A bout of national stupidity isn't complete without Ross Douthat weighing in to support it, and so of course the recent "controversy" over whether or not hell exists* was like catnip to him.  Unsurprisingly, he insists that it does, and the reason is, "Because I want it to."  Douthat---all religious authoritarians, really---should realize that actually making the case for their beliefs in public does them no favors, because it just exposes them as fantasists and moral children.  I thought it might be fun to run down this argument in-depth for that reason, because Douthat has really revealed himself to be a foot-stomping toddler with sadistic control issues, as opposed to someone with a mind sharp enough to deserve a well-paid column at one of the world's largest newspapers.

In part, hell’s weakening grip on the religious imagination is a consequence of growing pluralism. Bell’s book begins with a provocative question: Are Christians required to believe that Gandhi is in hell for being Hindu? The mahatma is a distinctive case, but swap in “my Hindu/Jewish/Buddhist neighbor” for Gandhi, and you can see why many religious Americans find the idea of eternal punishment for wrong belief increasingly unpalatable.

When your argument starts with your unease at the possibility that humans could overlook our differences to see the value in their fellow humans, regardless of skin color or country of origin, you're off to a bad start. But Douthat being Douthat, he constructs his arguments by pretending to see progressive change as well-meaning before he moves in to denounce it, and so I think that's actually what he intended to do here.  He just failed by using loaded terms.  He does a little better on accepting that people exposed through their TVs to what hell on earth looks like---Haiti right after the earthquake, countries torn by genocide---might be easier to persuade that no loving god would do this to human beings for eternity.  His problem is that he treats this humane approach to others as soft-headed---like most misogynists, he tends to fall into the trap of thinking of kindness as "feminine" and logic as "masculine" and therefore believes both cannot coincide---but actually, the no-hell argument is more logical within Christian presumptions than the hell argument.  It is true that a god who would allow people to go to hell is evil, full stop.  You cannot believe god is good and would allow a hell.  In fact, the preacher Rob Bell who has kicked all this off has, from what I understand, approached this argument with this kind of internal logic.  I do understand why that's threatening, of course.  The fear is that if people start to see some contradictions in religion, they'll start asking even more questions and end up being atheists.  And that does happen, but it's also true that resolving some of the more troubling contradictions can create space for people to keep believing religion, which is clearly what Bell is gambling on.

Anyway, more Douthat.  After his usual "liberals are so cute with their silly caring about others!" crap, he moves in for the kill:

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices.

Needless to say, it's actually Douthat who doesn't believe in human choices. He actually has spent a great deal of time and energy arguing that women especially shouldn't be allowed to have choices, especially over their bodies. 

If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

Argument #1 for hell: There has to be a hell, or else how will Douthat know when it's all said and done that he wins?  This is incredibly telling logic, and I think goes straight to the heart of conservatism.  It even tells you why so many Republicans would destroy our nation's prosperity in order to create a wide gulf between the rich and everyone else.  It's more fun being rich if most people are picking through trash to eat!  It's like having a home run.  It's harder to tell you've "won" if your neighbor's house is smaller than yours but they still live a relatively comfortable, prosperous life.

In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

I want to point out that in his eagerness to quote The Eagles, Douthat actually constructs heaven as a prison that people are desperately trying to escape.  In this case, through fucking.  Which is the critical point of this paragraph.  Douthat is saying there has to be a hell because otherwise we let our "glands" make decisions.  You know he couldn't get through this without indulging his sex obsession.  At the end of the day, he needs there to be a hell because otherwise where is god going to put all the dirty girls?  They have to be punished!  They had sexual pleasure and didn't pay for it!  They must pay.

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.

So, as usual, the argument comes down to, "We have to pretend there's a hell in order to create fear in people so we can control them."  And I don't use the word "pretend" to open up another argument about sincerity.  Sincerity is the least interesting aspect of this problem here.  What is more interesting is that the argument for hell is not that there's evidence for hell or that hell can be deduced through logic.  It's that we need to have this idea in order to get the results the believer wants.  To put it another way, you could replace the word "hell" with "a giant monster that eats people up in their bed because they show me up in arguments", and you'd get the same result.  Let's not talk about if it actually exists.  Let's just say that the amount of control that it gives you over others is reason enough to pretend it exists.

It's relevant, of course, to point out that Douthat is arguing something that is demonstrably untrue, which is that people who believe in hell behave better than people who don't.  Even Douthat doesn't believe this lie.  If he did, he wouldn't demand that there be legal restrictions to force women to comply with his religious dogma on sexuality.  If he actually believed that there was a heaven and hell that made life choices meaningful, he wouldn't want the law stepping in to take those life choices away in cases where allowing people those choices improves life in the here and now.  He doesn't actually think choice is meaningful; he wants to deprive people of it.**  Anyway, by the logic of this essay, atheists are bad people who lie, cheat, and murder all the time.  He has no evidence of this.  I would happily go toe-to-toe with Douthat in a contest of who's a more moral person between my atheist ass and his god-fearing ass, though of course, who wins depends on important moral questions over whether or not it's moral to believe women are people or that torturing people for eternity for having unauthorized orgasms is wrong.***

If there’s a modern-day analogue to the “Inferno,” a work of art that illustrates the humanist case for hell, it’s David Chase’s “The Sopranos.” The HBO hit is a portrait of damnation freely chosen: Chase made audiences love Tony Soprano, and then made us watch as the mob boss traveled so deep into iniquity — refusing every opportunity to turn back — that it was hard to imagine him ever coming out. “The Sopranos” never suggested that Tony was beyond forgiveness. But, by the end, it suggested that he was beyond ever genuinely asking for it.

Argument #2 for hell: Some fictional works use the symbolism of it in emotionally compelling ways.  Really good symbols should always be taken literally, which is why Douthat also is forced to believe that humanity can only be saved from the vampires by a teenage girl in California, that you really can get lost for a decade trying to get back from Troy to Greece, and that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is an excellent basis for government.

Is Gandhi in hell? It’s a question that should puncture religious chauvinism and unsettle fundamentalists of every stripe. But there’s a question that should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano really in heaven? 

In sum, a moral midget like Ross Douthat is happy to cast a national hero into hell in order to make sure that his enjoyment of HBO dramas isn't impeded by uncomfortable doubts that there's a tyrannical Sky Fairy that agrees with Douthat's irrational concern that other people enjoy their sexytimes too much.  Got it.

*No.

