Quote of the Day: The Christianist Embrace of Ignorance

I frequently lament the closed mindedness and open embrace of ignorance that are the hallmark of far right Christians (hate and bigotry are others).   Anything that challenges them have to think or raises questions about their Bronze Age derived belief system is rejected - often hysterically so - and they retreat into a fantasy world that tries to disconnect from objective reality.  In the process, untold  harm is done to society not to mention children raised in ignorance worship homes.  Andrew Sullivan sums it up well while reviewing the Christianist reaction to the new book Zealot described in an earlier post:

Christian fundamentalists often simply have no way to respond to the facts – because empirical inquiry is anathema to fundamentalists. They refuse to acknowledge the extraordinary insights into the origins of the Gospels that historical research has unearthed; they cannot tolerate any dissent from Biblical literalism (itself an inherent contradiction, since the Bible repeatedly contradicts itself if taken literally); they have to blind themselves to the science of our time in a way someone like Aquinas did not in his; they even have to insist on a literal interpretation of Genesis, for goodness’ sake.

So what are they to do when someone pops up with some actual research and arguments and challenges to received dogma? The only thing they can do is attack the messenger. That’s how intellectually bankrupt Christianism is. It cannot relate its own dogmas to the truths about the world we have discovered outside of faith. Christianists do not seem to understand that if something is demonstrably true, it cannot be counter to God, who is the ultimate Truth. They are terrified of using their minds because their faith is so often mindless – and any engagement with contemporary scholarship on Christianity is a threat to their faith, rather than, as it should be, a spur to see it in a new light.

What you see above, in other words, is an expression of fear and unreason. Which is roughly all that Christianism has in its rigid quiver.

One has to wonder what form of mental illness or psychological disturbance leads one to remain a fundamentalist Christian when all the evidence around you indicates that your beliefs are not valid. 

Federal Court Morning-After Pill Ruling Riles Christianists

America continues to have a far higher teen pregnancy rate than other developed countries for a simple reason: American sex education programs and access to contraception is opposed by the Christofascists who live in a fantasy world where they believe that "abstinence only" sex education is the only approach that can be allowed.   Sadly, too many politicians including in the Obama administration are afraid to take on this batshitery.  Meanwhile, the Bible belt has the highest teen pregnancy rate (and the highest divorce rate).  A federal court ruling has struck down the ban on sales of the so-called morning after pill to women under 17 and has reignited the convulsions and spittle eruptions among the "godly Christian" crowd who seemingly would prefer more pregnancies - and ultimately more abortions -  than otherwise would need be the case.  Combined with their lack of any concern for children once they are born as evidenced by their support for draconian GOP cuts to programs for poor children, it demonstrates the hypocrisy of the Christofascist crowd which might just as well have "Modern Day Pharisee" tattooed on their foreheads.  A story in the Washington Post looks at the court ruling.

A federal court ruling Friday requiring the government to make the morning-after pill available to females of any age without a prescription reignited a politically fraught debate that has stretched for more than a decade, vexing two administrations.

In a 59-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Edward Korman in New York offered a scathing rebuke of the 2011 decision by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to bar over-the-counter sales of the pill to girls younger than 17. Sebelius had overruled a recommendation from the Food and Drug Administration, which had found the emergency contraceptive was “safe and effective in adolescent females” and could be used properly by young women without consulting a doctor.

The judge ordered the FDA to lift the age restrictions within 30 days. The Obama administration has not said whether it will appeal the ruling.  Korman called Sebelius’s decision “politically motivated, scientifically unjustified, and contrary to agency precedent.” 

Women’s health advocates and major medical groups were quick to praise Friday’s ruling, saying it would help prevent unwanted pregnancies and remove unnecessary hurdles that often prevent teenagers from getting the pill in a timely manner. 

Meanwhile, antiabortion activists called the decision short-sighted, saying it could lead to more unprotected sex among teenagers, while also lowering the number of sexually active teens who are likely to discuss such issues with their parents or a doctor. 

Plan B is classified by the FDA as an emergency contraceptive and greatly reduces the chance of pregnancy if taken within 72 hours after intercourse. It differs from abortion drugs such as RU486, which is intended to terminate a pregnancy that already has been established.

Rather than condemning the decision, if Christianists truly want to lower abortions, they ought to be welcoming the ruling.  The fact that they are not shows that their real issue is a religious based obsession that sex is dirty, etc.  Teens will have sex no matter what  these fantasy world dwellers want to believe and the best way to prevent abortions is through better sex education and wider access to preventive measures such as Plan B.  These folks aren't really "pro-life," they are anti-sex.

Falsely Aggrieved Christian Soldiers

Burning of two sodomites at the stake outside Zürich, 1482, by Spiezer Schilling

In addition to attacking gays and gay supportive Republicans as noted in a prior post, the Christianists have shifted into hysterical high gear shrieking and lamenting that it is they who are now being persecuted.  The phenomenon would be laughable but for the fact that far too many sheeple will stupidly - there really is no other word applicable - believe the rants and lies of the professional Christian crowd and hate groups like Family Research Council, the National Organization for Marriage and a host of other similarly foul and dishonest groups.   A piece at Shakesville looks at the ridiculousness of the Christianist whining and false claims of persecution.  Here are highlights:

Over at The American Prospect, Paul Waldman documents the outpouring of self-pitying aggrievement from a number of conservative Christian commentators who are lamenting their "second-class citizenship" because they support the "traditional definition of marriage."

Here's CBN's David Brody lamenting the sorrows of Kirk Cameron and Tim Tebow. Here's Red State's Erik Erikson predicting the coming pogrom ("Within a year or two we will see Christian schools attacked for refusing to admit students whose parents are gay. We will see churches suffer the loss of their tax exempt status for refusing to hold gay weddings. We will see private businesses shut down because they refuse to treat as legitimate that which perverts God's own established plan."). Here's Fox News commentator Todd Starnes on the oppression that has already begun ("it's as if we're second-class citizens now because we support the traditional, Biblical definition of marriage").

And here's Pat Robertson (of course) warning that "the foundation of our society since the founding of our great Republic is under attack" by "a few people [who] want to have their way doing of sex affirmed by everyone else." Solid commentary as always from the biggest bozo in the hate biz.

It is execrable that there are conservative Christians—whose paternalistic, retrofuck, unscientific, indefensible views on reproductive rights and women's agency are currently being legislated all over the nation with nary a peep from the office-holding pro-choice president—who have the temerity to whine about how oppressed they are simply for having their undiluted right to legislate how every other person should be allowed to use their bodies and live their lives minimally eroded via marriage equality.

