I don’t know why so many people seem so surprised about this…

The Enemy At Home – Dinesh D’Souza

Publisher Comments:

Whenever Muslims charge that the war on terror is really a war against Islam, Americans hasten to assure them they are wrong. Yet as Dinesh D’Souza argues in this powerful and timely polemic, there really is a war against Islam. Only this war is not being waged by Christian conservatives bent on a moral crusade to impose democracy abroad but by the American cultural left, which for years has been vigorously exporting its domestic war against religion and traditional morality to the rest of the world.

D’Souza contends that the cultural left is responsible for 9/11 in two ways: by fostering a decadent and depraved American culture that angers and repulses other societies — especially traditional and religious ones — and by promoting, at home and abroad, an anti-American attitude that blames America for all the problems of the world.

Islamic anti-Americanism is not merely a reaction to U.S. foreign policy but is also rooted in a revulsion against what Muslims perceive to be the atheism and moral depravity of American popular culture. Muslims and other traditional people around the world allege that secular American values are being imposed on their societies and that these values undermine religious belief, weaken the traditional family, and corrupt the innocence of children. But it is not "America" that is doing this to them, it is the American cultural left. What traditional societies consider repulsive and immoral, the cultural left considers progressive and liberating.

Taking issue with those on the right who speak of a "clash of civilizations," D’Souza argues that the war on terror is really a war for the hearts and minds of traditional Muslims — and traditional peoples everywhere. The only way to win the struggle with radical Islam is to convince traditional Muslims that America is on their side.

(emphasis mine)  Note the appeals to traditional cultures scattered throughout.  There’s a glaring problem at the core of the book, and what’s remarkable to me is that so many people see it, and yet they don’t.  D’Souza’s book, which places the blame for the 9-11 terrorist attacks squarely on Liberals and western liberal democracy, has been disturbing the comfortable clubhouse atmostphere on the right ever since it came out.  That’s not surprising.  Here’s Stanley Kurtz, dancing around it…

Not only does D’Souza downplay and deny the profound influence of Islam on our current dilemma, he ignores an array of non-religious, or only marginally religious, factors that his own explanation is (or ought to be) directly tied to.

With all the post-9/11 attention to Islam, for example, we’ve given short shrift to Middle Eastern kinship structures-like the Muslim preference for marriage to the father’s brother’s daughter (see “Root Causes”). These marriage and family patterns inhibit political and economic development, block immigrant assimilation, and are indeed directly threatened by the sort of cultural productions D’Souza decries. Yet, while Islamists may seize upon Hollywood films and international productions of the Vagina Monologues as symbols of their underlying objections to modernity, the more important sources of conflict are the distinctively Muslim social practices that generate such complaints to begin with.

In other words, if immigrant British Muslims weren’t secluding their daughters in hopes of preserving family honor and protecting an already promised marriage to a cousin back in Pakistan, they’d be far less upset with Western movies in the first place. What’s driving the distress is less the movies that a daughter sees at college than the fact that British daughters go off to college at all, freely meet men there, and freely choose their husbands from among those men. Other British immigrant communities, with less restrictive family practices, may occasionally grouse about cultural depravity. Yet the complaints are less frequent, less deeply felt, and far less deadly. It’s the marriage practice, not the movie, that counts.

Not quite Stanley…but close.  Here’s Hugh Hewitt, also nearly getting it…

To give us insight into the Jihadist loathing for American culture, D’Souza relies on the writings of the father of modern Radical Islam, Sayyid Qutb. Qutb spent two years in America and then returned to the Middle East thoroughly disgusted by American culture. He spent the rest of his life chronicling his hatred for America’s decadent society.

Here’s where D’Souza is dishonest or careless: He informs the reader that Qutb died in 1966. He fails to inform the reader that the time Qutb spent in America was between 1948 and 1950.

Since D’Souza blames our culture for much of the Islamic world’s animus towards America, this is no small matter. The culture of the 1940’s wasn’t what it is today. Perhaps Qutb was scandalized by pop culture products of the time like the overt raciness of “The Best Years of Our Lives” or the raw sexuality contained on the typical Bing Crosby record; the man was after all a lunatic. But the culture of the late 1940’s contained none of the things that D’Souza so obviously deplores and that he postulates are inflaming the Muslim world. The 1940’s had no filthy hippies, no gangsta rap, no gay weddings.

D’Souza may think it would be a swell thing for us to turn our cultural clock back to 1949. No big deal there – to each his own. The point is that even if D’Souza were able to wave a wand and pull off such a trick, the Jihadists wouldn’t care. Qutb briefly immersed himself in our late 1940’s incarnation and emerged full of hatred.

To his everlasting credit, Hewitt specifically denounces D’Souza’s central claim:

Second, and this is also no small thing, it’s not liberals’ fault. Radical Islam hates a respectable Church-going Presbyterian family man every bit as much as it hates a spoiled libertine like Paris Hilton. As far as radical Islam is concerned, the two are in the same basic class; they’re both infidels. Short of conversion or surrender, there is nothing our society can do to appease radical Islam.

This is all true…but the problem civilization faces today isn’t specific to radical Islam. 

I think the best review of The Enemy At Home I’ve read so far is Bruce Bower’s over at The Stranger.  But Bower, while conservative, isn’t a winger, and he is willing to name the nature of the betrayal that D’Souza’s book represents…

D’Souza (who says he is Catholic) invites us to “imagine how American culture looks and feels to someone who has been raised in a traditional society… where homosexuality is taboo and against the law…. One can only imagine the Muslim reaction to televised scenes of homosexual men exchanging marriage vows in San Francisco and Boston.” Let it be recalled that D’Souza is referring here to a “traditional society” in which girls of 13 or 14 are routinely forced to marry their cousins, and in which the groom, if his conjugal attentions are resisted on the wedding night, is encouraged by his new in-laws to take his bride by force. Such are the sensitivities that, D’Souza laments, are so deeply offended by the American left…

He’s quick to warn, moreover, that in discussing potentially troubling aspects of Muslim culture, “we should be on guard against the blinders of ethnocentrism.” In short, while inviting conservative Christians to buy the idea that Muslim family values are essentially equivalent to their own, he wants them to overlook the multitudinous—and profoundly disturbing—ways in which they aren’t. He labors consistently to minimize this value gap—and thereby reinforce his argument that today’s terrorism (far from perpetrating a centuries-long tradition of violent jihad) is, quite simply, a reaction to America’s post-’60s moral dissipation. He would have his readers believe that if only the U.S. returned to the values of the Eisenhower era, our Muslim adversaries would let us be. But he deliberately obscures the mountains of evidence that for “traditional Muslims,” even small-town 1940s America wouldn’t do.

