. And it’s revisionism. And they’ve been working on that one for a while."
On criticism of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a nineteenth-century nun whose writings influenced his portrayal of Jesus’ death. The New Yorker, September 15, 2003
"That’s bullshit…I don’t want to be dissing my father. He never denied the Holocaust; he just said there were fewer than six million. I don’t want them having me dissing my father. I mean, he’s my father."
On allegations that his father is a Holocaust denier. The New Yorker, September 15, 2003
"I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union."
In The New York Post, January 30, 2004
"They take it up the ass. This [pointing to his butt] is only for taking a shit."
When asked what he thinks of homosexuals in an interview with El Pais in January 1992
"With this look, who’s going to think I’m gay. I don’t lend myself to that type of confusion. Do I sound like a homosexual? Do I talk like them? Do I move like them?"
When asked during the El Pais interview if he is afraid of being mistaken for a homosexual, because he is an actor.
"I have no idea how anti-Semitism entered into it. But I do feel that gay people will burn in hell. Their way of life goes completely against God’s plan for procreation."
"Fucking Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."
During his arrest for driving under the influence, July 2006
"What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?"
To a female sergeant during his arrest for DUI
"In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson’s Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images."
It’s worth noting that The Man Without A Face, was produced after Gibson’s homophobic outburst in El Pais, and was widely taken at the time (mostly by heterosexuals sympathetic to Gibson) as a kind of apology to the gay community. I’ve read the book the film was based on, I still have it on my shelves. The story is about a young boy growing up in an emotionally abusive family, who turns to an older neighbor for support and guidance. As their relationship develops, the boy finds himself experiencing a nascent sexual awakening and desire for the older man, which the older man gently but firmly turns aside. He is not interested in having a sexual relationship with the boy, he just wants to help him through a difficult time in his life, despite the suspicions of the local townsfolk. The final confrontation in the book comes when the boy discovers that the man really was a homosexual, and he lashes out at him in fear and confusion over his own sexual orientation.
The story is about growing up, trust, and what it is to genuniely love someone. It’s about accepting differences in others, accepting yourself and not running away from your life. The punchline is that the man was gay, and so was the boy, yet the man did not take advantage of him. There was real love and friendship there between them, that was taken away and destroyed by fear and prejudice. The prejudice of the townspeople, and the boy’s own fears and doubts about himself. Gibson, in making the film, turned the man into a heterosexual who had only been mistaken for a homosexual once in his life, when he was falsely accused of having an affair with a former student, effectively nullifying the book’s point that to be homosexual isn’t necessarily to be a child molester, and thereby weakening the impact of its message about love. The townsfolk were right about the man…and yet they were wrong. The boy lashed out at the man from fear of something within himself. This is what prejudice does to us…it tears us apart from within, tears neighbor from neighbor, friend from friend. But Gibson could not bring himself to make that film. So he turned the story into a tale about the unjust persecution of a heterosexual. Yet to this day people point to this film, Gibson’s directorial debut, as some kind of proof that Gibson really isn’t a homophobic bigot after all.
So when Gibson offered to make a film about the Holocaust after the outrage over Passion of the Christ…I laughed. Some blogger wag whose name I cannot recall just now, joked that in his script for his Holocaust film, Gibson changes the story to make it a bunch of Jews who kill six million Nazis. But no…he would have made a very nice film about the crimes against the Jews by the Third Reich, and few would have noticed that the film’s basic premise was, as Gibson’s father insists, that the killing of Jews by the Nazis wasn’t anything special or systematic, because a lot of people died during world war II.
At the root of prejudice is a terrible blindness to the humanity of the hated other. The hated other is not really human, so the things that happen to them are not remarkable. It is only injustice when bad things happen to real people. Not when it happens to Jews. Not when it happens to women who challenge the authority of men. Not when it happens to homosexuals. That is the message of every film Mel Gibson has ever made. It is what he believes. It is his bedrock. You saw it again last week in Malibu, without the silver screen makeup.
So is the breakfast toast in the congressional cafeterias, with both fries and toast having been liberated from the appellation "freedom."
Three years after House Republicans trumpeted the new names to get back at the French for snubbing the coalition of the willing in Iraq, congressmen don’t even want to talk about french fries, which are actually native to Belgium, and toast.
Neither Reps. Bob Ney of Ohio nor Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, the authors of the culinary rebuke, were willing this week to say who led the retreat, as it were, from the frying pan. But retreat there has been, as a casual observer can see for himself in the House’s basement cafeterias.
"We don’t have a comment for your story," said a spokeswoman for Mr. Ney.