**I'm restricting my arguments to his advocacy of laws that would, as he's admitted in the past, be detrimental to peace and prosperity in the here and now.  Douthat has conceded, though he occasionally takes it back, that allowing women control over their bodies improves their marriages, their economic prospects, and the stability of society.  But he thinks they shouldn't have that choice anyway, because god and stuff.  Clearly, laws against murder and theft are justifiable even if you believe in hell, just because the effects are immediately negative.

***Yes and yes.

Ruh-roh, the douchebag wingnut community is very unhappy with the suggestion that their attempts to strip people of their personal freedoms might be an act of sadism.  John Hawkins at Right Wing News, responding to Matt and my mockery of Kay Hymowitz for wanting everyone to get married right after they graduate high school, kicks his legs and says, “Nuh-uh!”  Sadly, his claim to be motivated by something other than sadism is undercut by his actual post.

This is intriguing on more than one level because studies consistently show that married people are happier than single people, religious people are happier than non-religious people, and conservatives are happier than liberals.

I’m sure much of the research he’s referencing is deeply flawed (having grown up in Bible-thumping land, I can assure you that many people who are stone cold miserable would tell a pollster they’re full of joy, because otherwise, everything they’ve lived for is a lie), but let’s take the marriage argument on its own, since that’s what he’s kicking his feet about.  Let’s assume for the sake of argument that married people are happier.  That’s because they got to choose who they’re married to, and because they married later in life than people used to do.  Here’s some interesting research:

Not surprisingly, researchers in the ‘50s found that less than one in three married couples reported being happy or very happy with their relationship. Compare that to today, when 61 percent of married Americans report themselves to be “very happy” in their marriage. Part of the sour spouse problem of the ‘50s was that many couples didn’t really want to be married to each other. Often, they were trapped into marriage by unintended pregnancy. With no sex-ed, no birth control, no legal abortion—the exact legislative agenda of today’s pro-life movement!—teen birth rates soared, reaching highs that have not been equaled since: there were twice as many teen mothers in the ‘50s than today.

So, John looks at research that shows that married people are happy.  And so he wishes to “fix” this situation by dramatically lowering the happiness rates of married people by shoving all the single people into dysfunctional relationships as soon as possible.  I forget why we’re supposed to think this is an argument against the hypothesis that conservatives are sadistic. 

By the way, if you’re trying to sound like someone who isn’t jealous of other people because they don’t fearfully deprive themselves of freedom like you do, don’t say things like this:

Additionally, Marcotte’s tired jabs about conservatives hating sex aren’t surprising coming from someone whose philosophy could be fairly summed up as screw everything that moves, follow that with an abortion, and accuse anyone who raises an eyebrow about it of “slut shaming.”

It’s really difficult to buy the argument that you’re not anti-sex when the first reaction you have to a woman who doesn’t hate herself for being sexual is to call her a slut.  In fact, that’s kind of definitional.  Which is, of course, what’s going on, since he’s conflating “monogamy with a boyfriend of 5 years that’s conducted without shame or self-hatred” with “screwing everything that moves”.  Once you have an orgasm without crying, you’ve crossed the line into Irredeemable Slut territory, I suppose.*  Tell me again how this attitude is so conducive to human happiness!

Read All...

Well, this is one good thing that’s happened. 

Like Atrios said, you folks out there owe yourselves a hand for getting the mendacious fool off the air.  His slipping ratings weren’t good, but he was also on during a really poor time slot, so I imagine that can’t have been all there was to it.  The pressure campaign on advertisers, on the other hand, made it really hard for Fox News to make money off the ratings he was getting.  Murdoch is willing to lose money to promote right wing ideology, but even he has limits.  I suspect that the slipping quality of advertisements was hurting ratings, too.  It’s subconscious, but really poor quality advertising tends to make the programming seem more suspect.  If you’re watching some guy rant about whatever right wing conspiracy Beck was on about that day, but the advertising is high-quality stuff, you’re likelier to think there’s value to what he’s saying.  But if the ads are mostly cheap crap “as seen on TV” and obvious scams, it imbues the whole thing with an access channel/2AM on a forgotten cable channel vibe, and it will be treated with more disdain by the audience.  So, I think that helped lower ratings.  His show always looked cheap anyway, and the ads didn’t help.  I know that sounds shallow, but these things matter.

I realize the immediate liberal instinct is to piss all over any victory.  I expect the objections to be:

*We don’t know that he was actually fired.
*Meh, I’m more worried about conservatives who present themselves as moderates. He was just a sideshow anyway.
*It’s not like Fox News is gone.

But I think we should enjoy this moment.  Beck was, in all his nuttiness, a real problem.  He pulled the discourse to the right.  In his role as the “out there” conservative, he managed to make people like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly look less nutty.  That’s incredibly dangerous.  He was also a major factor in the increased speed with which conservatives have run away from empirical reality and towards conspiracy-mongering.  I don’t know if we can reverse the trend, but this is a good first step.

Via Matt, Monica Potts caught Kay Hymowitz wishing people got married young for the sole reason that she doesn’t think young people should be enjoying their brief time on this planet:

“Before [today], the fact is that primarily, a 20-year-old woman would have been a wife and a mother,” author Kay Hymowitz told the crowd of about 100 for the Manhattan Institute in New York City. Men would have been mowing lawns and changing the oil in their family sedans instead of playing video games and watching television. In previous decades, adults in their 20s and 30s were too busy with real life for such empty entertainment, Hymowitz says. “They didn’t live with roommates in Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Dupont Circle in D.C.”

I’m going to quarrel with Hymowitz’s assumption that the vast majority of men in their 20s and 30s live in two neighborhoods in the country that probably have like, what, 20 square miles put together.  Even if they have roommates, that strikes me as pretty dense.  I’ve been to both of these neighborhoods, and while they aren’t, thank god, suburban sprawl, nor are you talking about an impoverished block in Calcutta.  I’m just saying.  Also, many women live there as well, riding their bikes along and scandalizing the religious fundamentalists with their freedoms.  No one tell Hymowitz, or she’ll start writing her next book about how the freedom afforded women by the bicycle is secretly making them unhappy.

Matt makes a less facetious point:

Hymowitz’s argument, essentially, is that not only has feminism opened up new doors of opportunity to women[Marcotte’s note: including the riding of bicycles. Women even have the freedom to remove the gears, a scandalous fact I’m sure will be an entire chapter in Hymowitz’s new book.], but it’s helped contribute to the growth of a society in which young men are less crushed down with family and household obligations and are spending more time enjoying themselves. Except she means this as a bad thing! In both cases the conservative conceit seems to be that a decline in human suffering is a bad thing because it leads to a corresponding decline in admirable anti-suffering effort. John Holbo memorably dubbed this Donner Party Conservatism.

