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What the hell, let’s just make this Abortion Wednesday. I was just alerted to an interesting op-ed in the WaPo about how the US Conference of Catholic Bishops would apparently unleash more hellfire and damnation on anyone opposing the bills discussed below than on anyone who executed a doctor convicted under HB1.

I am so glad I managed to find a Catholic church in this town that isn’t so single-issue. But I guess it doesn’t matter since I’m goin’ to hell anyway.

It’s not only lawmakers and candidates who risk damnation, 98 percent of the U.S. bishops agreed last November, but the voters who put them in office. “It is important to be clear,” the bishops said in a 44-page statement titled “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” “that the political choices faced by citizens[emphasis added] not only have an impact on general peace and prosperity but also may affect the individual’s salvation.”

…

To Catholics like me who oppose liberal abortion laws but also think that other issues — war or peace, health care, just wages, immigration, affordable housing, torture — actually matter, the idea that abortion trumps everything, all the time, no matter what, is both bad religion and bad civics. It’s not, for God’s sake, as though we’re in Nazi Germany and supporting Hitler.

Or is it? Amazingly, at least one influential bishop has made just that comparison publicly, and it’s a good bet that many others believe it privately.

…

That Doran forgets his history (five of the seven justices who supported Roe v. Wade were actually appointed by Republican presidents) doesn’t obscure his point. He is not alone among Catholic bishops in his attempt to anathematize the Democrats, to make the party and its candidates illegitimate in the mind of the electorate. George Weigel — papal biographer and intellectual guru to the new generation of conservative bishops — said as much, as the wafer wars reached a fevered pitch. “The Republican Party is a more secure platform from which Catholics can work on the great issues of the day than a party in thrall to abortion ‘rights,’ gay activism, and a utilitarian approach to the biotech future that is disturbingly reminiscent of ‘Brave New World,’ ” he wrote in his syndicated column.

…

This year’s presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, will be deemed worthy of support because of his consistent antiabortion voting record. But does anyone believe that outlawing abortion, or even turning the issue back to the states, will be anywhere near the top of McCain’s priorities? It wasn’t for Ronald Reagan (tax cuts and a military build-up trumped everything), or George H.W. Bush (a longtime supporter of Planned Parenthood who appointed the pro-abortion rights David Souter to the Supreme Court), nor even for George W. Bush, who has yet to call for actually overturning Roe, much less a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion. Meanwhile, is it fair for a Catholic like me to suspect that the liberal economic policies of the Democratic candidate, whether Obama or Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, will result in less dire poverty and thus perhaps fewer abortions? And isn’t that supposed to be the goal?

The bishops seem to have forgotten that it is not simply aspirations that matter, though they seem more than willing to accept rhetoric (”I am pro-life”) over results.

I feel like the last blogger in Georgia to chime in on the ridiculous SB 59, a bill crafted by Republicans to be exactly the kind of “nanny state” they accuse Democrats of foisting, and to make the internets come to a screeching halt. Okay, not really; the internets would go on unmolested, but Georgia would be made to look even more asinine in the world of science and technology after getting its teeth kicked in by federal courts.

For my out-of-town readers, here’s the crux of the proposed law:

It shall be illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking website to allow a minor using a protected computer to create or maintain a profile web page on a social networking website without the permission of the minor’s parent or guardian and without providing such parent or guardian access to such profile web page at all times.

Right. Implausible enforcement (and Republicans thought undocumented Latinos were hard to catch?), questionable constitutionality, and general lack of a clue, all in one delicious crime.

In poking around for a little more background info to include with my pending Street Team blog post on the subject, I saw, right there on WikiPedia, what the even bigger underlying problem with this whole situation is.

Republican state Senator Cecil Staton, the Chairman of the Senate Science and Technology Committee, is a “publisher” with three advanced degrees.

A Master of Divinity and a Master of Theology (thesis: “A study of the language of theophany in the Old Testament with special reference to the niphal of [raah]”) from the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. And a Ph.D. from Oxford (yay? oh no, wait) with a dissertation titled, “‘And Yahweh appeared … ‘ : a study of the motifs of ’seeing God’ and of ‘God’s appearing’ in Old Testament narratives.”