Losing the capacity to oppress is not oppression.  And there's no equivalence, none, between a position that wants to reserve marriage for some and deny it to others, and a position that wants to extend marriage to all, for anyone who wants to take part in whatever way they wish, with no one compelled to participate.

It's a theme I have touched on before although I may noy have enunciated it so well.  The real grievance of the Christofascist is that they are losing their ability to  persecute others at will and without restriction.  If you want to see what true persecution looks like, Andrew Sullivan has a post that looks at what the "godly Christian" folk have done to gays over the centuries.   Here are highlights:

There’s a dangerous tendency to believe that somehow, this was the first time in human history that gay people had sought marriage, or deemed themselves worthy of it. That’s not true – and my anthology finds examples from 14th century China to Native American culture to African matriarchies. Here is Montaigne, writing in the late 16th Century, of an incident he had heard of:

On my return from Saint Peter’s I met a man who informed me humorously of two things: that the Portuguese made their obeisance in Passion week; and then, that on this same day the station was at San Giovanna Porta Latina, in which church a few years before certain Portuguese had entered into a strange brotherhood.

They married one another, male to male, at Mass, with the same ceremonies with which we perform our marriages, read the same marriage Gospel service, and then went to bed and lived together. The Roman wits said that because in the other conjunction, of male and female, this circumstance of marriage alone makes it legitimate, it had seemed to these sharp folk that this other action would become equally legitimate if they authorized it with ceremonies and mysteries of the Church.

Eight or nine Portuguese of this fine sect were burned.

“This fine sect”… “these sharp folk”. Montaigne was one of the first supporters of marriage equality. But he had to tell us in code. As we congratulate ourselves, let us recall the profound pain this stigmatization caused for so many throughout history, and the brutal repression they had to endure – even being burned alive for seizing their own destiny and declaring the church their own.

I continue to believe that if one added up all the good Christianity has done(mainly through relief services for the poor and medical assistance) and weighed it against all the evils that have been done and all the lives lost as a result of wars of religion and the persecution of non-believers, the net result would be that the world would have been a better place had Christianity never existed.  Yes, this assessment is harsh and unfair to those who actually practice the Gospel message.  Unfortunately, their good deeds are far outweighed by the evil done under the Christian banner.   Sadly, today's Christianists continue the tradition of hatred, persecution of others and evil deeds.

New Poll Shows Dramatic Rise In Support for Gay Marriage

More bad news for the Christofascists and proponents of DOMA and Proposition 8: a new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows support for gay marriage now hitting 58%.  While polls are in no way binding on how the U. S. Supreme Court may rule in  United States v. Windsor  (Docket 12-307), which challenges the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”), and Hollingsworth v. Perry (Docket 12-144), which challenges the constitutionality of California’s Proposition , the Court does not exist in a vacuum and increased support for gay marriage could help tip justices sitting on the fence to rule with the gay supportive justices inclined to strike down both DOMA and proposition 8.  I suspect the folks at NOM, FRC, The Family Foundation and similar virulently anti-gay organizations are not jumping with joy over the new polling results.  Here are highlights from ABC News:

Support for gay marriage reached a new high in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, marking a dramatic change in public attitudes on the subject across the past decade. Fifty-eight percent of Americans now say it should be legal for gay and lesbian couples to wed.

That number has grown sharply in ABC News/Washington Post polls, from a low of 32 percent in a 2004 survey of registered voters, advancing to a narrow majority for the first time only two years ago, and now up again to a significant majority for the first time.(See PDF with full results, charts and tables here.)

Most Americans, moreover, say the U.S. Constitution should trump state laws on gay marriage, a question now before the U.S. Supreme Court. And – in another fundamental shift – just 24 percent now see homosexuality as a choice, down from 40 percent nearly 20 years ago. It’s a view that closely relates to opinions on the legality of same-sex marriage.

Support for gay marriage, though, has gone from 47 percent to today’s 58 percent in just the last three years – culminating a period of change first endorsed by some state courts, then by some political figures, notably with Hillary Clinton expressing support for same-sex marriage today, and Barack Obama doing the same last May, a position he went on to underscore in his second inaugural address in January.

Sharp differences across groups remain, but there have been large advances across the board. In one striking gap, gay marriage is supported by a vast 81 percent of adults younger than 30, compared with just 44 percent of seniors. But that’s up by more than 10 points in both groups just since March 2011, and by more than 20 points in both groups since 2004, the low point for gay marriage support in ABC/Post polls.

Among the declining number of people who see homosexuality as a choice, just 29 percent support gay marriage, with nearly seven in 10 opposed. Among those who reject this view, support for same-sex marriage soars to 73 percent.

The Christofascists and snake oil merchants of the "ex-gay" ministries are clearly losing the battle of public opinion.  Meanwhile, I can only ponder how much aid might have been given to the poor and hungry war if the Christofascists had heeded the Gospel message rather than squandered millions marketing hate and denigrating gay citizens.

New Study: Opposition to Gay Marriage Narrow and Concentrated

A new study that focused on exit polls and other date from the 2012 general election indicates that the opponents of gay marriage are increasingly concentrated in three groups of voters: (i) older people, (ii) white evangelical Christians and (iii) non-college-educated whites.  Which, along with the Christofascist take over of much of the grass roots organization, explains why the Republican Party continues to be homophobic and fighting a long term losing battle, especially as older voters literally die off only to be replaced with younger, more gay friendly voters.  Here are excerpts from the Washington Post on the study findings:

Exit polls and other surveys from last year’s election suggest that resistance to same-sex marriage is shrinking and mainly concentrated among certain segments of the population: older people, white evangelical Christians and non-college-educated whites.

That is the analysis of a new study of the data by two pollsters, one a Democrat and the other a Republican.

“Significant opposition to the freedom to marry is increasingly isolated within narrow demographic groups while a much broader and more diverse majority are ready to let same-sex couples marry,” wrote Joel Benenson, who led President Obama’s polling operation in 2008 and 2012, and Jan van Lohuizen, who did the same job for former president George W. Bush.

Voters age 65 and older expressed opposition to allowing such unions in their states by a 21-point margin, with 37 percent supporting them and 58 percent opposing. Those younger than 65 favored them by eight points, 52 percent to 44 percent.

The disparity was even greater among religious groups, broken down along racial lines. White evangelical Christians opposed same-sex marriage by nearly 3 to 1. But every non-evangelical group — other white Protestants, white Catholics, Hispanic Catholics, African American non-evangelicals and Jewish voters — expressed support for such unions by double-digit margins.

Meanwhile, African American voters who described themselves as evangelical or born again were narrowly divided, with 45 percent saying their state should recognize same-sex marriage and 47 percent saying it should not.

