Trump Supporters: Motivated Ignorance Explained

One thing that strikes me about Trump supporters in the current circumstances is the effort they make to remain ignorant of the seriousness of the scandals swirling around their amoral and unfit president. Of course, Fox News. Breitbart and other conservative "news" outlets provide assistance with their censorship of anything inconvenient to maintaining the pretense that the Trump/Pence regime is performing well rather be honest and let their viewers/listeners learn the reality that the regime is a train wreck perhaps hurtling toward disaster.  This embrace of ignorance is not surprising when it comes to the evangelical Christians who daily reject modernity and science which challenge their fairy tale and myth based beliefs.  For others, presumably bigotry and a need to maintain a belief that they are superior to others justifies ignoring anything that might ruffle their false sense of superiority or outmoded world view.  A piece in Vox looks at this conscious effort to ignore the truth while labeling inconvenient facts as "fake news.:  Here are excerpts:

Objectively, Donald Trump’s presidency is flailing. Regardless of what you feel about his core politics and policy, the Trump administration is caught in a cycle of scandals of its own creation. Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, with the possible intent of quashing an FBI probe into his campaign. He gave away intelligence secrets to the Russians, potentially endangering a foreign agent embedded with ISIS.

The start of the Trump administration has been riddled with more scandals than any presidency of recent memory. And yet Trump still enjoys high support among his base: 85 percent of Trump voters approve of the job he’s doing, a recent Morning Consult poll found.

If you’re looking for an explanation for why Trump’s support is so solid among his base — and why it will remain so stubbornly high — read this piece by the Associated Press, where the reporters asked Trump supporters how they’re handling the wave of scandals.

“I tuned it out,” Michele Velardi, a 44-year-old in Staten Island, told the AP of the recent news. “I didn’t want to be depressed. I don’t want to feel that he’s not doing what he said, so I just choose to not listen.”

This line is extremely revealing. It shows a psychological tendency we’re all susceptible to. That tendency is called “motivated ignorance,” and it’s an extremely powerful force in American politics.

Here’s a simple truth: We find inconvenient political facts to be genuinely unpleasant. Psychologists theorize that’s because our partisan identities get mixed up with our personal identities — which would mean that an attack on our strongly held beliefs is an attack on the self.

This “fundamental need for a shared reality with other people” all too often overshadows incentives to weigh evidence or to be objective when it comes to political discussions.

This is the dark truth that lies at the heart of all partisan politics. We automatically have an easier time remembering information that fits our worldviews. We’re simply quicker to recognize information that confirms what we already know, which makes us blind to facts that discount it.

Velardi, the Trump supporter in the AP story, avoided the news by averting her eyes (and ears). But if you’re a regular consumer of conservative media, you don’t have to.

Vox’s Alvin Chang tracked how conservative news sites have been covering the recent Trump controversies. And they largely have been avoiding the topic or obscuring the details.

“Even amid some of the most troubling presidential news in decades, a huge portion of this country is having a very different experience of these events, and repeating it over and over,”

This is a key point that many people miss when discussing the “fake news” or “filter bubble” problem in our online media ecosystems. Avoiding facts inconvenient to our worldview isn’t just some passive, unconscious habit we engage in. We do it because we find these facts to be unpleasant. And as long as this experience remains unpleasant, and easy to avoid, we’re just going to drift further and further apart.

These scandals seem likely to keep growing. And new ones may pop up. But know that it will take a lot for Trump’s supporters to abandon him.

The Descent of Evangelical Christians into Abject Ignorance

This blog has looked before at the correlation between the belief in Bible inerrancy and low levels of education with evangelicals routinely being revealed as the least educated overall and the most believing in the Bible as inerrant fact.   As the evangelical Christians - those I call the Christofascists - have taken over the Republican Party we now see only 43% of self-identifying Republicans believing in evolution.  The sane and educated people have simply left the GOP, a party that once valued science and knowledge.  But even among Evangelicals there is an exodus of the younger educated factions who go to college, receive an education and come to see the religious faith in which the have been raised/brainwashed as unacceptable.  A Piece in The Daily Beast authored by a professor at an evangelical college looks at the downward spiral among evangelicals.  Here are excerpts:

According to a December 2013 Pew poll, among white evangelical Protestants, a demographic that includes many Republican members of Congress and governors, almost 64 percent reject the idea that humans have evolved.

The connection between acceptance of evolution and political affiliation has grown stronger over the past three years, exacerbating the polarization now plaguing Congress. Among Democrats, acceptance of evolution increased by 3 percent, to 67 percent, while among Republicans it decreased from 54 percent to 43 percent.

The trajectory is not encouraging, especially as it runs in parallel with a steady increase in the evidence for evolution—evidence now piled so high that not even one evolutionary biologist at any of America’s research universities rejects the theory. Evolution is as widely accepted in biology departments as gravity is in physics departments.

So how is it that 64 percent of America’s “white evangelical evangelical Protestants,” an unusually powerful and wealthy demographic, remains so strongly opposed to evolution?

I am a white evangelical Protestant, or at least I was until persuaded to leave a couple of years ago. Raised in a parsonage, I grew up in that tradition and, after earning a Ph.D. in physics, I taught science, including evolution, at an evangelical college, one of approximately 160 similar—and accredited—institutions in the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Most evangelical colleges teach evolution, albeit quietly, carefully, and often tentatively, although there are exceptions. 

In an ideal world these efforts should slowly trickle onto Main Street, where they would inform ordinary evangelicals, including those who run for Congress. In time, Darwin’s dangerous idea should become widely accepted, just as Christians gradually gave credence to Galileo’s dangerous idea about the motion of the earth.  But that is not what is happening.

For a quarter century I taught scientific theories of origins—evolution and the Big Bang Theory—under a cloud of suspicion that waxed and waned but never totally disappeared. With few exceptions, my mostly evangelical students accepted these ideas. I took informal polls indicating that most of the 50 percent of my students who rejected evolution at the beginning of my course accepted it by the end. My colleagues at other evangelical colleges report similar experiences. We were hopeful that these evangelical students would become leaders of their faith communities and gradually persuade their fellow evangelicals that evolution was not a lie from hell—which was what many of them had been taught in Sunday school. But instead scientifically informed young evangelicals became so alienated from their home churches that they walked away, taking their enlightenment with them.

An alarming study by the Barna group looked at the mass exodus of 20-somethings from evangelicalism and discovered that one of the major sources of discontent was the perception that “Christianity was antagonistic to science.” Anti-evolution, and general suspicion of science, has become such a significant part of the evangelical identity that many people feel compelled to choose one or the other. Many of my most talented former students no longer attend any church, and some have completely abandoned their faith traditions.

