Having viewed at least some portion of the iceberg of dirt set to crash his Titanic nomination for AG, Matt Gaetz has graciously stepped aside for someone else who might slip past senatorial review.
I'm kind of joking. When I say "graciously stepped aside", I guess I'm still wondering at the hubris that let Matt Gaetz keep his name in knowing of his ethics investigation and probably being well aware of whether he paid for sex with a minor once or a few times or whatever--or whether he was always ass deep in hookers and blow.
Before we get on to the quandary of Pam Bondi, the recipient of Trump money to forget about any prosecution against Trump University, which defrauded down on their luck folks of all sorts who thought lessons from real estate stable genius Trump would change their fortunes, not leave them even more immersed in debt, as the new Gaetz--let's think about the old one:
Exclusive: Trump to be formally arrested and charged with 34 Class E felonies for falsification of business records tomorrow. But he will not be handcuffed, placed in a jail cell or subjected to a mug shot, per a source debriefed on Tuesday's procedures. https://t.co/3cqbNJD8VS
This Holy Week, the transit of Stunato Mundi is truly a representation of the Stations of the Ass and It's Foal he rode in on and no one's palms are clean. Between you, me, and the whole entire internet, I am going to be sick that the arraignment of Trump on April 4th will give Christianist Doomsday heads some Maranatha energy and lets total racist assholes make MLK analogies. People are seriously covering his willing surrender in NYC (his hometown) as if it was notable that he didn't, I dunno, abscond to Argentina. It's for the drama. Trump is a thirsty bitch who lives for the drama. He could have done this by Zoom. He wanted a display of pretend martyrdom.
MAGAS: Donald Trump is not your bridegroom, Gurl. Just drop that like it's hellfire hot. He's also not a martyr for any damn cause and isn't being denied going to the mountaintop of a second term. He's a twice-impeached pussy-grabbing, mafia-adjacent, seditionist who is wildly earning all the indictments. Get a whole grip on reality. The man looks bad right now because he's been bad forever and never got good.
His campaign boasts that he's raised $7 million or so since the indictment. If I believe that: good. That money could have gone to actually viable Republican candidates instead of this guy. That money is several $$$ less in MAGA hands.
The House’s second-ranking Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise, repeatedly refused to say on Sunday that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen.https://t.co/7xiOcg941S
Rep. Steve Scalise once styled himself "David Duke without the baggage" because of course, in politics as in many walks of life, a reputation is your calling card. David Duke, of course, was an early backer of the virulently racist Trump that came down an escalator to discuss his 2016 candidacy in terms of stopping Mexicans and assorted Central Americans from coming to the US who were in all probability (as far as Trump knew) gangsters and rapists. Steve Scalise is a congressman who by now is basically David Duke with a taxpayer-funded job.
We should understand his baggage by now. He isn't different. He's just in office. That's all.
Some people might point to his not so long ago traumatic shooting incident and I will note there is something that came out of that: many people face tragedy and decide that the outcome will be that they are better people. And Scalise resolved to just be himself, Which was so unnecessary on his part, but I digress.
Anyhow, he isn't worse than Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell, and definitely no worse than Chuck Grassley, here. He's just so basically weak and inutile to any need of his constituents that all he can do is perform for their biases. He doesn't serve the people. He serves power, and in his brain, Trump, the twice-impeached one-term wonder with lawsuits and debts clinging to his every waking moment, is still who Scalise thinks is in power, so he cedes him that for fear of what the Twitter-less social media sensation will say about him.
Even if all Trump is chewing up now is the Mar-a-Lago wallpaper.
Yes, that is amazingly servile and grotesque, a cowardice so mutated from basic human dignity that children should shudder and cling to their parents and plead with unseen angels that they would never be so gutless and miscalculating at once to think pretending Trump won is the winning thing. Rather than, I don't know, actually being a party leader who wants the government scheme outlined by a little old thing called the Constitution to be somehow popular with people for governance-related reasons, not vague culture war bullshit.
His district should find another congressperson, because this one is clearly broken. And it wasn't Trump who broke him, he came here that way, and only wanted a reason to go full Renfield for the right authoritarian white supremacist shitlord.
Newsmax is reporting tonight that Trump will invoke executive privilege in an attempt to block all the subpoenas for former members of his WH staff issued by the bipartisan Select Committee on J6. pic.twitter.com/a86Y9wenla
Did you know that Trump was no longer president? Courts of law recognize it, and even his own lawyers sort of do. He isn't president. He isn't. He lost the popular vote badly. He lost the electoral vote badly, by his own terms of what badly would look like. He isn't an executive of anything but the FAILING Trump Organization. Which is doing poorly because he was a bad president and people hate him. Many people are saying this.