I think it’s important to remember that no matter how much huffing and puffing and rationalization goes on, a great deal of conservative ideology can be summed up as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”. Or even just the fear that someone might just be having fun, at least without clearing it with the authorities first that they’re the right race and income level to feel pleasure.

Take this quote that Jamelle Bouie nabbed from Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association:

Welfare has destroyed the African-American family by telling young black women that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and obsolete. Welfare has subsidized illegitimacy by offering financial rewards to women who have more children out of wedlock. We have incentivized fornication rather than marriage, and it’s no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits.

He had to work up to it, but he eventually got to the point, which is this strange obsession with stomping out the sexual agency of black people, who he clearly thinks are all on welfare.  Which, by the way, if you’re wondering why the pro-choice community thinks anti-choice billboards targeting black women are rooted in a ridiculously racist view of black women’s sexuality, I think this “rut like rabbits” comment should be a solid clue to where we might get such an opinion. 

I often find myself wondering, and today more than most days, how things can get this bad.  It seems to me that if wingnuts put a tenth of much effort as they do into resenting others into improving their own home and sex lives, they’d be too busy being happy and blissful to give a fuck what anyone else is doing. It’s just basic logic, and I wonder why not just do the math and go for it.

I was thinking more about the Douthat piece I wrote about here, because I really think it’s kind of interesting what a maddening shithead that guy is.  It’s not just his smug misogyny, or the way that he radiates disgust with human sexuality (especially female sexuality) that is really unnerving in anyone, but especially a still-young man.  It’s not even that he’s demonstrably disingenuous, because he presents arguments that right wing watchers can prove easily he obtained because he engages with fringe conservatives who agitate to ban contraception, but he acts like he’s being reasonable and downplays the radical nature of the arguments he’s presenting. 

No, I think what really sets people off about his is that he’s a genius at packing in more false assumptions per paragraph than almost anyone writing, especially when he’s talking about sex.  Take this, for example:

But they also see Planned Parenthood’s larger worldview — in which teen sexual activity is taken for granted¹, and the most important judgment to be made about a sexual encounter is whether it’s clinically “safe”² — as the enemy of the kind of sexual idealism³ they’re trying to restore⁴.

Liberals argue, not unreasonably, that Planned Parenthood’s approach is tailored to the gritty realities⁵ of teenage⁶ sexuality. But realism can blur into cynicism⁷, and a jaded attitude⁸ can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Social conservatives look at the contemporary sexual landscape and remember that it wasn’t always thus⁹, and they look at current trends and hope¹⁰ that it doesn’t have to be this way forever.

Reading some of the other responses to him, I realized exactly how fucked up his argument truly is.  So I’ve taken the time to footnote these sentences, so as to detail out exactly how many false assumptions he smuggles in.

1) There’s a couple of false assumptions, but the first one is that it’s a negative thing—-“taken for granted” is never really a positive thing, is it?—-to believe that teenagers are going to experiment and explore sexuality.  In fact, Douthat assumes this earlier on and concedes the argument that this always was and always will be the behavior of post-pubescent individuals.  But he takes for granted that this is tragic.  I don’t actually think that most people that aren’t sex-phobes or misogynists think it’s a great tragedy that young people start dating and eventually fucking.  When I was in high school, we even had dances where you were encouraged to bring dates!  I’m sure a couple of church ladies believed this could happen without said dates ever considering the possibility of “sexual activity”—-a range of behavior that spans from holding hands to anal intercourse—-but by and large, most people, even conservative-leaning, believe that coming into your sexuality is a major part of growing up.  The timetable is usually more of the point of contention, but not the fact that sexual activity is natural and even desirable. 

Also, Douthat draws on research done on college kids for a bulk of this article, so he’s also suggesting that the widespread assumption that it’s natural and even good for college kids to be having sex is fucked up.  This phrase also assumes, falsely, that Planned Parenthood only serves teenage clients.  It actually serves a wide range of ages.

Read All...

Some days, I really think the organized Christian right should take some of their big bags of money and spend just a little of it doing some background research on the historical analogies they use to describe themselves.

A description of what’s in this video, which is a bunch of leaders associated with the Family Research Council, which has been singled out as a hate group by the SPLC for its anti-gay stance:

Perkins explains the absolute necessity of getting Christians into all levels of government while Boykin compared Christians today to the Spartan army and quoted King Leonidas by declaring “molon labe” [“come and get them”] when he and his army were told to lay down their weapons.

Likewise, Boykin declared “molon labe,” stating that he will not be silenced and challenged those in Washington who are out to take his liberties, rob his grandchildren, and destroy America to just try to take them from him.

Finally, Joyner announced that Christians have more than enough people to take control, but they need to bind together and, as such, would soon be unveiling coalition called “300”.

Well, clearly that movie about the Spartans pulling an Alamo against the Persian army made quite the impression on these fuckwits.  Look. I find it hard to blame them.  Look at Gerard Butler in his King Leonidas costume:

Still, for such an band of homophobes pushing an anti-gay agenda, I think they may have thought to do a little more background research on the ancient Spartan army that fought the actual Battle of Thermopylae.  I realize the movie “300” is horribly homophobic, and the gap between that and the realities of the Spartan army was noted by not a few pro-gay writers when the movie came out.  Like Richard Burnett:

Except real-life Spartan warriors made up the fiercest gay and bisexual army in human history. Sparta demanded its warriors sexually love one another so that they would also fight for each other to the death.

Obviously, the Spartan military wasn’t “gay” or even “homosexual” in the modern sense of the word.  Ancient Greeks just had really different sexual mores than modern people do, and certainly the same-sex relationships in Greece don’t resemble the love-among-equals standard that is both law and custom for straight and gay in the United States now.  But dudes were nonetheless touching penises, and you’d think that Tony Perkins and company would perhaps not want to associate themselves with that. 

Or maybe not.  After all, it was just recently that one of the prominent members of Perkins’ group the FRC was caught having a little Spartan holiday of his own, having hired a male prostitute to travel with him in Europe.  And of course, you have Ted Haggard before him, and really, a much too long list to go into of “family values” conservatives caught up in sex scandals, frequently involving same-sex relations. 

This sort of history would make me think a lot more carefully about what historical analogies I want to invoke.  But then again, maybe Tony Perkins and company agree with Bucky Bright on “30 Rock”:

Men were men back then. If you wanted to do something private with another man, it wasn’t gay. No. It was just two men, celebrating each other’s strength.

Via Hugo, I found this blog post that really is the epitome of Nice Guys®, and what makes them such megadouchebags.  It starts off like this:

It’s difficult to write about the sexual isolation of sensitive men without falling back on clichés.

