French Neo-Nazi Front National Vice President "Outed" as Gay

Apparently French Neo-Nazi politicians have a lot in common with many far right Republicans here in America.  Both take extreme anti-gay positions even as one - French Front National ("FN") vice president Florian Philippot - is outed as gay and self-loathing closet cases like Rick Santorum, Ken Cuccinelli and others rant about what they secretly intensely desire - hot gay sex.  As The Telegraph reports, Philippot was outed by a French gossip magazine.  Many French politicians show their hypocrisy by lamenting the invasion of Philippot's "privacy" even as his political party takes horrifically anti-gay positions, including opposition to gay marriage.   Why is it fine to trample on the civil rights of others, especially gays and those hated by FN, but off limits to expose Philippot's glaring hypocrisy?  Here are article highlights:

A French gossip magazine sparked outrage across the political spectrum on Friday by "outing" the far-Right Front National's vice president, Florian Philippot, as homosexual.

The rare breach of Gallic press protocol is an embarrassment for the FN, whose attitude towards homosexuals has historically ranged from ambivalent to downright homophobic.

Closer, which scored a global scoop in January by publishing photos of French president, François Hollande, visiting his secret lover Julie Gayet, on Friday released pictures of Mr Philippot with his boyfriend, an unnamed TV journalist, on a trip to Vienna last week.

"At last a real weekend away from Paris," it headlined, followed by an inside article entitled: "Yes to love for all" – a play on words with France's recent Marriage for All bill legalizing gay marriage.

Politicians across the board slammed the revelation as an unacceptable breach of Mr Philippot's private life.

FN leader Marine Le Pen denounced what she called "a very grave violation of individual liberties".
 
However, Closer's editor, Laurence Piau, defended her decision to "out" the politician as in the public's interest.

"Florian Philippot is a high-profile figure, he's the most invited guest on morning media shows after Marine Le Pen and the FN is a party like any other, if we believe what has been said of late," she told Europe 1 radio.

Noting that heterosexual public figures received just as much private scrutiny, she said: "How can you imagine that the number two of the Front National, who could take power if you believe what the FN says, could take up his post without every mentioning his family, his private relationships, without having a wife, or a girl or boyfriend? How is that possible in 2014?," she asked.

Above all, Closer's editor said the magazine's revelations could explain Miss Le Pen's decision not to participate in marches against gay marriage, which took place across France last year.

Other prominent members of her party, notably her niece Marion Maréchal Le Pen, an MP, were present in the "Demos for All" protests, some of whose supporters are virulently homophobic.

As I have made clear before, I fully support "outing" politicians who either personally or whose political parties strive against full legal equality for LGBT individuals.  If these individuals want their private lives kept private, then they and their affiliated political parties need to get out of the private lives of others.  Are you listening Rick Santorum?

Friends of "Jackie" Continue to Dish Rolling Stone's UVA Rape Story

University of Virginia student Alex Stock talks during an interview with The Associated Press in Charlottsville

As more information continues to come out of the mouths of the friends of "Jackie," the purported gang rape victim at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia, it looks increasingly that both "Jackie" and Rolling Stone's reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, were engaging in fantasy and sought to create a cataclysmic story regardless of the true facts.  If they sought to further women's rights and fight campus sexual assault, all that they have done is make future victims of actual assault less likely to be believed.  It is also noteworthy that, unlike "Jackie," the three friends dished in the Rolling Stone article are not afraid to use their real names as they try to set the record straight.  Here are highlights from Yahoo News:

Almost a month after the scathing Rolling Stone article was published, Kathryn Hendley, Alex Stock, and Ryan Duffin are still trying to set the record straight.

The friends told The Associated Press that the article about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia frat house was wrong on a number of key points, especially its assertion that they urged the victim to not report the attack.

Duffin, a 20-year-old, third-year student referred to as "Randall" in the Rolling Stone article, told the AP that not only did he encourage the alleged victim to go to police, but he started to dial 9-1-1 on his cellphone until she begged off saying she just wanted to go back to her dorm and go to sleep.

The AP also spoke with the other two friends portrayed in the article: third-year, 20-year-old U.Va. students Hendley and Stock, known as "Cindy" and "Andy" in the article. None of the three friends was contacted by Rolling Stone's reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, before the article was published; each of them rejected multiple assertions made in the article, for which Rolling Stone has since apologized for and noted discrepancies.

Jackie eventually told Duffin and Stock her version of what happened that night: that she was forced to perform oral sex on five men at the frat house.