The question is, would it even do for D’Souza and his neighbors in the kook pews.  I’m not being melodramatic here.

For those who cherish freedom, 9/11 was intensely clarifying. Presumably it, and its aftermath, have been just as clarifying for D’Souza, whose book leaves no doubt whatsoever that he now unequivocally despises freedom—that open homosexuality and female “immodesty” are, in his estimation, so disgusting as to warrant throwing one’s lot in with religious totalitarians…the book he’s written is nothing less than a call for America’s destruction. He is the enemy at home. Treason is the only word for it.

Yes.  Yes it is.  And yet…how many times have we heard the pulpit thumpers of the religious right calling down God’s wrath on America for it’s sins?  Didn’t Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwall state flatly, while the rubble that was once the World Trade Center was still smoldering, that America, specifically American immorality, was to blame for 9-11?  Isn’t there a traveling preacher named Fred Phelps running around the nation hoisting signs at the funerals of dead American soldiers (like he did the funerals of gay people like Matthew Shepard), that praise the terrorists for killing them?  The threat America, the threat civilization itself faces today, isn’t radical Islam, it’s religious fundamentalism.  But you can appreciate why Kurtz and Hewitt are loath to say so…that’s a key part of the republican base nowadays after all isn’t it.

Critics on the right dance around one of the key distinguishing features of that fundamentalism, preferring to refer it delicately a reaction to "immodesty", but note that it isn’t the immodesty of males that’s the issue.  Kurtz nearly says it when he talks about the culture of arranged marriages in Middle eastern cultures.

…for D’Souza, it’s enough to note that the virtues praised by most traditional cultures make up “pretty much the same list.” D’Souza goes so far as to equate “the traditional morality that holds sway in all traditional cultures” with the “virtual moral consensus in America prior to the 1960’s.”

That would certainly have surprised the 1878 Supreme Court, which unanimously rejected the practice of polygamy on the grounds of its incompatibility with democracy. (See “Polygamy Versus Democracy.”) Polygamy, the court said, embodies a “patriarchal principle” characteristic of societies in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa — a principle incompatible with the American system of government.

Now polygamous relationships where they’re entered into freely by both men and women don’t necessarily embody that patriarchal principal.  But where it becomes an enforced polygyny that regards women as the property of men then it isn’t just incompatible with our system of government, it is anathema to the principals of individual liberty and equal justice that is its philosophical bedrock.  You simply cannot sustain a democracy where people are literally regarded as property, as the United States found out during the horrors of our civil war.  That includes women.  And where you find this deeply entrenched religious fundamentalism, you inevitably find a bedrock of hatred toward sexual freedom.  Fundamentalism hates all freedom, but in particular, it absolutely despises the sexual freedom of women. 

And D’Souza has made it abundantly clear in the past, what he thinks of that…

After his 1983 graduation from Dartmouth College, D’Souza moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked for Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a conservative organization strongly critical of coeducation, affirmative action, and campus access to birth control. As writer and editor-in-chief for Prospect, the organization’s magazine, D’Souza wrote a March 1984 cover story identifying a Freshman undergraduate who had begun a sexual relationship with another student against her mother’s wishes. D’Souza offered details of the woman’s sex life, and criticized Princeton University for paying the student’s tuition fees after the student’s mother withdrew financial support.

The ensuing scandal was reported in The New York Times.  D’Souza claimed that the woman’s name had been published as the result of a "proofreading error" and that he "care[s] about the girl; that’s why [he] wrote the story."

No, no…I strongly doubt that was any kind of accident.  What D’Souza was doing there was little different from what the Saudi morality police do every day when they see women who, in their considered opinion, are behaving immodestly and smack them upside the head if they’re feeling good, or cut it off altogether if they’re feeling…well…traditional.  

If you want to know where someone stands in the war between civilization and fundamentalism, their attitudes toward the dignity and equality of women is a good place to start looking.  The fundamentalist hatred of modernity points back, time and again, to its core contempt for women.  And the republican base is just brimming with it.

A few days ago I posted this cartoon about Bill Donohue (he of of the Catholic League) bellyaching that the Edward’s campaign had hired two "trash talking" bloggers, who in his esteemed opinion were anti catholic bigots.  What had apparently set him off was the writing of one of them, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, about the Catholic Church’s war on contraception and abortion.  Well…you can see where this is going…right?

Because I had the nerve to be critical of the Catholic church’s stance on birth control and abortion—nevermind their political opposition to distributing condoms to fight HIV, a stance that has helped usher thousands and possibly millions to their untimely deaths—I’ve gotten a number of letters from people who call themselves “Christians”, as Bill Donohue also calls himself.

Bill managed to get his faithful up in arms over what this woman wrote.  Here is a sampling of what they wrote back…

Andy Driggers from Dallas, TX was also so moved by my criticisms of religious anti-choicers, that he wrote:

Problem with women like you, you just need a good fucking from a real man! Living in Texas myself, I know you haven’t found that real Texan yet. But once your liberal pro feminist ass gets a real good fucking, you might see the light. Until then, enjoy your battery operated toys b/c most real men wouldn’t want to give you the fucking you deserve b/c the shit that would come out of you ears.

An example, from Paul Bernard of Scottsdale, AZ:

i like the way you trash talk i don’t particularly want to have sex with you but i would like a blow job.

Bud Phelps, another person who opposes "bigotry", as defined by right wing shill Bill Donohue.

It’s just too bad your mother didn’t abort you. You are nothing more than a filthy mouth slut. I bet a couple of years in Iraq being raped and beaten daily would help you appreciate America a little. Need a plane ticket ?

Romanco De Leone was also moved by Donohue’s poignant claims about insulating the Catholic church from legitimate criticisms.

YOU RACIST WHORE. FAT UGLY BITCH. SUCK MY LONG COCK ASSHOLE I HOPE YOU KIDS NEVER LIVE AND YOUR PARENTS DIE A TRAGIC DEATH YOU ASSHOLE BITCH!
I HOPE YOUR WOMB IS BARREN AND YOUR CAREER PLUMMETS TO HELL YOU BITCH

Whore.  Bitch.  Slut.  You just need a good fucking from a real man.  There’s the enemy civilization is facing today.  There’s the enemy civilization has always faced.  And there’s the burning core of hatred it feels for it.  We’ve taken their wimmin away from them.  And with that comes all the primitive instincts for survival and aggression of the cornered savage.  They despise civilization, because it frees women from obedience to them; and with that goes the only way they know how to sire children, and acquire status. 

You can argue that American fundamentalists aren’t as violent as Islamic radicals in the grand scheme of things, but I would argue that’s because they don’t feel quite so powerless against their own societies as the Islamists do against the west.  A decisive victory in the culture wars by liberals and moderates against fundamentalism, particularly in the struggle against the independence of the courts, a decisive shift in power toward the democrats and against the republicans, and I believe we’ll all be singing a different tune about that.