The Reverend Staton is in charge of our science and technology legislation here in Georgia. Giddyup and pass the leeches.

The Christians are back on campus this week, right on schedule. I already gushed last year about how proud it makes me of our country that we can have public shouting matches like this in the public forum and walk away unscathed, and I’m no less giddy about it this year. God love ‘em, those fundamentalists, for having the chutzpah to stand up to hours of ridicule and argument each day for a week, as they hold up their “Homo Sex is Sin” and “You Deserve Hell” signs while preaching to mostly deaf ears.

Their ability to speak their mind on campus was particularly poignant this week, what with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stirring up all that trouble in New York City the last couple days, so I made the preachers a special sign to add to the gallery of counter-demonstrations.

One thing I haven’t seen much discussion about (nary a mention on DailyKos) regarding Sen. Larry Craig is just how pathetic the reaction from the Log Cabin Republicans (”People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, so we made ours out of wood! Try to blow our wood down, we dare ya! Go on, blow our wood!”) has been. You would think, in a moment where one man’s career has been destroyed and their beloved party’s moral superiority on family values continues to take the beating, flogging, spanking that it royally deserves, they might take this opportunity to appeal for some reason, tolerance, and open-mindedness for the good of their other, non-social political endeavors. They might put a stake in the ground and say that this is why we, the Log Cabin Republicans, stand for gay equality in the GOP, not just as a matter of civil rights, but for political expedience: let us not lose any more hard-working, otherwise conservative Republican lawmakers to scandal just because their psyche can’t handle the kind of self-loathing, dissociative disorder-inducing, ultimately destructive pressure to stay in the closet that would make the Catholic Church and Jewish mothers file a class-action lawsuit against the GOP for monopolizing all the guilt-tripping left in the world.

The first day of the breaking news was as close as the LCR came to being sympathetic:

Log Cabin strongly opposes outing. It’s unproductive and distracts people from the real work of convincing more Americans to support equality for gay and lesbian people. It’s not for me to speculate about Senator Craig’s sexual orientation. However it’s clear that whether it’s Jim McGreevey, Ted Haggard, or someone else, life in the closet often leads to destructive, harmful, and reckless behavior.

That was, of course, after questioning his ability to continue serving in the Senate. But now it’s all “Don’t let the stall door hit ya where who knows split ya,” as they don’t touch his dirty, naughty lifestyle choice with a 40-foot pole and focus only on his law-breakin’ ways:

Senator Craig made the right decision in resigning from the U.S. Senate. He lost his credibility to serve the people of Idaho and his actions damaged the credibility of the Republican Party. Senator Craig had no other choice but to resign—for the good of his State, the good of his Party, and the good of his family.

His actions in Minnesota and the way he handled this situation showed terrible judgment. Senator Craig obviously failed to live up to the principles he espoused as a lawmaker. His explanation for pleading guilty was absurd and his denial was not believable. Senator Craig had hoped a guilty plea would sweep this matter under the rug, but it clearly backfired on him. Hopefully his resignation signals his willingness to take responsibility for his illegal actions and terrible judgment.

The LCR blog maintains that “Craig’s criminal conviction is the biggest reason for the differences in Republican reaction to” Craig versus Vitter, who at least had the decency to consort with lady prostitutes; nevermind that Craig’s criminal conviction, on the record as “disorderly conduct,” is about as exciting as jaywalking. Hell, I was ticketed for disorderly conduct once for saying I thought Savannah sucked in front of a Savannah cop. Am I barred for life from running for office? Or just from tapping my foot in men’s rooms?

Oh, Log Cabin kids, the things you will subject yourselves to in order to save a little money on your taxes. Sad, so sad.

Conservatives say that America is largely a conservative country and that conservatives are the majority of Americans. If they’re right, moments like this make it seem like their success is based on the fact that their movement is, at its core, a movement of hate, and it’s a lot easier to hate than to try to make things better; I should know, I love to hate, I hate things up and down all day every day. I hate people while driving my car and while sitting on my duff on the couch with a beer. I hate noises and weird foods and bureaucratic nightmares. I’m like a hate Olympian. Odds are even that I probably hate something about you. But I’m not going to build the rest of my life on it like a mantra.