"My first reaction was, 'We need to go to police,'" he said. "I wanted to go to police immediately. I was really forceful on that, actually. And I almost took it to calling (the police) right there." He said he had his phone out, prepared to call 9-1-1, "but she didn't want to and," he remembers thinking, "'I can't do that if she doesn't want to do it.'"

I'm not saying that force oral sex is anything to be ignored, but it is something far, far different than being gang raped after being thrown through a glass top table as reported by Rolling Stone.  Obviously, someone is lying and it would appear to be "Jackie."   

The Evils of Religion: ISIS States Enslaving and Raping Nonbeliever Women is Permitted

The parallels between ISIS - the Islamic self-proclaimed  terrorist state - and Christian fundamentalists just keep getting more pronounced.  Both groups, of course, base their toxic beliefs on selective readings of their "holy books," the Bible and the Koran which they maintain permits, if not requires, countless horrors to be done to others.  CNN is reporting on ISIS' proclamations that enslaving, having sex with 'unbelieving' women (even , prepubescent girls) is just fine under the Koran.  Meanwhile, here in America we have Christofascists and spokesmen for Family Research Council basically stating that the murder of gays on a wholesale basis is justified by the Bible.   First these highlights from CNN (NOTE: These "godly folk" are enslaving women):

Can you take non-Muslim women and children captive? Yes, says ISIS.

Can you have sex with them, even prepubescent girls? Yes, according to the Islamist extremist group.

Can you sell them or give them as gifts to others? The answer is yes, once again.

People in Mosul -- the Iraqi city now under control of the group calling itself the Islamic State -- got these and other messages loud and clear after sunset prayers Friday, when armed men handed out a color-printed pamphlet "Question and Answers on Female Slaves and their Freedom," three residents told CNN.

The idea that ISIS is kidnapping, selling and raping women and children is hardly surprising. Many such accounts have surfaced since the group began its often brutal run through Syria and Iraq, including chilling stories from members of the Yazidi religious minority. And these are on top of other horrific allegations, such as the killings and mistreatment of innocent civilians simply because they didn't subscribe to ISIS' extreme take on Sharia law.

And that's the thing about ISIS: Its militants have justified their actions -- like the beheadings of journalists and aid workers -- in God's name.  Even then, it is rare to see its rationale laid out as plainly as in "Question and Answers on Female Slaves and their Freedom."

In the document, for instance, it is explained that capturing women is permissible if they are "nonbelievers." It adds, "Female slaves are the women that Muslims took from their enemies."

Much of the pamphlet talks about ISIS' policy on having sexual intercourse with a female slave, something that the group cites the Quran to justify.

As to girls: "It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn't reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse," the document reads. "However, if she is not fit for intercourse, he (the owner ) can only enjoy her without intercourse."

All done in the name of God/Allah.  Meanwhile, if you travel back to America, talking heads for Family Research Council tacitly agree with a caller who advocates for the wholesale slaughter of gays.  Again, the "holy book" justifies it.   Here are highlights from Right Wing Watch:

Craig James, the failed Republican U.S. Senate candidate and former sportscaster who now works at the Family Research Council, spoke on Friday with a “Washington Watch” radio show caller who shared his “solution” to the problem of gay people filing complaints against businesses that deny them service because of their sexual orientation: execute gay people. 

[W]hen they try to force us to go against God, I think that’s where they cross the line and we should pass laws to execute them when they have judges to go against our businesses.”

James couldn't quite bring himself to denounce or oppose this call to put gays to death, instead merely saying “I don’t know about the executing” before offering up a response about the need for Christians in America, like the martyrs of the past, to get “firm” in challenging gay people:

Perhaps the FRC just doesn’t mind calls demanding the execution of gay people, as its president Tony Perkins once defended a Ugandan law which made homosexuality a crime punishable by death in certain cases.

Rape women and young girls all because the Koran says you can.  Murder gays on a whole sale basis because the Bible tells you so.  There really is not that big a difference in the underlying mindset.  The take away?  Fundamentalist religion is a foul evil regardless of which "holy book" is being cited as justification.  A religion free world would likely be a better, less violent place.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

The New Indian-American Lobby

The party of angry white men - i.e., the Republican Party - may have a new lobby to face that will not sit well with its Christofascist/Tea Party base: Indian-Americans, a group I am acquainted with through my numerous Indian-American clients (some of whom were at a  White House gathering last month).  Like other minority groups, these immigrant and native born Americans subscribe to the so-called American dream and want to have more input into policy issues.  In the last presidential election, they voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama for obvious reasons.  Today's GOP is a party of exclusion and if one isn't a white, heterosexual conservative Christian, one truly is not welcomed.  A piece in Politico Magazine looks at the growing political ambitions of this demographic.  Here are highlights:

November wasn’t kind to the political power of Indian-Americans. In the hundreds of congressional and gubernatorial races across the country, only five Indian-American candidates were on the ballot. Three lost. Representative Ami Bera, incumbent Democrat from California, left Election Day trailing by thousands of votes only to secure a narrow victory during a recount. Two of Indian-Americans’ biggest victories were the electoral equivalents of shoo-ins—California Attorney General Kamala Harris and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Come next month, Indian-Americans will have only one elected representative in Washington—the same number that they have in the current Congress.

