Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Another Baptist Pastor Wants Gays Killed - - Hate is Something Taught and Learned
"Oh, so you're saying we should go out and start killing them? No, I'm saying the government should. They won't, but they should."Another quote :One of the most glaring signs of our need for a national revival in America is the increasing acceptance of homosexuality. According to Romans 1, God reveals His wrath on mankind by giving people over to homosexuality as a just judgment on their idolatry. America has rejected the One True God.
And then this longer quote via Towleroad:
"They should be put to death. That's what happened in Israel. That's why homosexuality wouldn't have grown in Israel. It tends to limit conversions. It tends to limit people coming out of the closet. — 'Oh, so you're saying we should go out and start killing them, no?' — I'm saying the government should. They won't but they should. [You say], 'oh, I can't believe you you're horrible. You're a backwards neanderthal of a person.' Is that what you're calling scripture? Is God a neanderthal backwards.. in his morality. Is it his word or not? If it's his word, he commanded it. It's his idea, not mine. And I'm not ashamed of it."
The audio is here: http://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=527121350272 (at least until it's removed).
It's impossible not wondering how someone can become so consumed with hatred towards other human beings. People that the hate merchant doesn't even know. The answer is easy: it is taught and learned as demonstrated by this post at Joe.My.God entitled "Four Year-Old Church Singer Performs Ain't No Homos Gonna Make It To Heaven." Joe's reaction:
It's impossible not wondering how someone can become so consumed with hatred towards other human beings. People that the hate merchant doesn't even know. The answer is easy: it is taught and learned as demonstrated by this post at Joe.My.God entitled "Four Year-Old Church Singer Performs Ain't No Homos Gonna Make It To Heaven." Joe's reaction:
Christian Love: It's apparently an actual song and not only did they teach it to a four year-old, they proudly brought him up to the pulpit to perform it, generating whoops and a standing ovation from the congregation. Praise! Glory! Hit the link for the video if you can bear it.
This is nothing less than child abuse. I truly want nothing to do with the title "Christian" if it means being even remotely deemed affiliated in any way with these horrible people.
Are the GOP and the Right Wing Media Beginning to Regret Their Racism?
I have maintained for a long time that just barely under the surface of the Christianist organizations, the Tea Party crowd, and Right Wing news outlets such as Fox News lurks a very strong streak of racism. Not to mention, homophobia as well. But with the changing demographics of the USA and the rapid shift occurring the acceptance of gay Americans, the deliberate pandering by the GOP and its media allies to the nastiest elements in American society may be poised to bite them in the ass big time. That, of course, would strike me as Divine justice. An article in The Nation looks at conservative efforts to pretend that the GOP and Fox News, et al, are not the equivalent of modern day segregationists. Here are some highlights:
Conservatives must be feeling regretful. After nearly fifty years of using appeals to white racial resentment to take over the South, win presidential elections and control of Congress, conservatives are realizing this might come back to bite them in the ass. As the right wing has become xenophobic and anti-Latino, conservatives have watched young Latinos and young Asian Americans join young African-Americans in being overwhelmingly Democratic. The greater diversity of this younger generation has in turn meant that Democrats, especially Barack Obama, have won handily among young voters in recent elections. All of a sudden, conservatives see being the party of angry white males as a potential liability, and they want to change their image.You can see this concern in Mitt Romney’s recent campaign events touting his substantively thin but rhetorically compassionate education reform agenda. As the Washington Post reported on Romney’s visit to a school in West Philadelphia on Thursday, his first campaign event in a majority black neighborhood: “Mitt Romney’s campaign team has been quietly laying plans . . . . o reassure independent swing voters that Romney can be inclusive and tolerant in his thinking and approach.” Romney’s campaign insists they are sincere, but they never made any such outreach during the primaries, . . . .The conservative media are happy to help burnish both white racial anxieties and the official story line that Republicans are the friends of minorities by trying to tell an oddly inverted story of race relations in America. According to National Review’s current cover story by Kevin Williamson, it is the Republican Party which has consistently supported civil rights and Democrats who have opposed it. Meanwhile, conservative blogs, talk radio and Fox News hype random stories of anti-white violence, creating the false impression that whites are more often the victims of hate crimes by blacks than the reverse.The National Review argument has been thoroughly debunked in many outlets. . . . . Critics of Williamson’s piece were generous enough not to mention that National Review’s tendencies towards racism and opposition to civil rights continue today. National Review recently let go of longtime contributor John Derbyshire for penning a shockingly bigoted rant in another publication, . . . . NR also had to drop another contributor, Robert Weissberg, shortly thereafter for having, in Lowry’s words, “delivered a noxious talk about the future of white nationalism.” Meanwhile NR defends voting laws that would disenfranchise minorities through onerous requirements such as presenting government-issued photo identification. And it argues that the Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary.There is a corollary to this logic holding that it is blacks that oppress whites, rather than the reverse. This is, of course, a regular feature in arguments against affirmative action.
Conservative media have been especially eager to smear Trayon Martin, the young black victim of a shooting for which the perpetrator was initially not arrested. They are also getting on the wrong side of modern civil rights struggles, by opposing gay rights and fanning the flames of Islamophobia.
What's Behind Romney's Extremist Foreign Policy?
One would think that after the disastrous fool's errand in Iraq launched needlessly by Chimperator George Bush and the never ending fiasco in Afghanistan which any two-bit historian could have predicted, the GOP and Mitt Romney would be preaching a moderate foreign policy that seeks to avoid future disasters. But quite to the contrary, Mitt Romney seems hell bent to venture into a shooting war with Iran and a trade war with China. One has to wonder why the extremism. One obvious answer is the xenophobia of the delusional Kool-Aid drinking base that Romney is constantly pandering to. Another answer, based on a post by Andrew Sullivan, might be on the bizarre manner in which Romney's Mormon faith depicts the United States as the sole blessed by God nation on earth. The latter explanation is far more frightening than the first. Here are highlights from Andrew's post:
In some ways, Mormonism is the perfect form of Christianity for Christianist nationalist politics. It is the only form of Christianity that believes Jesus visited America; that the Garden of Eden was somewhere in Missouri; and the only one that, as a theological proposition, sees the US Constitution as an integral part of the divine order, and one that Jesus personally foresaw in his appearances in America two millennia ago, and blessed.
It means that America alone has divine permission to do what it wants in the wider world, that America is subject to different standards than everyone else (because we alone are divinely blessed), and that geopolitics is about the global supremacy of the modern world's first divine nation (even if Iran and Israel might differ on which country is divinely blessed).
There's a reason, in other words, that Romney's foreign policy does not have a moderate, realist strain to it; that it is wedded to zero-sum conflict as the only way to engage the world (he regards Russia as America's number one geopolitical foe and wants a trade war with China); that its opposition to Jihadism gets perilously close to opposition to Islam as a whole; and that its core principle is that America is always, by definition, right.
I wish we had a Mormon candidate in a party that adheres to a separation of church and state and of politics and religion (like Reid or Huntsman in a different universe). Then we could regard that faith as utterly irrelevant to a candidate's capacity for running the country. But when the GOP affirmatively declares that there is no such thing as a secular decision, that there is no place and no decision and no policy which is not subject to religious and theological influence ... it seems to me that we have to examine how a candidate's faith affects their politics - by the GOP's own reasoning.
Does Romney believe that America is uniquely divine among nations? How would that affect his decisions as president? Does he believe that the Constitution is also divine and a "necessary prologue" for the triumph of the LDS Church in America and across the world? Would he therefore appoint Justices who share that view? Or if the original Constitution is divine, and the Amendments are not, as Garry Wills asks, what status do the Amendments have in a Mormon president's eyes?
Do I find these possibilities about Romney very, very frightening? Most certainly. Particularly given the heightened powers of the presidency pushed through by the Chimperator and Emperor Palpatine Cheney. I am not anti-religion per se. However, religion has caused more wars and more needless deaths than almost any other cause throughout history. If Romney believes even a fraction of this bullshit, the last thing we need is for him to be in the White House.
The Christianists' War on LGBT Families
One of the biggest lies of the Christian Right and their boot licking political whores in the GOP are their claims that they care about children and families - all children and families that is except for families of LGBT Americans. We're pretty much viewed as human garbage (the photo above is of me and my partner and some of our children from my daughter's wedding) to be removed from sight as the "godly Christians" pat themselves on the back for their piety and religiosity. It's enough to make one want to vomit. But these bigots and money loving professional Christians do need to be challenged. In what may be little better than tilting at windmills, Jennifer Chrisler, head of the Family Equality Council,has challenged hatemeister Tony Perkins of the hate group Family Research Council to join her family for dinner. Will he do it? I'm not holding my breath. Neither is Chrisler. God for bid that Perkins have to face those he seeks to harm on a daily basis. Here are highlights from The Advocate:
Jennifer Chrisler, head of the Family Equality Council, told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin today that antigay leader Tony Perkins might “open his heart” if he accepts her invitation to dinner with her family.
Chrisler extended the invitation after Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, discussed his opposition to same-sex marriage and denounced gay parents in an interview with Baldwin last week, and Baldwin challenged him to justify his views, asking him among other things if he had ever been to the home of a same-sex married couple.
Baldwin noted that Perkins, queried by CNN, told the network today that he and his wife “will be glad to respond when we receive the invitation to find a time that works.” Chrisler isn’t holding her breath, but she thinks spending time with her family, which includes her same-sex spouse and 10-year-old twin boys, would do Perkins some good. “I don’t think that I’ll change his mind, buy I do think that we might be able to open his heart a little bit,” she told Baldwin.
Yes, my children are older now, but hearing deliberate vicious lies told about one's parent and loved ones causes needless emotional and psychological harm. Not that the Christianists and professional gay haters like Perkins give a damn about the collateral damage they inflict. For them, it's all about feeling self-righteous and good about themselves (and in Perkins' case making a buck) at the cost of suffering inflicted on others.
Mitt Romney and the GOP's Fiscal Phonies
All politicians and political parties can stretch the truth a bit. But at some point, the truth becomes so stretched that it can only be called what it is: lying. And the GOP has no shortage of liars and phonies when they pretend to support or believe one thing, but a review of the facts shows a very different picture. As noted in prior posts, the GOP base claims to want small government - except for when it would mean a decrease in federal dollars received. Dollars that disproportionately benefit red states. Paul Krugman has a column in the New York Times that looks at the fiscal phonies of the GOP. Here are highlights:
Quick quiz: What’s a good five-letter description of Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, that ends in “y”? The obvious choice is, of course, “bully.” But as a recent debate over the state’s budget reveals, “phony” is an equally valid answer. And as Mr. Christie goes, so goes his party.Until now the attack of the fiscal phonies has been mainly a national rather than a state issue, with Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, as the prime example. As regular readers of this column know, Mr. Ryan has somehow acquired a reputation as a stern fiscal hawk despite offering budget proposals that, far from being focused on deficit reduction, are mainly about cutting taxes for the rich while slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. In fact, once you strip out Mr. Ryan’s “magic asterisks” — claims that he will somehow increase revenues and cut spending in ways that he refuses to specify — what you’re left with are plans that would increase, not reduce, federal debt.The same can be said of Mitt Romney, who claims that he will balance the budget but whose actual proposals consist mainly of huge tax cuts (for corporations and the wealthy, of course) plus a promise not to cut defense spending.Both Mr. Ryan and Mr. Romney, then, are fake deficit hawks. And the evidence for their fakery isn’t just their bad arithmetic; it’s the fact that for all their alleged deep concern over budget gaps, that concern isn’t sufficient to induce them to give up anything — anything at all — that they and their financial backers want. They’re willing to snatch food from the mouths of babes (literally, via cuts in crucial nutritional aid programs), but that’s a positive from their point of view . . . .Still, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Romney are playing to a national audience. Are Republican governors, who have to deal with real budget constraints, different? Well, there have been many claims to that effect; Mr. Christie, in particular, has been widely held up, not least by himself, as an example of a politician willing to make tough choices. But last week we got to see him facing an actual tough choice — and aside from the yelling-at-people thing, he proved himself just another standard fiscal phony.Last week reality hit: David Rosen, the state’s independent, nonpartisan budget analyst, told legislators that the state faces a $1.3 billion shortfall. How did the governor respond? First, by attacking the messenger. . . . even Mr. Christie’s own officials are predicting a major budget shortfall, just not quite as big. And the two big credit-rating agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, have recently issued warnings about New Jersey’s budget situation . . .So is our tough-talking governor willing to reconsider his pet tax cut? Fuhgeddaboudit. Instead, he wants to fill the hole with one-shot budget gimmicks, including reneging on a promise to reduce borrowing for transportation investment and diverting funds from clean-energy programs. So much for fiscal responsibility.[W]hoever Mr. Romney picks, he or she will cheerfully go along with the budget-busting, reverse Robin Hood policies that you know are coming if the former governor wins. For the modern American right doesn’t care about deficits, and never did. All that talk about debt was just an excuse for attacking Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and food stamps.
Religion's War on Gays
 |
| Via City Watch |
A piece in City Watch has an interview with Mel White, founder of Soul Force, which takes a pretty negative look at the status of gays in America - at least gays living outside of progressive major metropolitan areas (which excludes pretty much all f the cities in Virginia). Despite the "It Gets Better" campaign, White maintains that for many in the LGBT community, things may actually be getting worse in "fly over states" as the Christian Right ramps up its efforts to denigrate and marginalizes gays and their families. He gives particular focus on Lynchburg, Virginia which has come to be dominated by Liberty University and its creationist believing and gay-hating zealots. While White may take too gloomy a view in someways, his indictment of religion is dead on. Here are some excerpts:
White and hundreds of Soulforce volunteers protest outside megachurches that preach hatred and bigotry in the name of religion. White travels to communities where young gays, lesbians, bisexuals or transgender people have committed suicide.
He holds memorial services for them in front of the church doors. He accuses the pastors of these churches of murder. His books “Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America” and “Holy Terror: Lies the Christian Right Tell Us to Deny Gay Equality,” are two of the most important works that examine the innate cruelty and proto-fascism of the Christian right.
At its heart it is the church. The churches should be convicted, not just Ravi. He’s just an extension of the hatred that people feel about this threat, this gay threat. Pope Benedict XVI should be on trial. Richard Land from the Southern Baptists should be on trial. Religious leaders, Protestant and Catholic, should be on trial. They made this happen, but too few Americans make the connection.”
White applauds President Obama for taking a personal stand for marriage equality. But he also notes that the president’s statement was accompanied by a reiteration that states have the right to determine their own policies toward marriage.
Despite gains by gays in the wider culture, especially in the entertainment industry, and despite the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the civil rights of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people in most states are deteriorating, White said.
White and Nixon left Virginia for California a few weeks ago because the culture, he says, had become increasingly inhospitable to gay couples. In distressed communities across the country there is a correlating rise in intolerance, hate talk and homophobia.
“When I moved to Lynchburg it was a blue city, in spite of Liberty University being there,” White said. “We had an amazing progressive woman, Shannon Valentine, as our state representative. She visited our home. We had a progressive mayor and a progressive City Council. In 2009 everything went to hell. Our new attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, is crazy.
“We have 29 states that do not outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” White said. Transgender Americans are invariably the worst victims of discrimination and violence. And yet there are 44 states that do not outlaw discrimination on the basis of gender identity. There are 44 states that have laws or constitutional amendments denying us the rights of marriage, claiming our relationships are unholy, that we’re sick and icky,” White said.
“Too many of my sisters and brothers in the gay community don’t seem to understand the power of religion,” White lamented. “They have been rejected by religion. They hate the idea of religion. Therefore, they’re not going to deal with religion, which is fatal, because religion is the heart of homophobia.
“Without religion there would be no homophobia. What other source of homophobia is there but six verses in the Bible? When Bible literalists preach that LGBT people are going to hell they become Christian terrorists. They use fear as their weapon, like all terrorists. They are seeking to deny our religious and civil rights. They threaten to turn our democracy into a fundamentalist theocracy. And if we don’t reverse the trend there is the very real possibility that in the end we will all be governed according to their perverted version of biblical law.”
Yes, it's a grim perspective, but living in a state like Virginia where we just witnessed religious extremism on a wide basis in the Virginia General Assembly, it is very important to recognize that the ultimate enemy of LGBT equality is religion.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Why the GOP Fringe Sets the Party Agenda
As a former Republican and city committee member activist, at times I wonder how the Republican Party became so insane. Yes, I often discuss the GOP leadership's pact with the Devil - i.e., the Christian Right and then the Tea Party - as part of the cause. And then there's the issue of the near complete flight of moderates from the party as has enveloped my entire extended family of "Rockefeller Republicans." But that still doesn't fully explain why the most insane, theocratic and generally delusional elements of the GOP base now seem to set the party's agenda. David Frum, a conservative not too well loved by the GOP base since he's rational and is willing to yell out "the emperor has no clothes" as a premise that may partly explain the demise of a once rational and generally objective fact embracing political party. He also focuses on the fact that it is the alleged small government loving red states and the elderly who in fact suck up a disproportionate share of federal government dollars. Why does the word "hypocrites" spring to mind? Here are highlights from Frum's column that is written in the context of his new book:
Cindy asks:
The Democrats seem to have found a way to marginalize the far fringes of their base without completely losing their vote, while the Republicans seem currently to have been overwhelmed and taken over by their far fringes. Assuming you agree with that rather generic statement, why do you think that the GOP has been less successful in holding their middle? And, how do you think they can pull back from this current trend? Or, do you think it's possible at this point for that to happen?About 20% of America calls itself liberal; about 40% calls itself conservative. That asymmetry explains a great deal of the difference between the parties. The Democrats cannot remotely convince themselves that their base can deliver elections for them. They know they must work to broaden their coalition—and to restrain their base. Their base knows it too.
The bigger Republican base, however, can imagine itself as representing the majority of the country, or anyway, something close to it. All that's needed is one last push! And when you are so close to having everything your own way—why compromise?
That aversion to compromise is intensified by a strange fact of American government. Republicans, the anti-government party, depend on the votes of the elderly, the affluent, and the rural—in other words, the American government's redistributional winners. From the point of view of those voters, any compromise will bring only bad news to them. They like things the way they are now! And—in contrast to more prosperous times in the past—they don't today feel they have anything like the margin of security that would allow them to share.
This is one of the major themes of Patriots: the most affluent have become the most anxious. My selfish protagonist, heir to a mustard fortune, stands in for these winners—and then breaks with them, not because he is so very remarkably generous, but because something in him recoils and rebels at a political game that heaps accumulating rewards on the winners—and only accumulating penalties on the losers.
Do I see hope for such a trend in real life? I don't know. But we need it.
Greed and the fear of change (and those deemed "other") are, in short, their principle motivation. What makes the utter hypocrisy even worse is that they then wrap themselves in religion and profess their piety even as they flush the Gospel message down the toilet.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)