He immediately then goes into a long quote from a work of fiction that portrays a woman in a violently abusive relationship who also doesn’t have sex with a man outside of her relationship.  I submit to the jury this observation: If your reaction to hearing that a woman is in a relationship with a man who smacks her, kicks her, and calls her a “fat twat” is not to say, “Oh my god, that’s terrible!  I hope she gets help!”  but instead to say, “Damn, there’s one more woman whose pussy I’m not penetrating, woe is me,” you are not a sensitive man.  On the contrary, you are a self-absorbed narcissist!  The lack of dick-dipping in your life should be taken not as evidence that women love assholes, but that they avoid at least one asshole—-you—-like the plague.  You should be commending women for their asshole-detection skills in not dating you.  Not that it’s hard to detect your assholery, obviously—-it’s immediate from the second you viewed an abused woman not as a person who needs help and empathy, but some bitch who isn’t giving you the vagina-cookies you earned by heroically refraining from beating her.

I could have stopped reading there and gone on my merry way, but I kept perversely going, which I suppose is evidence I’m one of those masochistic females that love getting shit on by men that Nice Guys® are always talking about.

For many feminists, young women’s attraction to socially dominant men is either a fiction dreamt up by angry “men’s rights” types, or a fact of life that’s true, but somewhat trivial – important only insofar as it may lead to misogynistic attitudes on the part of men, as Hugo seems to imply.  I would argue, to the contrary, that women’s attraction – some women’s attraction – to socially dominant men is both true and non-trivial.

Notice the slight-of-hand?  The quote from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is about a violent abuser, but our blogger Miguel says that this is about “socially dominant” men.  I submit to the jury that “socially dominant” is not the same thing as being abusive or even insensitive.  After all, by his own measure, Miguel appears to be proof of this.  He is on a pity trip because he’s not socially dominant, but he is quite clearly an insensitive prick. 

I would argue that it is true that women—-and men—-are quite often attracted to socially dominant, i.e. confident people.  “Socially dominant” is a deliberately ambiguous term, and Miguel is choosing it so as to conflate a bunch of disparate personality traits, such as self-confidence and popularity with being aggressive or cruel.  Which Miguel then proceeds to do, equating social dominance with “hyper-masculinity”, and blaming women’s biology.  Without this assumption that confidence is always coupled with aggression, that popularity is always coupled with abusiveness, that straightforwardness equals pushiness, his entire argument falls apart.  Take the concluding paragraph:

Even among men who are more “successful” sexually, I think a lot of young men who are sympathetic toward feminism feel they have to behave hypocritically – be a little bit pushy, arrogant, and entitled – in order to get laid.  Indeed, the life course of many male feminists seems to entail a period of acting out – usually corresponding to that point in life during which most people explore their sexuality – followed by a period of contrition.  It’s almost as though there’s an unspoken deal between feminist women and their male counterparts:  “We’ll forgive you for your youthful sexual arrogance and entitlement, so long as you don’t mention that a lot of us were turned on by men’s youthful sexual arrogance and entitlement.”  This is a lousy deal, and it’s unnecessary.  Not only does it freeze out and sexually isolate a lot of shy young men, but it causes men who are otherwise sympathetic to feminism to conclude that, in the sexual realm, feminism isn’t telling the whole story.

Shyness doesn’t make you nice.  It just makes you Nice®.  I have known many people who are shy assholes, who both hate other people and retreat from them, which actually makes a lot of sense. 

I’m going to offer a counter-theory for Miguel.  I believe what he has experienced is being rejected by women who prefer men who are self-confident, popular, and straightforward instead of men who lurk around giving you the stink eye because you haven’t offered to suck their cocks yet, even though they totally complimented on your shoes and pretended to care about your opinions.  And he has decided that these men are pushy/arrogant/entitled because they do things such as ask a woman out on a date when they want to date that woman, instead of lingering around for years sending out resentment rays of passive aggression.  And sometimes, yes, those men are abusive.  But if he actually paid attention to the trajectory instead of gathered up evidence that he’s a victim of women not falling on his penis, he might notice that very few abusive relationships start off as abusive.  In fact, abusers usually do a really good job of appearing sensitive and interested in women, and then they start to make their move after the relationship starts.  In fact, I would point out that this is why Nice Guys® and abusers have more in common than Nice Guys® think!  Both are groups of men who merely feign interest in women in order to get what they want.  Nice Guys® just aren’t as good at it.

But there is actually no reason whatsoever to think “social dominance” or “alphaness” means that someone is an abuser or an asshole, any more than shyness is evidence that someone is nice or sensitive.  A lot of gregarious, confident extroverts are actually kind, generous, and sensitive.  Being nice is, to be fair, usually not enough to get you laid.  You probably should have talents, a sense of humor, a sense of fun, or something else that makes others think spending time with you will benefit them in terms of being fun.  But there’s no rule that says people who are funny, confident or talented can’t be kind.  Nor, as Miguel’s complete indifference to the suffering of abuse victims demonstrates, is there any reason to think that lacking these qualities that draw people to you somehow means you’re a kind and generous soul. 

My counter-theory is that Nice Guys® group together traits like confidence with aggression, so they can convince themselves that confident men are always assholes, and thus that they’re being unfairly deprived of pussy by women who are sick fucks that enjoy being abused.  Are some confident men abusive assholes?  Absolutely; look at Charlie Sheen.  But are all confident men?  Well, I can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone like Matt Damon is a truly nice guy, but gosh, he seems like it. But what I can say is I’ve known many men who are great husbands/boyfriends and are also confident men that Miguel would probably denounce as pushy/entitled because they’re honest about what they want.  Some shy men are also very nice people, just shy.  But many shy men are inconsiderate fuckwits or even wife-beaters.  I just don’t think there’s a strong correlation between “alpha”-ness and basic human decency. 

But I do know this—-there’s no amount of shyness that turns a man who worries more about men not getting laid than women getting beaten into a nice person.  None.

From the heartland, a tale that perfectly illustrates the workaday dumbass resentments that Republicans rely on to get votes.  Kansas state legislator Connie O’Brien, Republican of course, was in a hearing on the subject of in-state tuition being granted to illegal immigrants who had Kansas state residency requirements.  She decided to go off on a rant that is similar to what’s going on around dining room tables and on Facebook every day:

  REP. O’BRIEN: My son who’s a Kansas resident, born here, raised here, didn’t qualify for any financial aid. Yet this girl was going to get financial aid. My son was kinda upset about it because he works and pays for his own schooling and his books and everything and he didn’t think that was fair. We didn’t ask the girl what nationality she was, we didn’t think that was proper. But we could tell by looking at her that she was not originally from this country. [...]