But this electoral thumping obscures the truth behind the curtain: The nation’s three million Indian-Americans are increasingly looking to flex their political muscles, and they have one very clear advantage to bring to the money-driven world of modern politics: They’re one of the wealthiest ethnic groups in the United States. According to a 2013 Pew Survey, Indian-Americans’ median household income sits at $88,000, the highest of all Asian-American subgroups (the U.S. average at-large is a relatively paltry $49,800).

Indians as a whole have a long way to go before they can be seen as an influential group in politics.  But he has a very clear benchmark in mind as he tries to navigate his educated and wealthy ethnic group towards political power: Jewish-Americans. “We’re learning a lot from the Jewish diaspora here and what we have noticed from the Jewish diaspora is that they’re willing to contribute, invest, and write checks,” Rangaswami told me. “Because of the size of India, we could become a much larger community [than the Jews] in terms of population and also in terms of diversity.”

Anand Shah believes that Indian-Americans will likely replicate this path—uniting around certain causes close to the heart of the population, like the well-being and future of India itself. USINPAC, the largest Indian-American lobbying organization, was lauded for its highly successful lobbying of Congress to pass the U.S.-India Nuclear Treaty in 2008 (after President Bush first negotiated it in 2005), but has not boasted any landmark victories since. U.S.-India relations cooled notably in recent years as the U.S. began to court China more formally and many Indians have been irked over a lack of visas for highly-qualified Indian engineers.

Much like Jewish-Americans, Indian-Americans currently lean heavily towards the Democratic Party—in 2013, a Pew Survey claimed that 65 percent of Indian-Americans identify as Democrats, while only 18 percent identify as Republicans. Yet as a group, there’s reason to believe that Indian-Americans votes are up for grabs.

Paul Kapur, a professor at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School who focuses on U.S. policy towards South Asia, argues that because neither party has yet “really reached out to Indian-Americans … they’re not really captured by one party or the other.” Kapur says that Indian-Americans’ overwhelming support for Obama may stem from the president’s association with the third world.

[F]or Indians who come from a country with a cacophonous democracy filled with numerous coexisting religious, linguistic and ethnic groups, keeping social values private and out of the public sphere is the norm. In India, much of family law differs for Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, and thus many Indian immigrants are likely perplexed by evangelicals’ efforts to codify aspects of their faith in broad-sweeping legislation.

Jindal and Haley have formidable barriers that could keep their stories from resonating with Indian-American donors in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. Around 80 percent of Indian-Americans are Hindu and Jindal and Haley have both converted to Christianity (Jindal was raised a Hindu and Haley a Sikh). Both Jindal and Haley have Americanized their first names—Jindal was born Piyush and Haley, Nimrata—and both of their home states contain small Indian-American communities that pale in size, wealth and importance to those in California, New York, New Jersey and Texas.

Unsuccessful Democratic candidate Ro Khanna in California’s 17^th district in the heart of Silicon Valley also claims that the GOP’s outdated views on science could push Indian-Americans in tech, engineering and medicine towards Democrats for years to come. “Jindal…doesn’t believe in evolution,” Khanna told me. “The Indian-American community believes in science.” . . . . Khanna believes that Republicans who do not recognize the threat of climate change, deny evolution, or dither on so-called “Net Neutrality” could face significant barriers in courting Indian-Americans.

From my experience, this is a community that doesn't suffer fools or bigots.  The GOP has much to learn if it wishes to truly court this growing voting block. 

Obama’s Immigration Move Benefits Democrats

If one listens to the white supremacists of the Republican party, Barack Obama's executive order on immigration was all about adding new voters to the Democrat base.  Never mind that citizenship - and with it, voting - were not part of the equation.  But that is not to say that the move won't bring real benefits to Democrats in the form of great popularity with Hispanics.  Meanwhile, the hyperventilating and rants of racists within the GOP further confirm to most Hispanics and other racial minorities that the GOP is not friendly to them or fellow minority groups.   A piece in the New York Times looks at how Obama's executive order may yield long term benefits for Democrats.  Here are excerpts:

A month after President Obama’s decision to defer deportation and offer work authorization to millions of undocumented immigrants, his action not only looks like a winner, but it also seems to be a fairly promising sign for Democrats after the disastrous midterm elections last month.

