Sequel of the random stuff

In no particular order:

• Same–sex marriage was illegal in North Carolina, but the people there voted to ban it again.
  • The last time North Carolina amended their constitution to concern marriage was to ban interracial marriage (via).
• If it was legalized, same–sex marriage could provide a one billion dollar boost to the American budget each year for a decade. Marriage equality, it’s good for the economy!
• Teh cute.
• Yet another misogynistic fundamentalist pastor. He’s against women voting and blames them for everything. No surprise there.
• I’ve often said that complementarianism is really hierarchicalism. And now (via) Rachel Held Evans reports that complementarianism is losing ground. Good.
  • Evans also quotes someone who writes that (my emphasis) “For millennia, followers of God have practiced what used to be called patriarchy and is now called complementarianism.” Well, at least he’s honest.

A brilliant rant

John Cole has written a brilliant post about the negative influence of fundamentalism and conservative Christianity on US society (via). An excerpt (links removed):

But from where I stand these days, the only thing I see religion doing in the public sector is gay bashing and telling women, mostly poor and desperate and in deplorable financial and personal situations, what to do with their bodies. I see busybodies deciding what drugs they can dispense to which customers, or deciding that they don’t have to issue a marriage license because of some petty deity that I don’t believe in told them to hate their fellow citizens and ignore the law. In a country in dire financial straits but still spending billions and billions of dollars on education, I see religious folks actively and openly working to make our schoolkids dumber. I see them shooting people who provided a medical procedure, and I see others rummaging through people’s personal lives to find out who hasn’t lived up the word of God. I see glassy-eyed fools running for President claiming that vaccines that save lives actually cause cancer, or that if you get raped and are pregnant, you should just lie back and think of Jeebus and make the best of a bad situation. In fact, everywhere you look these days, if Christianity or religion is getting a mention, it means something ugly is happening and someone somewhere is being victimized, marginalized, or otherwise abused. Go read some of the arguments against integration and you’ll see the same bible verses used today against homosexuals. Fifty years from now, they’ll be recycling them again to trash someone else they don’t like or who isn’t good enough for them.

Read the rest of it.

War on Christmas ends

Today, a national association of brick–and–mortar and online retails declared victory in the War on Christmas. A press release was issued to mark the occasion:

Today is a great day in the history of capitalism, business, and the United States. Retailers decades long effort to redefine Christmas have been successful. What once was a religious holiday has successfully transformed into a commercialized and consumerized glorified shopping spree. And no wingnut can really complain, as Christmas was the bastardized descendant of the Roman festival of Saturnalia and various winter solstice observances. A careful reading of the Bible reveals evidence that implies that Jesus was probably born in late summer or early autumn. Therefore, our victory in the War on Christmas in no way is an attack on any religion.

The press release gave special thanks one group:

We would like to give special thanks to our moles in the National Association of Perennially Pissed off Wingnuts for distracting them from our real objective. Everyone knows that the phrase “Happy Holidays” merely began as a shortening of “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.” However, our agents, by reminding wingnuts that the phrase “Happy Holidays” could also apply to Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and other winter holidays, and by making wingnuts think it was a politically correct attack on Christianity, allowed us to distract our enemies with an irrelevant diversion, therefore allowing us to focus on our real objective.

When you think they couldn’t go any lower (updated)

Shorter GOP in Michigan Senate: “It’s okay to bully in the name of Jesus.”

A bill was recently passed by the Michigan Senate. It is a purported anti–bullying bill, but in reality the bill basically protects those who bully based on moral convictions:

This section does not prohibit a statement of a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil, or a pupil and parent or guardian.

In other words, it’s a how to bully act.

In addition, while IANAL, the law protects sincerely held beliefs, including those by teachers. If a teachers sincerely believes that people in group X are going to burn in hell forever, this law seems to protect those statements. Hence, the la looks like it also serves as a backdoor way to legalize proselytization in school, therefore violating the Establishment Clause.

Via Lawyers, Guns, and Money.

Update: The section in question has been dropped from the bill (via).

Book Review: Quiverfull – Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement

Before my previous computer died, I arranged an inter–library loan for a book I had been badly wanting to read. The book is Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement by American journalist Kathryn Joyce. The book is available from Beacon Press. I promised a review and a summary of its contents, and here they are, after the jump.

I thought they were fiscal conservatives

For people who claim to hate government spending so much, they sure had no difficulty finding the money to triple the budget earmarked for defending the Preservation of Bigotry Defense of (heterosexual) Marriage Act.

Hat tip.

Why not just admit that you want women barefoot and pregnant?

At least he’s honest:

The goal is to get government money out of the abortion process and if contraceptive services have to suffer a bit of collateral damage in the process, so be it. When The Texas Tribune asked state Rep. Wayne Christian (R-Nacogdoches), a supporter of the family planning cuts, if this was a war on birth control, he said “yes.”

“Well of course this is a war on birth control and abortions and everything, that’s what family planning is supposed to be about,” Christian said.

Family planning clinics are routinely referred to by many Texas Republican legislators as “abortion clinics” even though none of the 71 family planning clinics in the state that receive government funding provide abortions. Texas and federal law prohibits that, but most women’s health clinics will refer women or teens who want an abortion to a provider.

“They’re sitting here, referring women out to receive abortions,” Christian said in an interview with NPR. “Those are the clinics, including Planned Parenthood, we were targeting.”

If he truly wanted to eliminate abortion, he’d be pushing birth control endlessly.

When people like me say that the religious right and faux–lifers are really motivated by a desire to control women, we’re not kidding. People like Wayne Christian really are reactionaries who want women back in their homes.