[S]ome professors, alarmed by the persistent gap between the evangelical community and the findings of science—the gap that drives their students out of their churches—have naively presumed to educate their larger faith communities by writing books and articles in support of scientific theories of origins such as evolution and the Big Bang. Their quiet whispers thus become loud proclamations. Influential leaders read their books and are horrified to discover that a faculty member at “their” college is spreading “lies from the pit of hell” and destroying the faith of the students. Campaigns of various sorts are mounted and pressure exerted on the college leadership to remove that dangerous professor.

Productive scholarship that would be highly valued at other institutions became instead a major liability. Administrators complained that I was too controversial and creating public relations problems . . . 

I spent countless hours in the office of a succession of college presidents, explaining why Christians needed to make peace with evolution, no matter how painful. I was forced to communicate and even meet with hostile external constituents to defend well-established science against people who knew nothing about it beyond the challenges it posed to their interpretation of the Bible. One such watchdog group, the Reformed Nazarenes, rejoiced when I finally left the college.


My story is far from unique. Indeed, it’s almost typical. Understandably, only a handful of evangelical scholars have published books and articles in defense of evolution, but many of them have been forced to resign as a result.

It is no surprise that American Christofascists are focusing so much effort on Africa.  To thrive, their poisonous religious beliefs require (i) an ignorant, uneducated audience, or (ii) simple minded individuals who due to their own psychological issues are terrified to think or question hogwash that has been spoon fed to them.   It is frightening that such mental midgets now hold so much sway over the GOP which seems engaged in a race towards utter ignorance.

Congressional Climate Deniers - Virginia Ranks in La La Land

As the last post noted, the Republican Party has become a religious organization that rejects modernity and anything that suggests that the beliefs of the Christofascists party base might be wrong.  The dignity and normalcy of gays - particularly gay marriage - threatens the ability of the simpleminded (and their pastors in the pulpit) to blindly cling to a few selective Bible passages.  Evolution, naturally causes conniptions since it clearly debunks a literal approach to the Bible.  So too does climate change because it goes against the same closed minded, ignorant by choice mindset that prefers to hang onto the writings of uneducated, wandering goat herders from 2,500 years ago rather than engage in meaningful though and moral deliberations.  With the Virginia GOP firmly in the grips of the Christofascists, as Think Progress reports, Virginia's congressional delegation ranks among the most insane in the country when it comes to climate change denial.  Yep, right up there with Oklahoma. Here are excerpts:

Climate change is happening, humans are the cause, and a shocking number — more than 65 percent — of congressional Republicans refuse to accept it.

155 elected representatives from the 113th Congress have taken over $51 million from the fossil fuel industry that is the driving force behind the carbon emissions that cause climate change. They deny what over 97 percent of climate scientists say is happening — current human activity creates the greenhouse gas emissions that trap heat within the atmosphere and cause climate change. And their constituents are paying the price, with Americans across the nation suffering 368 climate-related national disaster declarations since 2011.

Almost 70 percent — 125 members — of the current Republican caucus in the House of Representatives deny the basic tenets of climate science. 65 percent (30 members) of the Senate Republican caucus also deny climate change. What this means is that they have made public statements indicating that they question or reject that climate change is real, is happening, and is caused by human consumption of fossil fuels.

This refusal to accept overwhelming scientific evidence is not just a symptom of the rank-and-file backbenchers. Members of GOP leadership and the committees that make critical decisions on national energy policy and air pollution have even higher concentrations:

• 90 percent of the Republican leadership in both House and Senate deny climate change
• 17 out of 22 Republican members of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, or 77 percent, are climate deniers
• 22 out of 30 Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, or 73 percent deny the reality of climate change
• 100 percent of Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Republicans have said climate change is not happening or that humans do not cause it

Some states are sorely suffering the effects of climate change in the form of climate-fueled natural disasters even as their elected representatives take in millions from fossil fuel contributions and reject the reality of climate science:

• 18 members of the Texas congressional delegation deny the reality of climate change. Over their careers, these members have raked in over $10.8 million from oil, gas, and coal interests. Texas has suffered 58 climate-fueled disaster declarations since 2011.
• More than half of the Oklahoma delegation denies climate change, and together they have received nearly $2.5 million in fossil fuel money. Since 2011, Oklahomans have borne dozens of disasters worsened by climate change.
• 7 members of the Virginia congressional delegation — more than half — deny climate change and together they pulled in more than $1.25 million from fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal interests. And Virginians have 8 disaster declarations to show for it.

Being clinically insane or having undergone a lobotomy are increasingly prerequisites to membership in today's GOP.   Meanwhile, here on the Virginia coast, sea levels continue to rise and flooding problems increase. 

George Wiil - A Bigot Tries to Mask His Bigotry

UPDATED:  A comment was left on this post that takes on George Will's anti-gay bias head on and underscores the harm being done to the children of gay parents due to the prohibition against same sex marriage.  Here is part of the comment that deserves to be highlighted:

It seems that he has not read the policy statements by the American Academy of Pediatrics endorsing marriage for same-sex couples in 2006. After their exhaustive review of the published science, these nationally recognized child health experts affirmed that children’s outcomes were comparable in two-parent homes regardless of parental gender, and endorsed same-sex civil marriage to benefit the children by providing them with federal and local financial security. Children have a right to know and be cared for by their parents. The frequent assertion that children have a right to a mother and a father is as incorrect as saying that they have a right to rich or good-looking parents.

Does Mr. Will know that the National Association of Social Workers endorsed marriage equality in 2004? The American Sociological Association reviewed all the published scientific data on same-sex marriage effects on children, and filed an Amicus Brief asserting that “there is no evidence that children with parents in stable same-sex or opposite-sex relationships differ in terms of well-being. Indeed, the greater stability offered by marriage for same-sex as well as opposite-sex parents may be an asset for child well-being.” The Child Welfare League of America and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry both issued policy statements stating that gays and lesbians have equal parenting skills in 2006.

This raises one unaddressed aspect of Mr. Will’s support for restricting marriage: Gays, like straights can and do have children from prior relations, by adoption, or from assisted reproductive technology. The current status is harmful to today’s and tomorrow’s children in same-sex parented families by limiting them from having two legal parents, limiting their recognition in cases of disability or death of the non-biological parent, and telling them that their families do not count and are less valued. Just because gay folk cannot have children by accident, as heterosexuals often do, is not a reason to emotionally, socially, financially, and legally continue to harm and disadvantage these children.