And Hewitt, perhaps, is more right then he knows.  The church-going Presbyterian family man, provided he has even a vaguely live and let live attitude, is hated every bit as much, and regarded as no different at all, from the spoiled libertine in the eyes of the Fundamentalist.  He could be opposed to abortion, and yet if he  does not object to contraception then he might as well be an abortionist.  He could be opposed to same-sex marriage and if he is willing to grant gay couples Any kind of legal status, even merely hospital visitation rights, then he might as well be a homosexual himself.  If he is willing to grant people any kind of sexual freedom, no matter how limited, then he is the enemy, and he must be destroyed. 

You can argue that the entire religious right mindset is one of assumed priviledge and status over others.  That, we are the people of God and the rest of you are the devil’s tools attitude.  Nationalism.  Racism.  Homophobia.   But I am convinced now that it all reaches its climax in its need to dominate women.  Reading the rhetoric and watching all the flag waving going back and forth between the middle eastern radicals and our own home grown ones since 9-11, I am convinced now that at its core the war between civilization and fundamentalism is a fight who owns women’s bodies.  Everything else about it springs from that one central obsession.  The attacks on science, the attacks on liberal democracy, public education, science, contraception, sexual license, pop culture…anything that enables a world where women might even want to choose for themselves is the enemy, and must be destroyed. 

Even I think, the war on homosexuality.  Notice how it’s almost always male homosexuality that they bellyache the most about.  People smirk that it’s because lesbians titulate them, but in the kook pews lesbians are thoroughly destested too, because they reject men.  But with gay males the hatred seems to burn a tad hotter, and I think it’s more then their regarding us as traitors to our gender.  We’re the ones whose sexuality demonstrates that males can take their lovers as equals, that a male doesn’t have to be dominant, that he can be taken and well as take, can give themselves wholeheartedly to their mate as well as recieve, can…well…be fucked after all…and still be gloriously, assertively male.  How do you beat into a woman’s head that men were created by God to be the head of the household, to which they must Gracefully Submit, when that kind of thing is going on?  We are males whose sexuality completely denies the theology of natural male dominance.  The street punk may feel his brittle manhood threatened by the sight of two guys holding hands and lash out, but this is why the mullahs say we have to be stoned to death.  We break the sexual pecking order.

At the core of its hatred, with all it’s higher principles stripped away, fundamentalism is about women, of that I am currently convinced.  Western civilization and its liberal democracies have taken their wimmin away.  For that they have to be destroyed.

Is it really so surprising that a man who plastered the intimate details of a female college student’s sex life across the pages of his magazine because she was defying her parents, that rails against birth control, co-habitation and women who find fulfillment outside of the home, would write a book essentially siding with terrorists from a "traditional culture" that views rape as a legitimate means of controlling its women?  No.  Not really.  What’s surprising is that more of them don’t say so outright like he did.  I’ve been waiting now, pretty much since 9-11, for someone on the far right to write the book D’Souza did.  If I’m surprised about anything, it’s that it’s taken so long.

Theo Hobson, writing in the Comment Is Free section of the Guardian Online, makes an interesting argument as to why the fight over gay rights is different from others.  He’s speaking to the struggle within various religious denominations, but he could just as well be speaking to the fight in society as a whole…

What emerged from the gay adoption business is that the issue of homosexuality is terribly dangerous to the Roman Catholic church. It comes away from such a debate with its public image damaged. And of course this is true of the Anglican Church too. Indeed, it seems to me that the debate about homosexuality poses such a serious threat to organised religion in this country that it is not absurd to compare it to the reformation of the 16th century.

Some will reply that the churches have always faced difficult moral issues, and they have muddled through: the gay issue is nothing unusual. Until quite recently I would have agreed. But it becomes ever clearer that the issue of homosexuality really is different. It has managed to tie the finest Anglican theologian of his generation in knots, effectively disabling him from leadership. And more widely and more seriously it is undermining the churches’ claim to the moral high ground.

…

Firstly, this is an issue that shuns compromise. It has a stark "either/or" quality. Either homosexuality is a fully valid alternative to heterosexuality or it is not. There is no room for compromise, no third way: poor Rowan Williams is trying to make himself a perch on a barbed-wire fence. You don’t find such absoluteness in other moral debates, such a complete absence of shared assumptions and aims.

I think you do, and the obvious example of it is the fight over abortion.  But here’s the critical difference, even with that bitter struggle:

The public change in attitudes towards homosexuality is not just the waning of a taboo. It is not just a case of a practice losing its aura of immorality (as with premarital sex or illegitimacy). Instead, the case for homosexual equality takes the form of a moral crusade. Those who want to uphold the old attitude are not just dated moralists (as is the case with those who want to uphold the old attitude to premarital sex or illegitimacy). They are accused of moral deficiency. The old taboo surrounding this practice does not disappear but "bounces back" at those who seek to uphold it. Such a sharp turn-around is, I think, without parallel in moral history.

These factors have combined to make the gay issue the church’s perfect storm, perhaps even its nemesis. Because previous shifts in public morality have been slower, and more amenable to compromise, the Church has been able to move its clunky stone feet, and keep standing. This shift has floored it. By resisting the new moral orthodoxy on homosexuality, and hardening against it, the church is fast losing the aura of moral authority it has more or less retained all this time. When a bishop defends discrimination against homosexuals he is, in the eyes of most of the population, displaying a lamentable moral deficiency.

So the issue of homosexuality has the strange power to turn the moral tables. The traditional moralist is subject to accusations of immorality. And this inversion is doing terrible damage to the Christian churches.

(Emphasis mine) And there it is.  At least in the abortion fight, there are two plausibly moral sides to it, that of concern for the life of the unborn, verses concern for the lives of women.  And there is a more general question of who decides how your own body is to be used.  But in arguments over homosexuality, there is only the judgment that same sex relationships are either damaging in some way, damaging enough to justify acting against them, or they are not.  You can take a stand for the rights of women to decide for themselves how and when to give birth, and still be forced to concede that the other side in the fight may well feel compelled to fight for the lives of the unborn, even against the lives of the living.  You can disagree with it, you can disagree profoundly with it, but there it is.  But in the case of homosexuality, there is only the damage that is done to gay people.  Either homosexuality is destructive or it is not.  And if it is not, then what have you been doing all this time to homosexual people?  Every same sex relationship torn asunder is either two souls saved, or two loving hearts cut to ribbons. 

