Religious conservative “morals” are anything but

Here we have two stories that perfectly sum up the fucked-up values of America’s religious conservatives.  Let’s start with this:

Republicans Are Pissed About Crackdowns on Vaccine Exemptions

The fight against measles in a handful of states is facing staunch opposition from Republicans and anti-vaxx parents as lawmakers crack down on exemptions that let kids skip vaccinations.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that through Friday there have been 839 individual cases of measles throughout 23 states. That’s the most cases since 1994, making this the worst measles outbreak in decades. In response, a number of states where it’s spread have been trying to limit exemptions, with efforts mostly led by Democrats.

Washington State got rid of personal/philosophical exemptions.  California is making it harder to claim false exemptions.  Oregon got rid of the “moral” exemption.  Connecticut is looking at removing religious exemptions.  Maine has tossed philosophical exemptions.  Slowly but surely, reason and common sense are making headway against tidal waves of anti-vaxxer bullshit, and naturally Republicans are howling like the infantile little assholes we all know they are.  Oh, you don’t want the government dictating your health choices in the face of a nationwide epidemic?  Let’s come back to that when you stop taking womens’ uteruses  hostage because you think a blob is a person.  And speaking of which…

Alabama Governor Signs Abortion Ban Into Law

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a controversial bill that bans nearly all abortions into law Wednesday evening.  It’s considered the most restrictive abortion law in the United States. The law makes it a crime for doctors to perform abortions at any stage of a pregnancy, unless a woman’s life is threatened or there is a lethal fetal anomaly.

This is the “pro-life” world we now live in, folks:  religious conservatives (overwhelmingly men, naturally) forcing women to give birth to unwanted children, while at the same time fighting legislation that prevents those same children from getting sick…and possibly dying.  They’d also like to let anyone of any mental state purchase automatic weapons, because without all those dead schoolkids they wouldn’t be able to look and feel compassionate by publicly spouting their Thoughts And Prayers™ on Twitter.  And let’s not forget that they overwhelmingly support the death penalty.  Yep, sounds “pro-life” to me all right.

But wait, we shouldn’t stop there.  We can take this so much further.  First we need steep fines on non-procreative ejaculations.  Outlaw jerking off — it’s causing trillions of innocent pre-babies to die in a holocaust of towels and tissues!  Next we need to outlaw the burning of coal and oil, because carbon is one of the building blocks of life (if you believe in that science stuff, anyway).  And what about those poor fetuses and blobs which have now been granted full personhood?  First we need to give them voting rights.  They’ll also have property rights with the ability to rent out space in the womb.  Make them attend church, because Jesus died for our blobs’ sins.  And let them be the second passenger in the carpool lane, fer chrissakes!  That blob is a person, you monster!

But enough of that.  To paraphrase Saint Carlin, these people don’t give a shit about you once you’re born.  Once you’re out of the womb, you’re on your own.  They’ll use their power to bring you into the world, but they don’t want a single government dollar going to help feed and care for you if your mother can’t do it all on her own.  They just want you born, and then you’re not their problem.  This is how they keep women in their place, as the Bible clearly dictates.  Praise be!

This all leads me to believe that the mind of an American religious conservative can be a dark and twisted maze of contradictions and misguided piety.  Selfish, irrational, willfully ignorant and dismissive of established knowledge, compromised by their belief of a guaranteed spot in Heaven, wielding religion as a weapon against those they don’t like, driven to control the behavior of others under the guise of “moral concern” — it’s a scary place, and minds like this have been very busy chipping away at whatever legal protections we still have against their influence.  Now that Trump is in power and appointing hundreds of right-wing judges into lifetime positions, I’m starting think these motherfuckers just might get their wish of a real-world “Handmaid’s Tale.”

I’m fully aware that conservatives automatically call this attitude intolerant.  “Typical intolerant libtard! Can’t stand different opinions.  Fuckin snowflake.”  But you know what?  Nobody should tolerate the kinds of immoral and inhumane things these people are getting away with.  So if I’m an intolerant asshole to them (and I’ve been told as much by a few), I’m fine with that.

Under His Eye…

Reap this.

Whoops.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick deletes “reap what you sow” tweet after mass shooting at LGBT club

A “reap what you sow” tweet from Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick that went out hours after approximately 50 people were killed at a Florida LGBT nightclub has been deleted amid backlash.  At precisely 7 a.m. Sunday Dan Patrick tweeted a photo with the words of Galatians 6:7. The verse reads, “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.”

I’m not surprised in the least that this came out of Texas…but it seems to me that what America is really reaping is mountains of dead bodies bought and paid for by NRA lobbyists and Republicans who refuse to do anything about it except offer “thoughts and prayers.” But I digress…

Patrick’s adviser Allen Blakemore issued a statement explaining that the tweet was an unfortunate coincidence.  …A Bible verse is tweeted from Patrick’s account every Sunday at 7 a.m.

