Bob Marshall Again Puts Virginia and the Virginia GOP in a Bad Light

I continually wonder WTF is wrong with the voters of Del. Bob Marshall's district that they keep electing such a lunatic to the House of Delegates.  The man never introduces common sense bills, but instead every year introduces one or more bills that open the state and the Republican Party of Virginia to ridicule and derision.  As noted recently, this year he has introduced two anti-gay bills - both supposedly to protect "religious freedom" - which seek to put "godly Christians" above the laws that govern everyone else.  Indeed, Marshall is so extreme it's a wonder that he hasn't come out singing the praises of the shooter in the Paris massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo (Catholic League lunatic William Donohue has said the victims brought on - dare we say deserved - their own deaths since they offended religious sensibilities).  A piece in Slate shows how Marshall again has brought horrific coverage to Virginia.  Here are excerpts:

Nearly a year ago, Kansas legislators quietly attempted to legalize anti-gay segregation, abandoning the effort only after a national wave of outrage arose. Now a Republican delegate in Virginia is attempting to replicate Kansas’ effort—with a bill so extreme, so radically and viciously anti-gay, that it makes Kansas’ measure look moderate by comparison.

The Virginia bill, introduced by Del. Bob Marshall, is actually quite ingenious in its complete degradation of gay citizens. Like every “religious liberty” measure introduced over the past year, its true intent is to legalize discrimination against gay people. But whereas most of those bills attempted to allow discrimination in the realm of gay marriage—permitting, for instance, a florist to refuse to provide flowers for a gay couple’s wedding—the Virginia bill has no such limitation.

Instead, Marshall’s measure would attach a “conscience clause” to any “license, registration, or certificate” obtained from the commonwealth, whether by a private business or a government agency.

This clause would allow all workers to refuse to “perform, assist, consent to, or participate in any action” that would “violate the religious or moral conviction of such person with respect to same-sex ‘marriage’ or homosexual behavior.” (Emphasis mine—though the scare quotes around “marriage” are in the bill.) In other words, workers in the state of Virginia need only declare that interacting with people who partake in “homosexual behavior” violates their “moral conviction”—and they will be free to turn them away.

Because the bill applies to both private and public enterprises, and because these enterprises almost always need some kind of “license, registration, or certificate” from the government, its reach is essentially endless.
Marshall, one of the more extreme anti-gay legislators in America, has a long track record with these kinds of bills. . . . Marshall is a fanatic, and it’s unclear if his new bill stands a chance of passing the heavily Republican House of Delegates. Still, Marshall’s measure is a useful reminder of the profound anti-gay animus that underlies every attempt to curtail gay rights in the name of religious freedom. No matter the rationalizations from the far-right media, bills promoting “religious liberty” are almost always simply pretext, a ploy to permit the debasement of gay citizens under the guise of principled “dissent.”

Conservatives have spent decades attempting to disguise their hatred of gays in the camouflage of sincerely held religious beliefs. Marshall and his allies unintentionally blow their cover, revealing the rank animosity behind their ostensibly respectable views. I have long insisted that “religious liberty” is nothing but a euphemism for a special right to discriminate against gay people. Thanks to legislators like Marshall, that once-controversial proposition is becoming more undeniable with each passing day.

It is time for decent people and respectable businesses to start avoiding Marshall's district in every way possible and while doing so, they need to make it clear that they won't return until Marshall is out of office permanently. 

Quote of the Day: Catholic Church Neurosis on Sexual Issues

The New York Times in its opinion section has a debate going on the Catholic Church and marriage that includes allowing gay marriage and ending priestly celibacy.  One of the position statements made is by Daniel Maguire,  a professor of moral theology at Marquette University who was ordained a priest in 1956 but left the priesthood and later married and now has two children and seven grandchildren. He is the author, most recently, of "Christianity Without God: Moving Beyond the Dogmas and Retrieving the Epic Moral Narrative."  Here's the pertinent quote:

Peter, whom some consider to have been the first pope, was a married man according to the Bible. Had popes and priests followed his lead who could doubt that we would have a different church today?