  REP. GATEWOOD: Can you expand on how you could tell that they were illegal?

  REP. O’BRIEN: Well she wasn’t black, she wasn’t Asian, and she had the olive complexion.

A lot of attention is rightly being paid to the “olive complexion” bit.  That’s kicking it old school style, going straight for the skin color when being racist, instead of trying to find ways to allude to skin color without actually saying anything about skin color.  (My favorite so far is to say you can totally tell by someone’s shoes that they’re an undocumented immigrant.)  And rightly so, though the reaction from right wingers to the outrage this sort of thing is to just look for more euphemisms they can use, instead of doing something as quaint as giving up their hobby of scanning the world, looking for non-white people having things and whipping yourself into an outrage. 

But I have to point out that this was far from the only stupid thing the woman said.  There’s also the fact that this was about in-state tuition, and she was complaining that her son didn’t get federal financial aid.  I would bet a lot of money that he did get in-state tuition, though. 

I think we should start calling this sort of thing “everyday birtherism”.  After all, both birtherism and this particular rant come from the same place, which is to say a belief that certain things—-financial aid, college degrees, the Presidency—-are only obtained by non-white people through fraud, or that there’s something illegitimate going on.  It’s interesting to me that Republicans who rail against federal spending then will turn around and claim they’re entitled to money from all federal programs, even those that were set up to aid people that aren’t as wealthy as they are.  Which is basically the heart of the “small government” claim.  It’s not that they want small government.  They just don’t want to share the public wealth with everyone, but just to keep it all for themselves. Thus, the “get government hands off my Medicare!”  That, translated from wingnut to English, means, “I don’t want other people to have the same privileges I have!” 

This is the same mentality behind Andrew Breitbart’s Pigford obsession, though he is slightly more sophisticated than this woman at creating plausible deniability.

So, while going through Salon’s coverage of CPAC, the theme I really detected this year was gut-punching, overt racism. One of the most astounding examples—-besides everything that falls out of Andrew Breitbart’s mouth—-is one of the groups that manned a booth at CPAC, Youth for Western Civilization.  And by “Western civilization”, what they mean is “people who are currently considered white people in modern America”.  I know this, because his group vociferously opposes immigration, especially when it comes to people from South and Central America, and definitely from Mexico—-if you’re speaking Spanish, they’re against it.  Going to their blog confirms this; most of it is ranting about the evils of immigration reform that would make life easier on mostly-Hispanic immigrants who’ve come here illegally.

Here’s what I would like to point out to Kevin DeAnna and his friends in the art of defending “Western civilization”: Latin America is Western civilization.  Or, if you’re going to say that the United States is, you have to include Latin America.  DeAnna is quoted at Salon as describing Western civilization as, “a cultural compound of Christian, classical, and the folk traditions of Europe.”  Well, I have to point out that Spain is not only European, but it’s more European than England, which gave us our language, being on the actual continent and all.  Sure, former colonies all have unique cultures from the European nations that originally colonized them, but that’s equally true of the United States as anywhere else.  Using “Western civilization” as a cover to bash immigrants, but Mexican immigrants especially is not only racist, but fucking stupid beyond all belief. 

Let’s play a game I like to call “guess who’s the Klan?”  I’ve pulled mission-statement-type language off the website for YWC and the KKK.  See if you can guess who is who? Answers at the bottom of the post, so you can guess first.*

The hatred for our children and their future is growing and is being fueled every single day. Stay firm in your convictions. Keep loving your heritage and keep witnessing to others that there is a better way than a war torn, violent, wicked, socialist, new world order. That way is the Christian way - law and order - love of family - love of nation. These are the principles of western Christian civilization.

And:

Instead, [multiculturalism] is about learning politically correct slogans that are designed to denigrate Western heritage in general and American heritage in particular. Multiculturalism is really about destroying and dispossessing the people and culture of the West, not about an appropriate education about other peoples…...

There is no reason to believe that the advances of modernity and the political freedoms we enjoy will endure with the extinction of the civilization that allowed them to exist.  Western Civilization is our civilization and despite the bigotry and hatred of the radical left, we have no wish to see our civilization be sent to the graveyard of history.

I suppose, on one level, this is shooting fish in a barrel.  But on the other hand, it’s not like people like Andrew Breitbart aren’t mainstreamed in the conservative movement and therefore have a baffling pull on the mainstream media.  You know, even though Breitbart is a proven and known liar, who is probably going to be on the hook for a whole lot of money for it if there’s a sliver of justice in the world. YWC and Breitbart both are part of what Salon dubbed the Tom Tancredo wing of the Republican party.  Breitbart’s self-proclaimed newest obsession is trying to stifle a legal settlement that all people that aren’t crazy-racist see as basic justice in its most mundane form, which is Congress taking action to make sure that black farmers who won a large and settled class action lawsuit regarding years of discrimination at the hands of the Department of Agriculture get the money they’re owed. Breitbart heard that some black people are going to get some money, shit his pants, and tuned out the rest of the world to do everything in his power to make sure it doesn’t happen, using his usual tools of accusing everyone in sight of corruption and fraud. (When you’re an immoral liar, I guess you think everyone else is, too.)  He’s managed to get a single black farmer who the court didn’t give money he thought was his due as cover, but I think that’s a pretty transparent move to everyone but the dopiest conservatives, especially since the slams against the Pigford settlement from conservative corners are all about “slavery reparations” (which it’s not) and “milking the system” and the usual accusations of widespread fraud that crop up every time conservatives discover that black people can get Treasury checks mailed to them just like white people. For instance, take the woman who held the press conference with Breitbart, Michele Bachmann.  Like the people they’re denouncing who got money from this lawsuit, Bachmann has gotten federal money for agriculture.  I guess it’s not “fraud” or “milking the system” when you’re her. 

*The first quote is from the KKK.  The second is from the Youth for Western Civilization.

Update: If you want more info on this sour young woman named Lila Rose, Media Matters has a round-up.  However bad you think she is, she’s worse.

Please, I beg of you. Because the current system you’re working under is a nightmare: Thinking sex is dirty, and waiting until you’re really drunk before giving in and having unfulfilling gropings.  Taking all that pent-up energy and channeling it into fantasies of being pimps and prostitutes that manage to be both lurid and corny.  Then inflicting your silly sexual fantasies on the public as part of “sting” operations, where you justify your own would-be perversions with your sadistic desire to punish the vulnerable for daring, I dunno, to exist I guess.  If you could just spend your youth like less-evil people did, by screwing around joyfully and maybe listening to some non-shitty records, maybe you would calm down and not be such terrible pieces of shit.  At least you would lose some of that constipated expression that is the surefire marker of a young conservative, one that’s common to Lila Rose, James O’Keefe, and Hannah Giles.  And maybe the dudes would spend a little less time thinking about ways to play at being rapists, either in terms of playing pimp or, like James O’Keefe tried to do, trap female journalists in situations that basically scream “rape dungeon”. 