Also, if the Select Committee is trying to uncover business having to do with Trump's 2020 campaign LOSS, how was the Trump campaign a part of his official business? While it is true that Trump didn't separate the duties of supporting his campaign and serving the business of state among people in his employ, so much so that Kayleigh McEnany wore two hats as both a WH press secretary and a campaign spokesperson, was it the job of Trump as president to ensure his 2020 victory, or was it his job to follow the Constitution?
Enquiring minds really want to know, because the answer should be, this MF really tried it and no court should be the one to accept it. Trump didn't try to put America First here, he put himself first. He tried to use the DOJ to give himself a victory. He thought the SCOTUS justices he picked would give him a second term. He even, in a deep cut, used his privileged position to run foreign policy to extort the President of Ukraine to help him get a leg up in a race against Joe Biden and thought if he didn't get convicted by the Senate, he was all good. He has now been impeached twice.
Oh hell no, does this guy still have any kind of executive privilege. While he's still using his fat mouth to undermine our democratic institutions? Mr. Make America Great Again, Again, is right this minute as invested as anyone could be in America not doing well so he can capitalize on it, and that should be seen as disqualifying.
This man is the proof of what privilege unchecked gets away with, He needs to have it denied because the nation needs to know what those he employed tried to do for his benefit.
He can invoke it all he wants. but acting as if isn't a magic trick, and he is a former president, to all of our shame--those who already know how shameful he was, and those who still need to learn it.
I have to admit, when I first saw this story about rich people gaming the college entrance system for their kids, I thought, "Huh. There's a wrong way for parents to bribe their kids' way into college?" But it isn't really a laughing matter.
Going back to my own college entry: I literally lack an ambition gland and barely had a clear idea what I wanted to do with myself when I got to college. What I knew I wanted to not do was waste my parents' money because they worked and saved hard for it, and I wanted therefore to just not fuck up. I got a part-time receptionist job to pay for some of my incidentals, but I lived at home and I basically didn't care about whether my school had prestige--I cared about whether I got a college experience.
I know this sounds weird--to my mind, there was a lot of truth in the idea that you "could lead an ass to Harvard, but you couldn't make him think." I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, but I realized higher ed would help me sort myself because I could use the generous class catalog to figure out what really interested me and turned me on. Regardless of what school I attended, if I had access to the learning, I would be educated. I realized I was a writer, and a close-reader and knew, after four years, I better get a practical job, because the intellectual path for me was never going to be practical.
That's privilege. But I still considered the point was that I earned my place there with my test scores, high school grades and extra-curriculars, and when I graduated, I did so because I worked at it. I understood what education meant.
What these parents did by cheating the system was cheat their kids out of that experience. They taught their kids that money and deception, not hard work, was what they needed to get by. They taught them they didn't need to earn it because there were other ways to be "deserving".
Like simply having money. And cheating.
They also cheated more deserving students who had worked hard out of an opportunity to be where their kids were, which is maddening. But thinking about the value of school as being about the "name brand" of the school itself, not the education provided, demonstrates that no matter what they paid, the real value was lost on them.
There's nothing that grates on me like the idea that being privileged meant that this kid's worldview was so screwed-up that he couldn't discern right from wrong, and deserved to get a lighter sentence. If what was ailing the poor little rich boy's mindset was "affluenza", then wouldn't a dose of reality to correct his worldview have done him far more good?
The belief that wealth grants one entitlements beyond the law is something that should be nipped in the bud, before it flowers into further pathology. The results can be far-reaching when allowed to mature. Yet our legal system puts away more broke people than it does rich folks. Interesting.
It's reaaaaallly unfair to categorize Rep. Paul Ryan (R) as a racist just because he endorses the studies of the basically white supremacist "scholar" Charles Murray, who is to race relations something like what Regnerus is to gay studies. (I am not even fooling with calling Murray a "white nationalist", even if I get that he's calling whites the real Americans. His line of inquiry seems to be why aren't ahem "other people" experiencing what white folks do and his results are predictably in line with the bias of the question.) What I would say is that Ryan will use anything he finds to demolish any economic program servicing the poor whether it serves black, white, or tangerine people, because he thinks "poor" is a moral value. A bad one. If you are poor, you are bad and you should feel bad. It isn't about the color of anything but your money.