Christianity strayed from the healthy sexual joy that Judaism offered in its poetic Song of Songs. Instead, influential neurotics like Augustine, who binged on sex in his youth, cast the negative shadow of his penis-obsession on the subsequent Christian view of human sexuality. The result? Women were a threat to the officially celibate male leaders; this poisoned the hierarchical attitude toward women. This is not the whole story of Catholic sexism, but it is a part.

The more one reads about the Church's 13th century "natural law" and  its obsession with all things sexual, the more one discovers that some of the "leading Church fathers" were seriously mentally ill.  Augustine is but one of the cavalcade of neurotics.   These psychologically disturbed men would have gotten along well with nutcases like tortured, self-loathing closet  cases Rick Santorum and Ken Cuccinelli.

Why Conservative Christians Would Have Hated Jesus

This blog often notes the reality that while professing support for Christian values, today's conservative Christians - and certainly those within the Republican Party - are pursuing agendas totally at odds with the Gospel social message.  It's as if the worship a reverse version of the Sermon on the Mount and believe that Mitt Romney's vulture capitalism is the highest form of walking in the shoes of Christ.  Other than seeking to police everyone bedrooms to impose a puritan form of sexual conduct, they truly despise the message of Christ.  A piece in Salon looks at why the "godly folk" would hate Christ if he returned today.  Here are excerpts:

Jesus never could have been the pastor of a contemporary evangelical church nor a conservative Roman Catholic bishop. Evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics thrive on drawing distinctions between their “truth” and other people’s failings. Jesus by contrast, set off an empathy time bomb that obliterates difference.

Jesus’ empathy bomb explodes every time a former evangelical puts love ahead of what the “Bible says.” It goes off every time Pope Francis puts inclusion ahead of dogma. It goes off every time a gay couple are welcomed into a church. Jesus’ time bomb explodes whenever atheists follow Jesus better than most Christians.

Put it this way: Godless non-church-going Denmark mandates four weeks of maternity leave before childbirth and fourteen weeks afterward for mothers. Parents of newborn children are assisted with well-baby nurse-practitioner visits in their homes.

In the “pro-life” and allegedly “family friendly” American Bible belt, conservative political leaders slash programs designed to help women and children while creating a justifying mythology about handouts versus empowerment.

In “God-fearing America” the poor are now the “takers,” no longer the “least of these,” and many conservative evangelicals side with today’s Pharisees, attacking the poor in the name of following the Bible.

So who is following Jesus?

Confronted by the Bible cult called evangelicalism we have a choice: follow Jesus or follow a book cult. If Jesus is God as evangelicals and Roman Catholics claim he is, then the choice is clear. We have to read the book–including the New Testament–as he did, and Jesus didn’t like the “Bible” of his day.

Confronted by bishops protecting dogma and tradition against Pope Francis’ embrace of empathy for the “other” we have a choice: follow Jesus or protect the institution.

Every time Jesus mentioned the equivalent of a church tradition, the Torah, he qualified it with something like this: “The scriptures say thus and so, but I say…” Jesus undermined the scriptures and religious tradition in favor of empathy. Every time Jesus undermined the scriptures (Jewish “church tradition”) it was to err on the side of co-suffering love.
Every time conservative Roman Catholics try to stop the Pope from bringing change to the Church they are on the side to those who killed Jesus.

In evangelical and Roman Catholic fundamentalist terms, Jesus was a rule-breaking humanist who wasn’t “saved.” A conservative bishop would have refused Jesus the sacraments. Christianity Today magazine would have editorialized against him, called for his firing, banning and branded him a traitor to the cause of Christianity.

The message of Jesus’ life is an intervention in and an acceleration of the evolution of empathy.

Jesus responded by attacking the preeminence of religion, tradition, dogma and group identity, offering an entirely new way of looking at spirituality by emphasizing basic human dignity above nation, state, gender or religion: . . 