One side in this fight, has a lot of human misery and grief to answer for.   And the time is long past for claiming that you couldn’t have known the damage you were doing.  Back in the 1950s, when gay people were still living their lives in the shadows, and at least plausibly throughout the 60s and much of the 70s, when gay people were just beginning to step forward in society and demand their place at the table, you could argue that you didn’t really know any gay people, nor much about their lives other then what you heard in the newspapers and from the guy thumping his pulpit in church.  But there is no excuse from ignorance today.  

And yet you see otherwise decent and intelligent people digging in their heels over it, to ridiculous lengths nowadays, and in the face of overwhelming evidence that not only there is nothing necessarily damaging about homosexuality, but that same sex romantic love and intimacy is just as necessary and life affirming for gay people, as it is for heterosexuals.  It’s startling to look at sometimes.  The opposition to this is essentially boxing itself in the same coffin made of junk science and religious dogma that the creationists have.  Why?  For some I’m sure it’s fear of loosing their brittle faith, the only thing keeping them afloat in a rapidly changing world.  But for others, the ones who are otherwise more flexible in their spirituality, more able to cope with change, it’s something far more disturbing then the loss of one’s inner bearings.  They can feel a mountain of guilt hanging just over their heads. 

What have we been doing to these people all this time?  What have we done?  What have I done? 

Every time the homophobes put one of those all embracing anti-same sex marriage amendments forward, the ones that ban Any legal recognition whatsoever of same sex couples, they take pains to reassure the public that their amendment isn’t intended to strip everything away from same sex couples.  Oh no…they say…it’s only about keeping marriage between a man and a woman.  The gays will still have rights too, they claim.  Just not the right to marry.

They lie.

Court rules gay couples can’t receive health insurance benefits

Public universities and governments can’t provide health insurance to the partners of gay employees without violating the state constitution, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled Friday.

A three-judge panel said a 2004 voter-approved ban on gay marriage also applies to same-sex domestic partner benefits.

"The marriage amendment’s plain language prohibits public employers from recognizing same-sex unions for any purpose," the court said.

The decision reverses a 2005 ruling from an Ingham County judge who said universities and governments could provide the benefits.

A constitutional amendment passed by Michigan voters in November 2004 made the union between a man and a woman the only agreement recognized as a marriage "or similar union for any purpose." Those six words led to a fight over benefits for gay couples.

Gay couples and others had argued the public intended to ban gay marriage but not block benefits for domestic partners.

But the court said: "It is a cornerstone of a democratic form of government to assume that a free people act rationally in the exercise of power, are presumed to know what they want, and to have understood the proposition submitted to them in all of its implications, and by their approval vote to have determined that the proposal is for the public good and expresses the free opinion of a sovereign people."

Dig it.  This is what the bigots behind the amendment were telling the public before the vote:

In Michigan, Citizens for Protection of Marriage repeatedly stated in its literature and in press interviews that a ban on same–sex marriage would not affect domestic partnership benefits.

“This has nothing to do with taking benefits away,” Marlene Elwell, campaign director, told USA Today on October 15, 2004. “This is about marriage between a man and a woman.”

The campaign’s communications director was equally adamant. The proposal would have no effect on gay couples, Kristina Hemphill told the Holland Sentinel. “This amendment has nothing to do with benefits,” she said.

They were saying this, even as they were pushing an amendment whose text clearly read:

To secure and preserve the benefits of marriage for our society and for future generations of children, the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose."

And that’s standard operating procedure for the religious right: lie through your teeth…Jesus won’t mind if you’re doing it for him. 

But look at what the judges decided.  Even though the rhetoric coming out of the mouths of the amendment supporters was telling the voters one thing, the voters are assumed to have meant to vote for what they were repeatedly told they weren’t voting for anyway.

And, in a sense, you can’t blame the judges here, because it’s right fucking there in the text of the amendment: "…the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose."  What part of "For Any Purpose" didn’t you understand when you voted?

And you have to figure that a lot of voters Did intend this result, even as they were nodding their heads and saying to themselves yes, yes, yes…this isn’t taking anything at all away from the homos…  Hypocrisy is how you save face, when you’re busy putting a knife in your neighbor’s back.  But given the results in Arizona, I expect that just enough people were fooled by the rhetoric, that the amendment might have failed if they saw clearly what it was they were voting for.  Maybe. 

And of course, that’s exactly why the religious right lies.

So it seems that now you can go to jail for life for committing adultery in Michigan…

Footnote on adultery turns into a spotlighted affair

In Michigan, adultery has long been a felony.

But when a judge warned that unfaithful spouses could technically be sentenced to life in prison, an obscure and seldom-used provision of the state’s criminal law became the subject of international scrutiny.

It’s unclear how serious Judge William Murphy of the Michigan Court of Appeals was when he pointed out the possible consequences of extramarital sex. Some observers say the liberal judge was making a political point by taking a strict interpretation of the law to an absurd conclusion.

Others have suggested Murphy was trying to embarrass Michigan Atty. Gen. Mike Cox, whose office triggered the ruling by appealing for a harsher sentence for a man who traded drugs for sex. In 2005, Cox acknowledged having an adulterous relationship.

Murphy’s adultery bombshell was a footnote in a November ruling on a drugs-for-sex case. But since a Detroit Free Press columnist wrote about the footnote last week, blogs and radio talk shows have debated the pros and cons of life sentences for cheating spouses.

The ruling came in the case of Lloyd Waltonen, 43, a man from Charlevoix in northern Michigan, who supplied a cocktail waitress with the prescription painkiller OxyContin in exchange for sex. Last year, Charlevoix Circuit Judge Richard M. Pajtas sentenced Waltonen to four to 20 years in prison, but dismissed four counts of firstdegree criminal sexual conduct, punishable by a life term, on the basis that the sex was consensual.

The state attorney general’s office successfully appealed Pajtas’ ruling, citing an obscure provision of Michigan’s criminal law, which states that a sexual act committed at the same time as a felony constitutes criminal sexual conduct.

An appellate panel found Waltonen guilty of criminal sexual conduct. He has asked the state Supreme Court to consider an appeal.

In the opinion, Murphy wrote that although legislators may have drafted the law conceiving of scenarios in which there was a violent felony involving forced sex, he was "curtailed by the language of the statute from reaching any other conclusion."

Murphy wrote that a person was technically guilty of firstdegree criminal sexual conduct any time he or she "engages in sexual penetration in an adulterous relationship."

He noted that state law defines first-degree criminal sexual conduct as sexual penetration involving another felony. Because adultery is a felony, he wrote, adulterous sex could result in life imprisonment.