The latest “let’s play pimp!” situation comes courtesy of Lila Rose, who really, really doesn’t like women who just go ahead and have sex like it’s a thing you just get to do.  Her group, Live Action, sent a bunch of undercover hoaxers to Planned Parenthoods so they could pretend they were pimps (seriously, the well of conservative men who want a chance to play pimp is endless, isn’t it?) in order to get “shocking” footage, and basically to do them like Rose’s buddy O’Keefe did to ACORN.  They didn’t get a whole lot.  One employee was egregiously unprofessional, and she’s been fired, and that’s about it.  The second video that’s out mostly demonstrates exactly how little Lila Rose can get done without aggressive editing:

As Jodi Jacobson notes, this video actually proves that the nurse at the Planned Parenthood was doing her job. She immediately went to her supervisors after the hoaxers left and alerted them to the potential underage prostitution.  The video doesn’t mention this, making Rose and her comrades big fat fucking lying sacks of shit.  No surprise there.  As I’ve noted before, Rose asked me to debate her, but when I insisted it be done in a style where she couldn’t edit it, she balked.  Someone who won’t accept a fair fight is not an honest person, sorry. 

It’s also interesting that nothing the nurse says is wrong, illegal, or messed up.  She offers medically and legally accurate information.  The only thing she does “wrong” is not to leap up and lock the door the second the guy drops the vague term “sex work”, and again, she immediately reported the visit, as she’s supposed to. When I worked in banking and someone was trying to pass a bad check, we didn’t immediately say, “Hey, wait here.  I’m going to call the police.”  We fronted and acted normal, while quietly trying to report them.  That’s how this works.

What’s really interesting about this second video is that it’s only shocking if you have one or more of these assumptions:

*That young people don’t deserve correct information or medical attention.

*That sex workers don’t deserve correct information or medical attention.

*That sexually active women don’t deserve HIPAA rights to confidentiality.

*That STD testing, contraception, and especially long-term contraception are too filthy to be spoken about, even in confidential medical settings with trained professionals.

I don’t share any of these assumptions.  On the contrary, I believe that all people—-even women, even young women, even women who have accepted money in exchange for sexual favors—-deserve basic human rights.  I believe they deserve medical care, and that being sexually active in ways outside of how Lila Rose approves does not mean you should be doomed to have an untreated STD or an unwanted pregnancy.  I think most people, if they think about it, agree with me.  Lila Rose is hoping that a knee-jerk hatred of young women and sex workers will override reason and the basic rights of humans here.  I think she’s going to be surprised how many people don’t agree that widespread, unchecked STD transmission and unwanted pregnancy is such a great fucking idea.

I could write some about how the GOP is trying to use anti-choice nonsense to redefine rape so that simply saying “no” or being legally unable to consent isn’t enough, but it’s Friday, and I’m in a good mood and I don’t want to depress myself.  So, instead I’m going to deliver to you a cheery tale of how to monetize right wing idiocy, brought to you by Tyler Cowen.

Moving to dispel claims that President Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii, his supporters in the state’s legislature have introduced a bill that would allow anyone to get a copy of his birth records for a $100 fee.

The idea behind the measure is to end skepticism over Obama’s birthplace while raising a little money for a government with a projected budget deficit exceeding $800 million over the next two years.

If they’d done this up front, when they were getting 10-20 requests a week, this would have netted them $78,000 a year.  Not a lot, but not nothing.  But there’s a little nugget that’s interesting in this story that doesn’t bode well for the Tea Party.

But the number of birther requests has been declining from the 10 to 20 weekly inquiries received early last year, according to the Department of Health.

“Requests have decreased significantly over the years. Currently we receive anywhere from zero to five per week,” said department spokeswoman Janice Okubo.

Are Birthers losing enthusiasm?  It seems like it.  There’s been a resurgence in right wing media over the past month or so in Birther nonsense, and Jesse’s been sending me near-daily links to places like WorldNetDaily that are really pumping this crap up.  My initial feeling was that they’re bored and so going back to the well, but I was all wrong.  They’re actually acting like someone in a relationship who feels the spark waning, and so starts buying new lingerie and proposing going out on date nights.  They’re trying to win the Birthers back! And now it’s not just the usual crew of rabid internet goobers.  Even Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who in the past have either ignored or even criticized Birther nonsense, are jumping on the train. 

Limbaugh:

Top-rated talk radio host Rush Limbaugh on Friday questioned why new Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie has not gotten support from the White House in his efforts to resolve the doubts of so-called “birthers” about Barack Obama’s place of birth.

Limbaugh also says he finds it “stunning” that Abercrombie still can’t prove Obama was born in Hawaii as he maintains.

What’s great about being a Birther is you can be a Birther while pretending you’re not a Birther.  I think it was Rick Perlstein who summed it up to me once, which is that all conservatives think everyone else in their movement is the sucker. 

Glenn Beck, as is his custom, is putting his own spin on it.

For those who can’t click the link, Beck—-while holding a bunny he probably then decapitated so he could drink its blood as soon as they quit filming—-claimed that Obama referenced the five pillars of Islam in coded terms in his State of the Union speech, by having five platform points, or something like that. While not directly questioning the birth certificate, this is part of the general Birther tent, since the imagined lack of a birth certificate is part of a larger conspiracy theory about how Obama is a secret Kenyan Muslim that is out to turn the country into a socialist theocracy. 

I’m sure you’ve all seen Tim Pawlenty’s jaw-droppingly silly ad, but if not, here it is:

I found this ad fascinating, for one major reason.  Right off the top, it invokes a bunch of cliches that we are used to getting from action film trailers.  Which is the intention, of course, but is a really strange thing to do, because aping the cliches of film trailers is something that is done frequently in our culture, and, until Pawlenty made this ad, it was done every single time as parody.  Even when people are goofing off with friends, you know that when someone starts to intone, “In a world where….”, whatever comes next is a joke.  If it’s a video that makes use of film trailer cliches for any reason other than to be a straightforward film trailer, then it’s a joke. 

I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, but this happens so often examples are easy to come by.  There’s the amateur versions:

Then Hollywood got into the game, mocking itself:

Tropic Thunder Trailer
Uploaded by jirony. - Full seasons and entire episodes online.