Another “pocket of opposition,” the pollsters said, is white voters who do not have a college degree. Only 40 percent of them supported same-sex marriage, compared with 56 percent who opposed it. Other groups supported such unions: by 54 percent to 38 percent among non-white, non-college graduates; 56 percent to 41 percent among white college graduates; and 58 percent to 35 percent among non-white college graduates.

In an interview, Benenson said the study suggests that lawmakers and candidates who embrace such unions are not likely to be punished politically, because “the American people are already there.”  “Demographics is a big part of it,” Van Lohuizen added, “but I also think there is a lot of rethinking going on.”

However, David Lane, who organizes conservative Christians nationwide, said the more than 65 million Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals are feeling increasingly alienated from electoral politics. If GOP leaders embrace same-sex marriage, he predicted, “it will lead quickly to the collapse of the Republican Party,” causing a core constituency to leave for a third party or to renounce politics.

In sum, the opponents of marriage equality are the elderly and senile, religious extremist and the uneducated.  As for the frothing at the mouth by the Christofascists' spokesmen, I discount Lane's statements which evidence the Christofascists' effort to retain control of the GOP and to remain relevant as the rest of society and the world move onward.  I believe the GOP has more to lose from its unholy alliance with the Bible beaters than it does from embracing marriage equality.

Why Science and Religion Cannot Be Reconciled

As scientific knowledge advances it is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile religion - especially fundamentalist forms of religion and those that claim the Bible (or Koran) are inerrant - with scientific reality.   The Old Testament including the Book of Genesis simply do not agree with and cannot be reconciled with the true age of the Earth, evolution, modern knowledge on sexual orientation, or the findings of the human genome project that confirm that Adam and Eve never existed as historical persons.   And the problem is only going to grow worse for fundamentalists in particular.  The result?  More of the younger generations walking away from religion white the hysteria and venom of the fundamentalists - both Christian and Muslim - grow more extreme as they desperately fight against modernity and anything that threatens their house of cards faith systems.  A piece in Huffington Post by Physicist, Victor Stenger, looks at why religion and science cannot be reconciled in the final analysis.  The piece is very harsh towards religion, and in my view deservedly so.  Especially, when one considers the self-congratulatory embrace of ignorance among the Christofascists.  Here are some article excerpts (they are fairly lengthy):

Religious apologists, spiritualist gurus, and accommodating atheists have been bombarding us with assertions that science and religion have no reason not to get along. This may be politically convenient, but it's simply untrue. Science and religion are fundamentally irreconcilable, and they always will be.

Faith is belief in the absence of supportive evidence and even in the light of contrary evidence. No one disputes that religion is based on faith. Some authors claim that science is also based on faith. They argue that science takes it on faith that the world is rational and that nature can be ordered in an intelligible way.

However, science makes no such assumption on faith. It analyzes observations by applying certain methodological rules and formulates models to describe those observations. It justifies that process by its practical success, not by any logical deduction derived from dubious metaphysical assumptions. We must distinguish faith from trust. Science has earned our trust by its proven success. Religion has destroyed our trust by its repeated failure.

Using the empirical method, science has eliminated smallpox, flown men to the moon, and discovered DNA. If science did not work, we wouldn't do it. Relying on faith, religion has brought us inquisitions, holy wars, and intolerance. Religion does not work, but we still do it.

Science and religion are fundamentally incompatible because of their unequivocally opposed epistemologies -- the separate assumptions they make concerning what we can know about the world. Every human alive is aware of a world that seems to exist outside the body, the world of sensory experience we call the natural. Science is the systematic study of the observations made of the natural world with our senses and scientific instruments.

By contrast, all major religions teach that humans possess an additional "inner" sense that allows us to access a realm lying beyond the visible world -- a divine, transcendent reality we call the supernatural. If it does not involve the transcendent, it is not religion.

No doubt science has its limits. However, that fact that science is limited doesn't mean that religion or any alternative system of thought can or does provide insight into what lies beyond those limits. For example, science cannot yet show precisely how the universe and life originated naturally, although many plausible scenarios exist. But the fact that science does not at present have a definitive answer to this question does not mean that ancient creation myths such as those in Genesis have any substance, any chance of eventually being verified.

So far we see no evidence that the feelings people experience when they perceive themselves to be in touch with the supernatural correspond to anything outside their heads, and have no reason to rely on those feelings when they occur. 

[R]eligion, as it is currently practiced, with its continued focus on closed thinking and ancient mythology, is not doing much to support the goal of a better, safer world. In fact, religion is hindering our attempts to attain that goal. Today science and religion find themselves in serious conflict. Even moderate believers do not fully accept Darwinian evolution. Although they claim to see no conflict between their faith and evolution, they insist that God still controlled the development of life so humans would evolve, which is not at all what the theory of evolution says.

Those who rely on observation and reason to provide an understanding of the world must stop viewing as harmless those who rely instead on superstition and the mythologies in ancient texts passed down from the childhood of our species. For the sake of the future of humanity, we must fight to expunge the fantasies of faith from human thinking.

Religious faith would not be such a negative force in society if it were just about religion. However, the magical thinking that becomes deeply ingrained whenever faith rules over facts warps all areas of life. It produces a frame of mind in which concepts are formulated with deep passion but without the slightest attention paid to the evidence that bears on the concept. Nowhere is this more evident than in America today where the large majority of the public hold on to a whole set of beliefs despite the total lack of evidence to support these beliefs and, indeed, strong evidence that denies them. Magical thinking and blind faith are the worst mental system we can apply under these circumstances. They allow the most outrageous lies to be accepted as facts.

From its very beginning, religion has been a tool used by those in power to retain that power and keep the masses in line. This continues today as religious groups are manipulated to work against believers' own best interests in health and economic well-being in order to cast doubt on well-established scientific findings. This would not be possible except for the diametrically opposed world-views of science and religion. Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. We can only hope religion will change its commitment to nonsense.