So…dig it.  A wingnut prosecutor on an anti-drug jihad piles a sex charge on top of a drug charge, in order to get a stiffer sentence handed down.  The law he’s trying to bend out of shape here was only intended to apply to violent sex crimes, but never mind…he thinks he can use it any damn way he pleases, because he’s on a mission to clean up what consenting adults do in private.  And it works.  Even better then he probably wanted it too.  See…one of the big jokes here in all this, is that this prosecutor has admitted to having an adulterous affair in his own past…

No one in Michigan has been charged with adultery since 1971.

Nevertheless, defense attorneys across the state are snickering and speculating about the prospect of life in prison for the attorney general.

From his office in Lansing, criminal defense attorney Hugh Clarke Jr. chuckled as he contemplated the idea — apparently raised by colleagues — of setting up a special prosecution team to charge Cox.

"It’s all so silly," he sighed. "I only wish Judge Murphy would have used a different example. The judiciary in Michigan shouldn’t be held up to ridicule because of his use of that analogy."

Cox declined to speak to reporters about Murphy’s ruling. His spokesman, Rusty Hills, said Cox’s adultery was not relevant to the case.

He is trying to get a man sentenced to life in prison for trading drugs for sex, with a completely willing partner, and he thinks his own immorality isn’t an issue.  Well of course not.  Morality laws are for the peasants…to keep them in line.  The authorities live by their own rules, up in Valhalla. 

But this is what happens when the law starts treating purely moral issues as criminals ones.  It’s what happens when the law is reduced to panty sniffing by puritan nutcases who are outraged over the possibility that somewhere someone is having a good time.  Suddenly, we’re all criminals.  Every one of us.  And that’s the point.  All have sinned and all have fallen short of the glory of God…and especially fallen short of the glory God’s right hand men…  If we weren’t here to tell you how to live your lives…who knows what you’d do with them…

But the real belly laugh here isn’t the prospect of a jackass prosecutor getting hung by his own petard.  Here’s the belly laugh, proudly posted on the right wing news site, World Net Daily, and thanks to Pam’s House Blend for catching it…

What do you think of the possibility of life in prison for adultery?

Sex between consenting adults should not be a matter for any criminal court, period	32.43% (1248)

Leave it up to civil courts for monetary damages like alimony, but not jail time	15.75% (606)

Come on, if everyone who committed adutery were jailed, there’d be hardly anyone left on the street	12.16% (468)

Stiff jail time is needed, we have to do something about rampant infidelity	10.63% (409)

A little jail time is proper, but life is preposterous	9.98% (384)

Old Testament laws call for executions, so let’s get back to the Bible	7.28% (280)

Other	4.96% (191)

I agree, life in prison is appropriate	2.60% (100)

Any jail time for adultery is ridiculous in this modern age	2.31% (89)

Life sentence is too light, should be execution according to Sharia law	1.90% (73)

---

TOTAL VOTES: 3848

This is the same crowd that was screaming for blood when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas.  This is the same crowd that thumps the bible like a machine gun constantly on issues of gay rights.  They can cite you chapter and verse each passage in the bible that they believe condemns homosexuality. 

Never mind that Adultery is condemned right in the fucking ten commandments not just once…but if you read it broadly enough, twice:

7. Thou Shalt Not Break Wedlock.

10. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s House; Neither Shalt Covet Thy Neighbor’s Wife, His Manservant, His Maid, His Ox, His Ass, Or Ought That Is His.

-Translated by William Tyndale

Suddenly it’s a whole ‘nother ballgame when it’s a matter of…er…your own balls.  Listening to the American right wing bellyaching about morals and values, right up to the moment the finger turns around and starts pointing right back at them, you really begin to see why Jesus didn’t much like hypocrites.

I forget sometimes how old I am.  This may sound surprising to someone younger, or it might not.  I don’t know.  When I was a kid, I always assumed the adults around me knew how old they seemed to me.  Most of them, certainly acted it.  But I keep forgetting. 

I’m 53, which isn’t all that old objectively.  My body is in good health.  I can see the age setting in on my skin, and in the increasing field of grey in my hair.  But just I don’t feel all that old.  And yet I find myself surrounded more and more by people who don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.  Standing in the line during my draft pre-induction physical is a memory as vivid to me now as when I first lived it (they told me to go back home and put on a few more pounds…and then a few months later the draft was canceled so I didn’t have to go back for a second exam).  The race riots in the late 60s and early 70s.  Watergate…Nixon giving his resignation speech.  Seems like it happened only last week.  The world before the Internet and personal computers.  When the phrase "Made in Japan" denoted junk, not quality.  The local head shop.  The ERA battle.  Underground comix.  The unmitigated hassle of banking before direct deposit and ATM machines.  Ma Bell.  Black and white TVs with vacuum tubes inside.  Duck and Cover.  Cap guns.  The invention of skateboarding.  Meet the Beatles.  Soda cans before they put the pop top on.  Something keeps telling me I’m older then I think.

Mostly…things like this…via Glenn Greenwald…

Rod Dreher is as conservative as it gets — a contributor to National Review and the Corner, a current columnist for The Dallas Morning News, a self-described "practicing Christian and political conservative."

Today, Dreher has an extraordinary (oral) essay at NPR in which he recounts how the conduct of President Bush (for whom he voted twice) in the Iraq War (which he supported) is causing him to question, really to abandon, the core political beliefs he has held since childhood.

Dreher, 40, recounts that his "first real political memory" was the 1979 failed rescue effort of the U.S. hostages in Iran. He says he "hated" Jimmy Carter for "shaming America before our enemies with weakness and incompetence." When Reagan was elected, he believed "America was saved." Reagan was "strong and confident." Democrats were "weak and depressed."

In particular, Dreher recounts how much, during the 1980s, he "disliked hippies – the blame America first liberals who were so hung up on Vietnam, who surrendered to Communists back then just like they want to do now." In short, Republicans were "winners." Democrats were "defeatists."

On 9/11, Dreher’s first thought was : "Thank God we have a Republican in the White House." The rest of his essay:

As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.

But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.

In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did.

The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government’s conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.

I turn 40 next month — middle aged at last — a time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power revealed so painfully.

I did not expect Vietnam.

As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.

I had a heretical thought for a conservative – that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word – that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot – that they have to question authority.

On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?

Question Authority.  Yes.  You cannot understand the 1960s, without first understanding the stifling, conformist 1950s.  We saw it all go down, the communist witch hunts, Viet Nam, Watergate, and we took away from it something ironically enough, John Mitchall, Nixon’s Attorney General and a central figure in the Watergate conspiracy, once said to reporters…

"You will be better advised to watch what we do instead of what we say."

No kidding.  Those are words that should be embossed in bold letters at the top of every ballot in every election.  Never mind what they say…pay attention to what they do.  And when they start hiding things from the voters, it should set off every alarm bell you have.  At minimum, we can’t govern ourselves if we don’t know what the fuck our government is up to.  Nixon was legendary for his secretiveness.  But Bush makes him look like he lived in a glass White House.