This is disgusting, though. It's like calling "health" a moral value and saying that people with any physical condition short of perfectly fit are bad and should feel bad. Cancer? Heart disease? Bad case of the old and ricketies? Ah, you should have thought of that before you had a fallible physical body, you shirking lazy bastard. So, sick? It's quite on you. Poor--that's you, too.
And if you are disadvantaged and tend demographically to be poorer, like "inner city" or is that "urban" or do we completely have your number, Rep. Ryan and can go ahead and say "black" people? Why, then, Rep. Ryan is fully on board with saying that the existence of the social safety net such as it is provides a disincentive to work! A hammock, if you will.
But you know what I think is the real disincentive? Work that doesn't pay. "Education" that doesn't educate. Our failure to translate the language of opportunity into applicability for young people who would succeed if they were shown ways to triumph instead of being chastised.
I dunno. There's a lot of benefits of society poured into Paul Ryan, and this is where his thought process leads him? He's swinging on a little net called privilege that doesn't ask him to try any harder to figure out how to rectify a troubled world. I can't say I am therefore rooting for his success. From those to whom much was given, should much be expected? Waiting.
It's not unalloyed good news, because although I am optimistic (just see my last blog entry) I was not found in a cabbage patch nor was I raised on sunshine and good vibes. The response of some social conservatives definitely reminds me that nothing is over--if anything, the desire of a handful of retrograde culture warriors to wrap themselves in the mantle of faith and claim special privilege as a marginalized group seems to have grown. It's what you might call a smaller, but more motivated group. Look at it this way, if it's right that the SCOTUS Windsor ruling has literally made all further argument on gay marriage moot, what the hell is Brian Brown gonna do now? Get a real job? Even Fox News might stop inviting Tony Perkins on, and everyone knows Bryan Fischer is worried that if folks are freely getting gay-married...well, he's on his own thing and I think he's more scared of turning into a vulva than turning gay, but my point is, that rear-guard money is catch as catch can and they gotta hustle now. So they will hustle.
You know, I feel a bit silly blogging about a letter to the editor of the WSJ from 1%-er billionaire Tom Perkins, even one given an intriguingly tasteless title like "Progressive Kristallnact Coming?" But it really tweaked a nerve with me. Here we go:
Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."
I'm thinking about how dreadful it his, him writing that from someone's attic where he's hiding a luxury penthouse, probably, with an utter lack of perspective regarding his own privilege and a thorough failure to imagine the lack of privilege of the people he just compared himself to.
He goes on:
From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a "snob" despite the millions she has spent on our city's homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.
Pure ingratitude people have these days. After all, when Marie Antoinette recommended starving peasants supplement their diets with pastries, the grateful French peasants offered her a free haircut. Sure, they made her wait a bit, and botched it by about a foot (or a head) but it was hardly as bad as being called "a snob". There wasn't any such a thing as class consciousness before Occupy and them, these days. (I wonder if he thinks "conspicuous consumption" is that thing where someone makes a nasty racket coughing into one's handkerchief and then inelegantly expiring on the floor?)
I'd say he'd be the one of the first against the wall when the revolution comes (in jest) but I'd only be making his point.
Now, I think this is silly, but apparently John Cornyn, the senior senator of TX, thinks that bad people from Acorn will steal all your precious bodily fluids because Obamacare is socialism.
I do not believe that it is necessary to point out how this is not right. Acorn is, by the way, defunct. The ACA is the law of the land. And people employed to walk people through the process will either do the job right or get totes fired, no?
Anyway, in reality, I think the problem is that Cornyn thinks he will be primaried from the right. This is so dumb. David Barton. for example, although he is verily dumber than paint, elected not to challenge John Cornyn. And I seriously doubt Louie Gohmert is a serious challenger himself, either, too. Or maybe Cornyn thinks the ACORN threat is real. I for one give the halfway to hell up.
I was reading about the problems gay foster kids have finding placement in a safe, nurturing environment in Mother Jones this morning. Why oh why did they have to chose....oh, wait.
It's not a choice.
We're all born with a predisposition to being ignorant, but I understand there's a therapy for it.
Recent events, like the suicides of Tyler Clementi and Seth Walsh remind us of how very serious the problem of feeling isolated, picked-on and unsupported can be for gay young people.
I want to believe most people don't actually suck, and are like the people in this ad. I think schools and workplaces should be safe from gender/orientation-based judgements. I think people should be seen for who they are and what they do, and not random perceptions drawn from stereotypes and ignorance.