Today's GOP: Brain Dead on Policy

Not to beat a dead horse, but to be a Republican nowadays requires one's principal motivations to be based on racism, religious extremism and greed.  It also requires that one have had a lobotomy when it comes to contemplating any serious policies to address the nation's ills.  Other than the favored knee jerk mantras of cutting taxes, disenfranchising minority voters, ending abortion and contraception, and slashing government, there is a total absence of any real policy proposals.  And in my view, the decline of the GOP as a thinking party tracks directly back to the rise of the Christofascists in the party.  Now, the rejection of objective reality and the rejection of any thoughtful analysis are the highest attributes within the GOP base.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the GOP's descent into a policy vacuum.  Here are highlights:

The problem with Republicans today on public policy isn’t that they’re stuck in the 1980s; it’s that they’ve given up entirely. More often than not, what passes for Republican “policy” is just symbolic, not substantive. Think, for example, about the big GOP rollout of the spring, a balanced budget amendment — which wouldn’t be much in terms of substantive policy even if it had a chance to pass, which it obviously doesn’t. Or think of their inability (still!) to come up with an alternative to the Affordable Care Act. Again, it’s not that Republican health policy is stuck in the 1980s; it’s that there is nothing that could really be called Republican health policy. Or, to move away from Ponnuru’s topics to national security, there’s the frenzy over Benghazi, Libya, that (as Kevin Drum points out) somehow never quite is about anything, or what seems to be purely symbolic attacks on Chuck Hagel.

The first step out of the policy wilderness for Republicans, then, is for them to decide that developing substantive public policy ideas is a good idea at all. If the way to do that is to attribute it to Ronald Reagan, well, if it works then there’s nothing wrong with it. I hope so; the nation could really use a political party that advances well thought out conservative policy options. There hasn’t been one of those in years.

The GOP’s Chistianist Conundrum

There continues to be much talk about the Republican Party seeking to change its messaging if not the substance of its policies.  On the social issues component of this endeavor, however, the GOP faces a major problem: its Christianist base that refuses to tone down its hate and bigotry.  Making maters even worse, a new Pew survey found that the image of the GOP as a creature of the Christofascists is harming the party's competitiveness with non-Christian and the non-church going voters. Among Jewish voters, in fact, Muslims have a higher favorable rating than Christofascists.  Of course, all of this is the result of the GOP's cynical decision to court Christofascists a number of years ago and, worse yet, start electing them to local city and county committees and caucuses.  Here are highlights on the new survey findings:

In 2012, many political reporters suggested that the issue of Israel would be pivotal for Jewish Americans, and it did feature prominently in both campaigns. Yet in the end, the issue did not seem to affect the voting decisions of most Jewish voters, 69% of whom backed President Obama. If the question of Israel did not move many Jewish voters, what did? Although it was not discussed widely during the campaign, one of the most influential factors for Jewish voters was the Christian Right.  .  .  .  in the case of Jewish voters, the close association between the GOP and the Christian Right proved to be profoundly important. 

Few social groups are further apart in their politics than conservative Christians and Jews. In 2012, the Public Religion Research Institute conducted a survey of Jewish voters. That survey painted a portrait of a group that remains one of the most socially liberal in the U.S. American Jews strongly support legal abortion (93% say it should be legal in all or most cases) and favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry (81%). Conservative Christians, by contrast, are strongly opposed to same-sex marriage (78%), and most believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases (65%). However, the two groups are not just divided on social issues. Both groups also embrace very different perspectives on cultural pluralism, religious traditionalism, and church-state separation issues.

[T]he Christian Right scored only 20.9 on a 100-point “feeling thermometer” scale among Jews, well below Muslims (41.4) and Mormons (47). Nearly one in five (19%) Jews gave the Christian Right the lowest score possible (1). In fact, no political or religious group scored lower among Jews than the Christian Right.

The challenge confronting the GOP as it attempts to broaden its base is not limited to Jewish voters. A survey conducted by Pew last year found that more than six in ten (61%) non-Christian affiliated Americans (a group that includes Hindus, Jews and Muslims) agreed that “religious conservatives have too much control over the Republican Party.” Nearly two-thirds of religiously unaffiliated Americans also affirmed this statement. These groups are among the fastest-growing religious communities in the U.S. 

Pentagon to Remove Ban on Women in Combat

In recognition of the roles that women have already been playing in the fool's errand armed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan launched by Chimperator George W. Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney, the Pentagon is poised to remove the ban in women in combat positions.  The ban is a recognition of reality and will remove the barrier that has barred women from full recognition for their valor and kept many from advancing up the ranks of the military.  One can just imagine the shrieks of Phyllis Schlafly and Christofascists who want women kept as subordinate chattel in the home - bare foot and pregnant if you will.  Obviously, I do not believe that all women should be required to go into combat positions, but those who want them should not be held back.  The Washington Post looks at the policy change:

Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta plans to announce Thursday a lifting of the ban on female service members in combat roles, a watershed policy change that was informed by women’s valor in Iraq and Afghanistan and that removes the remaining barrier to a fully inclusive military, defense officials said.

Panetta made the decision “upon the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” a senior defense official said Wednesday, an assertion that stunned female veteran activists who said they assumed that the brass was still uneasy about opening the most physically arduous positions to women. The Army and the Marines, which make up the bulk of the military’s ground combat force, will present plans to open most jobs to women by May 15.

“The onus is going to be on them to justify why a woman can’t serve in a particular role,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plan before the official announcement.

The decision comes after a decade of counterinsurgency missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, where women demonstrated heroism on battlefields with no front lines. It dovetails with another seismic policy change in the military that has been implemented relatively smoothly: the repeal of the ban on openly gay service members.

Lawmakers and female veterans applauded Wednesday’s news, saying the ban on women in combat roles is obsolete.  “This is monumental,” said Anu Bhagwati, a former Marine captain and executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network, which has advocated for the full inclusion of women. “Every time equality is recognized and meritocracy is enforced, it helps everyone, and it will help professionalize the force.”

Advocates and experts say women are unlikely to flock to those positions, such as roles in light infantry and tank units and Special Forces — although some may. More substantively, they say, lifting the ban will go a long way toward changing the culture of a male-dominated institution in which women have long complained about discrimination and a high incidence of sexual assault.

“The reality is that so many women have been, in effect, in combat or quasi-combat,” he said. “This is catching up with reality.”

In a statement, Sen. James M. Inhofe (Okla.), the leading Republican on the Armed Services Committee, voiced a measure of concern, saying last year’s study raised “serious practical barriers” that, if ignored, could jeopardize the “safety and privacy” of service members.

James Inhofe - a Christianist who never can separate his bigoted religious views from public policy - not surprisingly raised to bogus issue of  service member "privacy" as a reason to keep women inferior.