Evangelicals struggle to conform Jesus to a book, not the other way around. And the conservative bishops have aligned themselves with the American neoconservative wing of their church against not just the Pope Francis but against the emancipating logic of Jesus’ empathy time bomb. If Jesus isn’t the “lens” evangelicals and Roman Catholics read the Bible and their traditions through then whatever they say to the contrary they do not really believe Jesus is the son of God.

Well said.  The reality of just how unChristian the godly folk have become goes a long way toward explaining why 30% of the younger generations have simply walked away from Christianity.  The "godly folk" have made it something truly ugly.  Hatred of others has become conservative Christianity defining characteristic, along with conduct that would have embarrassed the biblical Pharisees.

Mississippi Enacts "Turn Away the Gays" Law

The state of Mississippi seems dead set on maintaining its reputation as perhaps the most backward and reactionary state in America.  How else to explain the passage of a "turn away the gays" bill by the Republican controlled legislature.  Not surprisingly, Republican Governor Phil Bryant says he will sign the bill.  The law - like that passed and then vetoed in Arizona - purports to address the growing restrictions on "religious freedom" which in reality equates to allowing Christofascists to ignore laws they don't like and to discriminate at will.  The last laugh on the anti-gay bigots in the Mississippi legislature is that they have unwittingly give Muslims and others a loophole to strike back at Christofascists who could be on the receiving end of discrimination by those of other faiths.  The New Civil Rights Movement has details.  Here are excerpts:

Gov. Phil Bryant has announced he will sign Mississippi‘s highly-controversial and nationally condemned bill that is being called a license to discriminate against LGBT people, women, and minorities. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act was rammed through the state senate last night by Republicans after it had been returned to a committee several weeks ago. Many had believed the bill was dead.

The bill, SB 2681, ”protects” people of faith from having to bend to laws or other government policies that they claim violate their deeply-held religious beliefs. A pharmacist could refuse to fill a prescription for HIV medication or contraception. A teacher could refuse to teach children of a same-sex couple. A DMV worker could refuse to administer a driving test to a person who is transgender. A waitress could refuse service to a gay man or lesbian. In the extreme, a man could refuse to take direction at his job from a female supervisor.

The bill could allow any religion — regardless of how mainstream or far from the mainstream — to establish a foothold in Mississippi, as no particular religion may be “protected.” Observers of all religions, including Sharia law, Satanism, and other non-Christianist religions, will also have the right to act, or not act, based on their deeply-held religious beliefs.

“From its inception,” Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality told The New Civil Rights Movement yesterday by telephone, the goal of the bill has been “to create a license to discriminate under the guise of protecting religious freedom.”

The law will go into effect July 1.

There are plenty of reasons to avoid Mississippi.  Now there is another one.

Christofascist and Arizon GOP Draft New Anti-Gay Bill

One would think that after the furor that surrounded Arizona SB 1062 and Gov. Jan Brewer's ultimate veto of the bill the Christofascists and their puppets in the Arizona GOP would have waited a while before bringing forth another anti-gay measure.  But, given the Christofascists' insistence that they be above the laws that govern everyone else, the pander political prostitutes in the Arizona GOP seem only too willing to try to push another anti-gay law through the Arizona legislature.  While less broad than SB 1062 in its application, the new bill - House Bill 2481- likewise seeks to give Christofascists who cite religious belief the right to ignore their responsibilities as public servants and turn gays away.  As for churches, the bill seeks to fix a problem that does not even exist.  Hhere are excerpts from AZCentral.com:

The demise of Senate Bill 1062, which was widely denounced as discriminatory against gays and lesbians, may not be the last word in Arizona’s debate over religious freedoms and civil rights this legislative session.

Another bill, also being touted as protecting religious freedom, has garnered little attention but could again force lawmakers to take a stand on a divisive issue.

House Bill 2481, which has advanced on mostly party-line committee votes and is awaiting a debate by the full House of Representatives, would prevent government from requiring ordained clergy and judges to “solemnize a marriage that is inconsistent with the minister’s sincerely held religious beliefs.”