I know that's a lot. But that what I hope is our future.
To get this out of the way--I don't want it to appear in any respect that I endorse anything said by Pat Robertson. Oh no. What I'm doing by posting this clip is sort of like having my mental immune system purge a foreign invader. I saw it a couple of days ago--it festered inside my brain, and only by blogging about this crap can I feel like I've really cleaned it out of my system. You know, the way you might taste something so nasty, like a bad bit of lunch meat, that you have to spit it out and right away rinse your mouth out. So forgive me if I'm linking to ignorance, stupidity and hate. I'm only doing so to call it out properly.
Now, right at the top of the video--wouldn't you naturally think that "gay advocates" would really more properly be: "Gay people, their friends and allies, and other people who support equality?" I would say so, since there are plenty of people who didn't support Prop. 8 nationwide. Probably world-wide.
The cute couple in the "Bride" and "Groom" shirts? They look so normal, don't they? Well, the fellow is Luke Otterstad, and he....isn't exactly normal. No, he's part of something called the Church of the Divide, and they are a small family affair who go around being pests in and around California, and have associations with a would-be abortion-clinic bomber. They seem a little like Westboro Baptist without the press.
And basically, when you see Pat Robertson, or Maggie Gallagher of NOM--just keep in mind one irritating detail that I can't miss--
How different is what they do from WBC with their "God Hates Fags" signs? Because really, all they are doing is using a tiny scrap of the Bible to justify denying rights to a group of people with no other basis--only logically dubious justifications and outright lying occasionally supported with pseudoscience--which are always combined with the worst sort of Drama Queen Prophecies of Doom. Oh noes, where iz our rights? Everyone's gonna go gay! The species will go extinct! And other insanely implausible things, when you get right down to it!
When the science goes something like this:
As for the concern that the votes of pro-Prop-8-ers were wasted--
Oh, fucking, well. Interestingly enough, some things actually should not be put to a popular vote. So sorry you thought that there wasn't actually a check and balance on you, but the courts actually exist for just that purpose. And whether Judge Walker is a "homosexual" as Pat Robertson points out, is irrelevant to whether his decision was correct with respects to the law. He didn't say "Gay marriage is okay because I said so!" He cited case law and history and pointed out something these lame haters haven't yet figured out--
They don't have a good reason for being against marriage equality. They are the one's whose argument comes down to "because I (and my version of God) say so." They are the ones who are making up tiresome crap to try and invalidate the reality of the relationships, the households, the ties that bind people right here and now.
And when a sanctimonious right-wing wannabe-relevant political has been like Newt Gingrich signs up for the hating, lying, wrong side of the culture war--citing history and using the bullshit phrase "protecting marriage", which are words that should stick in his throat:
it needs to bite him on his hypocritical rear end.
What people like Robertson, Gallagher, Otterstad, and Gingrich all fail to realize, is that there is nothing, not one thing, different in form in same-sex relationships from opposite-sex relationships, but gender. And that the sexual aspect has very little to do with things, ultimately. If, say, Newt Gingrich was to find that his spouse was unable to meet his needs through illness or injury, he wouldn't just leave her, would he?
Oh, wait....
Maybe a serial adulterer and multiply-married jerk isn't quite the example that Phyllis and Del are of long-term commitments to marriage.
Is it wrong that I'm personally addressing Gingrich's life? Maybe it's a little ad hom--but then so is the bullshit that people are talking about Judge Walker. And also, because I want to stress that the issue is not about an abstraction, but about real people's lives. Someone's friend. Child. Parent. Brother or sister. And sloughing off the reality of that would be so wrong as to make one wonder if such a person who could had even a little compassion in them at all--
Compassion, meaning what we need to understand how to do right--how to treat the other as you would want to be treated. Compassion being the real basis of society. And the bullshit that the 700 Club, and NOM, and the religious right as a whole, and too many other sanctimonious assholes to count, being the basis of what is wrong with the world.
A federal judge in San Francisco decided today that gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry, striking down Proposition 8, the voter approved ballot measure that banned same-sex unions.
U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker said Proposition 8, passed by voters in November 2008, violated the federal constitutional rights of gays and lesbians to marry the partners of their choice. His ruling is expected to be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
.....
Backers of Proposition 8 contended that the legal burden was on the challengers to prove there was no rational justification for voting for the measure. They cited as rational a view that children fare best with both a father and a mother.