Welcome back to planet earth, jackass. Remember when they were saying the war would be over in a matter of days? Flowers, they were going to shower our troops with. And…and…the oil we got out of Iraq would make the war pay for itself. Well…no. Here’s how you pay for war…
By Brian MacQuarrie
The Boston Globe
August 2, 2006
WASHINGTON — President Bush came and sat by the side of Sergeant Brian Fountaine, a 24-year-old tank commander from Dorchester, a gung-ho soldier who had lobbied to be deployed a second time. Now Fountaine was among the wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, his legs amputated below the knees after an explosion June 8 ripped apart the Humvee in which he was riding.
The president chatted about the sergeant’s beloved Red Sox, but made no reference to the war, the soldier said.
If the topic had come up, the president might not have liked what Fountaine had on his mind. In a dramatic change of heart, Fountaine now considers the war a military quagmire in which American soldiers are caught in a deadly vise between irreconcilable enemies.
In his view, troop morale has plummeted, suicide has increased, and the sacrifices being made in American blood and treasure suddenly seem questionable.
The war began with the justifiable goal of toppling a reckless, dangerous dictator in Saddam Hussein, the soldier said. But as the country slides toward civil war, Fountaine added, the goal of a democratic Iraq seems more distant by the day.
"You have to wonder, what exactly are we doing?" Fountaine said. "In my opinion, [Iraq] is a country that has been at war with itself and with other enemies for thousands of years. And we’re supposed to make them happy? I don’t think so. I don’t see it happening."
When asked if history will justify the life-altering sacrifice he has made, Fountaine paused for several seconds, lowered his head, and slowly replied: "If in 10 or 20 years, if Iraq is in the same spot and America is still losing boys over there, then, no, I think my sacrifice will be as futile as anyone else’s."
That sacrifice has been profound, excruciatingly exacted from Fountaine’s body by two large bombs on a dusty road a dozen miles north of Baghdad.
The pain has been both physical and psychic. On June 30, while visiting the Marine Corps War Memorial in a wheelchair he was still learning to use, Fountaine lost control and fell over. Nothing he experienced in the explosion outside Taji — not the searing burn, not the loss of blood, not the experience of binding his own mangled legs with tourniquets — equaled the humiliation of that moment.
…
"When you swing your legs over the side of the bed, you wonder why your feet don’t hit the floor," Fountaine said. "And then you remember: It’s because you don’t have feet, stupid."
When historians question how the United States of America managed to get itself dragged by a smirking spoiled silver spoon jackass brat into a useless pointless war that eventually turned the entire middle east into a raging conflagration, these four words will explain it all: Freedom Fries…Freedom Toast…
Just over three years after the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, and the middle east is a horrific mess. Say…weren’t the Iraqis supposed to welcome us with roses? Wasn’t democracy supposed to spread like wildfire across the middle east? We’ll be cleaning up after president codpiece’s excellent adventure for generations. But that’s not to say all the news from the middle east is grim. Sometimes it’s funny-grim.
Take the case of Danish imam Ahmed Akkari, of Lebanese birth, who single-handedly instigated months of raging anger in the Muslim world over twelve cartoons of the prophet Mohamed published in a Danish newspaper. The twelve cartoons not being offensive enough, the good imam traveled throughout the Muslim world showing people pictures of things he claimed were images of the prophet produced by the Danes, that actually weren’t. There was a picture of a man wearing a pig mask, that Akkari claimed was a Danish man mocking Mohamed. It turned out to have been a newspaper photo taken at a pig calling contest. Akkari claimed another photo showing a cartoon of Mohamed as a pedophile was also printed in Jyllands-Posten. It wasn’t. Lying through your teeth to incite mob violence is standard operating procedure for all religious zealots, regardless of the specifics of the faith. For his trouble, Akkari got the Danish embassy in Lebanon burned down.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Denmark and Sweden were front-runners in the race to rescue foreigners fleeing the violence in Lebanon, nearly completing the evacuations of more than 10,000 citizens Friday while many other countries struggled to get their nationals out.
The Scandinavians credited new crisis response plans streamlined after bitter lessons learned during the tsunami disaster in 2004.
"It would be fair to say that what we’re able to do now is something we learned from the tsunami," said Lars Thuesen, coordinator of the Lebanon evacuations for the Danish Foreign Ministry.
By Friday morning, Sweden had already evacuated 6,400 citizens while Denmark had shipped out 5,000 nationals from Lebanon — more than any other countries. Both governments said only a few hundred of their citizens remained.
By contrast, the U.S. evacuation efforts were just entering high gear Friday…
…
The Danes got a test run in crisis management earlier this year when newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad triggered violent protests against Danish embassies in Muslim countries.
One of the Danish Muslims who spearheaded the rallies against the prophet drawings, Lebanese-born Ahmad Akkari, was among those evacuated from Beirut on Thursday.
"My impression is that the transportation has been safe and that no one has been suffering," Akkari told Denmark’s TV2 channel as he boarded a Greek ferry chartered by Denmark.