America, Not Keith Ellison, decides what book a congressman takes his oath on
… Forgive me, but America should not give a hoot what Keith Ellison’s favorite book is. Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don’t serve in Congress. In your personal life, we will fight for your right to prefer any other book. We will even fight for your right to publish cartoons mocking our Bible. But, Mr. Ellison, America, not you, decides on what book its public servants take their oath.

Naturally, the vast majority of commenters on the article are foaming-mouth conservative pseudo-Christian wackjobs who seem just as hungry for bloodshed as the extremist Muslims they fear.

“This man should not even be considered for government office of any kind. The Liberals posting here constantly remind me why I hate them!”

“Congratualtions Minnesota. You sent a filthy animal to congress, and now look whats going on. Did he state during his campaign that, if elected, he would take his oath on the murdering handbook insyead of the bible? If so, the people who voted this America hating dog in to office, are themselves America hating dogs! If liberals don’t like this post…TOUGH! Believe me, thanks to your consistant stupidity, I, and all America Loving Conservatives, will have the chance to say I TOLD YOU SO!”

“swearing on the Bible is an act of Submission to our Constitution.” [I love that logical power-move.]

“Terrorists and liberals hate what America stands for. So, while our Armed forces have the terrorists engaged in their part of the world, they have sought, and received, the help of liberals here to carry out what they can not.”

A few people have pointed out an inconvenient fact pulled straight from the Constitution:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any officeor public trust under the United States.

But the Radical Right doesn’t seem to care. Jesus built this country, and you can go to hell if you think otherwise. (I’m sure Jesus would be a big fan of our ever-polarizing wealth distribution.)

Republicans say the Democrats are not worth electing because they don’t have a coherent vision. But if this rabid pseudo-religious Right is going to be the army that carries the vision to which the GOP is hitching its wagon, I’d rather have no vision at all. There are good Republicans in this country, and there are good, devout Christians, too, but the company they’re keeping is more poisonous to what I thought this country was than any tax-hiking booty-sexing cross-dressing peace-loving pot-smoking weirdo I ever did saw.

This country is fascinating in the way that it can sometimes fill you with joyful awe and utter revulsion in the same moment.

Much closer to the happy end of the spectrum, this week Georgia Tech’s campus was visited by “The Christians” as I like to call them. They pop up about once a semester and spend a few days hanging out at our miniature outdoor amphitheater, preaching loudly to whomever will sit and watch while a number of them stand at the periphery with their gigantic “HOMO SEX IS SIN” and other hellfire and damnation signs up on poles. On Thursday afternoon, there was quite a lively back-and-forth going between a large group of liberal, gay-tolerant (or just plain gay-gay) students and the red-faced preacher, with roars of laughter and witty, often sarcastic but sometimes genuine debate. At 4:30, “The Christians” ran out of time on their demonstration permit, and everyone just packed up and left. As contentious as the scene got at times, it was always a pretty well-intentioned and playful counterdemonstration, and there were many people who didn’t see eye-to-eye at all shaking hands with their opponents as everyone wandered off.

I walked away smiling and shaking my head, and ultimately regretted not shouting my own thoughts out to the crowd: God Bless America. As we watch the violent protests against the Pope’s gaffe in other parts of the world, I can’t help but be filled with love for this country and the way we can engage each other in public like that without setting anyone on fire. If “The Christians” come back and banter with the bois in pink shirts, I might have to whip up my own sign to hold on the sidelines: “Where the preachers can preach, And the gays can be gay, God bless the USA.”

You know what else you can do in America? You can absolutely suck the left one of the most heinous demigods of hatred and filth. Last night, the Young Dems of Atlanta blog got linked to by the white supremacist website stormfront.org, and a bunch of neo-Nazi racist inbred scumbag retards are crawling all over our site, giving it net-herpes and making me want to take a shower. One of our bloggers went on a rant about this story, in which it seems even the very Republican residents of a small Georgia town are lamenting the rabid anti-immigrant policies occupying the nation’s thoughts these days.