Sometimes I forget how old I am.  Not everyone remembers that past like I do.  Barbara O’Brien puts Dreher’s experience into perspective for me…

The answers to your questions, Mr. Dreher, is (1) yes, and (2) because you were brainwashed. As I wrote here,

I noticed years ago that the rank-and-file “movement conservative” is younger than I am. Well, OK, most people are younger than I am. But surely you’ve noticed that a disproportionate number of True Believers are people who reached their late teens / early twenties during the Carter or Reagan years at the earliest. They came of age at the same time the right-wing media / think tank infrastructure began to dominate national political discourse, and all their adult lives their brains have been pickled in rightie propaganda.

Because they’re too young to remember When Things Were Different, they don’t recognize that the way mass media has handled politics for the past thirty or so years is abnormal. What passes for our national political discourse — as presented on radio, television, and much print media — is scripted in right-wing think tanks and media paid for by the likes of Joseph Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife, and more recently by Sun Myung Moon. What looks like “debate” is just puppet theater, presented to manipulate public opinion in favor of the Right.

In this puppet theater “liberals” (booo! hisss!) are the craven, cowardly, and possibly demented villains, and “conservatives” are the noble heroes who come to the rescue of the virtuous maid America. Any American under the age of 40 has had this narrative pounded into his head his entire life. Rare is the individual born after the Baby Boom who has any clue what “liberalism” really is. Ask, and they’ll tell you that liberals are people who “believe in” raising taxes and spending money on big entitlement programs, which of course is bad. (Read this to understand why it’s bad.)

Just one example of how the word liberal has been utterly bastardized, see this Heritage Foundation press release of March 2006 that complains Congress is becoming “liberal.” Why? Because of its pork-barrel spending.

But I want to say something more about betrayal. One piece left out of most commentary on the freaks (not hippies, children; the name preferred by participants of the counterculture was freaks) was how betrayed many of us felt. Remember, we’d been born in the years after World War II. We’d spent our childhoods dramatizing our fathers’ struggles on Normandy Beach and Iwo Jima in our suburban back yards. Most of us watched “Victory at Sea” at least twice. Most of our childhood heroes were characters out of American mythos, like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone (who seemed an awful lot alike). Further, some of the scariest times of the Cold War unfolded during our elementary and middle schools years. We grew up believing the Communists would nuke us any second. Our schools (even Sunday School, as I recall) and media made sure we were thoroughly indoctrinated with the understanding that liberty and democracy were “good” and Communism was “bad,” and America Is the Greatest Nation in the World.

For many of us, these feelings reached their apex during the Kennedy administration. I was nine years old when he was elected. He seemed to embody everything that was noble and good and heroic about America. I remember his tour of Europe the summer before the assassination. I watched his motorcade move through cheering crowds on our black-and-white console television and never felt prouder to be an American.

But then our hearts were broken in Dallas, and less than two years later Lyndon Johnson announced he would send troops to Vietnam. And then the young men of my generation were drafted into the meat grinder. Sooner or later, most of us figured out our idealism had been misplaced. I was one of the later ones; the realization dawned for me during the Nixon Administration, which began while I was a senior in high school. Oh, I still believed in liberty and democracy; I felt betrayed because I realized our government didn’t. And much of my parents’ generation didn’t seem to, either.

The counterculture was both a backlash to that betrayal and to the cultural rigidity of the 1950s. And much of “movement conservatism” was a backlash to the counterculture, albeit rooted in the pseudo-conservatism documented earlier by Richard Hofstadter and others.

Just so.  I forget this.  More and more people I live and work with every day now, came of political age during Carter.  It always amazed me how they could idolize that cardboard right-wing conservative figurehead Reagan, who famously laughed at Bob Hope’s AIDS jokes during the re-dedication of the Statue of Liberty.  But Carter’s handling of the Iran Hostage situation probably affected a good many of them the way it affected Dreher, and Reagan’s theatrical posturing as a force for American strength and values probably inspired them the way Bush’s did after 9-11, and never mind that the families of tens of thousands of "disappeareds" in south America might view it a little differently.  You can’t trust a president who treats the lives of helpless impoverished people with indifference, if not contempt, to respect American lives any better.  The conservative juggernaut Reagan helped usher into American politics has been an unmitigated disaster for American democracy, and we can see that disaster’s culmination in Iraq…in Katrina…in Bush.

Nixon and Reagan were both notorious for the grandiose trappings of luxury and royalty they attached to the presidency, prompting the columnist Mary McGrory to say of the Reagan republicans that they were "Free, free at last from the loathsome hypocrisy of the respectable republican cloth coat", ironically a phrase Nixon coined back when he was Eisenhower’s VP.  Nixon’s nemesis on the editorial pages of the Washington Post, the political cartoonist Herblock, once averred that the proper degree of respect for the president was as public servant number one.  Because in this democracy, that’s what the president is.  But it’s a lesson lost to a lot of us now, because the right wing noise machine has deftly associated that basic principle of democracy with national weakness.  Kings don’t suffer questioning by the peasants, and we have a president now who seems to really think the office he was elected to was king, and not public servant number 1.  That’s no accident.  It’s taken them years to get us here.  But it’s starting to look as though one more Viet Nam might bring us back to democracy again.  Maybe. 

This is no hippy slogan.  This is how democracy works.  Ask the Watergate generation why this is so.  Or just sit back, and watch it all happening again.  I guess for some of you this would be the first time you saw it.  But not just democracy, this is how Life works, unless you aspire to be nothing more then someone else’s sock puppet.  If I could, I would put this on all our coins instead of the Christianist, "In God We Trust",  that became de rigueur for American currency by a law passed in the 1950s.  

E Pluribus Unum.  Question Authority.

Via Pam’s House Blend…  The Massachusetts bigots would like the process of taking the right to marry away from us to be a dignified one…

MFI and VoteOnMarriage.org – the ballot question committee seeking to advance the Massachusetts marriage amendment – has endeavored to advance a campaign that refrains from name calling and does not denigrate individuals. However, as many political pundits predict, the same sex marriage debate, much like the abortion debate, will be with us for decades and MFI sees a need and an opportunity to work with leaders on all sides to promote justice in the way we discuss our differences.

"The tone and rhetoric around this public policy issue has escalated to a frenzied level, too often with shouting that does nothing promote understanding. Denouncing individuals as bigots does not bring people with honest differences together. We would like to work with our opponents to raise the quality of the dialogue," said Kris Mineau, president, Massachusetts Family Institute and spokesman, VoteOnMarriage.org

…Even as this initiative beings to take shape, MFI and VoteOnMarriage.org will continue to urge supporters of the marriage amendment to be respectful of human differences and always maintain a dialogue that affirms the dignity of every person.