What do George Will, Cal Thomas and Pat Buchanan have in common?  The fact that they are so-called conservative columnists and pundits is obvious.  But they also share an open bigotry - based on their Medieval religious beliefs - against gays and gay equality under the civil laws.  The only difference now is that Will is trying to mask his anti-gay bigotry in a column in the Washington Post by pretending that gay marriage should be opposed because "guidance from social science is as yet impossible."   (Thomas and Buchanan don't even bother trying to hide the basis of their bigotry.)  Like many of the religious extremists who are grappling for justifications for their opposition to marriage equality other than pure religious based animus, Will is acting as if granting marriage rights to same sex couples will somehow change heterosexual marriages and/or that we don't have enough clinical data to justify it.  Here's a sampling of Will's double speak:

[R]esearch about, for example, the stability of same-sex marriages or child-rearing by same-sex couples is “radically inconclusive” because these are recent phenomena and they provide a small sample from which to conclude that these innovations will be benign.

Today “there neither are nor could possibly be any scientifically valid studies from which to predict the effects of a family structure that is so new and so rare.” Hence there can be no “scientific basis for constitutionalizing same-sex marriage.”

In addition endeavoring to mask the religious belief roots of his own prejudice and bigotry, Will is intentionally ignoring obvious facts: (1) gays and gay relationships have existed throughout recorded history; (2) same sex couples have in the past, now at present and in the future will be parenting children and denying marriage rights will not change this reality; (3) millions of children will never be raised in homes headed by a stable heterosexual couples, and this reality will not change; (4) since gay marriage first emerged in Massachusetts divorce rates both in Massachusetts and nationwide are down. 

Given these objective reality truths, Will's opposition to marriage equality only serves to deprive same sex couples and their children of rights, stability and often financial security that heterosexual couples unthinkingly take for granted.Will's reason makes about as much sense as the rantings of the radical anti-abortion crowd that worships fetuses up until the time they are born and yet vote for GOP demagogues who seek to slash programs for poor children and who would leave millions of children without health care coverage.  The hypocrisy is palpable.

Let's be clear the real basis on Will's anti-gay marriage agenda rests on one thing: his clinging to a few passages on the Bible authored by those utterly ignorant of modern knowledge on sexual orientation, biology, medicine and virtually every other form of modern knowledge.  Will knows that admitting this truth destroys his credibility with a majority of Americans.  Hence the ruse that a denial of equal protection under the Constitution is justified because of a supposed lack of clinical data.  Two comments on Will's column summed things up well:  

Sound reasoning, Bubba Will. I suppose we better go back and get us some social science evidence for how black folk integrate into society before we allow that to go too far as well, right, Bubba?

The argument that we can't allow gay marriage because we haven't allowed it long enough to get any solid data points is too ridiculous to engage in.

Ebracing Christianism - A Political Dead End for the GOP

Despite the changing views on religion sweeping across America, including a wholesale exodus of the under 30 generations for institutional religion, the Republican Party for the most part remains locked in an embrace of the Christofascists that will ultimately prove fatal.    The elderly ranks of the Bible beaters are dying off and not being replaced by similarly unthinking/believing younger ranks.  Indeed, as the study cited in an earlier post found, outside of white evangelical Christians, every Christian denomination is trending towards acceptance of gay marriage.  But it is not on just the issue of gay marriage where the GOP is courting political suicide.  Contraception, climate change, the acceptance of scientific fact and objective reality - modernity itself - all are gaining growing acceptance and recognition by a majority of Americans.  Meanwhile the Christians and the GOP remain in a shrinking bubble.  Andrew Sullivan has a post that is a follow up to a debate that he had with a hard core Christianist that looks at the dead end the GOP is racing towards.  Here are highlights:

Last week, as regular readers know, I went to the University of Idaho to debate whether civil marriage equality was good or bad for society as a whole. My interlocutor was and is a fundamentalist, a believer in Biblical morality .  .  .  .  . My hosts sincerely believe that there can be no solid separation between church and state and no basis for social order or “truth” other than Biblical morality as strained through the New Testament. And so purely pragmatic political arguments can quickly become problematic for them. Peter Leithart, who attended the debate, wrote it up on First Things and admirably homed in on the core divide:

Sullivan demanded that Wilson defend his position with secular, civil arguments, not theocratic ones, and in this demand Sullivan has the support of liberal polity. Sullivan’s is a rigid standard for public discourse that leaves biblically-grounded Christians with little to say … That leaves Christians with the option of making theologically rich, biblically founded arguments against gay marriage.  .  .  .  . If that’s a hard case to make, it’s even harder to make the case that homosexuals are in any way a threat to our civilization.

 The traditional Christian moral arguments depend on a metaphysical understanding that is no longer widely shared, not even by Christians.

This is why Christianism cannot win a majority – and is fast becoming a smaller minority. If your agrument is that God says so – and your fellow citizens don’t believe in that same God – how can you even engage in secular debate? New analysis (pdf) of polling and the last election results on the gay marriage question, for example, reveal that only one major religious group now opposes marriage equality across the board: white evangelical Christians, who are pretty close to synonymous with the Tea Party. Even every other Christian population supports it [gay marriage]! From white non-evangelical Christians to Catholics, clear majorities favor the reform.

The GOP’s problem is that this is their base; it cannot compromise because God’s word is inviolable; and yet it is also losing the argument badly. You either stick with this base and lose – or you fight them and lose. Which is why so many in the GOP are now just not talking about the issue.

In Idaho, the crowd was largely white and evangelical. They voted overwhelmingly against marriage equality at the start and after a debate in which my opponent conceded that his argument was ultimately rooted totally in Biblical truth and not secular consequences, and who declared the state of heterosexual marriage as in crisis. In other words, that night mirrored the last twenty years. The longer this debate has gone on, the more the opposition has withdrawn to claims of simple Biblical authority. That is not an appeal to the center of the American polity.

The theo-conservative response to this was an attempt to revive “natural law” arguments against gay marriage, derived from updating Aquinas.  .  .  .  .  Aquinas didn’t know, for example, that humans were conceived by a woman’s egg as well as a man’s sperm. He couldn’t possibly have known what Darwin and his followers have unfolded: a vast, constantly shuffling of DNA, designed to generate diversity in order to survive the challenges of subsistence through time and environment. He couldn’t have known that the animal kingdom is full of homosexuality .  .  .  .

Personally, I care nothing about the slow eventual death of the extremist white evangelical denominations.  But I do care and am troubled by the fact that one of America's major political parties seems trapped in the grip of a dying and increasingly irrational segment of the population.  A segment that sadly views everyone who doesn't look and think just as they do with hatred and contempt.  They will be the death of the Republican Party and their rabid homophobia is hastening the move of many younger Americans from Christianity itself.  The irony is that the Christofascists claim that gays will destroy western civilization yet it is they themselves who are destroying Christianity.

The Ugly Face of Religious Based Homophobia

Click image to enlarge

With three children of my own, one grandchild and another one on the way, I find few things more incomprehensible that throwing away one's own child based on a few passages in a book that is selectively read for every other purpose.  Yes, I am talking about the Bible - a book I suspect has caused more harm than good over the centuries - and those who cling to the supposed condemnations of same sex relations while utterly ignoring a host of other prohibitions.  In my view, if one discards their child because they are gay, few things better demonstrate the hypocrisy of these parents and the ugliness of conservative Christianity in general  Frank Bruni has a column in the New York Times that looks at the evil still being done by those who simple mindedly cling to a handful of Bible passages and reject their children.  Here are column highlights:

Jeff Chu was married last September, on the lawn of a house on Cape Cod, against the backdrop of an ivy-covered fence. About 80 people came.  His mother and father weren’t among them. 

His mother sent an e-mail just beforehand, to let him know that she was thinking of him. But to be a part of the ceremony? To celebrate the day? That much she couldn’t do, because Jeff was pledging his devotion to another man. And his parents, strict Southern Baptists, have always deemed such a love sinful, and against God’s wishes. 

Against God’s wishes. That notion — that argument — is probably the most stubborn barrier to the full acceptance of gay and lesbian Americans, a last bastion and engine of bigotry. It’s what many preachers still thunder. It’s what some politicians still maintain. 

It’s what Jeff himself once feared.  “How many nights have I spent sweaty and panicked and drained of tears, because I thought I would go to hell — for being gay, for being me?” he asks.  And how often, he adds, did he pray “that God would take these feelings from me?” 

His parents came to America from Hong Kong with the conservative beliefs that Baptist missionaries had spread through that area of the world. They reared Jeff in their religion, sending him to a Christian high school in Miami. One of his vivid memories from those years was the sudden banishment of a favorite teacher after the school discovered that he was involved with another man.  Jeff knew even then that he had feelings like the teacher’s, and writes: “This was the lesson that I learned: Nobody could ever, ever find out, because if they did, I would be damned and cast out, just like he was.” 

At Princeton, he dated women. But in London for graduate school, he began to date men, and to wonder how that orientation could be wrong, when God had presumably made him the way he was.

Although his book doesn’t focus on the scattered references in the Bible to homosexuality, Jeff knows them well. And, yes, a few seem to condemn same-sex intimacy.   But have they been translated correctly? Interpreted the right way? Are they timeless verities or — more logically — reflections of an outmoded culture and obsolete mind-set? And if all of the Bible is to be taken literally, shouldn’t Christians refrain from planting multiple kinds of seed in one field or letting women speak in church or charging interest to the poor?

[H]e thinks it arrogant to insist, as the zealots who condemn gay people do, that God’s will is so easily known. And in light of that, he thinks it wrong for anyone to try to consign gays to the shame that so many of them have endured. 

The stories in Jeff’s book made me sad, and they made me angry. How much needless pain have people like him been put through, and in God’s name no less? 

The truth, as anyone educated and willing to open their mind knows is that the Bible was written by ignorant, uneducated nomads who knew nothing of science, sexual orientation and a host of other realms of knowledge and who wanted to hold themselves apart from surrounding peoples, many of whom accepted same sex relations.  The hubris of condemning others out of intellectual laziness and a refusal to use God given intelligence, now that's the sin.  Not loving same sex relationships.  My contempt and disgust for those who cling to what is little more than baseless bigotry against gays only seems to increase over time.  They, not gays, are the face of evil in the world.

Supporters of Sequestration Discovery They Have Screwed Themselves

As noted in prior posts, it would be wonderful if all of the lay offs and furloughs that will be the result of the sequester could be reserved for red states and those who support the GOP economic saboteurs in Congress, particularly those in the House of Representatives.  While that unfortunately isn't possible, there is going to be some perverse pleasure to be enjoyed watching many of the cretins who have cheered on the GOP suddenly discover that they have really screwed themselves.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at instances where lunatic members of the GOP base are suddenly having a real reality check.  Am I being perverse in enjoying this?  Perhaps, but these folks DO deserve what they have brought on themselves.  An analysis of state by state cuts can be found here.  Here are article highlights:

The federal budget cuts were still an abstraction as American Eagle Flight 3429 crossed the snow-crusted plains into southwestern Kansas. Kevin Colvin, a construction manager flying in for work, looked out of the window at the tiny airport below.

“They make it sound like, ‘Oh my God! We’re going to die if we make these cuts!’ ” he said, eating a potato chip, the cuts still two days away. “I think it’s a bunch of BS.”

The cuts came into clearer focus Thursday. Garden City Regional Airport would lose its air traffic controllers, saving the federal government $318,756 and leaving pilots to handle landings, takeoffs and weather conditions mostly by themselves.   “Oh,” said Dave Unruh, a retired farmer who heard the news as he waited for a flight to Dallas. “Is that part of the deal?”

By Friday, people in this solidly conservative area faced the reality that it was.

As sequestration dawned, reactions in Kansas’s 1st Congressional District ranged from disbelief to concern to a kind of defiant joy that the $85 billion in mandatory spending cuts had arrived at last. In the 2012 House elections, voters here overwhelmingly backed tea party conservative Tim Huelskamp, who recently hailed sequestration as “the first significant tea party victory” in Washington.

Not everyone here sees it that way. Mayor David Crase and airport director Rachelle Powell spent last week writing letters to Huelskamp and other elected officials urging them to save Garden City’s tower, one of 238 at relatively small airports across the country set to close beginning April 1. Crase said the closure would “undo years of investments” at the local, state and federal level. Powell warned of a decline in flights and associated revenue from fuel or fees or dinners at the popular restaurant Napoli’s at the Flight Deck. Though it was too soon to know, she worried that American Eagle might curtail the only regional jet service in and out of southwestern Kansas  .  .  .  . 

Mostly, Powell was worried about what she described as “a severe negative impact” on airport safety. .  .  .  .  Jeff De Busk, an air traffic control manager and father of six who expects to lose his job, recounted two recent near-collisions — both involving pilots on the wrong radio channel — averted by the tower. “I understand we have to cut the budget,” he said. “But this? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Here were Judy and Earl Kleeman, retirees headed to Florida for a cruise to the Turks and Caicos Islands. “I feel strongly about the need to cut the national debt,” Judy Kleeman said, wondering whether she was willing to fly without the tower. “But I do feel strongly about education, and so many people need help. 

 Sadly, the GOP has become the party of the ignorant, uninformed,racists, religious extremists and bigots.  And it is going to do severe damage to America before it hopefully somehow reforms itself or dies a much needed death.

The South - Dumb America

At this point in my life, I have lived far longer in the South than any where else, including in Alabama, Texas and Virginia.  One phenomenon that continually strikes me is that more often than not, southern states more often than not take actions and support positions that are against there own best interest when viewed by any objective rational basis.  Motivating these counter productive actions and policies is typically a slavish deference to ignorance embracing religion and all to frequently racism.  While most southern white Republicans won't verbalize the true motivation for their hatred of Barack Obama, in truth they cannot tolerate a black man in the White House.  It reminds them all too well of their declining power and privilege. One certainly sees the symptoms of this sickness in the Virginia GOP and its ignorance and bigotry embracing masters at The Family Foundation.  A piece in the New York Review of Books looks at the South's self-defeating behavior.  Here are highlights:

[T]he current South is willing to cut off its own nose to show contempt for the government. Governor Rick Scott of Florida turned down more than $2 billion in federal funds for a high-speed rail system in Florida that would have created jobs and millions of dollars in revenues, just to show he was independent of the hated federal government. In this mood, his forebears would have turned down TVA. People across the South are going even farther than Scott, begging to secede again from the Union. Packer notes that the tea is cooling in parties across the rest of the nation, but seems to be fermenting to a more toxic brew in the South. No one needs better health care more than the South, but it fights it off so long as Obama is offering it, its governors turning down funds for Medicaid. This is a region that rejects sex education, though its rate of teenage pregnancies is double and in places triple that of New England. It fights federal help with education, preferring to inoculate its children against science by denying evolution.

No part of the country will suffer the effects of global warming earlier or with more devastation than the South, yet its politicians resist measures to curb carbon emissions and deny the very existence of climate change—sending it to the dungeon with evolution and biblical errancy. One doesn’t need much imagination to see the South with lowered or swollen waters in its rivers and ports, raging kudzu, swarming mosquitos, and record-breaking high temperatures, still telling itself that global-warming talk is just a liberal conspiracy. But it just digs deeper in denial. The South has decided to be defeated and dumb.

Humans should always cling to what is good about their heritage, but that depends on being able to separate what is good from what is bad. It is noble to oppose mindless change, so long as that does not commit you to rejecting change itself. The South defeats its own cause when it cannot discriminate between the good and the evil in its past, or pretends that the latter does not linger on into the present .  .  .

Tradition dies hard, hardest among those who cannot admit to the toll it has taken on them. That is why the worst aspects of the South are resurfacing under Obama’s presidency. It is the dignity. That a black should have not merely rights but prominence, authority, and even awe—that is what many Southerners cannot stomach. They would let him ride on the bus, or get into Ivy League schools. But he must be kept from the altar; he cannot perform the secular equivalent of taking the Lord in his hands. It is the dignity.

This is the thing that makes the South the distillation point for all the fugitive extremisms of our time, the heart of Say-No Republicanism, the home of lost causes and nostalgic lunacy. It is as if the whole continent were tipped upward, so that the scattered crazinesses might slide down to the bottom. The South has often been defeated. Now it is defeating itself.

The GOP Descent Into Insanity: 64% of Republicans Are Birthers

How does one begin to describe the mass insanity that has taken over the Republican Party?  My Republican ancestors would be spinning in their graves if they could see the batshitery that now qualifies as mainstream GOP thought.  Ditto for William F. Buckley, Jr., who worked to bring intellect and reason to conservationism.  Now, to be a Republican one literally must have had a lobotomy or be clinically insane.  How else to explain the findings of a new Fairleigh Dickinson University survey of register voters that found that 64% of Republicans are so-called "birthers" who continue to believe that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States.  Apparently, Hawaii doesn't qualify as a part of the nation in the minds of those who inhabit the fetid swamp that is today's GOP.  A piece in Salon looks at the off the charts delusion of Republicans.  Here are highlights:

A whopping 64 percent of Republicans think it’s “probably true” that President Obama is hiding important information about his background and early life, including his possible birthplace, according to a new nationwide survey of registered voters from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind project examining Americans’ belief in political conspiracy theories.

The report goes on to state that purported levels of knowledge generally reduces susceptibility to belief in birtherism and conspiracy theories and birtherism in general - except among Republicans where claimed knowledge of current events has an opposite effect:

In general, higher levels of actual knowledge about politics tends to reduce belief inconspiracy theories. In the poll, respondents were asked a series of four questions about current events, and respondents who were able to answer more questions correctly were less likely to endorse the conspiracy theories. Fifteen percent of people who got none of the questions right thought that three or four of the conspiracies were likely, compared to three percent of those who answered three or four correctly. Education also tended to reduce belief in the conspiracy theories.

However, the relationship between current events knowledge and belief in conspiracy theories is conditional on partisanship. Among Democrats, each question answered correctly reduces the likelihood of endorsing at least one of the conspiracy theories by seven points.Among independents, each additional question reduces it by two points. For Republicans,though, each additional question answered correctly tends to increase belief in at least one of the theories by two points.

Given that evangelical Christians - the mainstay of today's GOP - have lower levels of education and higher levels of belief that the Bible is literally true in every respect, perhaps the staggering levels of birtherism correlate simply correlate to the increasing ignorance of the GOP base.  Whatever the cause, it is sad that a political part that once valued intelligence, education, logic and reason has been reduced to a group of ignorance embracing Neanderthals. 

Anti-Gay Pastor Equates Gays to Child Molesters, Cannibals,and Rapists

There are times that the hideousness and undisguised animus of the self-styled "godly Christian" set is simply numbing and shocks the conscience.  Or at least the consciences of decent moral people.  And it is clear that this animus goes far beyond a mere statement of religious belief.  Indeed, the desire to encourage attacks on and crimes against LGBT citizens is almost palpable.   And like it or not, because of the refusal of what I refer to as the "good Christians" who cower in silence rather than upset the sensibilities of bigots within their denominations, the hate merchants have become the public face of Christianity.  It is no wonder that the younger generations are walking away from institutional Christianity when despicable levels of hate and bigotry seem to be the only visible attributes of the faith.  An anti-gay pastor in Colorado (pictured above left) has once again highlighted what is fast becoming the predominant public face of Christianity in America.  KOAA.com has coverage of the virulent hate being preached from pulpits in El Paso County, Colorado.  Here are highlights:

A local pastor is causing a national stir equating homosexuals to cannibals, child molesters, rapists, and murderers. Pastor David Beuhner of Christ the King Church in northern El Paso County is calling for discrimination against the gay community as state lawmakers revisit marriage equality this session.

"If we embrace homosexuality, we'll destroy society, we'll destroy families, we'll destroy everything. It's not just that God hates homosexuals, there's a reason why he hates it." That's the line causing national outrage from the LGBT community; Pastor David Beuhner took to the airwaves early this month on his radio show 'Generations' in what he says is a last-ditch effort to save our society from falling off the moral cliff.

"If you break natural laws-- you say you don't believe in gravity, you jump off a building, you're gonna die. Homosexuality has consequences and God designed those consequences," Beuhner told News 5's Jacqui Heinrich in an exclusive interview explaining his on-air remarks.

As the Colorado legislature reopens the issue of marriage equality this session, Beuhner is speaking out not just against civil unions, but calling for discrimination against gays, equating them to cannibals, rapists, and child molesters. "The word of god is quite clear. He's destroyed every culture that has embraced homosexuality. The sin is similar to that of cannibalism and child molestation in the sense that it's a sin against society," Beuhner said. "I'm calling for discrimination against adulterers, rapists, murderers, homosexuals. Yes, we must discriminate as a society."

"God's law to the civil magistrate in terms of homosexuality says you should remove the abomination from the land, so that's God's instruction to the people who work up in the capitol who make our laws. That's what they're going to be held accountable for," he said.

Can't you just feel the "love"?  And Beuhner not only proves that he's an asshole and a bigot, but he also shows himself to be an ignorant ass as well when he repeats the Christofascist canard that God has "destroyed every culture that embraced homosexuality."   As this blog has noted before, one of the factors that destroyed the western Roman Empire - most likely the culture Beuhner was referring to -  was Christianity and the Church, not the gays.  And ridiculousness of his claims become even more clear when one considers that the Classical Greek/Roman period lasted five (5) times longer than the period that the United States has existed or the fact that the Persian Empire (before the rise of Islam) lasted over 1,200 years.  And that's just the beginning of the empires that accepted homosexuality.   If one looks at China, which may soon eclipse America, the various dynasties of imperial China lasted over 3,900 years (see the image below) versus America's paltry 237 years of existence.  Not surprisingly, Beuhner's church views the Bible as follows:

We acknowledge the Bible, which includes all sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, to be the infallible and inerrant Word of God, sufficient for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Beuhner is an ignorant, bigoted ass and one wonders how his knuckles are a bloody mess dragging on the ground as they must.  Yet his kind of thinking passes for intelligent discourse in today's GOP.  If Christianity is not going to be fated to ultimately die, the "good Christians" need to directly challenge the Beuhners of the world and stop their hijacking of the faith.

Young men sipping tea and having sex. Individual panel from a hand scroll on homosexual themes, paint on silk; China, Qing Dynasty (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries); Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana, United States

The Proud Embrace of Ignorance

With the world, the scope of knowledge and technology changing at breath taking speed, nations and societies that embrace change and strive to meet the new challenges through innovation will prosper.  Those that do not will be doomed to fade to second tier status.  After World War I, many in Britain - especially conservatives - failed to grasp that it would never be possible to return to the pre-war era.  One consequence was that Britain began its slide from world super power status even though the full result wasn't realized until after World War II.  Here in America we stand poised at a similar cross roads where we can try to pretend it is still 1950 or face and embrace the new world we face.  Sadly, the Christofascists and Tea Party and their political prostitutes in the Republican Party seem determined to pursue the path to decline and second tier status.  The image above from Joe Jervis' blog sums up the mindset that these people who in their self-congratulatory piety are working diligently to lead the nation to long term disaster.  I find these people frightening. 

One Man One Woman - The Right's Myth of Biblical Marriage

This blog has looked at the Bible's description of marriage before and concluded that if one is honest - a very big if for Christianists who seem to have forgotten one of the Ten Commandments - the true Biblical model for marriage is actually polygamy, not the one man and one woman model that Maggie Gallagher and other theocratic bloviate about.  The chart above (click the image to enlarge it) shows other Biblical models for marriage.  In short, it's time to call out the anti-gay Christianists for what they are: LIARS.   Of course, getting the truth out to those who live in the bubble like world of the Southern Baptist Convention and conservative elements in the Roman Catholic Church will not be easy.  They like to cite the Bible but sadly ignore most of what is says.

In "Red States" Mourning and Delusion Continue

P. S. I forgot to mention that, as noted in a prior post, Tennessee ranks among the ten states with the least educated population.  Maybe that explains Ms. Cox's shock over the election results.

It will be interesting to see whether or not the 2012 election results will finally burst the bubble in which so many Republicans live - especially in deep "red states" where Republicans and conservatives just cannot grasp that the country and the world are changing and the 1950's are truly gone forever.   One would think with all the various media outlets available these folks could turn the dial from Fox News at least once in a while.  But, I guess that would involve thinking and trying to educate one's self - thinks that the GOP and the Christofascists seek to avoid at all cost.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the election aftermath in the la la land that has come to be the GOP's alternate reality.  Here are highlights:

HENDERSONVILLE, Tenn. — She arrived early to take apart the campaign office piece by piece, just as she felt so many other things about her life were being dismantled. Beth Cox wore a Mitt Romney T-shirt, a cross around her neck and fresh eyeliner, even though she had been crying on and off and knew her makeup was likely to run. A day after the election, she tuned the radio to Glenn Beck and began pulling posters and American flags off the wall.

Here in the heart of Red America, Cox and many others spent last week grieving not only for themselves and their candidate but also for a country they now believe has gone wildly off track. The days after Barack Obama’s reelection gave birth to a saying in Central Tennessee: Once was a slip, but twice is a sign. 

If, as Obama likes to say, the country has decided to “move forward,” it has also decided to move further away from the values and beliefs of a state where Romney won 60 percent of the vote, a county where he won 70 percent, and a town where he won nearly 80. 

[I]n a single election night, parts of her [Cox's] country had legalized marijuana, approved gay marriage and resoundingly reelected a president who she worried would “accelerate our decline.”  .  .  .   .   “I just don’t get it,” the county sheriff said.

Romney’s thorough defeat had come more as a shock than as a disappointment, and now Cox stared at the actual results on her computer and tried to imagine what the majority of her country believed. “Virginia went blue? Really?” she said. “Southern-values Virginia?”

She blamed some of the divisiveness on Republicans. The party had gotten “way too white,” she said, and she hoped it would never again run a presidential ticket without including a woman or a minority. The tea party was an extremist movement that needed to be “neutralized,” she said, and Romney’s campaign had suffered irreparable damage when high-profile Republicans spoke about “crazy immigration talk and legitimate rape.”

But many other aspects of the division seemed fundamental and harder to solve.  .   .   .   . 

There was the America of gay marriage and the America of her Southern Baptist church, where 7,000 came to listen on Sundays, and where church literature described marriage as “the uniting of one man and one woman.”

Later that night, she left her two-story house in the suburbs and headed to a church a mile outside of town. It was her place of comfort — the place where she always found an answer. She drove onto the church’s sprawling campus, past the children’s center, the volleyball courts and techno-lit recreation room for teenagers and parked in front of a small building. Then she walked up to the second floor to lead her weekly prayer group of 25 women. 

Not to sound cruel, but perhaps Ms. Cox needs to spend less time at her Church - a Southern Baptist Church, of course -  open her eyes, maybe even travel to large Northeast cities, and stop drinking the GO/Southern Baptist Kool-Aid.  Indeed, start thinking for herself and embracing knowledge rather than the intellectual gruel that are the staple of the Christianists and the GOP which they have now overrun.  As citizens, we have a duty to educate ourselves and not live in a bubble.  Yes, it is scary stuff for folks like Ms. Cox - especially the thinking part - but it needs to be done.  And maybe in the process Ms. Cox would come to grasp that all of us are fully human whether we are black or white, gay or straight, Christian or non-Christian.     

The Republican Brain Drain

Richard Cohen has a wonderful take down of the Republican Party in the Washington Post that looks at the intellectual decline of the GOP and the sad fact that the Party is no longer a party of ideas and innovation but instead a party that only looks backwards and that seeks to drag the nation back to a place in history that was never as wonderful as in the minds of the reactionaries and Christianists.  Trying to return to the 1950's simply does not address or find solutions to 2012 problems.  The GOP has a systemic problem that must be corrected: the primaries and caucuses need to be retooled to lessen the impact of the insane elements in the party.  Here are some column excerpts:

In 1980 Ronald Reagan won the Republican nomination. He beat a future president, George H.W. Bush; two future Senate majority leaders, Howard Baker and Bob Dole; and two lesser-known congressmen. This year Mitt Romney won the GOP nomination. He beat a radio host, a disgraced former House speaker, a defeated Senate candidate, a former appointee of the Obama administration, a tongue-tied Texas governor, a prevaricating religious zealot who happens to serve in the House of Representatives and a cranky libertarian doctor. Where did all the talent go?

Until the Republican Party can answer this question, it makes no sense to continue to carp about Mitt Romney and the startlingly incompetent presidential campaign he’s running. His faults as a politician are manifest. He is robotic, unknowable (his own wife asserted at the national convention that “he made me laugh” and then failed to cite a single humorous moment), ideologically incoherent and severely out of touch with the average American. He is his party’s nominee because, like the one-eyed man in the valley of the blind, he is just the best of the worst.

Since Republicans are so focused on the individual and not on the system that produced him, they miss the real problem. The system in this case is the series of incredibly damaging primaries and caucuses that, in the crucial early stages, produce a candidate who could sweep Bavaria. The Iowa caucuses alone take the GOP so far to the right that it all but dooms the winner. Romney had to vow to stop thinking. He had to virtually declare himself anti-Hispanic (criticizing Texas for providing tuition discounts to the college-age children of illegal immigrants). While he has now moderated his approach, it is a bit late. Hispanic is not Spanish for Stupid.

Across the board, Romney pandered to the right. He did so on guns, abortion and even Iran. A GOP candidate has to oppose same-sex marriage, deny global warming and insist — against all evidence — that local control of education is the best.

The list of Republicans who looked at Iowa’s daunting demographics and did not run is more distinguished than those who did. At one time or another, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain (who was forced to drop out) were front-runners. Can you think of any two people less qualified for the presidency?
 
They have designed a system where, politically speaking, the lowest common denominator wins. We are all the poorer for it. 

Contrast the candidates of yore with the collection that took the field this year. The Republican Party has had a brain drain so that now its highest intellectual achievement is — like an infant in the Terrible 2s— simply to say no to everything, especially taxes.

 

Obama "Fear" Driving Social Conservatives

The immediately prior post looked at the fear of modernity and sense of being threatened by the modern world which ultimately underlies much of the unrest in the Arab world.  The post also drew parallels between Christian and Islamic fundamentalists.  A piece in Politico looks at the fear that is driving social conservatives to Mitt Romney.  Why? Because in their minds Obama represents a changing world and changing knowledge that ranges from the human genome project that proves that Adam and Eve never existed (hence no Fall and no need for a Messiah) to understanding that homosexuality is a natural and normal condition.  All of this scares the living Hell out of these knuckle dragging Neanderthals who are terrified to think for themselves and accept that their pastors and priest have been selling them a false bill of goods.  In contrast, Romney promises to try to roll back time and allow them to continue to exist in a fantasy world even at the expense of their own economic well being.  Oh, and let's not forget the sad reality that the GOP has become the party of white supremacists who cannot tolerate that Obama is not white.  Here are article highlights:

 

Fear of President Barack Obama — not enthusiasm for Mitt Romney — is driving religious conservatives to pull the lever for the GOP nominee this November.

Romney — a former Massachusetts governor who came late to the anti-abortion rights cause — was never a favorite of evangelical voters during the Republican primaries, and their love for him hasn’t grown much now that he has officially become their party’s standard bearer, as judged by interviews with two dozen conservatives at the Values Voter Summit in Washington this weekend.

But religious conservatives will support Romney because Obama — who endorsed same-sex marriage earlier this year — is anathema to them.

“It’s not excitement, it is fear — fear of the other guy,” said Dolores Taylor, 69, of West Harrison, N.Y., explaining why she will vote for Romney over Obama in November. “Excited doesn’t seem to be the right word — I’d say energized, because I’m so angry about what’s going on.”

Jackie Lewis, a woman from Ashburn, Va., echoed those sentiments, calling the motivating factor behind her decision to back Romney “total fear”of the incumbent.  “We can’t take four more years of this,” she said.

Conservatives attending the conference said they worried about a range of things during a possible Obama II, from implementation of the president’s health care law, and a move to what they saw as more “socialist” policies to the end of the very values — including the protection of life and traditional marriage — that they came to the summit to support.

Asked who they supported during the GOP primaries, the majority of those interviewed named someone other than Romney. Many were early supporters of Rick Santorum or Michele Bachmann, both of whom spoke at the conference, though they all say they’re backing Romney now that he’s the nominee.

In a CNN poll released last week, 48 percent of Romney supporters said their vote was for Romney, while 47 percent said they were voting for him as a vote against Obama.

In many ways, these people are little different than the Muslims rioting against the USA around the Arab world.  The real enemy for these people is change and modernity and Romney has been only too happy to pander to their Neanderthal mindset.  These dim wits fail to grasp that the world WILL change and that they are fighting losing rear guard battle.

Why Are Muslims - and Fundamentalists in General - So Easily Offended?

An op-ed in the Washington Post looks at the question of why the Muslims in the Arab world are so easily offended by what they perceive to be insults to  Islam in general or Mohammad in particular.   It's a question that, in my view, also applies to Christian fundamentalists who seem to look for what they describe as insults to their religious beliefs.  In both instances, there is a huge fear of modernity and an unspoken fear that what if critics are correct in their condemnation of fundamentalist faiths?  Too many of the adherents fear the same thing: having to think for themselves and having to formulate their own moral decisions in a world vastly different that that in which both Christianity and Islam first arose.  

And as the article in the Post also indicates, there is a huge sense of inferiority because the glories of the past for both religions have been lost.  Once the Catholic Church and Islam both fostered and protected knowledge of the past and respected learning.  Now, one can argue that the inflexibility and refusal to accept modern knowledge are at the root of the very causes for the decline of the intellectual levels of both Christianity and Islam.  Sooner or later modernity and new knowledge make old beliefs become untenable except for those who consciously decide to remain ignorant.  Any religion that refuses to change and adapt and which requires the equivalent to a lobotomy to maintain unchallenged belief is doomed to eventually die.  Just as we are seeing the slow death of Christianity in the western world because of conservative Christianity's refusal to change.  Conservatives in both Christianity and Islam are unwittingly the worse enemies of both faiths.  Here are some column excerpts:

Modernity requires the willingness to be offended. And as anti-American violence across the Middle East and beyond shows, that willingness is something the Arab world, the heartland of Islam, still lacks.

Time and again in recent years, as the outside world has battered the walls of Muslim lands and as Muslims have left their places of birth in search of greater opportunities in the Western world, modernity — with its sometimes distasteful but ultimately benign criticism of Islam — has sparked fatal protests. To understand why violence keeps erupting and to seek to prevent it, we must discern what fuels this sense of grievance.

There is an Arab pain and a volatility in the face of judgment by outsiders that stem from a deep and enduring sense of humiliation. A vast chasm separates the poor standing of Arabs in the world today from their history of greatness. In this context, their injured pride is easy to understand.

In the narrative of history transmitted to schoolchildren throughout the Arab world and reinforced by the media, religious scholars and laymen alike, Arabs were favored by divine providence. They had come out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century, carrying Islam from Morocco to faraway Indonesia. In the process, they overran the Byzantine and Persian empires, then crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Iberia, and there they fashioned a brilliant civilization that stood as a rebuke to the intolerance of the European states to the north. Cordoba and Granada were adorned and exalted in the Arab imagination. Andalusia brought together all that the Arabs favored — poetry, glamorous courts, philosophers who debated the great issues of the day.

If Islam’s rise was spectacular, its fall was swift and unsparing. This is the world that the great historian Bernard Lewis explored in his 2002 book “What Went Wrong?” The blessing of God, seen at work in the ascent of the Muslims, now appeared to desert them. 

The coming of the West to their world brought superior military, administrative and intellectual achievement into their midst — and the outsiders were unsparing in their judgments.

Even as Arabs insist that their defects were inflicted on them by outsiders, they know their weaknesses. Younger Arabs today can be brittle and proud about their culture, yet deeply ashamed of what they see around them. They know that more than 300 million Arabs have fallen to economic stagnation and cultural decline.   .   .   .   .   In the privacy of their own language, in daily chatter on the street, on blogs and in the media, and in works of art and fiction, they probe endlessly what befell them.  But woe to the outsider who ventures onto that explosive terrain. The assumption is that Westerners bear Arabs malice, that Western judgments are always slanted and cruel.

We know the celebrated cases when modernity has agitated the pious. A little more than two decades ago, it was a writer of Muslim and Indian birth, Salman Rushdie, whose irreverent work of fiction, “The Satanic Verses,” offended believers with its portrayal of Islam.  .   .   .   .   The confrontation laid bare the unease of Islam in the modern world.

The storm that erupted this past week at the gates of American diplomatic outposts across the Muslim world is a piece of this history. As usual, it was easily ignited.

It is never hard to assemble a crowd of young protesters in the teeming cities of the Muslim world. American embassies and consulates are magnets for the disgruntled. It is inside those fortresses, the gullible believe, that rulers are made and unmade. Yet these same diplomatic outposts dispense coveted visas and a way out to the possibilities of the Western world. 

The ambivalence toward modernity that torments Muslims is unlikely to abate. The temptations of the West have alienated a younger generation from its elders. Men and women insist that they revere the faith as they seek to break out of its restrictions. 

Cultural freedom is never absolute, of course, and the Western tradition itself, from the Athenians to the present, struggles mightily with the line between freedom and order. In the Muslim world, that struggle is more fierce and lasting, and it will show itself in far more than burnt flags and overrun embassies.

One huge irony is that the Christofascist elements in America - especially in today's Republican Party - hate and condemn Muslims when in fact both the condemned and those that condemn them suffer from the same affliction: a refusal to adapt to a changing world and to admit any possibility that maybe, just maybe, their religion doesn't have all the answers.  For both fundamentalist Christians and Muslims this truth threatens their flimsy house of cards world view and fabricated definition of who they are.  It terrifies both groups and outrage and violence are the natural fruits of closed minds and limited world views.  As they fight against modernity and knowledge, Pope Benedict XVI and the ayatollahs have more in common than either would like to admit.  I've often said that gays are so hated by both groups of fundamentalists because our existence suggests that perhaps the Bible and the Koran are in error.

GOP Senate Candidate: "Legitimately Raped" Women Don't Get Pregnant

Just when you think the batshitery from the GOP cannot get any worse, someone like Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) - who is running against Senator Clair McCaskill - comes along.  Adkin opposes abortion in all instances because Adkin says "legitimately raped" women don't get pregnant.  I don't know if I want to know what Adkin considers to be a "legitimate rape" - although something tells me that if the woman is white and the man is black, then it'd be legitimate in Adkin's mind.  One can only wonder what cave or from under what rock Akin has slithered.  Yet, in Missouri, Adkin is frighteningly leading McCaskill in the polls at the moment - not a very good commentary on the people of Missouri if you ask me.  Has the state of Missouri had a collective lobotomy?  Here's a video clip of Adkin's lunacy:

Like most of the loons who inhabit today's GOP, Adkin doesn't let the facts get in the way of his cretin like pronouncements as noted by Joe Jervis:

A 1996 study by the American Journal of Obstetricians and Gynecologists found “rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency” and is “a cause of many unwanted pregnancies” — an estimated “32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year.” In a tweet, McCaskill said she was “stunned” by Akin’s comments. Akin is perhaps the boldest among a crop of conservative 2012 nominees who could hamper GOP efforts to take back the Senate in the fall. Akin has called for an end to the school-lunch program and a total ban on the morning-after pill.

Yet despite this all too typical insanity (never mind the racism, hate and bigotry) people seriously tell me that I should go back to the GOP!   Adkins opponent had this to say:

“It is beyond comprehension that someone can be so ignorant about the emotional and physical trauma brought on by rape,” McCaskill said in a statment. “The ideas that Todd Akin has expressed about the serious crime of rape and the impact on its victims are offensive.” 

When the GOP decided to embrace the Christianists for political gain, they also made the conscious decision to embrace ignorance as well.  To be a Republican today, one needs to be a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, motivated by greed, and ignorant by deliberate choice.  The GOP itself has become offensive.