Another Indictment of America's Faux Exceptionalism

Many, especially on the far right and among Christofascist/Tea Party circles, like to bloviate about American exceptionalism.  American exceptionalism is, of course, a myth used by the ignorant and xenophobic to make themselves feel good about themselves and superior to others much as the Christofascists focus on condemning others rather than face the reality of their own hypocrisy filled, miserable lives.   But, as this blog has looked previously, there is one area in which America is exceptional, but in a very negative and unflattering way:  we have the shortest life expectancy of any developed nation and we have the least efficient health care system as well despite spending more on health care than any other nation.  The irony is that the policies that lead to this horrible distinction are those championed by those who most wrap themselves in patriotism and feign worship of Christianity.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this ignominious distinct held by America and offers an indictment of the nation's failing health care system and those responsible for the true "culture of death."  Here are excerpts:

January has turned out to be a banner month for fans of American exceptionalism. As documented in voluminous detail in a 404-page report released last week by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, Americans lead shorter lives than Western Europeans, Australians, Japanese and Canadians. Of the 17 countries measured, the United States placed dead last in life expectancy, even though we lead the planet in the amount we spend on health care (17.6 percent of gross domestic product in 2010 vs. 11.6 percent each for France and Germany). We get radically less bang for the buck than comparable nations. If that’s not exceptionalism, I don’t know what is.

Americans die young. The death rate for Americans younger than 50, the report showed, is almost off the comparative charts. A range of exceptionally American factors — car usage and lack of exercise, junk-food diets, violent deaths from guns, high numbers of uninsured and a concomitant lack of treatment, the high rate of poverty — all contribute to this grim distinction.  

The study enumerates other key, if unsurprising, factors in our shortness of life. “Americans are more likely to find their health care inaccessible or unaffordable,” it concludes. “Americans benefit less from safety net programs that can buffer the negative health effects of poverty and other social disadvantages.”

But a funny thing happens to Americans’ life expectancy when they age. The U.S. mortality rate is the highest of the 17 nations until Americans hit 50 and the second-highest until they hit 70. Then our mortality ranking precipitously shifts: By the time American seniors hit 80, they have some of the longest life expectancies in the world.

What gives? .  .  .  .   the larger part of the answer is that at age 65, Americans enter a health-care system that ceases to be exceptional when compared with the systems in the other 16 nations studied. They leave behind the private provision of medical coverage, forsake the genius of the market and avail themselves of universal medical insurance. For the first time, they are beneficiaries of the same kind of social policy that their counterparts in other lands enjoy. And presto, change-o: Their life expectancy catches up with and eventually surpasses those of the French, Germans, Britons and Canadians.

The big question raised by the data in this study is how Americans have allowed themselves to sink to the bottom of so many indexes that measure the quality and duration of our lives. What’s truly exceptional about America, it turns out, is the indifference we show to our compatriots, the absence of the kind of national solidarity more evident in the nations that surpass us on all these lists. Mitt Romney may have lost the election — thankfully — but his relegation of 47 percent of his fellow Americans to history’s scrap heap evinces a spirit that suffuses all too many of our institutional arrangements and social relations. 

Yes, it is damning and all too accurate.  Even more damning is that the policies that are the root cause of this disgrace track directly back to the GOP and its supposedly :godly Christian" base.  They are indeed modern day Pharisees.  They most certainly are not true followers of the Gospel message.

More Fury Over Latest GOP Rape Remarks

Some in the GOP - i.e., the non-Christofascists - are livid that another Republican member of Congress (pictured above) has reignited controversy by saying that Todd Akin "was partially right" in his remarks about rape and abortion that likely guaranteed Akin's defeat on November 2012 in the Senatorial contest in Missouri.    Indeed, the increasingly rare sane members of the GOP are desperately looking for ways to stop the insane rape comments.  The problem the face is that their political party has been taken over by the knuckle dragging, Bible toting Christofascists who just cannot comprehend that a majority of Americans find their beliefs and statements reprehensible.  Politico looks at this latest firestorm over Christianist batshitery.  Here are excerpts:

Rep. Phil Gingrey’s attempts to explain Todd Akin’s rape remarks are leaving many Republicans beyond frustrated that a few in their party can’t help but insert rape into the already contentious abortion debate.

“This is actually pretty simple. If you’re about to talk about rape as anything other than a brutal and horrible crime, stop,” said Republican strategist Kevin Madden, who was a senior adviser in Mitt Romney’s campaign.

On Thursday, the Georgia Republican didn’t heed that advice, telling a local Chamber of Commerce breakfast that Akin was “partially right” when he said last year that a woman can stop herself from getting pregnant.

“We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate,’” Gingrey said.

He also said that Akin’s definition of a “non-legitimate rape” could be “a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents.”

But Gingrey’s lengthy explanation of what Akin meant was quickly circulated by Democrats, repudiated by medical groups, and had some Republicans smacking their heads in frustration.

And it may have added new urgency to a training program that’s already being launched by an anti-abortion group — the Susan B. Anthony list — to keep candidates and lawmakers from continually making the same kinds of comments that may have helped ruin Republicans’ chances of winning the Senate.

Former Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) questioned why Gingrey was talking about the months-old comment in the first place.  “There’s no way to defend what Todd Akin said,” Bono Mack said. “You just can’t do it and you shouldn’t try to put it into a scientific context. It was a bad statement. And to try to defend it or explain someone else’s poor choice of words, it would be a fool’s errand.”

Training is not the solution to the GOP's problem.  The only real solution is to expel the religious extremists from the party and to cease pandering to them in any way.  Will the GOP do this?  I doubt it.

Will The GOP Threaten a Partial Government Shutdown?

The GOP establishment, as noted in a prior post today, seems to have realized that it needs to retake control of the party primary process to lessen the odds of lunatics and anarchists being elected to Congress.  However, that does nothing to rein in those lunatics, rabid dogs and near anarchists Republicans already in Congress, particularly in the House of Representatives who seem hell bent to destroy the nation's economy - along with the finances of countless American families - in their quest to cut government programs and federal spending on programs the Christofascists and Tea Party loons dislike.  The country has made it past the "fiscal cliff" crisis, but now there is the upcoming debt ceiling crisis where some wonder how much damage the Congressional Republicans will do in their quest to pander to extremists.   A piece in Huffington Post looks at this question and speculates on what may be upcoming.  Here are excerpts:

The just-completed deal to resolve the so-called fiscal cliff has created an even greater cliff down the road. By the end of February, lawmakers will have to grapple with $1 trillion in sequestration cuts that are scheduled to take effect and the need for a debt limit increase. Shortly thereafter, they will have to deal with the end of a continuing resolution to keep the government funded

Any one of these issues on its own would be difficult to resolve. Taken together, they could produce complete gridlock, which itself would have deep economic consequences.

President Barack Obama has pledged that he won't negotiate over the debt ceiling as a matter of principle. But Republicans are still insisting that they will extract as many concessions from the talks as they can.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" this week, "we Republicans need to be willing to tolerate a temporary, partial government shutdown" in order to achieve spending cuts and entitlement reforms.

On Friday morning, meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told members that he was prepared to use the debt ceiling fight as leverage to get spending cuts.

A Republican Senate aide added on: "We all know this deadline is coming. In regards to the CR [U. S. government credit rating] vs the debt ceiling, a downgrade will likely occur if spending is not cut, not if Congress were to refuse to debt ceiling temporarily."

But there would, indeed, be different consequences depending on which event is used to extract spending cuts. If, for example, Congress passes a debt limit increase but fails to pass a continuing resolution, the government can continue to borrow funds to pay its existing bills. But it would cease to operate as normal. As the Congressional Budget Office noted in a 1995 report:

Failing to raise the debt ceiling would not bring the government to a screeching halt the way that not passing appropriations bills would. Employees would not be sent home, and checks would continue to be issued. If the Treasury was low on cash, however, there could be delays in honoring checks and disruptions in the normal flow of government services.

On the other hand, if Congress were to pass a continuing resolution but not raise the debt ceiling, the government would be operating on dwindling funds. Over time, the Treasury would fail to meet its obligations on salaries and wages, retirement funds and social security benefits.

And then there would be the macro and global impact. As a 1979 Government Accountability Office report noted:

At a minimum, however, the government could be subject to additional claims for interest on unredeemed matured debt and to claims for damages resulting from failure to make payments. But even beyond that, the full faith and credit of the U.S. government would be threatened. Domestic money markets, in which government securities play a major role, could be affected substantially.

More recently, JP Morgan's managing director outlined the consequences in a letter to the Treasury Department. Among the impacts projected were the following:

• A rise in Treasury's long-term funding costs;
• A contraction of credit;
• A reduction in the purchase of Treasuries by foreign investors on a permanent basis or even sell off exiting holdings;
• A downgrading of the U.S. sovereign credit rating;
• A possible run on money market funds;
• The destruction of market confidence.

Every American needs to be concerned about what the GOP extremists may do - and needs to understand that we are no longer dealing with rational individuals when it comes to the Tea Party members of Congress.  These individuals live in some alternate universe.

Can the GOP Establishment Fix the Party's Primary Problem?

This blog has noted frequently the the GOP's descent into insanity began when the Christofascists were allowed into local city and county committees from which they slowly took over much of the GOP primary process like a slowly metastasizing cancer.   The result has been that sane and moderate candidates find themselves unable to get nominations in the typically low turn out primaries that are populated by the religious extremists - here in Virginia, The Family Foundation rallies the nutcases - and their Tea Party cousins.  The result has been that even Ronald Reagan could not win a nomination contest nowadays because he would not be extreme and crazy enough to satisfy the Christianists.  Belatedly, the so-called GOP establishment has realized that their short term expediency of embracing the lunatic fringe is turning into a form of political suicide.  An article in Politico looks at the so-called establishment's first effort to regain control of the primary system.  Here are excerpts:

The disastrous 2012 election and embarrassing fiscal cliff standoff has brought forth one principal conclusion from establishment Republicans: They have a primary problem.

The intra-party contests, or threat thereof, have become the original sin that explains many of the party’s woes in the minds of GOP leaders. It’s the primaries that push their presidential nominees far to the right (see “self-deportation” and “47 percent”); produce lackluster Senate candidates (Todd Akin has almost become a one-word shorthand); and, as seen most vividly in the last two weeks, dissuade scores of gerrymandered House members from face-saving compromise while politically emasculating their speaker.

What to do about the primaries has become Topic A in many a post-election Republican soul-searching session, and now the first steps are being taken to address the issue. For Senate Republicans, that means a modified return to their 2010 posture of openly playing in primaries. A retiring House Republican is starting a super PAC to help House members challenged from the right. And an RNC commission is mulling over changes to the party’s presidential primary.

In the Senate, where at least five GOP losses in the past two election cycles could be attributed to primaries, Republican leaders are planning to intervene in selected 2014 races to ensure preferred candidates win the nomination.

High-profile Senate Republicans are going to try to pre-empt bloody primaries with aggressive, early recruitment and support — effectively trying to clear fields.

Further, top Senate Republicans have made clear to outside groups that they’d like the third parties to not exist simply as entities that air attack ads against Democrats in general elections but to play a more hands-on role in GOP primaries.  .   .   .   .  Translation into non-Senate speak: The big-money establishment Republican super PACs like American Crossroads need to serve as a counterbalance in primaries to conservative outfits such as Club for Growth and former Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund.

In the House, look no further than the Plan B debacle and the 151 Republican “no” votes on the final compromise to understand how primaries have become the chief political threat in a GOP caucus in which more than half the members faced nominal general election opposition this year.

“A lot of the Republican Conference strategy has been to not put members in a difficult primary situation and that makes it tougher for us to sign off on a deal,” lamented former Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio), a Boehner ally.

“When a center-right Republican is in a primary and is being targeted by some group as a RINO, we’re going to make sure we have their back,” said LaTourette. “Not just with speeches and press releases but with money.”

There is more that is worth a full read.  Personally, I believe the effort will be difficult since the lunatic fringe is now far too entrenched in the local committees.  The patients have taken over the asylum and putting them back on the fringe will take a great deal of work and money - and calling out the crazies for what they are.

The Insane Asylum That is Today's GOP

While it has now been many years since I resigned from the Republican Party and gave up the seat on the Virginia Beach City Committee that I had held for eight years, I continue to shake my head in dismay at what has become of a political party I was once proud to belong to and support.  I ask my self at times WTF happened?  But I know the one word answer: Christianists.  Out of short term political expediency, these folks were welcomed to the party and voted into positions on committees across the country and as their influence grew, rational moderates fled the increasing push for a theocratic agenda and attendant greed, fear and hate based policies.  Some may ask about the Tea Party's role in the now rampant insanity within the GOP, but with some 85% of the Tea Party identifying as conservative Christians, the two groups are actually one and the same.  Those who carry the Tea Party banner simply disguise their religious extremism, in my view.  With sane individuals fewer and farther between within the GOP, there now are no leaders who are brave enough or willing to take on the patients within the insane asylum the GOP has become.   A piece in BuzzFeed looks at the leadership void.  Here are excerpts:

WASHINGTON — Forget the Republican Party’s need to rebrand itself. Forget party elders' promises that they will start reaching out to minorities. And forget the supposed soul-searching that is meant to sweep over the GOP as it undergoes a serious reexamination of its future.
Right now, Republicans are having trouble even getting out of their own way.

Conservative groups are splintering. The Romney campaign has dissolved into backbiting and billing disputes. A “plan B” to avert the fiscal cliff proved to be a colossal embarrassment. A teetotaling Idaho senator has been charged with drunk driving. But the most striking symptom of the GOP’s horrible moment is the party’s inability to get done what virtually everyone here knows is in its political best interest: A hasty surrender.