And so have politicians:

Film trailer cliches, I thought, had exactly two meanings to Americans: you are about to see a film trailer, or you’re about to see a joke.  The earnestness that Pawlenty brings to this is baffling.  It’s like he’s only speaking to people who never have read the Onion, never have seen a comedy made after 1960, think the word “camp” only refers to places you go for vacation, and only watch YouTube when someone sends them a video of a kitten licking a puppy(which is, admittedly, the best thing ever in the Video, Just Cute Not Humorous category).  This video says, “Are you obtuse?  Completely out of touch?  Unable to understand even the most primitive of jokes?  Completely devoid of any appreciation for irony? Then vote for Tim Pawlenty.” 

It was confusing until I read Digby’s take on it.  Don’t get me wrong; she’s as bemused as I am.  But she shook my brain awake with this:

Between this and his constant references to his “red hot smokin’wife”, I don’t know if he’s running for president or auditioning to play James Bond. There is such a thing as protesting too much.

At what point, I thought, “Not really for teabaggers and the Christian right.”  Just think of the epic amounts of cultural garbage exhibiting a distinct lack of self-awareness they’re capable of generating.  Even that Christine O’Donnell ad, which tries to be funny, is off.  But, more to the point: wingnuttery is an American subculture with a high tolerance for utter humorlessness.  Dressing up as revolutionary era soldiers, crying in church, talking about the gold standard, using the word “homosexuality” as if it’s dirty, and putting decals of crying bald eagles on your car?  We live in a country where some people think it’s appropriate to get 9/11 tattoos. You or I might think, “What kind of morons is Pawlenty trying to rope in with this weirdness?”, but your answer lies right there. 

In what may really win the award for tastelessness in the ongoing contest of conservatives to see who can deflect criticism of their lies and eliminationist rhetoric the hardest, Erick Erickson may win with using the occasion of the attempted murder of a Jewish congresswoman (and the deaths of six others) to launch a maudlin recruitment ad for Christianity.  (Though, it’s hard to be conservatives using the occasion of an attack on a Jewish woman to claim that criticizing them is “blood libel”.)  This sort of thing is sadly inevitable; amongst fundamentalists, blaming atheism (and evolutionary theory) for murder and mayhem is a favorite tactic. 

Quoth our nimrod:

In all the discussions we’re having, let’s not forget that bad things have happened throughout history, but we are seeing more and more a pattern of violence from those who reject Christ and we are seeing the most extreme rhetoric from those who reject the only real truth while embracing every other historic fad and nonsense as variations of truth. The one true way has been shunned, ridiculed, bastardized, co-opted, and buried over in psycho-babble nonsense, “find your own spirtual self” crap, and haphazard soul damning assorted other garbage.

For a taste of what I’m talking about, look at Timothy McVeigh. Raised a Catholic, McVeigh self-admitted that there was a god of some sorts, but that he was agnostic, had no belief in hell, and had drifted far from anything having to do with Jesus Christ. But the left routinely tries to portray McVeigh as some sort of Christian terrorist. They know not of what they speak.

The topic of faith in Christ makes people cringe. But whether you believe it or not, here is the reality: beyond us is a world we cannot see with our eyes. It impacts us on a daily basis. It is a world of very real angels and very real demons. It is a world of a very real God and a very real Satan, a very real Heaven and a very real Hell.

My feeling is that I don’t really feel comfortable around people who claim the only thing standing between them and mass murder is their relationship with an imaginary friend.  He didn’t even try to generalize and suggest that religion was necessary for morality.  He went all in and said that only Christianity is responsible for morality.  If you poked him, I bet he’d offer some opinions on what kinds of Christianity are the only kinds that prevent people from shooting up public events at supermarkets or schools.

Which leads me to his claim that non-Christianity is why there’s murder and chaos.  Most people in the world aren’t Christians, so by his measures, we all should have killed each other off by now in bloody rampages, due to that being the normal state of humans who are uncontrolled by Jesus.  Weirdly, that hasn’t happened, inclining me to think morality might have another source besides Christianity. 

What is interesting to me is that this is a threat at its core.  Which makes sense; as Media Matters demonstrates, Erickson is a nasty piece of work who enjoys threatening rhetoric:

Erickson is right. Why, just this morning, I came across a quote from a loud-mouthed atheist who denounced former Supreme Court Justice David Souter as a “goat fucking child molester.”

No, wait: That was Erick Erickson. And so was this: “At what point do the people tell the politicians to go to hell? At what point do they get off the couch, march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?” And it was Erick Erickson who said he’d pull a shotgun on any government employee who tried to make him fill out the American Community Survey, too.

If Erickson’s well-advertised fondness for Christ doesn’t stop him from talking about beating people to a pulp, or pulling guns on them, or from referring to public servants as child molesters, or from presuming to know who God is angry with at any given moment, he should at least take a look at what the Bible has to say about hypocrisy before going on about the “extreme rhetoric” of non-believers.

And so this column is basically a threat: share my religion or there will be more mass murders.  Makes you long for the people who are more into speaking in tongues and self-help books sprinkled with Jesus, doesn’t it?  And the hell talk is just more threats.  As was his response to the anger his column provoked.

Atheists don’t believe in hell, so this threat doesn’t sound nearly as scary as Erickson thinks it does.  It’s like telling someone that they have to do what you say, or you will launch your army of leprechauns on them.  This almost makes me feel bad for him; he has no idea how what he thinks is a tough guy act makes everyone who hears it cluck at what a simple-minded coward he seems to be. 

This sort of thing is always tried by right wing Christians who’ve convinced themselves everything should be a recruiting opportunity.  And, in my experience, it’s not very sticky.  I don’t think most people think about Timothy McVeigh’s religious beliefs one way or another, but if you want to know, he seems to have created a mish-mash of some Christian beliefs and some Christian Identity beliefs.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: since religion is made up, it’s endlessly malleable.  It’s really a poor predictor of moral behavior, because people can adjust their beliefs as they go to rationalize whatever they want.  Erickson is functionally trying to argue that religion is an effective form of mind control; ironically, he shares this belief with the Jared Loughner, though they obviously differ on the value of mind control, with Erickson in favor and Loughner against.  I don’t think it’s that simple.  I think religion is, at best, a weapon in the art of social control.  But Erickson is definitely saying Christianity works by getting inside someone and creating morality where none existed, which is definitely more akin to mind control. 

For the record, it actually seems like atheists are underrepresented in prison populations. But I would caution against reading causation into what is almost surely just correlation; many of the factors that make it likelier someone will be an atheist also make it likelier that they won’t go to prison. I just don’t think there’s much of a relationship between criminality and religion one way or another.