This is not because Mr. Obama’s immigration decision has proved to be popular. In fact, it is, over all, unpopular. Polls show that a majority of adults oppose his plan.

But as is the case on many issues, the politics of immigration reform are not simply about the issue’s popularity in national public opinion polls. They are also about intensity and coalitions: Who are the voters that really care about the issue, and how much do they matter? On immigration, the answer is fairly clear. Hispanic voters care a lot, and matter a lot.

A Pew Research poll conducted last week showed that 81 percent of Hispanics supported the immigration action . . . . That large majorities of Hispanic adults support Mr. Obama’s decision isn’t at all surprising. What is more telling is the extent to which Mr. Obama’s approval rating among Hispanic voters seems to have improved. Both Pew Research and Gallup show Mr. Obama’s approval rating rising into the mid-60s, up from around 50 percent earlier in November. 

[T]he gain is extremely impressive. By signing a piece of paper and taking a trip to Las Vegas, Mr. Obama boosted his rating among Hispanics, who make up 14 percent of the adult population, by around 15 points. 

Mr. Obama’s decision will eventually fade from the minds of Hispanic voters as well. But the longevity of the bump is probably less significant than its size and the fact that it happened. It may be a sign that Democratic-leaning voters who currently disapprove of Mr. Obama’s performance will come flocking back to the Democrats the moment the 2016 campaign arouses their partisanship. It is a sign that although these voters may be dissatisfied with Mr. Obama’s performance, they remain quite receptive to Democratic messages on the issues that brought them to the party in the first place.

Whether the next Democrat will reassemble the coalition that re-elected Mr. Obama remains to be seen. That said, Mr. Obama’s rebound among Hispanic voters may be a sign that the tactics that worked for the Obama campaign in 2012 might still work in 2016.

Sunday Male Beauty

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Can Tradional Religion Survive Contact with Extraterrestrials

I frequently note that knowledge and science are the enemies of traditional religions, especially Christianity and fundamentalist Islam.  The "holy book" on which they are based are Earth centric and view human kind as the top of the heap in terms of ruling the Earth and creation.  The human genome project has already demonstrated the lie of the Adam and Eve myth - i.e., that they never really existed as historic personages. Now, with new discoveries on Mars increasing suggesting that life may have existed on that planet and the likelihood that out of the billions of solar systems in the universe other life exists, a piece in The Week queries whether these religions can survive the existence of extraterrestrial life.  For the fundamentalist adherents, I personally believe the answer is no.  Their literalism and claims of inerrancy (ridiculous as they may be) set the stage for collapse when objective proof blows away the focus of their myths.  Here are article highlights:

[T]here are now a pair of books — and a number of essays about and reviews of those books — that reflect seriously on how the major religions of the world would respond to first contact with extraterrestrial life.

From this range of writing, a broad consensus emerges.  Buddhism, as a nontheistic belief system, would be largely unshaken by the discovery of intelligent life on other worlds. Among Christians, the Vatican's long history of adjusting itself to the findings of modern science would lead Catholics to be relatively unfazed. More literalistic Protestants — especially evangelicals of various stripes — would have a much harder time of it, while certain sects with origins in 19th-century America (Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons), which already have folk beliefs about the existence of life on other planets, might actually thrive.

I'm afraid I'm skeptical about much of this, too. Yes, Buddhism and other nontheistic forms of spirituality might emerge relatively unscathed from a close encounter with extraterrestrial life. But most forms of Christianity (like Judaism and Islam) would be profoundly shaken by the definitive demonstration that life — let alone intelligent life — exists elsewhere in the universe.

Consider the theological implications of discovering even the most primitive form of microscopic unicellular life on another world (perhaps in the polar ice caps on Mars, or in a subsurface ocean of water on Jupiter's moon Europa). Such a discovery would seem to vindicate the evolutionary hypothesis that life can and does emerge from (seeming) nothingness all on its own, without divine intervention of any kind. And that would raise the possibility — perhaps a greater possibility than ever before in the minds of believers — that precisely the same thing could have happened on Earth.

In order to shoot down this theologically troubling possibility, believers could always leap to the view that God lies behind all life everywhere. But surely that would complicate the Judeo-Christian creation story in ways that go far beyond the usual debates about reading the Book of Genesis literally or allegorically. Wouldn't it have been more accurate for the text to speak of God creating a universe containing many worlds with life on them instead of implying that life on our planet is somehow unique?

