Category Politics

Family Research Center Shooting

In case you missed it, someone shot up the <a href="http://wwwfrc.org/"Family Research Council headquarters in Washington, DC.

Greta Christina puts it thusly:

This is not acceptable. We do not shoot people just because we disagree with them.

(read the rest of it for context which makes it better.)

Hemant Mehta passes on official statements from the Secular Coalition of America

“While we disagree with the Family Research Council on nearly every issue, the debate surrounding the role of religion in the public sphere should be fought with reason and logic, not guns,” said Edwina Rogers, Executive Director. “We absolutely condemn this sort of senseless violence.”

and American Atheists:

American Atheists is saddened to learn about the shooting at the Family Research Council today. Our thoughts are with the security officer who was injured and the other employees who were traumatized.

American Atheists never advocate violence as an answer to disagreements, even with those who believe differently than our members.

I can’t think of anything to add. I don’t like the FRC or what they advocate, but you don’t go around shooting people you disagree with, or otherwise doing or threatening violence. This is not acceptable.

NPR Almost Uses the L Word

From this morning’s NPR news podcast (starting at the 1:28 mark, if the link isn’t stale by the time you read this):

[Romney is]continuing to hammer at the president for allowing some exemptions to the work requirement in the welfare law.

Romney: “It is wrong to make any change that would make America more of a nation of government dependency”.

And that’s Romney in Iowa yesterday. Independent analysis shows the president’s changes simply could allow states exemptions when they can show that their own processes would place more people into jobs than by meeting the welfare law’s requirements.

(emphasis added)

So basically, <quote Romney saying X>; but actually, not-X.

NPR doesn’t actually use the word “liar”, but this comes pretty close. And given the current state of American news media—where if one person says that kittens should be killed with giant mallets, and another person says they shouldn’t, the average news outlet will treat both as equally-respectable opinions and that the truth lies somewhere halfway between (you should get a permit to kill kittens with mallets, after proving that you’re not some sort of weirdo, perhaps?)—I’m grateful for any advance in the direction of letting people know what’s going on.

So thank you, NPR.

Church-State Separation in Norway

Whøå (Google translation).

The Norwegian government is expected to amend its constitution to become a more secular society: the Church of Norway will no longer be the official state religion. As I understand it, from now on the government will no longer have any say in how the church is run (and will abolish the post of Minister of Churches), and the church will appoint its own bishops and other officials.

This all sounds rather… civilized and sensible, I must say. As an American, I’m not used to such things happening without a whole lot of hand-wringing, hyperbolic rhetoric, and accusations of treason, communism, and collusion with Satan. I don’t suppose we could get some Norwegians to come over here and show us how it’s done, could we?

War Is Peace. Slavery Is Oppression. Ignorance Is Strength.

Once again, it seems that the word “Family” in an organization’s name can be more accurately replaced with “patriarchy”.

The Illinois Family Institute didn’t like President Obama’s National Day of Prayer proclamation. No, they didn’t:

President Obama’s proclamation has raised the eyebrows of some because he is thankful that we live in a country that “respects the beliefs and protects the religious freedom of all people.” Critics have noted that this point seems to fly in the face of the President’s failure to defend the Defense of Marriage Act which would have huge ramifications for religious freedom should marriage be undefined to allow for homosexual couples. (The repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is already causing problems for military chaplains.) The President’s prayer proclamation also contradicts his actions associated with his health care plan that could force people to pay for abortions and contraceptives against the teachings of their faith

Got that? Failing to uphold a law that tells gays they can’t marry the person they want is at odds with religious freedom. Not forcing gay soldiers to live a lie is at odds with religious freedom. Telling religious employers that they have to play by the same rules as everybody else is at odds with religious freedom.

Anti-Christian Bigotry
"Anti-Christian Bigotry" by Dana Simpson

I once had a discussion with my friend JB about the Civil War, and mentioned the argument that the war was fought not over slavery, but over states’ rights. She snorted and said, “Yeah. The right to own slaves.”

Your right to religious freedom ends when it affects people outside of your sect. Your right to worship as you see fit does not include the right to be kowtowed to, the right to make other people live by your rules, or even the right not to be offended. Put on your big-boy pants and deal with it.

Animus

This morning, I got email from Robert Broadus at Protect Marriage Maryland, an organization formed to oppose gay marriage in Maryland (and also the repeal of DADT, DOMA, and generally stand in the way of social progress), about the Maryland bill to legalize gay marriage (which recently passed both houses, but hasn’t been signed by the governor yet):

It is important to understand that re-defining marriage is not about “equality,” “civil rights,” or even the word, “marriage,” as homosexuals in Maryland already have domestic partnership benefits, and have intentionally rejected civil unions at every opportunity.  Instead, re-defining marriage represents the hope of “acceptance” for their godless lifestyles, imposed on the rest of society via the government and the force of law.