You know how this works…right?  We stop calling them bigots, and they get to keep calling us AIDS spreading child molesting family destroying abominations in the eyes of God. 

Honest differences?  There is nothing honest about these people.  Nothing.  And especially nothing honest about their calls for mutual respect and civility.  Every time you hear something like this coming out of an anti-gay hate machine, you know they’re talking to the heterosexual majority, not the gay people they’re busy bashing.  They didn’t place that press release in the local gay papers.  This call for mutual respect wasn’t addressed to the gay people they’re trying to take the right to marry away from. This is window dressing for the big vote in a couple years.  They need to convince just enough voters that voting to take away their neighbor’s right to marry doesn’t mean they’re jumping in bed with bigots.  That’s what this is about.  Nothing else. 

Picture a bunch of white racists pleading with black Americans for mutual respect while arguing for segregated schools and neighborhoods.  Picture a bunch of antisemites insisting they want a dialog about the Nuremberg laws that affirms the dignity of every person.  It’s to laugh. 

"Everything you know is wrong" – The Firesign Theater

I’m looking through my server logs and I see a reference to my blog coming from a site I’d never seen before…Why the hell are you here?  Check out the Bad Science and Dead Racists tags for some good reading.  Anyway…I was looking around and I found a link to this…of all things…

The Geocentrism Challenge

CAI will write a check for $1,000 to the first person who can prove that the earth revolves around the sun. (If you lose, then we ask that you make a donation to the apostolate of CAI). Obviously, we at CAI don’t think anyone CAN prove it, and thus we can offer such a generous reward. In fact, we may up the ante in the near future.

Scripture is very clear that the earth is stationary and that the sun, moon and stars revolve around it. (By the way, in case you’re wondering, "flat-earthers" are not accepted here, since Scripture does not teach a flat earth, nor did the Fathers teach it).  [Bruce: Actually…I belong to the Flat Mars Society…]  If there was only one or two places where the Geocentric teaching appeared in Scripture, one might have the license to say that those passages were just incidental and really didn’t reflect the teaching of Scripture at large. But the fact is that Geocentrism permeates Scripture. Here are some of the more salient passages (Sirach 43:2-5; 43:9-10; 46:4; Psalm 19:5-7; 104:5; 104:19; 119:90; Ecclesiastes 1:5; 2 Kings 20:9-11; 2 Chronicles 32:24; Isaiah 38:7-8; Joshua 10:12-14; Judges 5:31; Job 9:7; Habakkuk 3:11; (1 Esdras 4:12); James 1:12). I could list many more, but I think these will suffice.

This was copied from a site called Catholic Apologetics International, and seems to have since been pulled from it, as the page they’ve linked to is no longer found.  But some digging around among the other links back at Why The Hell Are You Here? turned up this amazing little tidbit …

The non-moving Earth 

& anti-evolution web page of

The Fair Education Foundation, Inc.

Exposing the False Science Idol of Evolutionism,
and Proving the Truthfulness of the Bible from Creation to Heaven…

–  since 1973 –

Marshall Hall, Pres.

Questions from Daniel Ott and his audience will be seeking hard evidence from me

which proves that the Earth is neither rotating on an axis nor orbiting the sun.

You won’t want to miss this unraveling of the granddaddy of all conspiracies, and

what the Truth about the Non-Moving Earth issue means to every living person.

 

This site doesn’t appear to be satire.  In case you’re wondering, they seem to be claiming that the stars we see in the sky at night are mostly reflections of sunlight off of ice crystals.  Which explains for me a reference that’s always puzzled me in Jacob Bronowski’s wonderful book Science and Human Values.  In Part 2, The Habit of Truth, Bronowski relates a story of how the great German scientist, Werner Heisenberg, was denounced by the S.S.  He mentions a letter Himmler wrote defending Heisenberg, and suggesting that Heisenberg might be useful in a Nazi Academy he was planning to establish, "which Himmler proposed to devote to the conviction which he either shared with or imposed on his scientific yes-men, that the stars are made of ice."

Why, I wondered, would a blood drenched Nazi lunatic want people to believe the stars were made of ice?  Well now I know.  It’s necessary for an earth centric model of the universe.  The universe just can’t be as huge as it is, and work in an earth centric model.  So it has to be much smaller.  Which means the stars can’t be so big, and so far away.  They have to be much smaller, and huddled around the earth like a halo.  So the stars must be a cloud of ice crystals, reflecting the light from the sun.  That was what Himmler was wanting to prove, so he could prove the earth centric model, so the Nazis could throw out mountains of science that existed, and which was the result of free inquiry.  That much of modern physics by that time had been done by European Jews was probably on his mind.  But science, regardless of who is doing it, is anathema to totalitarians, who exalt authority over free inquiry, and the Nazis, contrary to a lot of claptrap about their so-called paganism, time and time again appealed to the bible, and to their own brand of biblical fundamentalism for justification.

It’s incredible to find people so afraid of the world as it is, that they’ll shrink back from it into this kind of delusion.  Galileo blew this model apart when he took a telescope he made and pointed it at the heavens and saw with his own eyes that the earth centric model simply didn’t work, and Copernicus’ powerful insight had been right.  You can buy a pair of binoculars nowadays that are far better then anything Galileo had in his day.  But Bronowski, writing this time in his book The Ascent of Man, puts his finger on it…

Galileo seems to me to have been strangely innocent about the world of politics, and most innocent in thinking that he could outwit it because he was clever.  For twenty years and more he moved along a path that led inevitably to his condemnation.  It took a long time to undermine him, but there was never any doubt that Galileo would be silenced, because the division between him and those in authority was absolute.  They believed that faith should dominate; and Galileo believed that truth should persuade.

And there it is.  This is why the republicans and the Bush administration have been waging an unprecedented (for America) war against science and knowledge.  When people say that the rush back into religious fundamentalism comes from fear of change and apprehension about where science is leading us, that may well be true in part.  But it is not the whole.  This is a fight over who is in charge, and at the core of it is the struggle for free inquiry.  Does your life belong to you, or to some strongman dictator, to the man thumping his bible at you, to your local committee of some national authoritarian political party?  Every time you ask a question, you challenge authority.  That is what is wrong with asking questions.  That is why science must be brought to heal.  Because it sets a bad example.

If the vehement prejudices toward gay people in some Episcopalian churches here in America seems surprising to the majority of American Episcopalians…there may be a reason for that…

Episcopal Churches’ Breakaway in Va. Evolved Over 30 Years

Parishioners say it happens quietly, unobtrusively: As the sick make their way to the altar, some worshipers begin speaking in tongues. Occasionally, one is "arrested in the spirit," falling unconscious into the arms of a fellow congregant.

The special faith-healing services, held one Sunday night a month at The Falls Church in Fairfax, are a rarity in the Episcopal Church. But members of The Falls Church have long felt at odds with fellow Episcopalians, who they believe have been drifting theologically in an ever more liberal direction.

Speaking in tongues…!?  I hear you ask.  Didn’t know that Episcopalians did that, did you?  I sure didn’t.  But they do at The Falls Church in Virginia.  On the other hand, it’s probably not actually Episcopalians that are doing that…

At least two-thirds of the worshipers are Methodists, Presbyterians or Baptists, and there is no pressure on them to be confirmed as Episcopalians, said the Rev. Rick Wright, associate rector.

Now that’s really interesting.  Go read the article.  The schisming churches in Virginia have all the sense and sensibilities of your typical southern charismatic megachurch.  So much so that they’ve lost many of their Episcopalians to other area churches.  Now two-thirds of the people in that sanctuary don’t even bother calling themselves Episcopalians.  And yet they’ve decided to take that Episcopalian church out of the American Episcopalian community, in favor of the church of a man who thinks gays should be arrested simply for sitting down together for lunch in public.  Why is that not surprising?  Ask the faithful at Six Flags Over Jesus and you’ll probably hear the same sentiment.   But they’re in their own church, not living like digger wasps inside someone else’s.

So I guess while its technically true that the Episcopalians in northern Virginia are schisming, the reality seems to be that it’s really just the usual suspects.   Ah, well…how else could a bunch of Baptists stage a schism, unless they did it in someone else’s church…

Somebody finally sits up and takes notice!  Wonderful!  Over at Eschaton, echidne says that it is an odd juxtaposition that our new congress may well repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, at the same time Massachusetts takes the right to marry away from its gay and lesbian citizens.  "Equal for war but not for love?" She asks.  Good question.

In fact, it is precisely to prevent people from asking that question, that we are not allowed to serve.  Did you think that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was really about military readiness?  Have some second thoughts please.  It is because the sight of openly gay people fighting for, and dying for their country, would cause people to raise those kinds of questions that the bigots have been fighting so bitterly to prevent us from serving. 

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has nothing to do with national security.  It has nothing to do with close quarters contact on the battlefield and all the other shibboleths the religious right keeps raising.  It has exactly zero to do with troop moral.  It is about preventing gay equality.  It has always been about preventing gay equality.  Nothing else.

So they’re going to allow a vote on the anti-gay marriage amendment in Massachusetts.  I was worrying about this when I saw all the Boston newspapers start bloviating about how the legislature had a "responsibility" to let the vote happen, after the state supreme court ruled they couldn’t force the vote, and that they had a "duty" and so on.

Does anymore seriously believe that our enemies, if the positions had been reversed, wouldn’t have used precisely the same tactics to prevent a vote, if doing it would take away our right to marry?  Would they have fucking cared what the newspapers said?  We are in a knife fight with these people, and you win a knife fight by fighting to win, not by playing by a set of rules designed specifically to allow the enemy to keep taking swings at you while you just stand there with your hands behind your back.  You go into a fight with these people to win by any means necessary, or don’t bother fighting them because they’ll laugh in your face and kick your balls.  They’re dancing in Massachusetts now, because they can figure now that in a couple years they’ll be able to cut the ring fingers off the gays in their state.  And if you thought the religious right was triumphalist before, just wait until they can crow that they turned back sodomite marriage in Massachusetts. 

To the cowards who previously voted to adjourn rather then vote, and then switched sides yesterday, all I have to say to you is I hope your own marriages suffer the same fate as ours.  About half of heterosexual marriages fail anyway don’t they? Piss on your hopes, your dreams, and every moment of awestruck joy you ever felt as a couple. 

Via TPM Muckraker…

"[W]e are leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion, rather than working within the Judeo-Christian principles that have made us a beacon for freedom-loving persons around the world."

— Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA), in an op-ed published in today’s USA Today, explaining why he believes the United States should refuse immigrants from the Middle East.

You may recall, this is the wanker who pitched a fit when congressman elect Keith Ellison announced he would take the oath of office in a ceremony using the Koran, instead of the Bible, and then went on to pitch a fit about Muslim immigrants pouring into the United States, and then went on to avow that he would never take the oath on the "Kor-Ran" (I watched him on a newscast…that’s how he keeps pronouncing it) and that he only wanted to "…draw attention to the need to acknowledge the Bible as the basis of America’s moral values. Judeo-Christian values are the greatest single protection against another Holocaust".  

Well Virgil…it’s really swell that you’re so busy defending American from people who want to mold it into the image of their religion.  Now…how about you go find yourself a mirror and tell it to the gutter crawling jackass you see in there.  Kor-Ran.  Kor-Ran.  Kor-Ran.  

Via The Agitator.  This is what it comes to…

It’s the holiday season, and the parties have already begun, never mind that Christmas is still a couple weeks away.  And a lot of that holiday cheer involves things like spiked eggnog, which is a decadent holiday treat if it’s done right.  I was enjoying a party the other day where one of the guests brought Bourbon slushies.  Nobody was getting ripped or anything, but we were all thoroughly enjoying ourselves, and the holiday…er…spirits.  Were we back in the 1920s, our holiday spirits would have been sold to us by mobsters, and we could all have been thrown in jail just for being caught drinking it. 

Prohibition.  They wanted a dry America.  They got a dry America.  They also got Al Capone and the Purple Gang.  For all the bellyaching about what drugs do to people, this isn’t about the health and welfare of Americans or they would be treating addiction not throwing addicts in jail.  This is about waging kultur kampf.  It’s about smacking all those dirty pot smoking hippies upside the head.  But it’s not hippies selling drugs anymore.  Nobody ever wanted to live in a violent world less then the flower children.  The Man drove them out of the business.  Now it’s blood thirsty south American drug cartels and middle eastern terrorists.  That’s what prohibition buys you. 

But who says that’s a bad thing?  Take another look at that photo.  That man isn’t a soldier, he’s a cop.  Look at all the equipment he’s wearing.  Take a guess at how much all of that cost.  The drug cartels aren’t the only people racking in the bucks over products that would otherwise cost next to nothing to produce and buy.  Funny isn’t it, how every goddamned moral crusade the right gets this country into, ends up lining the pockets of blood thirsty thugs, big government contractors and the moral crusaders themselves, who keep insisting that they’re fighting for all that is good and decent, while the rest of us are caught in a place between them that just keeps getting smaller and smaller, and then one day you wake up and realize that you can’t even take a piss without a man with a machine gun watching you.