Riiiiight.  Great bit of P.R. there.  All you have to do is read the kind of shit he tweets regularly (anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-poor, pro-white, pro-Christian, pro-discrimination, etc.) and it’s not much of a leap to conclude that he’d post this intentionally.  The only upside to all this is the vast sea of backlash he’s swimming in at the moment.  You wanted attention, Mr. Not-Even-A-Governor, and now you have it.

(Side note:  even if it was just a crazy coincidence that this tweet was unintentional, do you really need to be auto-tweeting Bible verses?  What’s the point, to gather Likes?  Matthew 6:6: “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”  Oh but if you do that, nobody will see what a stellar Christian you are!  Can’t have that, now can we?)

Rise of the Religious Reich

Normally I’d never compare anything to Hitler, because honestly whenever anyone does that they’ve basically torpedoed their argument.  But finally I might have something, and I don’t think Godwin’s Law applies because the comparison is becoming more and more valid by the day.

What we’re hearing coming out of the mouths of the right wing lately is fucking scary.  “Keep them refugees out!  Round up all th’ Muslims and put ’em into camps!  And hey, we also gotta make ’em wear somethin’ so we can tell they’re Muslims just by lookin’ at ’em!”  Right-wing nutjobs are actually saying these things and meaning them, and many of them are lawmakers.

Here…let’s taste the crazy, shall we?

State Senator Says Syrian Refugees In U.S. Should Be Segregated In Camps

Rhode Island state Sen. Elaine Morgan (R) said in an email Tuesday that she opposes resettling Syrian refugees because “[t]he Muslim religion and philosophy is to murder, rape, and decapitate anyone is a non Muslim.”  If the U.S. does “take these people in,” she added, “we should set up refugee camp to keep them segregated from our populous [sic].”

George Takei’s response to this is brilliant.  Go read it if you haven’t already, it’s worth it.  (I’m also aware that some dimwit Democrat suggested that America’s Japanese internment camps were a good idea.)  And then there’s this steaming pile:

Trump won’t rule out special ID for Muslim Americans noting their religion

Donald Trump would not rule out tracking Muslim Americans in a database or giving them “a special form of identification that noted their religion”, Yahoo news reported on Thursday in an interview with the Republican presidential candidate.

Hmm, why does that sound familiar?  I feel like someone has already tried that.  But this is just the tip of the iceberg — dip your toe into the pools of comment-filth on conservative news sites and Facebook groups, and you’ll see much, much worse.  Your faith in humanity will dip dramatically, so I don’t recommend it.

What the fuck is going on?  Is this really the road we’re on right now?  What country am I in?  Just when I think I’ve heard the most hateful jingoist bullshit come out of their mouths, they somehow manage to spew something even worse.  The politicians are stoking the fires of xenophobia and their followers are frothing at the mouth like crazed hyenas.  I mean, come on — this stuff about putting people in camps is what the right wing conspiracy nutjobs have always said would happen to them once Obama got into office.  (Actually they started that crap with Clinton.)  They sure have a fixation on putting people in camps, don’t they?  Gee, I wonder why.

This is madness.  Simple as that.

Nevermind the fact that right-wing terrorists have been deemed the biggest threat on American soil these days.  No, it’s easier to blame all members of a religion for the crimes of a few extremists.  Hell, I’m very anti-Christian and even I don’t think they’re all crazy and dangerous.  A lot of ’em are, especially the ones bombing and shooting dozens of people every year, but not all.  Geez.

My blood begins to boil every time I start reading what these racist little shitmonkeys are saying, so for my own sanity I’m minimizing my exposure to their ravings as much as I can.  I’ve stopped looking at Facebook daily (probably a good thing in itself), I don’t read the news more than once or twice a week, and I sparsely listen to left-leaning commentary that I would normally agree with…because right now they’re all reporting on the racist turds that are falling out of the mouths of the GOP.  It’s kinda hard not to talk about it because it’s so astonishingly insane, but I can only take so much.  I can’t even bring myself to write much about it on my own blog, but that’s mostly because so many out there are doing it so much better than I could.  There are plenty of professional blogs and commentary sites which are busily tracking Hurricane Hitler which is currently sweeping over the nation.  Oh, and I love comments from guys like this:

How soon until we hear about Muslim families gunned down in their homes by Christian patriots “fightin’ for an Amurrica free of terrrsts”?  It’s guaranteed to happen at some point.  Or maybe it already has.

Now more than ever it’s scary and dangerous to be anything other than a white Christian in America.  I don’t have a lot of hope that it’s going to get better anytime soon, not while we have bigoted asshats like Ted Cruz and Trump trying to get control of the White House.  I really, really want to think it’ll get better.  But they’re making it mighty difficult.