It’s difficult to find a Republican operative who is willing to say on the record that going over the fiscal cliff next Tuesday is a good idea. Provoking a crisis is bad politics: Republicans are resigned to taking the blame. And it’s bad for their policy agenda: They will likely be cornered into a broader tax hike than the best deal they could get from President Barack Obama today, and with none of the spending cuts that might now be on the table.  And yet, the dominant emotion among most Republicans here is one of sheer resignation.

“It’s a shit show,” one prominent Republican told BuzzFeed of the GOP’s messaging position. “Tax rates are going to go up on everyone, and we’re going to get the blame.”

The Republican woes have many roots, but here on Capitol Hill, one of the problems is particularly clear. Without a Republican president — or even a presidential nominee — leadership has fallen to two men who are in no position to actually lead a national party anywhere: Boehner and, to a lesser degree, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

McConnell is a tactical master and one of the best politicians in the country. But he is not equipped to be the party's national face, nor is he the sort to quickly impose a firm grip on the floundering party in order to lead it out of the wilderness.

As for Boehner, since the election he’s seen his standing within the party and conservative circles crumble. Conservative news outlets are openly discussing ousting him, accusing him of ideological crimes against his party and in some cases openly mocking him and questioning his honesty.

Expect more chaos within the GOP as the insane base continues to demand policies and positions that harm the country and make the exodus on rational people accelerate.  When the base of a political party no longer is tethered to objective reality bad things are bound to happen.  Today's GOP is in essence an extreme sectarian party that is welcoming to fewer and fewer Americans.

 

Debunking the Christianist Claim that America Descending to Godlessness

As a history major in college and one who has always done massive amounts of historical reading on my own, I constantly am distressed by the manner in which the religious extremists of the far right - the Christofascists who seek to force their beliefs on all citizens - demonstrate a very selective reading of history.  They leave out whatever is inconvenient - much as they do with their recitation of Bible verse - and fabricate entire new story lines when the truth doesn't fit their theocratic purposes.  Faux historian David Barton is a prime example of the latter phenomenon.  An op-ed in the New York Times written by a history professor looks at the rantings of  the likes of Bryan Fischer at AFA and then looks at the real history of religion - and Christianity in particular - in America.  The true picture is not surprisingly far different from that painted by the truth and veracity challenged mouth pieces of the Christianists.  Here are some column highlights:

Conservative activists insist that they protest these developments not to defend special privileges for Christianity, but to respect the founders’ desire for universal religious liberty — rooted, they say, in the Christian tradition. The controversial activist David Barton has devoted his career to popularizing this “forgotten history” through lectures, books and home-school curriculums. 

Bryan Fischer, spokesman for the American Family Association, told me that he saw the “nones” as proof that “the foundations of our culture are crumbling.”  

How accurate is this story of decline into godlessness? Is America, supposedly God’s last bastion in the Western world, rejecting faith and endangering religious liberty? 

The truth is that “nones” are nothing new. Religion has been a feature of human society since Neanderthal times, but so has religious indifference. Our illusions of the past as a golden age of faith tend to cloud our assessment of today’s religious landscape. We think of atheism and religious apathy as uniquely modern spiritual options, ideas that Voltaire and Hume devised in a coffee house one rainy afternoon sometime in the 18th century. Before the Enlightenment, legend has it, peasants hurried to church every week and princes bowed and scraped before priests. Historians have yet to unearth Pew studies from the 13th century, but it is safe to say that we frequently overestimate medieval piety. 

In 1584, census takers in Antwerp discovered that the city had a larger proportion of “nones” than 21st-century America: a full third of residents claimed no religious affiliation.  

Rates of church attendance have never been as sterling as the Christian Right’s fable of national decline suggests. Before the Civil War, regular attendance probably never exceeded 30 percent, rising to a high of 40 percent around 1965 and declining to under 30 percent in recent years — even as 77 percent still identify as Christians and 69 percent say they are “very” or “moderately” religious, according to a 2012 Gallup survey.

We know, then, that the good old days were not so good after all, even in God’s New Israel. Today’s spiritual independents are not unprecedented. What is new is their increasing visibility.  .  .  .  Americans are drifting out of the grip of institutionalized religion, just as they are drifting from institutional authority in general.

‘Religious authority’ is no longer clergy in the pulpit saying ‘Vote for Eisenhower,’ but forwarded URL links or gossip exchanges in chat rooms. There is no referee.”  For a very long time, Protestant leaders were those referees. If individual impiety flourished in centuries past, churches still wielded significant control over civic culture: the symbols, standards and sexual mores that most of the populace respected in public, if not always in private. Today, more and more Americans openly accept extramarital sex, homosexuality and other outrages to traditional Christian morality.

For most of our history, the loudest defenders of the separation of church and state were not rogue atheists, but Protestants worried about Catholics seeking financing for parochial schools or scheming their way into public office to take orders only from mitered masters in Rome.  Activists on both the left and the right tend to forget this irony of the First Amendment: it has been as much a weapon of religious oppression as a safeguard for liberty.

Conservative Christian activists hold those sectarian foundations more dearly than they admit, and they are challenging the Obama administration’s efforts to frame access to contraception and same-sex marriage as civil rights immune to the veto of “private” conscience.  

These legal efforts are less an attempt to redefine religious liberty than a campaign to preserve Christians’ historic right to police the boundary between secular principles and religious beliefs. Only now that conservative Christians have less control over organs of public power, they cannot rely on the political process. Now that the “nones” are declaring themselves, and more Americans — including many Christians — see birth control as a medical necessity rather than a sin, Mr. Sears sees a stark course of action for the Catholic and evangelical business owners he represents: “Litigation is all that our clients have.” Their problem, however, is more fundamental than legal precedent. Their problem is that America’s Christian consensus is fragmenting. We are left groping for something far messier: an evolving, this-worldly, compromise.

New Orleans Schools Ban Creationism and "Revisionis" History

No one whines more about America's supposed decline than Republicans.  Yet the GOP prostitutes itself shamelessly to the Christianists who seek to dumb down America's public school system so as to avoid anything that demonstrates that their ignorant belief in Bible inerrancy is simply not in accord with scientific fact and modern knowledge.  Nothing personifies this more than the Christianist push to have creationism taught in our public schools as if it were a legitimate area of science.  Closely aligned to this effort is the push to rewrite American history to (i) make the false claim that America was founded as a "Christian nation" and (ii) excise inconvenient events and individuals from the nation's history.  If anyone is contributing to America's decline it is the Christianists themselves through their deliberate embrace of ignorance.  Thus, it is refreshing that the Orleans Parish schools in Louisiana - not exactly one of the nation's most enlightened states - have banned the teaching of creationism and the revisionist history so loved by the far right.  Here are highlights from Raw Story on this development:

The school board for Orleans Parish in Louisiana voted Tuesday night to ban the teaching of creationism as science and what they called a “revisionist” history curriculum promoted by the state of Texas.