But defense witnesses conceded in cross-examination that studies show children reared from birth by same-sex couples fared as well as those born to opposite-sex parents and that marriage would benefit the families of gays and lesbians.
I so wish this would be the end of it, but of course NOM and the usual suspects are already planning their appeal. I'll just let some of the choicer bits of stupid grace my blog for a bit so I can hold them up for what they are:
Judge Walker's view is truly a radical rejection of Americans' rights, our history and our institutions that will only fuel a popular rebellion now taking place against elites who are more interested in remaking American institutions than respecting them.
If this ruling is upheld, millions of Americans will face for the first time a legal system that is committed to the view that our deeply held moral views on sex and marriage are unacceptable in the public square, the fruit of bigotry that should be discredited, stigmatized and repressed. Parents will find that, almost Soviet-style, their own children will be re-educated using their own tax dollars to disrespect their parents' views and values.
Regarding the highlighted part--FUCK YEAH! Ms. Gallagher, your deeply held moral views on sex and marriage are not acceptable because you are baselessly passing judgement upon your fellow human beings and telling them how to live. No one died and left you "Bedroom Boss"! Your point of view is bigoted and should be discredited because it is simply not right, and regardless of the opinion of people who voted for this marriage ban for one specific class of consenting adults, the essential right to be treated equally trumps your right to dictate to them. You still have a right to your opinion. But you would be surprised to the extent that this so-called "re-education" is anything but. It's merely an education: that different people may want different things, and can live their own lives in way that, ahem, aren't even your business.
(I do not understand why this woman is making other people's business her crusade. There are so many more productive and healthy things she could be doing with her time. I worry about her lifestyle. If a small child asked me why she was concerned about other people's marriages, I don't even know what I'd tell them. Hmph.)
Prop 8 Decision Threatens Core Civil Right to Vote for Marriage -This is a travesty of justice. The majority of Californians - and two-thirds of black voters in California - have just had their core civil right to vote for marriage stripped from them by an openly gay federal judge who has misread history and the Constitution to impose his San Francisco views on the American people.
The implicit comparison Judge Walker made between racism and marriage is particularly offensive to me and to all of us who remember the reality of Jim Crow.
It is not bigotry it is biology that discriminates between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples. To make a marriage requires a husband and a wife because these unions are necessary to make new life and connect children to their mother and father.
Judge Walker’s slur will not stand the test of time and history. We demand that Congress and the Supreme Court act to protect all Americans’ right to vote for marriage.
Yes, Bishop Jackson, there is nothing like letting the voice of the majority decide who is and is not supposed to be treated as equal. I am sure that if the people voted on the ability of inter-racial couples to marry, they would have, in those days, been just as right as the Loving decision was. Just the same as the people all on their own would have recognized the inequality implicit in segregation, and rid themselves of it at the ballot box without the Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education decision.
And then we woke up.
Bishop--this decision isn't even about you! It's about gay people! They are people! And they happen to be gay. Somehow, they have worked out the biology issue--which accounts for only a tiny portion of anyone's life. The rest is about love, companionship, supporting one another, nurturing one another, wanting to live together, and wanting to even love that person unto death--that isn't a damn thing about biology. Fuck you, pardon my language, for reducing my heterosexual marriage to a question of biology, for the kids we aren't going to have, for the fact that only a little sliver of my own marriage even has to do with sex--you, sir, cheapen marriage when you put it that way! You don't have any especial right to vote for or against another person's happiness, and you are ridiculously wrong in your understanding of family and marriage.
"Connect children to their mother and father"? So much for adoptive parents, foster parents, step-parents! The sexual ability to reproduce isn't what makes good parents and there are many, many people with crappy biological parents who will tell you that the biological act of making them did not actually imbue those parents with any wonderful parenting magic. The thing that makes that parenting connection, that children since the beginning of humanity need to become self-actualized, happy adults, is love. And gay people have it, because sometimes that is all that keeps a community together when there are so many people who would make second-class citizens out of a minority group and even congratulate themselves for the privilege.
I'm sure more people will have more foolishness to say about this issue, but those were some really sad examples.
I note that while he brushes off the age of the earth question as one he won't answer, he does respond eloquently regarding his committment to anti-abortion activism. And I think I understand why.
From the Christian home-schoolers, that question seems to have been rooted in finding out to what level Paul was willing to express his bona fides as a committed literalist Christian. Was he going to go all in and give the "Young Earth" answer? Would he invoke science?