Obama’s finger of Muslim terror!

I have a certain family member who subscribes to the “Obama’s a Muslim” school of paranoid and irrational conservative thinking.  She knows — for a fact! — he’s a Muslim, because he wears a ring that says so.  Well that’s a new one for me, so I asked for details.  Apparently he wears a ring that has the phrase “There is no God but Allah” on it.  Oh really.  She no doubt picked this up from an email that had been forwarded by a thousand like-minded people before her.

So while on the phone I did a Google search on the words “obama muslim ring”…and lo and behold, a bunch of right-wing whackjob stories came up making this claim.  How in the world did I miss this?  In a nutshell, they have some grainy low-res photos of his ring and imagined that the squiggly lines on it is actually Arabic writing.  Aha!  PROOF he’s a stealth Muslim!  Except, of course, he’s not being very stealthy about it…

These infantile scrawlings are the “proof.”

As usual a visit to Snopes.com shows us what’s really going on.  Spoiler:  it’s bullshit.  As if there was any doubt.

Isolating the ring from a much higher-resolution photograph of President Obama’s hand taken by photographer Miguel Villagran during a 5 June 2009 news conference in Dresden, Germany, shows the ring to bear what looks like nothing more than a plain loop-like pattern, with the top section matching the bottom.

We shared the above picture with a small survey of six different persons with fluency in written Arabic, and all of them said the pattern displayed on the ring appeared to be an abstract one with no discernible meaning in Arabic.

Check out the story on Snopes to see a highly detailed photo of the ring in question.  Yes, that is what all the fuss is about.  A bunch of fucking loopy shapes.

So I read the entire Snopes article to her, and she basically tried to brush it off with a “Yeah, whatever.”  Because nothing can sway paranoid (and dare I say racist) white conservatives from their Obama-hating opinions.  Facts are irrelevant.  Not to mention that the underlying Muslim=Evil idea is utter nonsense…

This is supremely disappointing to me because I know she’s not stupid–she just hates our black President and will believe anything that supports her irrational beliefs.  Well, it’s a kind of stupidity, I suppose…a self-imposed ignorance and gullibility.  A black hole of critical thinking.  And this happens with millions of people around the country, especially of the Baby Boomer generation…they get emails making outrageous claims with photographic “proof” of something (or they simply watch the shitfest on Fox News), and they immediately believe it without a second thought because it hits a raw nerve with them.  It happens everywhere:  email, Facebook, conspiracy websites…wherever ridiculous ideas like this can spread.  You can’t talk them out of it, either.  Their hatred has been validated by a badly-written chain letter with shitty photos and that’s all there is to it.

When I hear this stuff I can’t help but think:  the 2016 election can’t come soon enough!

Attention, climate change denialists!

This is simply genius.  Because, you know, whatever the weather’s like outside your window right now is how it is all over the world.

This One Comic Perfectly Shuts Down Deniers of Global Warming

This April 2014 comic below, from the Buffalo News’ Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Adam Zyglis, deftly calls out climate change deniers for this flawed argument: “it’s cold/snowing, so there can’t be climate change.” This argument was even employed by the chairman of the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works committee, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), when he held up a snowball on the floor of the Senate in an attempt to disprove climate change.

Arizona’s $1.7 million welfare circle-jerk finally “pays off”

The nutbags behind this push for drug testing were really, really hoping to find widespread abuse and fraud.  Because, you know, all them welfare folks are just lazy moochers who don’t wanna work, right?  What they found was next to nothing.  Oh how lovely to see how they’ll spin this into something they wanted to find….

Arizona Spent Over $1.7 Million Drug Testing Welfare Recipients to Catch One Person

According to USA Today, more than 87,000 welfare recipients went through Arizona’s program in the three years after it began. The total number of drug cheats caught was exactly one—a single positive result, which saved the state precisely $560. [UPDATE: According to numbers provided by the ACLU, the cost of Arizona’s drug testing program may be higher than we first reported. The ACLU estimates that each drug test costs $42, bringing the total cost as high as $3.65 million if all of the new welfare recipients were subjected to the tests.]

According to Tuscon Weekly, there was “One during the first three years of the program, and a grand total of three from 2009 to 2014.”  The results of Arizona’s implemented questionnaire and its efficiency are in question. Further, Arizona is not the only example of excessive drug testing.

What can we learn from conservatives about women?

Not all conservative citizens feel this way, but it rings pretty damn true if you listen to what’s been coming out of the mouths of 90% of the right-wing politicians.  And it’s not just limited to women–they’ve got a thing against just about anyone who isn’t a) straight b) white c) Christian.  It’s getting pretty damn scary…  I think having a black President (an eeeevil liberal one to boot) really pushed them over the edge and now all their hate is spilling out like an overflowing toilet.