None of the six schools run by the board actually teach creationism, according to The Times-Picayune, but outgoing Orleans Parish School Board President Thomas Robichaux felt strongly about the measure (PDF) anyway, which passed in two parts.

The first policy change pertains to the selection of textbooks. “No history textbook shall be approved which has been adjusted in accordance with the State of Texas revisionist guidelines nor shall any science textbook be approved which presents creationism or intelligent design as science or scientific theories,” it reads.

The second policy change prohibits teachers from taking the matter into their own hands. “No teacher of any discipline of science shall teach any aspect of religious faith as science or in a science class,” it reads. “No teacher of any discipline of science shall teach creationism or intelligent design in classes designated as science classes.”

The school district is not alone in pushing back against growing religious and conservative influence on science and history curriculum. When education officials in Texas began altering textbooks to reflect right-wing and religious viewpoints, lawmakers in California acted quickly to pass a bill that bans the state’s revisionist standards in California schools.

Officials in other states are particularly concerned about Texas’s changes because the state can tend to influence how the nation’s most widely accepted textbooks are written.

Given the de facto control of the Republican Party in Virginia by The Family Foundation, a vicious far right Christianist organization, don't hold your breath hoping to see similar commonsense measures in Virginia any time soon.

The Obvious Solution to Gun Violence

I never cease to find it ironic that among the loudest voices calling for unlimited access to guns in America are the far conservatives who time and time again equate to conservative Christians.  People who, if they took the Gospel message seriously, would eschew violence and the guns that are so intertwined with violence in America.  Instead they demonstrate a level of hatred of others, extremism and paranoia that in and of themselves  suggest that just maybe these folks ought not to have ready access to guns.  Common sense ought to suggest that assault style weapons do not belong freely accessible to anyone who wants them.  What is likewise disturbing is the refusal of conservatives in particular to ever learn from the successful policies of other nations.  A piece in the Washington Post puts the problem of gun violence in perspective and reveals how simple it would be to reduce the gun related carnage in this country if only politicians had a shred of courage.  Here are excerpts:

Announcing Wednesday that he would send proposals on reducing gun violence in America to Congress, President Obama mentioned a number of sensible gun-control measures. But he also paid homage to the Washington conventional wisdom about the many and varied causes of this calamity — from mental health issues to school safety.

In fact, the problem is not complex, and the solution is blindingly obvious.

What we should be trying to understand is not one single event but why we have so many of them. The number of deaths by firearms in the United States was 32,000 last year. Around 11,000 were gun homicides.

To understand how staggeringly high this number is, compare it to the rate in other rich countries. England and Wales have about 50 gun homicides a year — 3 percent of our rate per 100,000 people. Many people believe that America is simply a more violent, individualistic society. But again, the data clarify. For most crimes — theft, burglary, robbery, assault — the United States is within the range of other advanced countries. The category in which the U.S. rate is magnitudes higher is gun homicides.

The U.S. gun homicide rate is 30 times that of France or Australia, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, and 12 times higher than the average for other developed countries.

The data in social science are rarely this clear. They strongly suggest that we have so much more gun violence than other countries because we have far more permissive laws than others regarding the sale and possession of guns. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 50 percent of the guns. 

There is clear evidence that tightening laws — even in highly individualistic countries with long traditions of gun ownership — can reduce gun violence. In Australia, after a 1996 ban on all automatic and semiautomatic weapons — a real ban, not like the one we enacted in 1994 with 600-plus exceptions — gun-related homicides dropped 59 percent over the next decade. The rate of suicide by firearm plummeted 65 percent. (Almost 20,000 Americans die each year using guns to commit suicide — a method that is much more successful than other forms of suicide.)

[W]hy not have government do something much simpler and that has proven successful: limit access to guns. And not another toothless ban, riddled with exceptions, which the gun lobby would use to “prove” that such bans don’t reduce violence. 

The problems that produced the Newtown massacre are not complex, nor are the solutions. We do not lack for answers.  What we lack in America today is courage.

 In the wake of the Newtown massacre last week, the Virginian Pilot is reporting that gun sales in Virginia have soared to record numbers.  It's a pretty safe bet that it is not the liberals and liberal minded Christians who are flocking to buy guns.  It's likely largely the "godly Christian" set and their equally mentally disturbed Tea Party cousins.

It's Republicans Who Don't Know the Real America

Ensconced in their reality denying bubble Republicans claim to represent "real Americans" and seek to uphold a version of America that in many ways never really existed outside of small pockets and, of course in the programing of shows like Leave It to Beaver.  Most people never existed in this false idyllic world, but that doesn't matter to those who want to keep America white and Christian and hold contempt for most Americans.  The real America, however, is changing rapidly and underscores the alternate universe world of today's GOP.  A piece in Politico looks at the phenomenon and the need for Republicans to come outside their bubble.  Here are highlights:

Republicans’ post-election soul-searching has to go beyond a simple self-reflection about who we are – we know our core belief in small government and individual liberty remains unchanged. Rather than look inward, it’s time to look outward and finally get to know the people we seek to represent.

The days and months and years ahead must be about a nationwide effort to introduce ourselves and get to know the millions of people and thousands of communities that make up our 21st-century America.

We all know the GOP has become synonymous with older, white males. This isn’t entirely accurate, but it’s public perception, and perception is reality.

 

As we evolve, it doesn’t just matter what we say but who is saying it.  Howie Long and Charles Barkley are two of America’s most popular and successful sports analysts today. That’s because they have credibility: Football fans know that Howie understands football, and basketball fans know that Barkley gets hoops. We respect their opinion because we believe they know what they’re talking about.  It’s the same in politics.

No citizen will support a candidate they don’t think understands them. After all, the whole point of representative government is putting into office someone who represents your values.  The focus has got to be on inclusion – welcoming minorities, women, youth and all Americans into the party and giving them a voice in shaping who we are, not just a one-way conversation in telling them what we believe.

[I]f all we’re doing is looking inward, we’re going the wrong way.  Look outward and find out who America is instead. We have a lot of people to get to know.

Will Republicans take heed of this message?  I for one will not be holding my breath.  Frankly, I believe that the Christianist base of the GOP cannot and will not change.  No real change will occur until several more generations of angry whites die off.