How nice that no one is suffering Akkari. No thanks to you and your kind. And while you’re riding your boat to safety, say thank you to the nice Danes, who despite your inciting mob violence all over the world and getting their embassy burned to the ground, were willing to give a gutter crawling murderous lout like you a ride out of harm’s way.
Say hello to the cartoonists whose lives you put in jeopardy when you get back to the safety of Denmark fella.
I have to say that this "news analysis" in the NYT of the court decisions in New York and Georgia is one of the dumbest pieces of journalism I have read in a very long time. "For Gay Rights Movement, A Key Setback"? In some ways, I think the New York Court of Appeals decision will help, rather than hurt, the cause of marriage equality in the long run. Why? Because it will force the issue into legislatures, where it is best tackled, and where we will eventually win, and in one case, California, have already won.
If Sullivan thinks that this country could have overcome race segregation at the polls in the 1950s and 60s, had the Warren court reaffirmed the constitutionality of race segregation instead of striking it down, he’s smoking crack. Some states Still have those laws on the books, and voters have doggedly refused to remove them, even though they are no longer enforceable…
Alabama Vote Opens Old Racial Wounds
School Segregation Remains a State Law as Amendment Is Defeated
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — On that long-ago day of Alabama’s great shame, Gov. George C. Wallace (D) stood in a schoolhouse door and declared that his state’s constitution forbade black students to enroll at the University of Alabama.
He was correct.
If Wallace could be brought back to life today to reprise his 1963 moment of infamy outside Foster Auditorium, he would still be correct. Alabama voters made sure of that Nov. 2, refusing to approve a constitutional amendment to erase segregation-era wording requiring separate schools for "white and colored children" and to eliminate references to the poll taxes once imposed to disenfranchise blacks.
The vote was so close — a margin of 1,850 votes out of 1.38 million — that an automatic recount will take place Monday. But, with few expecting the results to change, the amendment’s saga has dragged Alabama into a confrontation with its segregationist past that illuminates the sometimes uneasy race relations of its present.
The outcome resonates achingly here in this college town, where the silver-haired men and women who close their eyes and lift their arms when the organ wails at Bethel Baptist Church — a short drive from Wallace’s schoolhouse door — don’t have to strain to remember riding buses past the shiny all-white school on their way to the all-black school.
"There are people here who are still fighting the Civil War," said Tommy Woods, 63, a deacon at Bethel and a retired school administrator. "They’re holding on to things that are long since past. It’s almost like a religion."
If the supreme court suddenly reversed itself on race segregation, you would, never doubt it, see some states rushing to put the Whites Only signs back up. Perhaps not a majority of American states would do that. And yes, those that did would suffer economic consequences, as people and corporations began to boycott them. But you have to have seen racism in America, seen how endemic it is, seen how even poor white people will reliably vote against their economic interests to maintain their status over blacks, to appreciate its intractable power. I’ve witnessed it first hand. Without the courts again and again overruling the popular will of the voters, without a doubt we would still have legal race segregation in America today.
The roll of the courts is to protect the rights of the individual against the power of the other branches of government. The other branches of government speak for the people. The courts speak for the constitution. They abdicate that responsibility, and all we are left with is mob rule, and that is what Sullivan is arguing for here. The argument that Sullivan is making can also be made for letting the states decide on sodomy laws, which puts us right back where we were before Lawrence, criminals literally in some states, and second class citizens everywhere else. Sodomy laws were used to justify discrimination against gay Americans in everything from custody battles to employment to equal housing laws. Those laws reached across the borders of their states, and into the lives of gay Americans no matter where we lived. These state laws and amendments banning same sex marriage will do the same. Note how, even though same sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts, out of state gay couples cannot marry there if their home states do not allow it. This is the situation mixed race couples faced, before Loving v. Virginia, another court decision that overruled the clear will of the majority of Americans. The Lovings’ case came to the courts after the couple married where it was legal, and were arrested for doing so when they returned to Virginia. The day is coming, when a same sex couple will find themselves under arrest, for exactly the same crime, and Sullivan is arguing that this is a good thing, and the courts should stay out of it.
Perhaps eventually gay citizens could find themselves one day in an America that was, for them, nearly half free and half not. But we will never be completely free as Americans, until we are as a class equal to our heterosexual neighbors, in every state. That will only happen, when the courts decide to do their fucking jobs, and defend the promise of liberty and justice for all in our constitution, against the tyranny of the mob.
In another post, Sullivan says we just need to "chill". But as William Lloyd Garrison once said, tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm.
It’s the flagpole at one of those churches that look nothing like churches, just down the road from Love In Action in Memphis. The church it’s in front of has no steeple, nothing at all in it’s style or structure to suggest that it’s even a church at all. It looks from the road, like your basic office building. Seems the god of the white upper class, at least in the bible belt these days, likes its sanctuaries to look like either office buildings, or shopping malls. A look perhaps befitting fundamentalism’s new emphasis on worldly things.
I can’t say much about the rest of the bible belt because I haven’t wandered there much, but Memphis seems to have more megachurches that look like shopping malls per capita then the rest of America has shopping malls. There’s Germantown Baptist, which I visited the last time I was down there. Nestled in the midst of a very well-to-do suburb of Memphis, it has it’s own tennis courts, day care, and big screen TV’s inside the sanctuary, so the folks in the back rows can see what’s happening on the stage. Then there is the place the locals call Six Flags Over Jesus…Bellevue Baptist Church. I’ve not been there yet, but the locals say it not only has the big screen TVs mounted on either side of the stage like Germantown, but TV cameras mounted on cranes that can pan around and capture all the action for the TV audience. It’s got a bookstore, A GRACE Family Life Center, a JOY Christian Recreation Complex, a Love building, a Praise building, a really nice website where you can find a link to their Live Sermon Webcast, and a User Agreement with this wee notice:
Hypertext Link: You may provide a hypertext link to this web site on another web site only upon the receipt of written consent from Bellevue. To receive such consent, fill out a request form. Upon receipt of written consent, you may provide a link in the following manner: (a) the link points to the URL http://www.bellevue.org and not to the pages within the site; (b) the appearance, position or other aspects of the link do not create a false impression that Bellevue is associated with, or endorses, another web site, church or product; (c) the link does not dilute or damage Bellevue’s trademarks, service marks or goodwill; (d) the link does not display Bellevue’s web site with frames. Bellevue may revoke its consent to the link at any time in its sole discretion.
We all have to protect our brand I guess.
Okay…so much so obvious. You’ve all heard me going on about megachurches before. But last night I was surfing my bookmarks and via The Flypaper Theory I discovered World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church, and I think they’ve done them all better. World Overcomers Outreach Ministries has a grand Walk Of Nations entranceway, a bookstore, a gym, an Olympic sized swimming pool, a bowling alley, a video arcade, and a pool hall. I’m a bit surprised they don’t have a bar somewhere in there too. The next step, is for someone to put a floating megachruch on the river somewhere, with a casino inside. But to make sure they leave their competition in the dust, World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church are even building their own Statue Of Liberty.
Well…kind of…
Our Lady Of Manifest Destiny, as PeskyFly puts it. I had to stare at it for about five minutes before I could convince my brain of what my eyes were seeing. The torch is gone, replaced by a cross. The tablet that once read July 4th, 1776, has been replaced by the ten commandments. And yes, they will unveil the thing tomorrow, on the fourth of July, 2006. According to this article in the Memphis Commerical Appeal, the seven spikes on her crown that represent the seven seas of the world has been changed to signify the seven redemptive names of Christ. The crown itself has been inscribed with the name "Jehovah". An old colossus, to replace the new one given this nation as a token of esteem once upon a time…
The New Colossus
by Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
The lamp of course, had to go, because the golden door has to go. Yearning to breath free are you? Don’t you know that freedom is only possible if you believe what we tell you to believe, live how we tell you to live, and worship how we tell you to worship? Democracy is a lie straight from Satan, because only the devil would think up a system of government that gives heathens the same rights as the righteous. Think about it. True freedom means doing what we tell you to do and thinking what we tell you to think because we’re righteous and if you’re not one of us then obviously you aren’t. Give your conscience to us and you’ll be free. We’ve got a really swell video arcade and pool hall you can while away the hours between sermons in. And the TV reception inside the church is great. Have you visited our gift shop yet?
From our Department Of Unsurprising Things… Via The Register…did you know that the Tribulation Forces are monitoring your keystrokes…?
Watchers of right-wing Christian groups in the States say a new apocalyptic videogame released by cultish Revelations-based fiction series Left Behind is riddled with spyware.
Developers have incorporated software from an Israeli firm called Double Fusion. It incorporates video advertising and product placement into the game, and reportedly records players’ behaviour, location, and other data to be uploaded to Left Behind’s Bible-powered marketing machine.
Nice. But the righteous have nothing to fear. If this sort of thing bothers you, you’re probably an agent of Satan anyway. Or a UN Peacekeeper.
In an interview on the series’ website Greg Bauman of Left Behind Games explains: "Left Behind: Eternal Forces will help readers get a sense of the conflict and chaos of the time period portrayed in Left Behind and live out how they would defend themselves and their faith from the Antichrist and his Global Peace Keeping Forces." The United Nations, already organ of satanic machinations for many on the Christian far-right, features strongly in the game. Goat-footed demons reportedly emerge from UN peacekeeping humvees.
Which reminds me of something I was watching unfold in tired resignation the other day…(via Steve Gilliard)
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Americans mistakenly worried the United Nations is plotting to take away their guns on July 4 — U.S. Independence Day — are flooding the world body with angry letters and postcards, the chairman of a U.N. conference on the illegal small arms trade said on Wednesday.
"I myself have received over 100,000 letters from the U.S. public, criticizing me personally, saying, ‘You are having this conference on the 4th of July, you are not going to get our guns on that day,"’ said Prasad Kariyawasam, Sri Lanka’s U.N. ambassador.
"That is a total misconception as far as we are concerned," Kariyawasam told reporters ahead of the two-week meeting opening on Monday.
For one, July 4 is a holiday at U.N. headquarters and the world body’s staff will be watching a fireworks display from the U.N. lawn rather than attending any meetings, he said.
For another, the U.N. conference will look only at illegal arms and "does not in any way address legal possession," a matter left to national governments to regulate rather than the United Nations, he added.
The campaign is largely the work of the U.S. National Rifle Association, whose executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, warns on an NRA Web site (http://www.stopungunban.org/) of a July 4 plot "to finalize a U.N. treaty that would strip all citizens of all nations of their right to self-protection."
Notice how the rank and file just ate it up. Lookout! Lookout! The UN is coming to take your guns away on the forth of July…! And you wonder why some people reflexively associate guns with mentally unstable lunatics. This is exactly why I am not a member of the NRA. That, and their knee jerk support for any gutter crawling bigot running for office who happens to have the right position on gun ownership. And you know what…I’ll bet at least two-thirds of the membership of Pink Pistols bought into this crap too.
These warnings beg a very serious question: can people, children in this case, become homosexuals by exposure to certain ideas and behavior? In other words, can a person who would not otherwise become homosexual, start the behavior, come to prefer it and continue it?
Can a society create more homosexuals? The answer quite clearly is yes. That is how current homosexuals, in fact, came to be. There is no evidence–none– for a genetic origin for homosexuality. That may come as a surprise to many people, but it’s true. It’s even more astonishing when one realizes how many influential groups and people now accept homosexuality as inborn for some, but when you look behind the rhetoric, you find that there is nothing but wishful thinking. For an excellent paper debunking this myth, see Culture and Family Institute’s article at http://www.cwfa.org/images/content/bornorbred.pdf .
In view of this, the promotion of this behavior to our children has incredibly destructive potential, yet this unprecedented trend is occurring with few objections by parents.
People, especially the young, can be seduced into homosexual behavior and have their identity molded around the homosexual lifestyle, through a combination of persuasion and circumstances which may include the following:
• Being convinced homosexuality is acceptable;
• Reading or viewing explicit homosexual pornography;
• A close relationship with a peer who is practicing homosexuality;
• Admiring an older teacher or mentor who is homosexual;
• Attending homosexual social venues (a “gay” club, bar, church youth group);
• Being homosexually molested;
• Having parents who espouse liberal values;
• No strong ties to a conservative church, and hostility toward traditional views.
And in that spirit, I would like to offer my own tips on how to make people homosexual. I should know, right, because I am one. Trust me, this stuff really works. The Gay Mafia could have me silenced for telling you people this stuff…
Vote democratic.
Stand too close to a homosexual on the bus or in the subway. Five minutes might be enough.
Breath in a homosexual’s second hand smoke.
Enter a restaurant where a homosexual is eating.
Call your senator or congressman and ask them to support extending the Voting Rights Act.
If you are a woman, applying for a job outside the home will make you a lesbian.
If you are a man, disrespecting your boss will make you gay.
If you are a woman, enjoying sex will make you a lesbian.
If you are a man, caring that your wife enjoys having sex with you will turn you gay.
Enjoying sex with her will also make you gay.
Yielding the right of way to oncoming traffic makes men gay. Real men don’t yield, they penetrate.
Oppose repealing the Estate Tax
Oppose the war in Iraq.
Question George Bush’s leadership. This one will turn you gay in a heartbeat.
If none of these work, use the following brute force methods. These are guaranteed to work.
Learn something new every day.
Read a book.
Question authority.
Think.
This wicked world is chock full of ways to turn people gay. In point of fact, everything can make you gay. Except when it doesn’t. You have been warned.
Not That We Were Influenced By The Money Or Anything…
Remember that GMC Electric Car exhibit at the Smithsonian…? Oh…missed it did you …
Smithsonian removes electric-car exhibit
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — Just weeks before the release of a movie about the death of the electric car from the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution has removed its EV1 electric sedan from display.
The National Museum of American History removed the rare exhibit yesterday, just as interest in electric and hybrid vehicles is on the rise.
The upcoming film "Who Killed the Electric Car?" questions why General Motors created the battery-powered vehicles and then crushed the program a few years later. The film opens June 30th.
GM happens to be one of the Smithsonian’s biggest contributors. But museum and GM officials say that had nothing to do with the removal of the EV1 from display.
A museum spokeswoman says the museum simply needed the space to display another vehicle, a high-tech SUV.
The Smithsonian has no plans to bring the electric car back on view. It will remain in a Suitland storage facility.
[Emphsis mine…] Nothing to see here people… Just another proud American institution of science and history kowtowing to the political realities of our times. Move along…move along… Perhaps you’d like a nice trip to the Grand Canyon gift shop…?
Imagine you’re a columnist. You decide to write something about how the National Park Service is allowing a creationist book to be sold in their Grand Canyon stores, over the protests of its own geologists, who point out that NPS has a mandate to promote sound science. Hawking a book that claims that the Grand Canyon was carved by Noah’s Flood a few thousand years ago is the polar opposite of this mandate. So what do you write? Well, if you’re Republican consultant Jay Bryant, and you’re writing for the conservative web site Town Hall, you declare that this as a clear-cut case of Darwinist atheists censoring freedom of speech in a desperate attempt to squelch Intelligent Design.
They’ll be closing down Cape Canaveral soon, because sending rockets up into space might break the crystal spheres the planets and the sun orbit around the earth in.
The important thing isn’t whether it’s a boy or a girl you have in your arms, but whether or not you care that they’re better for having been loved by you, and not worse.
The invitation arrived in Tokes Osubu’s e-mail inbox on Monday, and the contents astounded him: Black and Latino men were being invited to attend a gay sex party this weekend where condoms would be banned. Show up with a condom, the invitation said, and you’ll be asked to leave.
"I was shocked and disgusted," said Osubu, executive director of Gay Men of African Descent, a Harlem-based nonprofit group battling the HIV/AIDS epidemic among black gay men.
Osubu sent the party’s promoter a letter urging him to reconsider the policy, and the group plans to protest Saturday outside the East Harlem building where the party is scheduled to be held.
The party comes just weeks before the 25th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic and at a time when black men are facing startlingly high HIV infection rates. Nearly half of black men who have sex with men are HIV-positive, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.
"I’m sick of 18-year-olds coming in here HIV-positive," Osubu, 46, said in his East Harlem office. "It’s got to stop."
As I get older I find myself growing more and more accepting of things then I was when I was young and a tad full of myself. I can accept now that for some people, sex is more like a hobby then a passionate joining of two people, body and soul. I’m not interested in having sex with any of them, but they’d probably find me a tad uninteresting anyway. And I really don’t care if some people get into these sex club scenes or how many people they have sex with or how often, as long as there is a measure of compassion and kindness given. Whatever it is you do, you can’t take advantage of or abuse anyone, and you can’t spread disease. You have to leave them better for their encounter with you, even if it’s merely a few moments of casual pleasure, not worse. It doesn’t have to be love…but if you don’t love, you still need to care. And if you don’t care, you’ve no business taking anyone into your arms.
Or…inviting them into your church.
I want to say one more thing to any younger folks who are reading my blog: If the person you are with doesn’t care enough about you to keep you safe from disease, (let alone pregnancy if you’re heterosexual) they do not care about you enough for you to be giving yourself to them. In any sense. Take a walk. Go find the heart that loves you. It’s out there waiting for you. Don’t let anyone, be it a bible thumping nutcase who thinks you don’t deserve honest, factual information about STD prevention, or a really really cute someone who swears they think the world of you, they just think taking precautions is silly, take the possibility of that perfect body and soul love away from you. Nobody who really loves you would ever want to do that to you. That isn’t love…it’s greed. Your body, and your love, are precious things. Give them to the ones who deserve you, the ones who want more then anything for you to be happy, and safe, as the person you are.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has reportedly fired his top aide after discovering the man is gay.
The Mail reports that Stephen Noon’s sexuality was discovered when his long-term partner visited him at his office.
"His partner came to the office at the end of the day and was introduced to the Cardinal," a friend of the couple tells The Mail.
"Shortly afterwards the Church made it clear that his sexuality was incompatible with the job he had to do. Since he was the spokesperson for the Cardinal, Murphy-O’Connor clearly felt he had to act because homosexual acts are regarded by the Church as a sin," the friend was quoted as saying.
You know Murphy…I’ll just bet I could encapsulate your very existance inside a fairly small DOS Batch file…
I like to read Drew Curtis’ Fark.Com precisely for its being such a mixed bag. The Photoshop contests are what I mostly like, but the random news links users throw in there are often interesting too. And sometime the user community response is even more interesting.
The other day, someone posted a link to this story …
Man Allegedly Attacks Quizno’s Cup Mascot
NORTH HUNTINGDON, Pa. — For four years, Tammy Scattell has been hiring teenagers to fill a Quizno’s cup costume and advertise her North Huntingdon Quizno’s store.
Now, she can’t get anyone to do it.
"They’re like, ‘Let’s just give it some time.’ They are afraid to go out now. It’s kind of scary," Scattell said. The cup suit is a great marketing tool.
But police said a teen inside the suit took punches and kicks from a man who pulled over to attack him along Route 30 while his buddies took pictures of it on their camera phones.
A North Huntingdon police officer’s wife saw it happening and called police.
"A young man had jumped out of the vehicle, knocked a boy over in a Quizno’s suit and started kicking him. They got back in the vehicle and took off, and we were able to stop them a short time later," said Patrolman Tom Harris, of the North Huntingdon police. The Quizno’s mascot is OK.
These men face summary disorderly conduct citations:
Nicholas Trumpe, of Elizabeth
Justin Walker and Tony Anthony, of Greensburg
Jeremiah Bozich, of Irwin
Brian Goossen, of Jeannette
Each of the men is in his 20s.
They thought it was funny. Funny enough to take pictures as a keepsake. Maybe show them around to all their friends. Maybe post them on the Internet. Fuckin hilarious… A number of Farkers seemed to agree…
At least he was wearing a cup.
Thereby accomplishing what most of us have always wanted to do to character suited figures, but have never dared.
I so very badly want to do that but I have never seen one in my city.
I have wanted to do this oh so many times.
/minus the camera phones
//maybe just one
Thanks dude who beat up foam Quizno’s cup guy as I’ve wanted to do that as every single time I leave Quizno’s I have the crazy shaits. But I keep on going back.
QiznOWNED
Furries are bad enough. Pervs who dress as inanimate objects deserve whatever they get.
One of them almost gets it though…
When Bestbuy had their grand opened in New Orleans we tried for thirty minutes to get one of my friends to tackle the big stupid looking tag mascot that was waving and just being a general dumbass. Finally after we promised him 40 bucks he agreed. We waited on one of the isles and when the tag was coming by he got a huge running start and speared the crap out of it. We were all in uproarious laughter until we started to hear cries and then the tag unzipped to reveal a 14 year old girl. He got expelled from our school and an assult conviction….
But then he ends it with…
best.bet.evar.
Actually, you and your pals should have been arrested and jailed too, for paying that guy forty bucks to beat up a kid in a costume. Especially the ones who paid to watch it.
The sight of those mascot things usually irritates me, but that’s because I project on them how I would feel if I was trapped in a dead end minimum wage job and forced to humiliate myself in front of every car that drove by my place of work. I am a deathly shy soul, more stage crew then stage, and I would probably walk off the job rather then put one of those goddamned things on. But some people really like doing the mascot thing. I’ve met a few of them over the course of my lifetime, and they’re generally sweet exuberant souls who just want to make everyone smile. Bully bait, in other words.
Let it be said that not everyone in that thread thought what those guys did was funny. A few were pissed off that the only charge leveled against the attackers was disorderly conduct. What kind of person thinks it’s not only funny, but funny enough to take pictures of someone beating up someone else for no other reason then…well…it’s funny to watch someone getting beaten up. The kind of person you don’t really want walking the streets. And precisely because they don’t think its any big deal, and can’t fathom why anyone would want to make a big deal out of it. It was just some kid in a stupid costume…fuckin hilarious watching him trying to fight back from inside that stupid costume… It’s not what people hate that tells you how depraved they are…it’s what makes them laugh.
The Bush Administration announced last week that the nation is no longer losing wetlands–as long as you consider golf course water hazards to be wetlands.
Really.
Thursday (March 30), Interior Secretary Gale Norton called a press conference to claim our long nightmare of wetlands loss had finally come to an end due to unprecedented gains since 1997 (click hear to read the report she cites). However, she then admitted much of that gain has been in artificially created ponds, such as golf course water hazards and farm impoundments.
The sporting community–from Ducks Unlimited to the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership–reacted quickly, and not favorably.
I’ll bet not. Next they’ll be saying that global warming is on the decline, because worldwide sales of air conditioners are up.
John at Americablog posted this open letter from gay Democratic party insider Paul Yandura the other day. It pretty much speaks for me too, and I’d intended to blog a little about it…
Dear Friends:
The Republicans have announced that they intend to use gay equality issues as a divisive election year tactic- AGAIN this year. Neither the DNC, nor any of the national committees (DCCC,DSCC), have a strategy to combat this hatred (unless you count avoidance as a strategy).
For many months a number of us have made appeals to Howard Dean and party officials to care about and defend the dignity of gay and lesbian families and friends, in the same way they defend the dignity of other key constituencies.
As the enclosed article shows, the DNC is fighting the vicious attacks being waged upon immigrants by the Republican party. Its the right thing to do and I applaud their action. Why then is it so difficult for them to do the same for us?
Why are gays and lesbians continually left to fight these battles alone? Where are our allies?
All progressives need to be asking how much has the DNC budgeted to counter the anti-gay ballot initiatives in the states. We also all need to know why the DNC and our Democratic leaders continue to allow the Republicans to use our families and friends as pawns to win elections.
We need answers to these questions. Until we get them my advice is don’t give any more money to the Dems.
-Paul
Well, that’s not my advice. My advice is to give to specific democratic candidates who are willing to stand up for justice and equality for gay and lesbian Americans, and To No One Else until they all grow backbones. But then Dean has to go and do something you’d think was worthy only of Petulant George…
Democratic Party Chair Howard Dean on May 2 fired the party’s gay outreach advisor Donald Hitchcock less than a week after Hitchcock’s domestic partner, Paul Yandura, a longtime party activist, accused Dean of failing to take stronger action to defend gays.
Howard Dean sacked the party’s gay outreach advisor just days after his domestic partner publicly criticized the party chair for failing to stand up for gay families.
Dean immediately hired gay former Democratic Party operative Brian Bond to replace Hitchcock, according to DNC spokesperson Karen Finney, who called Bond a "proven leader."
…
"It was not retaliation," Finney said of Hitchcock’s dismissal. "It was decided we needed a change. We decided to hire a proven leader."
Sell it to the White House Press Corps Finney. I’m not a republican. You can’t expect me to believe transparantly obvious bullshit just because the party leadership tells me to believe it.
Hitchcock declined comment Tuesday night except to confirm that Dean informed him May 2 through a surrogate that he had been terminated. He said he was considering consulting an attorney to decide whether to contest the firing.
"This is retaliation, plain and simple," said Yandura. "This shows what they think about domestic partners."
Yandura said Tuesday night that Dean was using Hitchcock as a "scapegoat" for problems of Dean’s own making.
"All I did was ask questions about what the party and Dean are doing about its GLBT constituency, Yandura said. "I have yet to see any answers."
Well, you just got one. And so did the rest of us. Howard Dean just retaliated against a gay man whose spouse spoke out about the party’s cowardly behavior in the face of republican gay bashing. The same Howard Dean who eliminated the GLBT Outreach Desk, telling the Gay community when we started raising a stink that it was all really an effort to improve outreach to all constituencies. The same Howard Dean who enjoyed much gay support for his 2004 presidential run, based on his signing into law Vermont’s Civil Unions. Somehow, when he became chair of the DNC, some of us expected that the party would actually start fighting back against the bigots, instead of picking a lot of pointless fights with gay democrats. But I guess not. Well…we always were the easy targets…
My advice is still, and now more then ever, to give to, and work for, democrats who are willing to stand up for us. But then it seemed, once upon a time, as though Dean was one of those democrats, didn’t it. I can almost envy the republicans. Life must be so much simpler when all you have to think is what the party tells you to think, and all you have to do is what the party tells you to do.
Something I hadn’t heard about the recent Bin Laden rant, is that he wants the Danish cartoonists who drew Mohammad extradited…to al Qaeda. For a fair trial of course…
Al Qaeda’s leader focused much of his almost 52-minute message on what he continually referred to as “a Zionist-crusader war on Islam,” which he said was shown most explicitly by the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
Muslims consider it sacrilegious to produce a likeness of Mohammad, and the cartoons sparked violent protests throughout the Muslim world.
He said the cartoon controversy was “too serious for an apology” and was the most serious aspect of the alleged war against Islam.
Now, in a babbling rant that touched on “…what he called the slaughter of Muslims in places such as Palestine, Bosnia, Kashmir and Chechnya”, you’d think he’d rank that slaughter at least a tad higher then twelve cartoons of Mohammed. But…no. In the screaming mental chaos of the religious fanatic, bloodshed isn’t nearly as offensive as defiance.
He called for the extradition of those responsible for drawing and publishing the cartoons to be tried by al Qaeda, just as he said the United States and United Nations had demanded he be turned over after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“We demand that their governments hand them over to us to be judged by the law of Allah,” he said.
“This request is from the category of treating in kind, and we say to you, if you have not forgotten, let us remind you that when you announced Osama bin Laden was accused of striking at American interests, you issued a [U.N.] Security Council resolution which was passed unanimously declaring the extradition of Osama was mandatory despite no evidence being provided,” bin Laden said.
Al Qaeda has previously claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks.
In kind. In kind. He really thinks that drawing cartoons of Mohammed is worse then killing Muslims. Perhaps he’d like a few more then. I’d certainly rather draw cartoons then kill anyone.
Damn…I’m going to be so happy when we finally have a president who wants to go after that bastard.
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