What is it about douchebaggery and overdoing it in the prose department? Well, I know what it is—-douchebags are trying to be hyper-intellectual in order to distract from their basic “bitches ain’t shit” message.  A nice bit of pseudo-intellectualizing, some nauseastingly overdone prose, and of course going on at length are all nifty disguises for your basic assholery.  But please, douchebags, can you tone it down?  When I read your douchey prose, my judgments about your lack of character are getting conflated with my aesthetic distaste, and I like to keep those two things in neat, separate compartments.

The examples online are infinite, but a recent favorite had to be the anon douchebag who wrote the “consent is overrated” post at Jezebel.  The guy is, I suspect, a professional writer and so he loses a couple points by being at least clear in his prose, but on the whole, the pretentiousness meter hit 10 across the board.  A taste:

I once fell madly in love with a woman named Madeleine. I thought she liked me too because she kept agreeing to see me and she once elegantly blew me a kiss as she descended into a Metro station. We were never intimate because the moment never seemed right to try to kiss her. Lovesick and unsure of what to do, I complained about Madeleine to a female French friend who said to me, “Have you tried getting her drunk?” Obviously my friend’s recommendation was based on the assumption that after getting drunk Madeleine would be easier to seduce.

Words that this guy needs to banish from his vocabulary immediately: “madly”, “seduce”, and “elegant”.  He can use “lovesick”, but only on the condition that the circumstances are appropriate.  No more using it to describe how you feel about someone you’ve been on fewer than two dates with.  But what really pushes his essay over is the attempts to impress the audience with how worldly he is because he spent time in Paris, a city with a mere 11+ million people living in and around it.  Really elite, that.  He gets extra points for having no discernible sense of humor and a terminal case of taking his penis way too seriously. 

I bring this up now, because more revelations about Julian Assange’s over the top douchebaggery are coming out, thanks to Gawker. Assange is first rate at overdoing the prose when it comes to writing about his own dick, which he takes very seriously.  On top of it all, he has an affectation in his writing that took me awhile to put my finger on, but I finally figured it out—-he writes as if English is his second language, and he learned how to write in it strictly from reading overwritten, pretentious fantasy novels and erotica.  Gawker published a series of harassing emails the then-33-years-old Assange wrote to a 19-year-old that he was taken with.  A sample of how he tried to bully her with bad prose into sucking his cock:

Read All...

Roy Edroso has his annual round-up of wingnuts pretending Christmas is under assault up at the Village Voice, and it’s a doozy this year. What’s fascinating is that they’re always wrong.  It’s always bullshit.  A creche is moved from public to private property, and the assessment is this “ruins” Christmas, presumably for the 1-2 people in the world whose entire Christmas experience is about staring at a creche that is on public property.  (It loses all its magic if it’s not a state endorsement of religion.)  Then you have wingnuts pretending that a museum exhibit at the Smithsonian that is running October 30-February 13th was somehow done because of Christmas, as a direct assault on it.  Now, I realize that Christmas season starts earlier and earlier every year, but in what part of the country is it still Christmas up until Valentine’s Day?  If you’re going to be paranoid that an exhibit that features gay artists is some kind of assault on your traditional values blah-di-da, at least get creative about it.  The exhibit runs over Halloween (what Dan Savage calls Heteroween) and near Valentine’s Day (where the most irritating portrayals of heterosexuality imaginable blanket the airwaves)—-you could at least come up with a more interesting, paranoid attack than pretending that gay people don’t have Christmas trees.  Or in the case of Pat Buchanan, pretend that people with genitals don’t have Christmas.

But my favorite has to be annual feigned outrage that Planned Parenthood sells gift certificates, so you can give someone a check-up for Christmas.  Not the most exciting gift, but don’t worry, wingnuts think it’s totally sexxxxxxy, by claiming that the gift certificates are actually for abortion.  I’m trying to imagine how they think an abortion gift certificate presentation would go.  Here’s my guess:

VIRGINAL INGENUE (OPENING ENVELOPE): Oh wow, an abortion!  Thanks, older friend from the Feminist Recruitment Conspiracy. 

FEMINIST SLUT MACHINE: I know you’re not sexually active, but….

VIRGIN (WHO LOOKS LIKE SARAH PALIN MIXED WITH TAYLOR SWIFT, BUT WITH EYES THAT TAKE UP MOST OF HER HEAD): Well, I had no interest in sex before, and didn’t even really know what it was, but I’m going to go out and ride like 15 cocks tonight, all because now I can an abortion!  I can’t wait. 

FEMINIST: There’s nothing like your first abortion.  Getting your uterus scraped out is always a pleasure beyond compare, but your first time is special.

VIRGIN: Hey, look, I can spend this gift certificate on condoms, so I don’t even get pregnant in the first place.  That’s strange.

FEMINIST: Eh, that’s just there to keep the government money coming in.  No one actually uses birth control.  Why would you, when you have the chance to have someone put a tube in your cervix, drain your uterus, and give you a giant pad to sit on for the next week or so while you bleed out your ladyflower?

Yeah, that’s how we live.  Sure.

Anyway, with all these imaginary assaults on people’s right to enjoy Christmas, I thought you all would enjoy a fun counterpoint—-an actual attempt to censor atheists who are reaching out to each other during this holiday season.  (Via.) Atheists are buying ad space that is available to everyone, believers and non-believers alike, and putting up what I would consider exceedingly boring messages about how you’re not alone if you don’t believe in any gods.  In Ft. Worth, there are four ads on the side of buses, and some ministers tried to strong arm the city into refusing the ads by arranging a bus boycott, which failed.  The justification for this attempt at censorship was awesome:

“It’s a season to share good will toward all men,” Mr. Tatum said. “To have this at this time come out with a blatant disrespect of our faith, we think is unconscionable.”

It’s the season to have good will towards men, so the proper behavior is to tell some of those men that they have no right to express their opinions or seek community.  Strange definition of “good will”. 

That said, I don’t necessarily agree with atheists who think bland messages—-in this case, that it’s okay not to believe in god—-can’t be taken as an attack on religion.  I mean, they’re not in the most formal sense, but the mere existence of atheists is upsetting.  That other people gave in to their doubts means that the doubts that nibble at the you the believer’s brain might be true.  The biggest obstacle for many people in admitting that religion is pretty stupid-sounding is the fear that they’ll be all alone and rejected.  Being exposed to other atheists and seeing that they’re just fine is what often tips people over.  So yes, just existing and being out about your atheism is bad for the churches and their ability to retain members.