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Steve Montenegro, R-Litchfield Park, is narrower than SB 1062, which would have offered a legal defense for individuals and businesses facing discrimination lawsuits if they could have proved they acted upon a “sincerely held religious belief.”

An assistant pastor at a Surprise church, Montenegro told The Arizona Republic on Thursday that the legislation grew out of instances in New Jersey and England, where churches were sued for refusing to perform same-sex ceremonies. He said the legislation would also apply to priests, pastors, rabbis and others who might be asked to sanction marriages that contradict their beliefs and teachings.

He could not provide an example of a clergy member in Arizona who has been forced to act against his or her beliefs in marrying individuals. Marriage is defined in the state Constitution as only between a man and a woman.

The Anti-Defamation League has spoken against a provision that would extend the right to refuse to conduct ceremonies to judges, justices of the peace and clerks who perform them.  Religious officials are already exempt from lawsuits filed by people who feel they were wrongly denied marriage services, said Tracey Stewart, assistant regional director for the Anti- Defamation League.  But judges and other civil servants are not men of the cloth, she said.  “Those are usually individuals who are employed by government,” Stewart said.  Part of their public service as a government official extends to performing civil, not religious, marriage ceremonies, she said.

Political scientist John J. “Jack” Pitney Jr., who closely watches Arizona politics, said lawmakers’ inclination will be to avoid legislation similar to SB 1062, given the reaction from economic powerhouses like Apple and the NFL and high-profile political players such as former presidential candidate Mitt Romney and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

One has to wonder how a buffoon and nutcase like Rep.  Montenegro got elected in the first pace.  It does not speak well of his district or of Arizona as a whole.

Tea Party Nation Confirms The "Tea Party" is One and the Same as Christofascists

I have long maintained based on polls that show a roughly 85% overlap between Tea Party members and self-identified far right conservative Christians.   In fact, the cynical side of me believes that part of the rise of the Tea Party was by deliberate design as a vehicle to repackage Christofascists in a manner that would disguise their religious extremism form less informed and knowledgeable voters. Instead of wrapping themselves in the Bible and the cloak of religion, the new "Tea Party" would claim to wrap itself  in "freedom" and the United States Constitution.  No has made it clear that the Christofascists w, in the wake of Gov. Jan Brewer's veto of the religious extremist backed SB 1062, Judson Phillips, the head of Tea Party Nation, has made it perfectly clear that the Tea Party and the Christofascists are one and the same.  Here are highlights from a statement on the Tea Party Nation website attacking gays:

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has vetoed SB1062, The Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Arizona.  No one has ever accused Governor Brewer of being the most courageous Republican around. Come to think of it, the word courageous and Jan Brewer have probably never been uttered in the same sentence.

 

The left and the homosexual lobby in America went into overdrive to kill this bill.  Conservatives rallied for this bill and Governor Brewer opted for cowardice instead of courage.

Why is this bill so important and what did it mean for not only Arizona but America?  The issue can be boiled down to one word: Freedom.

A free man or woman controls their labor.  A slave has no control over their labor.  A free man or woman decides who they will work for and under what conditions.  The slave cannot.

The left and the homosexual lobby are both pushing slavery using the Orwellian concepts of “tolerance” and “inclusiveness.”

The storm rose against Arizona and Jan Brewer proved she was no Ronald Reagan.  She has an honored place in the ranks of the French Republicans.  Corporations and business interests, many of whom support far left wing causes, like Apple demanded this bill be vetoed.  Apple gives 96% of its political giving to Democrats.  Why a Republican listens to a word from Apple or lifts a finger to help them is beyond comprehension.  The NFL threatened to pull the Super Bowl from Arizona in 2015.

Someone with courage would have called their bluff.  Arizona has Jan Brewer.

The most common victims of the left wing homosexual assault on freedom have been Christian bakers and photographers. 

Note the theme of Christian persecution - the same mantra that we hear more and more from far right "Christian" hate groups that incessantly demonize and denigrate LGBT citizens.   Anyone who thinks that the Christofascists and the Tea Party are two different groups is merely deluding themselves.