The term “Tea Party extremist” has pretty much become redundant

Robert Reich recently posted this on Facebook and it really struck a chord with me.  Tea Party people like to say that guys like this are the extremists and not the norm, but I think we all know that’s not entirely accurate.  Yeah, he may be a little crazier than most in the party (women as human shields!), but I think most of them share more of his views than they want to admit.

In what world is Cliven Bundy, the 68-year-old rancher who refuses to pay his tab for grazing cattle on federal lands, a patriot? He drapes himself in the American flag but says “I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing,” while attracting a collection of thugs with assault rifles in the Nevada desert to force the Bureau of Land Management to back down from a court-ordered confiscation of his cattle. One of Bundy’s supporters, Tea Party leader Richard Mack, who is in the National Rifle Association’s Hall of Fame, says he plans to use women as human shields in a violent showdown with law enforcement. Fox News host Sean Hannity has all but encouraged a violent confrontation.

Bundy and his defenders aren’t patriots. What would you call them?

Right-wing nutjobs kill more Americans than jihadist nutjobs

I think more people don’t seem to care about this because the American media shies away from calling it “terrorism” when some Christian wingnut shoots up an abortion clinic or bombs a mosque or synagogue.  They don’t want Mr. and Mrs. Middle America thinking that Americans can be terrorists.  No, those are the people who follow that weird eastern religion — no good Christian would dare commit an act of terrorism, no sir!  But if the person came from another country, and especially if they’re part of “that” religion, watch out:  the terrorists are here, and together with the atheists they’re out to murder and eat your children.

This makes me wonder if labeling these acts as terrorism (as they should be) would be seen as an attack on Christianity itself, giving Christians yet another reason to claim they’re being “persecuted”, which they often do nowadays.  Maybe that’s part of the reason why the media shies away from that terminology.  Who knows…  All we can say for sure is that there are a lot of crazies out there who think they’ve got a direct line to Jesus, and they hear his voice in their heads telling them to kill people in his name.

In U.S., right wing extremists more deadly than jihadists

In fact, since 9/11 extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right wing ideologies, including white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists and anti-government militants, have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology. According to a count by the New America Foundation, right wing extremists have killed 34 people in the United States for political reasons since 9/11. (The total includes the latest shootings in Kansas, which are being classified as a hate crime).

“Since 9/11 extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right wing ideologies…have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology.”  By contrast, terrorists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology have killed 21 people in the United States since 9/11.

Fox News: America’s cesspit of fear-fueled political putrescence

I lost my dad to Fox News: How a generation was captured by thrashing hysteria

Old, white, wrinkled and angry, they are slipping from polite society in alarming numbers. We’re losing much of a generation.  They often sport hats or other clothing, some marking their status as veterans, Tea Partyers or “patriots” of some kind or another. They have yellow flags, bumper stickers and an unquenchable rage. They used to be the brave men and women who took on America’s challenges, tackling the ’60s, the Cold War and the Reagan years — but now many are terrified by the idea of slightly more affordable healthcare and a very moderate Democrat in the White House.

We’re losing people like my father to the despair of Fox News, and it’s all by design.

This article speaks directly to what’s going on with some relatives of mine.  They believe every bit of fear-mongering that Fox News spews out, so of course they’re absolutely terrified about the future of our country.  One in particular has taken it to a new level of paranoia.  Here’s just a taste of what this person thinks is going on — it’s like reading from the All-Is-Lost Handbook For Terrified White People:

• “The liberals” are going to destroy our economy with the Affordable Healthcare Act
• We’re unfairly punishing the rich in order to satisfy Obama’s socialist agenda and redistribute their wealth to the lazy unemployed
• The Mexicans and Native Americans are all lazy and living on government handouts
• The government’s coming for our guns because they’re buying up all the country’s ammunition
• Buying gold is actually a good way to defend against the coming economic collapse
• Obama’s a Muslim and his secret agenda is to take down America in the name of Allah or whatever

The end result of all this, of course, will be the total collapse of society as we know it and having to defend your house with a shotgun from roving bands of crazies who want to rape and pillage “the good people.”  This person actually talks about this stuff as if it’s actual fact, as if it’s going to happen beyond the shadow of a doubt.  The evidence?  Whatever Fox News says, of course.  Why would they lie?  They’re the only ones telling the truth out there amongst the Biased Liberal Media That’s Biased™!  Why can’t you see that!!!1!!1!

A lot of what Fox News spews is directly targeted at white middle-aged folks who tend to already be afraid of the future and afraid of change.  Hell, I’m only 42 and I’m already terrified of what state I’ll be in when I’m old ‘n’ creaky, but I’m at least trying to have somewhat realistic expectations — not the apocalyptic visions of a living hell on earth that Fox News is peddling.