“These people come over here to make a better way of life, not to blow us up,” complained Keith Slater, who keeps a portrait of Ronald Reagan on the wall. “I’m a die-hard Republican, but I think we missed the boat with this one.”

Naturally, the neo-Nazis find it ridiculous that we “Democraps” give a rat’s ass about those dirty Mexicans that got rounded up like they deserved. Of course, it seems the race-tards are equal opportunity politician haters these days, as a quick scan of the newslinks on their messageboards reveals plenty of Bush-bashing as well (mostly ’cause he listens to them Jewish neo-cons and gets us entangled in foreign conflict). But then, if they have to pick a ticket, well, there’s always David Duke to give you some clue which it’ll be.

We worry about the external threat from “Islamo-fascists” or whatever goofy word we make up for them, and we debate the pros and cons of racial profiling to focus more security assets on the browner airline passengers. Who’s worrying about the white threat?

Loose lips sink ships.
There have been several threads as of late, listing collections or large portions of collections, of firearms. Some may be flamboyant, while others may be deliberately posted to sucker you into listing yours. As I stated on one of those threads, posting a list of firearms on a site like this, is like faxing a list to the FBI.
Loose lips can still sink ships — namely the one you are standing on. It may be tempting to want to show off your collection, but that is doing nothing but adding information to your own dossier, and giving them a specific list to check off when they come knocking on (breaking down) your door. Don’t make their job any easier by offering up info on your Second Amendment rights. THINK BEFORE YOU POST, PEOPLE! Don’t start a thread on “What I own,” or add your firearms to an existing one. Where else can a Fed find info on WNs and the guns they own, so readily?

God bless America, where you are free to plot and arm yourself for revolution.

In this election season, there is a lot of talk from pundits, Republicans, and even within the Party itself about the strategic weaknesses of Democrats. Sometimes, when I face darkness like this, I really wonder if it’s that we don’t own enough guns. Heebie jeebie to the max, Batman.

In my weekly dissertation writers’ this-is-so-not-group-therapy group, the issue of guilt has come up in the last few sessions. A day spent farting around on the internet, cleaning your bathroom grout, and organizing your kitchen cupboards because you just can’t bring yourself to strap down to a word processor and write your dissertation can cause serious feelings of guilt in many a doctoral candidate. The question we debated was whether such feelings were justified or counter-productive: I think that in measured doses, a little guilt can do everyone some good. If you never feel guilty about wasting good research time, you’ll never graduate, right? Of course, having been raised Catholic, I find guilt is just as natural an ingredient to starting the day as a cup of coffee. And while guilt in moderation can be an excellent and healthy motivator, I know I take it to unhealthy extremes the way I live my life in fear of not saving the world from some kind of armageddon and therefore being a complete waste of all the love, support, potential, and top-dollar education that has been poured into me over the years. Fun goal, huh?

So I can hardly imagine what kind of miserable lives the children of Bush’s GOP science-hating sock puppets are going to lead now that the President has yoked them to an unbearable burden: “These boys and girls are not spare parts,” says Dr. President. With one fell swoop of his dusty, unused veto stamp, Dr. President has both saved humanity from curing itself of congenital diseases and relegated 90 percent of these frozen shake-and-bake “lives” to “death” in LANDFILLS. But what of the horrible fate that will befall the 10 percent that have the misfortune of being thawed out and adopted?

What is this? Another D on your algebra test! I suppose you were just too busy “hanging out” with your little skateboarding friends to study again, huh? Playing with your little Gameboy was just too important. Do you have the highest score in the school now, huh? Well that’s just fine. Go ahead, waste your life playing around and amount to nothing if you want to. God forgive me, when I just think about all the people out there today who we made sure got Parkinson’s Disease so that you could have the blessed opportunity to hang out all night smoking the reefer with your good-for-nothing friends! That’s just fine! Oh no, go on, go out and skate off into uselessness with your homies, as long as you come home occasionally to wipe the drool off my chin and change my diaper when I’ve got Alzheimer’s, that’ll be almost as good as if we’d used your stem cells for something valuable instead. But before you go, come talk to your grandfather on the phone, I just can’t bear to tell him myself that we can’t do anything for his Hodgkin’s because little Tommy had to grow up and be a BUM! A BUM I TELL YOU!

Well how on earth are these poor kids not going to be problem children by the time they’re in high school, what with all the psychological abuse they’ll have been through on the playground all their lives? God forbid anyone recognize them from Dr. President’s staged photo op, or they’ll never hear the end of it. I thought my nickname was ripe for colorful taunts, but just imagine the trauma of going through life as “TV dinner Danny,” “Peter petri dish,” “Microwaved Michael,” or “You’re the unwanted leftovers of some nameless guy who masturbated into a cup Yuri?” Okay, so they don’t all just roll off the tongue, but you get the picture.

“They remind us of what is lost when embryos are destroyed in the name of research,” he says. Thank you, Dr. President, for caring so much about my family that you’ll send thousands of children off to die to protect us from “terr’r,” but you absolutely won’t tolerate the sacrifices of the decaying stem cells sent to the dumpsters of fertility clinics everywhere to protect us from other painful, unforgiving deaths. How on earth does this man balance the sacrifice of so many “beautiful lives” under bombs and bullets and other swords of “righteousness” against protecting a bunch of zygote popsicles just long enough to throw them out with the garbage? Oh, right: he ignores reality and waits for Jesus to whisper in his ear. Gotcha.

If anyone knows how to get the names of those puppets in the picture, you just pipe right on up here. I sure hope that when I’m wasting away in a home and can’t remember my own family’s names, one of those little bastards has at least gone through nursing school and will think of the value of their life when they come bring me my insulin injections.

Excerpt from a real live conversation last night. But like with pictures ‘n’ stuff:

“I’ve got the High Life in the fridge.”

“Oh, high class.”

“Hey now, it’s the champagne of beers™. And I like the fancy gold can.”

“See, just like the Golden Dome.”

“Yeah, that’s it, it reminds me of those glory days under the Dome.”

“And it’s even got the girl on top, just like Mary on the Dome.”

“There’s a girl on the can?”

“Yeah, the girl on the moon on the High Life can, c’mon.”

“Wow, good memory. Say… Wait a minute, wasn’t there something in Revelation about a woman on a moon, with a crown of stars?”

“You know, I think there was.”

A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.

“How many stars have we got here…. Five around the girl. And seven on either side. I totally see twelve in that.” Twelve stars, twelve ounces, your guess is as good as mine.

“You could be onto something.”

“I’m telling you, we’ve got a serious DaVinci Code situation going on here. Miller’s in on something. They’re trying to tell us something.”

“And you’ve got the crescent moon there, a symbol of Islam.”

“YEAH, and the background behind the moon? Totally green. More Islam. And yet the poor buggers can’t even drink this stuff.”

“It’s too bad the stars aren’t six pointed or we’d have the whole trifecta.”

Then another sign appeared in the sky; it was a huge red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on its heads were seven diadems. Its tail swept away a third of the stars in the sky and hurled them down to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman about to give birth, to devour her child when she gave birth.

Oh come on, tell me the Miller Logo doesn’t hint at the dragon:

And they say Catholic school makes you crazy. Really I think it just makes you a drunk.

Kate brought to my attention the latest GOP claim to good Christian values –

House Bill 1552 — sponsored by state Rep. Barry Fleming (R-Harlem) — would remove a long-standing requirement that death sentences be imposed by a unanimous jury. If a simply majority of jurors felt a defendant should get death, the judge could impose a capital sentence.

The bill comes only weeks after an American Bar Association report recommended the opposite: that Georgia stop all death sentences and executions and set up a commission to analyze alleged problems with how the state sends people to death row.
…
Fleming said his bill will prevent a few jurors from “sabotaging” a death penalty case.

I really don’t know how to articulate a response any better than Kate already has, so I decided instead to make a pretty picture for her post.