(emphasis added)

Could Broadus make it any more plain that he’s a bigot, and that that’s his main reason for opposing marriage rights for gays? (And, not incidentally, that he thinks this approach is a good way to raise money for his cause.)

One reason why this matters is that animus played an important part in the Proposition 8 trial: basically, the Supreme Court decided that you can’t just pass laws against people because you don’t like them; that legislation has to provide an actual benefit or solve a real problem.

Indeed, in the Prop 8 ruling, judge Walker wrote:

In the absence of a rational basis, what remains of proponents’ case is an inference, amply supported by evidence in the record, that Proposition 8 was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples.FF 78-80. Whether that belief is based on moral disapproval of homosexuality, animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate.

Proponents’ purported rationales are nothing more than post-hoc justifications. […] What is left is evidence that Proposition 8 enacts a moral view that there is something “wrong” with same-sex couples.

Yes, I realize that Maryland is not California. But to the extent that they’re similar, if there’s an anti-gay-marriage referendum in Maryland, and it passes, and it gets challenged in court, then Broadus is laying the foundation for an animus charge.

I would have thought he’d be more subtle about it, though.

Fact-Checking the BillDo

Bill Donohue is in fine form this morning. As I read his apoplectic hissy fit over the fact that New York City will now mandate sex education, I can practically see the flecks of spittle flying out from the monitor and feel the floor shake as he stamps his feet:

We’ve had de facto sex-education in New York City for decades—that’s how long we’ve been shelling out condoms to students. And what has it gotten us? Moreover, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, literally tens of millions of condoms have been promiscuously distributed all over the city to anyone who wants them. And yet the rate of sexually transmitted diseases continues to skyrocket.

There is a sex-education program that could work, and it is one that is similar to the approach being used to discuss smoking. We don’t tell kids not to smoke and then instruct them on the proper way to inhale. No, we show them horrifying pictures of a smoker’s lungs. We tell them of the physical pain they are likely to endure by smoking. We tell them how it will shorten their life expectancy.

So… sex is like smoking? He wants kids to grow up and ideally never have sex ever? I have a mental image of a chaste couple getting married, and when they are finally allowed by their church to have sex, on their wedding night, all they can think of is the pictures of diseased cocks and pussies they got shown in their BillDo-style sex ed class.

There was something else I meant to mention. What was it?… Oh, right! “the rate of sexually transmitted diseases continues to skyrocket“.

You know what’s cool about the Internet? You can look shit up. In the US, which is where New York is, we have an institution called the Centers for Disease Control, part of whose job it is to keep track of incidences of diseases, including STDs. Here’s a form that’ll show you data about STDs by disease, year, age, and other criteria. Here’s another that lists fewer criteria, but has data for more years.

So in the second one, if we look up New York, grouping by disease and by year, we get:

(Click to see the whole thing. All rates are per 100,000 people.)

The thing I get from that is that gonorrhea is at a 20-year low, syphilis is a quarter of what it was in 1990, and the only one that’s on the rise is chlamydia, about which the CDC writes in its 2009 trends report:

Continuing increases in chlamydia diagnoses likely reflect expanded screening efforts, and not necessarily a true increase in disease burden; this means that more people are protecting their health by getting tested and being linked to treatment. This is critical, since chlamydia is one of the most widespread STDs in the United States.

Now, unfortunately all of these stats are for New York State, not just New York City. But I think if STDs in NYC were “skyrocket”ing as BillDo says, we’d know about it.

No, I think a simpler and far more plausible explanation is that, as usual, Donohue is pulling stuff out of his — or someone’s — ass. But what can you expect from someone whose job it is to pontificate about offenses to a magic man and his fluffers?

Update, 12:26: Clarify what the numbers in the graph mean.

I Agree With Bill Donohue

On Friday, BillDo wrote

The Catholic League would like to go further: it’s time to shut down the faith-based program altogether.

and my head went asplodey.

Okay, so we have different reasons for thinking that the faith-based program set up by George W. Bush should be shut down. I think it’s because the government shouldn’t be involved in promoting religion — either promoting one religion over another, or favoring religion over non-religion, or vice-versa — whereas Bill… well, here’s what he has to say:

When Sen. Obama was running for president three years ago, he pledged support for faith-based programs provided they were emptied of any faith component: he opposed the right of faith-based programs to maintain their integrity by hiring only people of their faith.

In 2009, the Obama administration balked: it said it would decide on a case-by-case basis whether a funding request from a faith-based program was acceptable. In 2010, many members of this program pushed to pare back religious liberty provisions that were extant.

When faith is gutted from faith-based programs—when Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Jews can’t hire their own—we are left with a carcass. […] The goal, obviously, is to convert these religious entities into full-blown secular organizations. It would be better not to let them hijack these programs in the name of assisting them, thus it makes sense to shut them down.

In other words, not only does he want Catholic charitable organizations to get federal assistance, he also wants them to be able to discriminate in hiring. Because hey, what’s the point in running a soup kitchen if the actual soup is ladled by a Protestant or a Jew, right?

That’s the problem I have with religious charities: they’re easily abused to be a tool for proselytizing: offer someone a free meal, but only after they listen to a sermon, or a lecture on the virtues of $RELIGION. In other words, advertising, just like when a business hands out sun visors with its logo on them at the county fair, or when the guy who’s selling time-shares offers to take you out for lunch so he can convince you to buy what he’s selling.

Obviously, the government has an interest in promoting the good done by religious organizations, but too often it seems that the organizations themselves see the good not as a goal in itself, but as a means toward a different end, often proselytizing. Recall that last year, Catholic Charities ceased its operations when it was told that it had to either stop discriminating against gay couples or stop accepting government money.

But if they can’t bring themselves to do good because it’s good, screw them. We don’t need to pump government money into churches’ advertising budgets.

“Religious Liberty”

BillDo is upset over the upcoming vote on legalizing gay marriage in New York state:

The New York State legislature is one vote away from passing a gay marriage bill. What is holding it up is pressure from Catholics, Protestants, Jews and others: they want to insulate religious institutions from state encroachment. That they have to fight for their First Amendment rights shows how threatening gay-marriage legislation really is.

The threats to religious liberty are not hypothetical. …

Well, thanks for clarifying that opposition to marriage equality comes from religious quarters. This confirms what I and others have been saying for a while.

But wait, what’s this? Threats to first-amendment rights? And non-hypothetical ones? As a properly sensitive liberal guy, I’m certainly all for protecting everyone’s freedom, to the extent required by the first amendment and the Kumbaya Act of 1993. So do tell, Bill: what exactly are these real, non-hypothetical threats?

The threats to religious liberty are not hypothetical. A New Mexico photographer who refused to photograph a gay couple’s commitment ceremony was forced to pay the couple’s attorney’s fees; Christians in New Jersey who objected to allowing a gay union ceremony in their privately owned facility have had their tax-exempt status stripped; a psychologist from Georgia was fired after she declined to counsel a lesbian about her relationship. And so on.

In other words, there are real concerns that if gay marriage passes in New York, religious liberty will be jeopardized.

First of all, there’s nothing in there about marriage. All of the above can already happen; extending marriage rights to gay couples wouldn’t change anything.

For another, I fail to see words like “church”, “synagogue” or “mosque” in those examples, so it’s not clear which religious rights are being trampled.

But most importantly, what I see is three examples of people being bigots and getting slapped for it.

In other words, the “religious freedom” BillDo is crusading for is the right to hang a “no faggots” sign on the door of one’s business. Because hey, that’s what Jesus would want.

Here’s a hint, Billy-boy: if you’re beating someone over the head with a stick, and someone takes away your stick, your rights aren’t being trampled, and you don’t get to play the victim.

Derp

Maggie Gallagher writes at NOM:

The tiny number of liberal northeastern states that have embraced gay marriage tend to have high per capita incomes, because they are much older, supporting fewer children, and much whiter, and better educated than average. They are older in part because with so little job growth, young adults with families move elsewhere, most likely to a southern state with a marriage amendment that enjoys more robust economic growth.

So, um, yeah. Apparently marriage equality kills jobs, resulting in higher per-capita income and better education. And also somehow whiteness and olditude.

I’d like to say the homophobes are scraping the bottom of the barrel, but as with creationists, every time I’ve thought that, I’ve been proven wrong.

Not Impressed with Right-Wing “Scholarship”

I recently stumbled upon a preview of a video purporting to teach children about the 1980s.

Given that the site is endorsed by Mike Huckabee, who once said that every American should be forced at gunpoint to watch David Barton, and since Barton belongs to the “make stuff up” school of historical research, you can understand why I was a bit suspicious. Read More