By shrugging it off, I think he might have been tipping a hand to the recognition that he'd get flak either way he answered it. But by addressing his anti-abortion cred, he established that he was right there in the same pew in a way that spoke to policy without speaking to belief. I think that was pretty canny of him, although I of course don't share his beliefs. Me--I take it as fairly documented that the earth is about four and a half billion years old and consider that reproductive issues are for a woman to decide with her partner and her medical practioner if need be, because they are very much a part of her personal business: physically, emotionally, socially, financially and morally. So long story short--I found both his answers to the early two-part question pretty much unsatisfactory.
To avoid Constance McMillen bringing a female date to her prom, the teen was sent to a "fake prom" while the rest of her class partied at a secret location at an event organized by parents.
McMillen tells The Advocate that a parent-organized prom happened behind her back — she and her date were sent to a Friday night event at a country club in Fulton, Miss., that attracted only five other students. Her school principal and teachers served as chaperones, but clearly there wasn't much to keep an eye on.
.....
Two students with learning difficulties were among the seven people at the country club event, McMillen recalls. "They had the time of their lives," McMillen says. "That's the one good thing that come out of this, [these kids] didn't have to worry about people making fun of them [at their prom]."
It seems like some people aren't happy unless they get their opportunity to single out others. But I note that it wasn't just Constance and her date that were singled out, but some youngsters with learning disabilities, too, which kind of makes it seem less like the parents of the other students and the district officials who helped pull this off wanted to single out someone for something they saw as immoral, and maybe a little more like it felt good to them to single people out. And that is not a very nice character trait.
Via Joe.My.God., here's a pic from the Hater Prom as found on Facebook of the "normal kids" having a nice time:
Now I don't want to be too hard on the kids who are having a good time and doing what HS seniors normally do--I was a teenager once, and I remember what peer pressure was like. But I also remember what being an unpopular kid was like, too. And if they don't quite get why this was the wrong way for things to be handled, now, I want to think they will get it, some day.
Some people actually do grow up and figure out how to live with all kinds of people and even make friends with them and find common ground. I think a few too many adults in Itawamba County did not.
I wrote a sprawling mess of a post last night about this story, so I decided I should start over and express my disgust a little more succinctly. A conservative group is challenging the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009:
(CNSNews.com) – A conservative civil liberties group is challenging the constitutionality of the recently enacted federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009.
The new law, attached to a defense authorization bill that President Obama signed on October 28, 2009, makes it a federal crime to attack someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center says it elevates people engaged in deviant sexual behaviors to a special, protected class of persons under federal law.
The lawsuit naming U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan on behalf of three pastors and the president of the American Family Association of Michigan.
All of the plaintiffs “take a strong public stand against the homosexual agenda, which seeks to normalize disordered sexual behavior that is contrary to Biblical teaching,” the Law Center said in a news release.
(Emphasis mine, naturally.) I'm pretty sure I engage in "deviant sexual behaviors"--in fact, I think I probably broke the law in Virginia once (or a few times, consecutively). And I'm heterosexual (well, mostly.) I take a strong stand against making gay-bashers a "protected class" just because they hide behind religion. It's very convenient to hate people and blame God. But the blame for anti-social and hateful behavior really needs to be dumped in the laps of those that spawn it--the haters and the bashers.
It doesn't "elevate" a group of people to say that they should not be physically assaulted, or that people should not be encouraged to physically assault them. It does not elevate them to say there should be no laws that particularly exclude them from fully participating in society, either. But it would elevate a few religions to let them dictate laws that exclude based upon their religious biases, and it would "elevate" them to give them a pass when they maintain that hate is just a crucial protected part of their religion.
These people think they know what "deviant" is--when the truth is, they don't know the half about the variety of human sexual experience and have no reason to know, because it very rarely affects them in their day-to-day lives. But violence and eliminationist rhetoric affect all of us--they are the ones who want to do harm by interfering in other people's private lives--whom they choose to make their families with, or simply love. Or even just mutally and consentually pleasure.
They can choose to believe that I, an atheist and a deviant, will answer some day to their God, if that's how they want to see it. But they have no right to make me, or any other "deviant" answerable to them by violence and intimidation. The law just imposes civility. It doesn't oppress them unless they think terrorism against GLBT folks is a sacrament. If that's how it is, I'm extra-glad there's a law. Because that is just crazy. And uncivil.
(Those poor oppressed things--unable to oppress others, and all!)