But theological adaptation to the discovery of simple extraterrestrial life is one thing. Adapting to the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe would be something else entirely — and I seriously doubt that most of the world's great theistic faiths could succeed in pulling it off, at least short of a truly radical shift in orientation.

Think of it as a theological Copernican Revolution. Just as the scientific Copernican Revolution destabilized and downgraded humanity's place in the cosmos by substituting heliocentrism for a geocentric view that placed the Earth and its inhabitants at the center of creation, so the discovery of advanced life on other planets would imply that human beings are just one of any number of intelligent creatures in the universe. And that, in turn, would seem to imply either that God created many equally special beings throughout the universe, or that God cares for us more than he does for those other intelligent beings.

Did God create those other intelligent creatures, too, but without an interest in revealing himself to them? Or did they, unlike human beings, evolve all on their own without divine origins and guidance?

How believers answer those questions will be a product, in part, of what the extraterrestrials look like. If the aliens have symmetrical body structures — two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears, two nostrils — then it may be plausible to assume that they were created in the image and likeness of the same God as we were. But if they look nothing like us at all, the case for separation between "our" God and these alien intelligences would grow much stronger.

But I have an equally hard time accepting that believers would be capable of wrapping their heads around the possibility that God loves all intelligent creatures on all planets equally.

I suspect that these puzzles are so corrosive in their skeptical implications that contact with intelligent life from other worlds would produce a rapid collapse of faith rooted in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Quran, with a rapid spread of atheistic secularism in their place.
But not necessarily. Here are two other options.

One possibility would be a growth in the kind of philosophical theism David. B. Hart defended in his recent outstanding book The Experience of God. This would be a form of Platonism, with God treated less as a person who intervenes and reveals himself miraculously and providentially in history than as the ontological unity of Plato's three transcendentals: the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. God in this sense stands behind the scenes, invisibly making possible and sustaining every entity and action in the universe — here as well as on any conceivable alien world — from the beginning to the end of time.

But there is another possibility — one that moves in the opposite direction, toward greater divine anthropomorphism. Here Mormons may be able to offer some guidance. Some Latter-day Saints (including, on some readings, Mormonism's founding prophet Joseph Smith) have claimed that God resides within the universe rather than serving as its transcendent ground, that he began as a human being and evolved into his current state of exaltation, that he has a body, that he didn't create the universe so much as form parts of it from preexisting matter, and that Mormon men and women can themselves evolve into gods and goddesses. Such a view — with its hints of polytheism and suggestion of finite divine power — would seem to be far more compatible than traditional Judeo-Christian monotheism with a vision of the universe populated by a multitude of intelligent beings.

As I said at the outset, I don't think religious believers will ever have to cope with an extraterrestrially inspired theological crisis — because contact with intelligent life from elsewhere in the universe is exceedingly unlikely. But we shouldn't kid ourselves about the challenges that such contact would pose, if it were to happen, to the world's religious traditions.

If we are honest with ourselves, there is no tangible, objective support for either Christianity and Islam, both of which springboard off of the Jewish Old Testament that has little archeological evidence to support its most striking claims.  A case in point: Moses.   The newly released Exodus: Gods and Kings, starring Christian Bale, has been condemned by some as not being "historically accurate."  As Wikipedia notes:

The existence of Moses as well as the veracity of the Exodus story are disputed among archaeologists and Egyptologists, with experts in the field of biblical criticism citing logical inconsistencies, new archaeological evidence, historical evidence, and related origin myths in Canaanite culture. Other historians maintain that the biographical details and Egyptian background attributed to Moses imply the existence of a historical political and religious leader who was involved in the consolidation of the Hebrew tribes in Canaan towards the end of the Bronze Age.

While the general narrative of the Exodus and the conquest of the Promised Land may be remotely rooted in historical events, the figure of Moses as a leader of the Israelites in these events cannot be substantiated.

How can there be historic accuracy about someone who likely never existed, or at least not as recited by the Bible?

Holiday Social Chaos

Between a business trip, two holiday parties and hosting a dinner party tonight - the table is set and ready to go - for friends and some of the husband's clients, the last few days and today have been crazy.  The obvious result is greatly reduced blog posts.  This week will be a social frenzy - dinner parties on Tuesday and Thursday, client dinner Wednesday, two parties on Friday night, two events on next Saturday night and a dinner party next Sunday.  Fortunately, we are not hosting except for Wednesday night.  Again, posting volume will be reduced.  I don't have any immediate plans to stop blogging - it remains a form of therapy - the idea does seem tempting at times, especially with the new job and more work demands.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty