Florida Man’s anti-freedom mind-control agenda must be quashed

Associated Press news photo

“Freedom from indoctrination”? No, it’s that we’re to practice the Repugnican-fascists’ blatant indoctrination. Their backasswards, far-right-wing indoctrination is so good and true that it’s not indoctrination, you see, and every other viewpoint is “indoctrination.” (Repugnican-fascist Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a serious threat to our freedom despite claiming to be all about freedom, is pictured with his human props pushing his anti-freedom agenda in April 2022.)

Growing up in the Arizona public school system in the 1970s and 1980s, I was, indeed, indoctrinated.

Among much other bullshit, I was taught, at least indirectly if not also directly, that homosexuality is bad — sick, criminal, sinful, etc. (Mostly, it just wasn’t brought up at all — the erasure of an entire group of people is fun!)

Today, of course, we have same-sex marriage as the law of the land — and he-man Nick Offerman just very effectively played a gay man in a long-term same-sex relationship (with Murray Bartlett of the first season of “The White Lotus”) in the zombie-apocalypse TV series “The Last of Us,” a turn that no television show ever would have taken when I was growing up* — and in many if not most parts of the United States, many if not most of the homophobes who still remain among us keep their ignorant, hateful, bigoted, homophobic thoughts to themselves in polite company.

I was taught in the public school system that capitalism is perfect — Godly, even (in high school I had to take a pro-capitalist course propagandistically titled “free enterprise”) — and essentially I was taught that there is no viable alternative socioeconomic model, and that you’re crazy and/or evil for even suggesting (or even thinking) that there could be or should be (Love it or leave it, Commie!).

Seriously, though — how nice it is for the sociopathic profiteers among us to ensure that our public schools teach that our socioeconomic exploitation, in which millions of us are just wage slaves who in a nation whose beyond-ludicrous degree of income inequality grows larger and larger with each passing year are barely surviving, is the only option available to us.

This degree of mass mind control is nothing if not fucking Orwellian.

American history was taught to me in public school as an ever-progressive** march forward by overwhelmingly white people with a few minor oopsies and boo-boos along the way, but overall, God bless (white [that part always was understood if not always spoken aloud]) America, land of the free!

Conservatism, being all about keeping the stupid white man firmly entrenched in power and dominating the rest of us in perpetuity, still believes that today’s public school students should have the same experience that I did in the 1970s and 1980s. (Well, actually, I’m sure that even the public education that I received in the backasswards state of Arizona in the 1970s and 1980s is too “liberal” for them.)

It’s funny, because despite the right-wing attempt to indoctrinate me with the “right” sexual orientation, I’m nonetheless an out gay man in a long-term same-sex relationship. The years-long attempts to indoctrinate me didn’t succeed; apparently I am immune to such toxic indoctrination. (I’m an atheist, too, so “Christo”fascism, of which homophobia is part and parcel, didn’t get to me either; “God” and “Jesus” to me are on par with other mythical figures, such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny…)

And for decades I have had deep issues with capitalism — which for the most part is just systemic, legalized thievery that so often results in injury, destruction and even death — and I would much prefer to see a hybrid socioeconomic model in which the essentials of life are not for-profit and in which OK, sure, the non-essentials, including the luxury items, can be capitalized. (And I’m a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders, of course.)

And yes, American history, as it is taught in our public school system, is, of course, whitewashed, to say the least; I seem to remember one U.S. history textbook with the maudlin title of The Pageant of American History or the like. I’m sure that Nazi Germany taught the history of Germany something like this: The nation was forged by strong, manly, God-supported white men! Get in line behind God’s soldiers or die, unGodly bitches!

So of course I oppose Repugnican-fascist Ron DeSantis’ fascist attempts to control what is and what is not taught in the public schools of Florida — in the name of “freedom from indoctrination.” (Indeed, you’re free to believe and to teach whatever you want — as long as stupid, evil white man Ron DeSantis agrees with it. Freedom! Yay!)

If our public schools don’t give our students the tools they need to be well-adjusted and successful in modern life, then our schools are failing them (which, of course, they are, but that’s another blog piece…).

And teaching like it’s still the fucking 1950s is not setting up our students for success. It’s setting them up for failure as future wage slaves to our corporate overlords, believing that the socioeconomic exploitation of them is what God wants and is the only kind of life that they ever can have.

On a related note, Advanced Placement courses are high school courses for the college-bound and are voluntary, and so their curricula should be hands fucking off to opportunistic political swine like the First Amendment-hating and freedom-hating Ron DeFuckingSantis, whose attack on the Advanced Placement black American studies course induced the College Board, which created the course, to water it down.

Of course, what DeSantis would prefer is that black Americans (as well as other non-white and LGBT Americans) just be erased entirely, so I doubt that the AP’s watering down of its black American studies course will please Gov. Florida Man.

As the Advanced Placement cave-in demonstrates, DeSantis already is winning his war to control all American minds.

Obviously I agree with age-appropriate teaching; of course your average kindergartener won’t understand the nuances of human sexuality, socioeconomic systems, the good and the ugly of U.S. history (including, of course, racism and the struggle for women’s rights and for LGBT rights as well as for non-whites’ rights), debates around religion, etc.

But an Advanced Placement student should be mature enough to handle the more adult topics, and further, DeSantis is trying to limit not just what Florida’s public elementary and high schools may teach, but what Florida’s colleges and universities — which are supposed to be bastions of independent thought and free speech — may or may not teach.

Former “President” Pussygrabber, at least, is so juvenile and self-absorbed (he’s the fucking poster child for the baby boomers) that he doesn’t bother to attack our public schools and universities; he’s too busy pettily attacking his legions of enemies (and as it is with every dictator and would-be dictator, it’s very easy to get on his shit list: just refuse to ardently lick his ass) like a petulant, perpetually miffed teenaged girl, apparently unaware that the majority of the nation is way, way beyond his endless grievance bullshit and knows fully well that he lost the 2020 presidential election.

That Ron DeSantis wants to institute mind control not only in the nation’s third-most-populous state, but in the entire nation as president, makes him much more dangerous than is Pussygrabber, in my book.

DeSantis’ goal is to indoctrinate all Americans into believing that any kind of life outside of the fascist hellscape that he has in mind for all of us — with him as our Dear Leader, of course — is our only fucking option.

Thankfully, barring one of the many criminal probes into his many crimes actually taking mob boss Pussygrabber down within the next two years or so (I’m not holding my breath), I expect Pussygrabber to win the 2024 Repugnican presidential nomination.

Why?

Because too many other deluded narcissists within the Repugnican Party apparently also are going to run for the Repugnican presidential nomination for 2024 — including people who have a snowball’s chance in hell, such as Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence — and, because the Repugnicans anti-democratically award all of a state’s delegates to the Repugnican National Convention to whichever Repugnican presidential candidate garners the most votes in that state, in 2024 Pussygrabber would benefit from a crowded Repugnican presidential field, just as he did in 2016.

Could Pussygrabber win in November 2024, though?

Um, he lost the national popular vote by millions of votes not only 2020, but in 2016 as well. History, methinks, is a guide on whether or not Pussygrabber could win back the White House in 2024.

Further, Pussygrabber eked out a “win” in 2016 only because of the anti-democratic Electoral College — and he did even that well only because at that time he was largely unknown, as least as a U.S. president.

Two impeachments, the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection that he treasonously led, and innumerable investigations into his mob-boss-level criminal activity later, the kind of “president” that Pussygrabber was and would be again no longer is an unknown; we know the treasonous asshole abundantly well.

Therefore, no, I can’t see Pussygrabber winning the presidency in 2024. (Well, maybe he could if he were running against Kamala Harris, who we’re still waiting upon to finally find her political legs, but that’s another blog piece…)

Pussygrabber and 2024 aside, Ron DeSantis must never be president of the United States of America — and so I hope that Pussygrabber beats DeSantis for the Repugnican presidential nomination, because I can’t see Pussygrabber winning (well, “winning”) the White House ever again.

I can, however, see a fascist demagogue like DeSantis, who offers cut-and-dry, “common-sense” “solutions” to our problems and who freely and giddily scapegoats others for his own political gain, winning the presidency, especially when as a president he is unknown, as Pussygrabber was in 2016.

Our freedom of thought, on which all of our other freedoms depend, depends on those of us who truly value freedom — including, ironically, freedom from (fascist) indoctrination — stopping the fascist, anti-democratic, freedom-hating DeSantis in his fucking tracks.

DeSantis is a cancer that must not be allowed to spread outside of the backasswards state of Florida. He must be contained within that fucking swamp.

—

*Seriously, though, the only reason I started to watch HBO’s “The Last of Us” is that it received good reviews, and I find the angle of zombification via fungal infection to be an interesting twist on a worn-out genre. (I tried to get into “The Walking Dead” several years ago but just couldn’t; I found the zombie genre to be tiresome already.)

So after two episodes of the establishment of the fungus zombies in “The Last of Us” (an aside: Can you kill them by spraying them with an anti-fungal, such as for athlete’s foot or jock itch?), I was surprised to see this “Brokeback Mountain”-like storyline plopped into the middle of the zombie action, and it actually works.

And while I had known that Nick Offerman would be in the third episode, I’d had no idea of the direction in which they took his character.

I mean, I imagine that plenty of homophobes have stopped watching the show after that third episode replete with man-on-man action, but to me, if you can drop in a gay love story in the middle of a zombie-apocalypse story and do it in a way that’s not too cheesy and actually works, then you’ve reached peak TV, in my book…

**”Progress,” you see, was white people taking over more and more of the nation under “manifest destiny.” The land’s natives had to be dispensed with and their territory taken from them, slaves from Africa had to be instrumental to profiteering, environmental destruction for the purpose of profiteering had to be done in the name of “progress,” etc., etc.

Adolescent Milo Whatshisnameopoulos annoying, pathetic — not ‘dangerous’

Updated below (on Monday, February 20, 2017, and on Tuesday, February 21, 2017)

The self-loathing attention whore Milo Yiannopoulos said nothing insightful or worthwhile on Bill Maher’s show on Friday night, and he follows the long tradition of being (quasi-)famous only for being (in)famous. Hate speech gets you attention, the perpetual adolescent discovered a while ago, and so he continues spewing forth hate speech.

“Alt-right” figure Milo Yiannopoulos, who is 32 going on 13, has an upcoming book ludicrously titled Dangerous.*

I’ve always instinctively avoided watching video of the vapid and insipid fool, but I do watch Bill Maher’s HBO show every week, and so finally I was exposed to The Milo Virus.

The virus isn’t deadly, or even dangerous — it’s just annoying.

Yiannopoulos giggled his way through his interview like a schoolgirl on nitrous oxide. Again: Annoying, not “dangerous.” (And if you must proclaim yourself to be “dangerous,” then you most likely are not.)

Probably the most offensive thing that Yiannopoulos said on Maher’s show (in the “overtime” portion of the show) is that transgender individuals are “confused” and, worse, that they are more likely to sexually abuse children than are others. This is, he proclaimed, a “fact” that is not in controversy.

If it’s not in controversy, that’s only because it’s not a fact; a simple Google search shows that it’s an “alternative fact.” Children are, in fact, most likely to be abused by a heterosexual, cisgender male (and girls are more likely to be sexually abused than are boys), and when children are sexually abused, it more often than not is by people the children know, not by strangers (such as transgender individuals lurking in public restrooms that match their gender identity).

The statistics on the sexual abuse of children say nothing about transgender individuals (“confused” or otherwise) being more likely to sexually abuse children than cisgender individuals who aren’t “confused” about their gender.

So here is nelly queen Yiannopoulos — really, she is quite on fire (she is out, but, of course, she couldn’t be in) — saying that transgender individuals are “confused” when the haters of course would say that he is confused, based upon his feminine mannerisms and dress and choice of sex partners. And they’d accuse him of being a child molester, too.

(And transgender individuals aren’t “confused”; they are crystal clear on the fact that although they were born with a certain set of genitalia and thus are expected by an oppressive, patriarchal, misogynist, backasswards society to act a certain way, acting that way isn’t natural to them. There is no “confusion” there. Only the troglodytic haters, who stupidly dutifully buy into all of society’s bullshit, are confused.)

What the fuck is the matter with Milo Yiannopoulos? Is he concerned (as are some other members of minority groups who are haters) that there must be some group — in this case, transgender individuals — who are loathed even more than is his own cohort of gay men?

To be clear, I’m a gay man, and while I feel like a male and have no desire to act in a feminine manner, I have no problem with feminine men and masculine women. People need to be themselves.

But no way in hell can I claim Milo Yiannopoulos as a fellow gay man. Not only is he incredibly hypocritical for attacking transgender individuals for their non-gender compliance, but on Maher’s show he wore not one, but two crosses around his neck (with his pearls…) and claimed that he is a staunch supporter of the Catholick church, which long has oppressed gay men like he. What kind of deep psychological damage must an individual have to love — and to aid and abet — his or her long-time oppressors?

Yiannopoulos is a vapid, sick piece of shit who never will accomplish anything significant for anyone. He is inflicting his mental illness, including his pathetically arrested development, upon the rest of us, and sadly, no, I don’t think that it’s all an act.

He gets attention, yes, but only as car wrecks and train wrecks get attention.

Unstable, sociopathic individuals, I suppose, can in their own way be dangerous, and hate speech certainly can be dangerous, and hate speech would include such blatant, hateful lies as that transgender individuals are more likely to sexually abuse children than are cisgender individuals.

As I’ve written before, because hate speech so easily can lead to real human beings being actually harmed, even killed, I don’t consider hate speech to be free speech. Hate speech is, in my book, a crime that often if not usually should be prosecuted.

But does freely spewing forth hate speech make Milo Yiannopoulos “dangerous”?

Not in the sense that he apparently considers himself (or at least portrays himself) to be “dangerous,” which apparently is that he’s a courageous truth-teller going against all of this insane political correctness of the left.

No, Milo Yiannopoulos is not courageous — only fucking cowards further attack already historically oppressed and relatively powerless minority groups — and he is not “dangerous” in the way that he would define the term.

He is just another fucking liar and narcissist who loves the spotlight — which is turned on him not because he helps and uplifts anyone, but because he only tries to tear others down — and who wallows in the undeserved attention that he receives like the attention piggy that he is.

Update (Monday, February 20, 2017): Wow. Karma rarely works this quickly.

Gay blogger Joe Jervis reported yesterday that Milo Yiannopoulos has a video-recorded history of excusing if not also even advocating under-aged sex — apparently proudly proclaiming that he learned how to perform fellatio well from a Catholick priest — and Jervis reports today:

Minutes ago CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference] chairman Matt Schlapp tweeted a statement announcing that homocon flamethrower Milo Yiannopoulos has been disinvited as the keynote speaker at this year’s convention. Schlapp writes:

We realize that Mr. Yiannopoulos has responded on Facebook, but it is insufficient. It is up to him to answer the tough questions and we urge him to immediately further address these troubling comments. We continue to believe that CPAC in a constructive forum for controversies and disagreements among conservatives; however, there is no disagreement among our attendees on the evils of sexual abuse of children.

And now we get to watch the free speech absolutists at Breitbart have a screaming meltdown. See my original post with the videos here.

To unpack this: Yiannopoulos’ video-recorded remarks about having learned how to give good head because of a certain Father Michael appear not to be snark; he apparently truly thanks the priest for having introduced him to gay sex when he was 14 years old.

While I agree with Yiannopoulos that in general we have unnecessary and even hysterical hang-ups over sex, and I’d even go so far as to venture that not every legal minor who has consensual (emphasis on consensual) sex with a legal adult automatically is destroyed for life (although we certainly couldn’t use Yiannopoulos as proof of that…), and while I’d point out that in the United Kingdom (where Yiannopolous was born and lives) the age of consent is 16 years old, and that there is no one, universal age of consent**, I have to wonder if Yiannopoulos saw FatherMichaelFellatiogate (i.e., his video-recorded historical defense of legal adults having sex with legal minors) coming, and so he decided to pre-emptively attack transgender individuals as child molesters as a slanderous diversion from his own scandal regarding pederasty.***

As I’ve said, Yiannopolous is sick, and he’s “dangerous” only in that sick people can be dangerous.

And why CPAC would have invited Yiannopoulos as a speaker in the first place eludes me. He’s not at all a traditional conservative; his being an out gay man, and a feminine-acting gay man, and non-heterosexuality and non-gender compliance being anathema to conservatives aside, Yiannopoulos is just vapid, self-centered and mean (although almost all conservatives are mean); he is no fount of conservative “thought.”

Second update (Monday, February 20, 2017): Wow. The Associated Press now reports that Simon & Schuster has canceled its publication of Dangerous, which was slated to come out in June.

I’m torn on this news. I’d never buy the book, but this could make Whatshisnameopoulos a “martyr,” and unless he contractually may not, he’ll probably just search for another publisher, and some shameless, money-grubbing publisher would publish it, perhaps especially now…

Third update (Tuesday, February 21, 2017): Three strikes; he’s out! Milo Yiannopoulos announced today that he has resigned from the “alt-right” website Breitbart.

I don’t for a nanosecond believe his face-saving claim that his resignation was voluntary and that he initiated it, but whatever; his “career” should be over.

I mean, who wants him now? He has been disowned by the conservatives/neo-Nazis and he certainly is unwanted by those of us who are left of center, and no, he probably can’t pull a David Brock, as he didn’t simply burn his bridges, but atomized them.

Fact is, Yiannopoulos did cavalierly and clearly condone pederasty in those videos that brought about his spectacular implosion. (No, to be fair even to him, he did not condone pedophilia. And, again, pedophilia is worse than is pederasty.)

Now, however, Yiannopoulos pathetically, lamely claims that his teen-aged sexual experiences with adult males — which not long ago enough he defended as anywhere from unharmful to actually beneficial and bragged he instigated himself, so that he was no victim — damaged him and that he now realizes that out of that victimhood that he first vehemently denied but now so conveniently claims, he said some inappropriate things.

Please. 

Yiannopoulos is a fucking cockroach and cockroaches tend to re-emerge after you think that they’re dead, but this should be it for him.

As Slate.com’s Michelle Goldberg snarked of Yiannopoulos:

… Yianopoulos’ act was all about baiting liberals over free speech; he’d say something repulsive, the left would react, and conservatives could play the defenders of edgy self-expression. In the end, however, the right shut him down the second he made conservatives uncomfortable. Going forward, even if any right-wingers are willing to be associated with him, it will be hard for him to continue the fiction that conservatives are uniquely open-minded. That means he’s no use to them, or to anyone, really. Poor snowflake.

Poor snowflake indeed.

I wish the cockroach luck with his “free-speech” crusade, which he promises to continue.

His “free speech” is to worthwhile discourse what neo-Nazi graffiti is to high art.

—

*Kinda reminds me of Michael Jackson having labeled himself as “bad.” If Jackson was bad, it wasn’t in the way that he had claimed to be “bad”…

**Wikipedia notes that “Age of consent laws vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, though most jurisdictions set the age of consent in the range 14 to 18. The laws may also vary by the type of sexual act, the gender of the participants, or other restrictions such as abuse of a position of trust; some jurisdictions may also make allowances for minors engaged in sexual acts with each other, rather than a single age.”

While I don’t have any huge problem with the UK setting its age of consent at 16, age 14 strikes me as too young to be able to consent, even if the individual considers himself or herself to be precocious.

And, of course, as Wikipedia notes, there is the issue of the abuse of a position of trust. Even if Yiannopoulos had been 16 or older, his priest shouldn’t have had sex with him. Priests, as good shepherds, are to tend to the sheep, not have sexual relations with the sheep.

***To be clear and to be fair, Yiannopoulos apparently has expressed that he is OK with consensual pederasty but not with pedophilia, and there is a difference between the two; there are degrees of things.

Still waiting for the national backlash

As apparently at least one editorial cartoonist (see above) and political commentator Bill Maher have noted, this past week the Confederate flag has been lowered and the rainbow flag has been raised. (Which, as Maher quipped, must have made for a very weird week for U.S. senator and presidential Repugnican Party presidential aspirant Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, whom pretty much everyone knows is a closet case.)

It’s a cute visual — one flag going down and another going up — but it’s not quite as simple as that.

We still have a long way to go in achieving equal human and civil rights for blacks and other racial minorities in the United States of America, and the image of the rainbow flag replacing the Confederate flag could send the message that we’re done with the racial thing, and so now we can celebrate the fact that we’re done with the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender thing. But we’re not done with that, either, as I have just noted.

I am happy that the Confederate flag is imploding. Don’t get me wrong. Earlier this month I wrote that the public display of the flag should be banned legally throughout the United States, as Germany bans the Nazi flag, and I still believe that no one should have to see the flag, which I still liken to the Nazi flag, in public. The flag deeply unsettles me, and I’m a white man (albeit a gay white man), so I can only imagine how many if not most blacks feel when they see the Confederate flag — the flag of racist, white supremacist traitors and terrorists — displayed in public as a terrorist warning/threat in the guise of “heritage” or “history” or “culture.”

No, because the First Amendment is used as justification for continued hate speech (which in my book is not protected by the First Amendment since hate speech so often ends in violence against and harm to weaker, historically oppressed individuals), I don’t expect the public display of the Confederate flag to be made illegal throughout the United States any year soon — although it should be made illegal for the federal government or any of the state governments to display the flag in public (except in museums and the like), including, of course, on state-issued license plates — but public and political pressure is bringing the flag down everywhere.

Yes, Mississippi’s flag, which incorporates the Confederate flag in it, as a state-government-sanctioned image has got to go and be redesigned, but while we wait for that — and the illegality of all state-issued license plates bearing the Confederate flag — it’s heartening that in the meantime Walmart, Amazon, Sears, eBay and countless other businesses have decided that they will not sell anything with the Confederate flag on it (with the exception, of course, of such things as history books and DVDs of “Gone with the Wind”).

I can’t remember the last time that I saw any merchandise emblazoned with the Confederate flag here in California — where the Confederate flag does not fly — but it’s nice to know that it now is harder for white supremacists to buy their freak flags online now, and I’m guessing that Walmart’s Southern-state stores have offered merchandise containing the flag of the white-supremacist traitor, if not even the flag itself.

And let’s face it, since the United States is so hyper-capitalist and consumerist, when Big Business decides to do something, such as to ban the Confederate flag, it’s almost as good as the state legislatures and the U.S. Congress actually doing their job, and certainly the elected cowards who fill our chambers of power won’t be as scared now to follow what Big Business has started to do.*

I also was delighted to learn that a black woman in South Carolina yesterday skillfully scaled the flagpole on the state’s capitol grounds and temporarily took down the Confederate flag that mind-blowingly still flies there. Of course law enforcement was waiting for her at the bottom of the flagpole and the flag quickly was raised again. But the woman had made her point; she quite understandably doesn’t want to wait for the state’s legislature to take the matter up, because the time to do the right thing is always right now.

It’s a little complicated, though, I think, as she was spouting the whole time that “God” is on her side.

I’m on her side, but I have a problem with the “God” thing, since “God” is used to justify one’s actions and desires, whether they’re righteous or whether they’re evil. “God” always very conveniently wants whatever it is that the individual who is invoking “God,” the individual who is claiming to know the will of “God” (which to me, an atheist, is like claiming to know the will of Santa Claus), wants.

The religious right, for example, of course, tells us that the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, in declaring that bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional, violated the will of “God,” and that This! Will! Not! Stand!

Oh! Except that It! Will!

The right-wing haters always pitch a fit when the U.S. Supreme Court or the U.S. Congress advances equal human and civil rights, such as with Brown vs. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Loving vs. Virginia, and now, the newly minted Obergefell vs. Hodges.

Of course the hatred of and the discrimination and persecution against us non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals will continue, but we continue to achieve full legal equality — equal human and civil rights.

The vast majority of us non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals don’t give a flying fuck what heterosexuals and gender-conforming individuals think of us; we only care when heterosexuals persecute us, when heterosexuals make their own ignorance, bigotry and hatred our problem, when they stand in the way of our pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

And this persistent, pernicious, pathetic right-wing “argument” that the haters’ rights actually are violated when they don’t get to continue to oppress others — similarly, the slave owners’ “rights” were violated when the slaves were freed, you see — isn’t working outside of the wingnuts’ echo chamber. The U.S. Supreme Court certainly didn’t buy it, and neither did the many federal and state courts below it when the haters tried to demonstrate any actual harm to themselves or to society at large by same-sex marriage. That was the haters’ legal task in the courtrooms — to demonstrate actual harm, because you can’t deny a group of people a right unless you can demonstrate that the granting of that right would cause actual harm — and because same-sex marriage harms no one, they failed miserably repeatedly.

As Bill Maher quipped to the haters’ (especially the Repugnican Tea Party presidential aspirants’) response to same-sex marriage now being the law of the land: “Fellas, you do realize that this is not mandatory? You don’t have to have sex with another man — it’s just an option now. OK, I just wanted to make that clear,” he said, hilariously adding after a pause: “They’re such drama queens, aren’t they?”

Indeed, the haters have been acting as though Obergefell vs. Hodges makes same-sex marriage mandatory for everyone, which even they, as insane as they are, know is a fucking lie (because they’re telling the lie in order to scare others to try to get their way politically [which is called terrorism]).

It’s quite simple: As I have noted before, if you don’t want to marry someone of the same sex (even if you’re gay or lesbian), or if you don’t want to get an abortion, then don’t get an abortion or don’t marry someone of the same sex. You have the freedom to follow your own religious convictions, as backasswards as they are, as long as you aren’t acting like the Islamofascists who comprise ISIS, trying to force others to follow your bullshit, troglodytic religion.

Because then, you’re just a “Christo”fascist, and I am governed not by the Koran or the Old Testament or the New Testament, but by the U.S. Constitution (and by other founding documents and by the laws of land, including U.S. statutes and U.S. Supreme Court caselaw, including, of course, the delicious Obergefell vs. Hodges). And I would battle an attempted takeover of the nation by “Christo”fascists just as I would an attempted takeover by Islamofascists.

Haters, you still get to hate; Obergefell vs. Hodges did not strip you of your right to hate others based upon your non-existent “God,” who is like a Santa Claus on crack. But leave the rest of us the fuck alone to pursue our life, liberty and happiness as is guaranteed to us, as is our birthright.

There will be no big national backlash because of Obergefell vs. Hodges. The terrorists who comprised the right wing risibly tried to raise this specter to spook the U.S. Supreme Court from doing the right thing, but with around 60 percent of all Americans supporting same-sex marriage, of course the U.S. Supreme Court was perfectly safe in doing the right, long-overdue thing. (Indeed, as I noted, the court wouldn’t have done the right thing unless it had felt quite safe in doing so. As independent from public opinion as the nation’s court [or, arguably, any court] is supposed to be, at least on paper, the political reality as to how far a court safely can stray from public opinion is different.)

Oh, there might be a nutjob (or two or three) like a Dylann Storm Roof who goes off and commits domestic terrorism against actual and/or perceived non-heterosexual or non-gender-conforming victims — this can happen at any time anyway, and it does — but we won’t see a national backlash to Obergefell vs. Hodges because the nation already is significantly segregated into political blocs anyway, replete with blue states and red states and with blue areas and red regions within the red states and blue states. To a large degree, those on the left and on the right mix as little as is possible anyway.

And before Friday, 36 states had had same-sex marriage anyway; before Friday there were only 14 holdout states. So it’s not like there wasn’t same-sex marriage anywhere in the nation, but that the U.S. Supreme Court just up and in one fell swoop went from zero percent same-sex marriage to 100 percent same-sex marriage in the United States. (That said, things did go fairly quickly, I suppose; Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to start issuing marriage certificates to same-sex couples in May 2004, and just a little more than 11 years later, all states must now do so.)

So again, no, there will be no national backlash. Talk of such a backlash is just what the self-serving, treasonous, backasswards wingnuts want, since their Bible-based worldview increasingly is being rejected and relegated to the dustbin of history, where it belongs.

Life will go on much as it has before. The years will pass. The old haters will die and take most of their hatred, bigotry and ignorance with them to their graves (and they have to have graves because they love unsustainability); fewer and fewer of us will be raised to be haters, and even those who do have some hatred in their hearts and minds will, because of the stigma attached to such hatred, for the most part keep their hatred to themselves.

The right-wing haters do their best to prevent progress, do their best to keep humankind bound in the rusted chains of the past, but with each passing day, their hatred is more and more unsustainable.

We progressives must continue to fight, as gains won can be threatened or lost later (look at voting rights and reproductive rights, for example), but, while we fight, we must keep in mind that, as Taylor Swift might put it, while the haters are gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, we must persevere and just shake, shake, shake, shake, shake it off, shake it off.

(If you’ve actually read this far, you kind of deserve a reference to Taylor Swift. Just sayin’.)

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*Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that Big Business suddenly wuvs us. No, Big Business has calculated that the intangible and tangible costs of continuing to sell the Confederate flag outweigh any profits that they’ve been getting from selling it.

Science: Conservatives are stupid

Synchronicity is fun.

As I compose this, the top three most-viewed Yahoo! News stories right now are:

“Low IQ and Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice”

“President Obama, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer Share Tense Tarmac Moment”

“Arizona Gov. Brewer Gets Book Critique from Obama”

The first article begins thusly:

There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario.

Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an e-mail to LiveScience. …

“This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact [with groups outside of one’s own] reduces prejudice,” said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science….*

This is the image that Yahoo! News used with both pieces on Repugnican Tea Party Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s recent obviously orchestrated tiff with President Barack Obama on her home turf:

Associated Press photo

The caption for this news photo reads:

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer points during an intense conversation with President Barack Obama after he arrived at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012, in Mesa, Arizona. Asked moments later what the conversation was about, Brewer, a Republican, said: “He was a little disturbed about my book.” Brewer recently published a book, Scorpions for Breakfast, something of a memoir of her years growing up and defends her signing of Arizona’s controversial law cracking down on illegal immigrants, which Obama opposes. Obama was objecting to Brewer’s description of a meeting he and Brewer had at the White House, where she described Obama as lecturing her.

Indeed, who is this uppity Negro to be lecturing the white governor of Arizona?

Why Obama agrees to meet with Brewer at all escapes me, since she only uses any meeting with him as future campaign material — and now, to boost her book sales — by supposedly showing her fellow white supremacists in Arizona, the South Africa of the Southwest, how she so bravely stood up to the black president. (Except that he isn’t the legitimate president, right?)

To those Arizonans who believe that Jan Brewer — who appeared to be drunk or otherwise intoxicated or otherwise significantly neurologically impaired during her first and only gubernatorial debate in 2010 (after her incredibly horrible first debate performance she refused to participate in any more debates) — is a great stateswoman, perhaps she does look like some hot shit openly publicly disrespecting President Barack Obama.

To those of us who don’t suffer from intellectual deficiency — and who thus aren’t conservative — however, Jan Brewer looks like what she is: an old, racist, wingnutty hag, a stupid, braying jackass.

I’ve always disliked the term “conservative,” because the vast majority of conservatives are just abject fucking morons. “Conservativism” sounds like a legitimate political school of thought, when, in fact, more often than not it indicates severe intellectual deficiency.

I look forward to the developing science on this topic. (Of course, the wingnuts eschew science — science and facts have a well-known liberal bias, you know — so their feelings shouldn’t be hurt that much.)

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*The LiveScience article is worth reading in full, and the money shot of the article, in my book, is the study’s psychologist’s essential assertion that to associate with groups that are different from one’s own is so mentally taxing that dipshits don’t even bother. This would, I suppose, explain the homogeneity of the red states and the red regions within the purplish and blue states: the dipshits huddle together in their ignorance and fear.

Clint Eastwood’s ‘J. Edgar’ is not your father’s gangster movie

Film review

Clyde Tolson (played by the Adonis Armie Hammer) and J. Edgar Hoover (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) have a lovers’ quarrel in Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar.”

Woe to the heterosexists who don’t bother to research the movies that they see who stumble into Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” thinking that they’re going to see an action-packed gangsta movie (he-man Clint Eastwood is directing, after all) but who instead get “Brokeback Mountain” meets “Bonnie and Clyde” — in which “Bonnie” is the late long-time FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

As others have noted, “J. Edgar” isn’t going to wholly please either side. The heterosexists don’t want the slightest flowery whiff of male homosexuality contaminating their gangster movies, as evidenced by the male homophobe behind me in the audience who twice uttered “faggot!” (and who once uttered “AIDS!”) during the movie and the female homophobe behind me who vocalized her disapproval during the scene in which a distraught J. Edgar Hoover dons his recently deceased mother’s dress.

And gay men like me are going to feel, as I do, that screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (who won an Oscar for his screenplay of “Milk”) and/or director Eastwood wussed out by having portrayed the very apparent real-life same-sex relationship between Hoover and his long-time “assistant” Clyde Tolson as essentially sexless.

No, I didn’t need a steamy sex scene, although I can’t say that I would have minded one; Armie Hammer, who plays Clyde Tolson in “J. Edgar” (and who played the “Winklevi” twins in “The Social Network”) is achingly beautiful, and much more handsome than was the real-life Tolson, just as the real-life J. Edgar never looked anything like Leonardo DiCaprio, even with all of that makeup piled atop his baby face.

But are we really to believe that although the real-life Hoover and Tolson were inseparable and never heterosexually married — and that although Tolson inherited Hoover’s estate after Hoover’s death and later was buried near Hoover — that the two of them never did more than hold hands and share just one (bloody, very conflicted) kiss?

“J. Edgar” apparently would have us believe so, and while many movies about gay characters have a closeted feel to them, this closeted feel can be artful if it is intentional and thus helps us to understand the characters and their sufferings better, but if this closeted feel is a result of the filmmakers’ own cowardice and/or discomfort with the material, then it diminishes the film, and this appears to be the case with “J. Edgar.”

“J. Edgar,” as others have noted, also tries to do too much. Hoover’s time as head of the FBI, which spanned from 1935 to 1972, can’t be captured in one film. Not that it has to be; “J. Edgar” is a fictionalized film, after all, not a documentary, but because “J. Edgar” portrays so many of the historical events during Hoover’s decades-long tenure at the FBI, it has lent itself to be criticized for what it leaves out — such as the “Lavender Scare” of the 1950s, which surely was relevant to the real-life Hoover and Tolson.

And because “J. Edgar” tries to capture so many historical events, the examination of Hoover’s psyche gets short shrift.

Judi Dench is good as Hoover’s mother, even if she is portrayed as a textbook case of the overbearing mother who lives through her son so that of course he turns out gay.

Perhaps the most memorable scene in the film is the one in which Hoover’s homophobic mother tells him the story of another young man who turned out to be gay and who killed himself, which was a good thing, in her eyes. Many of us gay men (my husband included) have been told by a homophobic parent that he or she could never accept a gay son, as Hoover is told by his mother in “J. Edgar,” so I expect that scene to resonate with millions of gay men.

Still, “J. Edgar” doesn’t go far enough with the examination of J. Edgar Hoover’s homosexuality. My guess is that that is a result of the combination of Dustin Lance Black’s upbringing as a Mormon, which, I surmise, keeps him on the “safe,” conservative side, and of the generation of Clint Eastwood (he’s 81 years old), who, while he reportedly is pro-gay, on other issues leans to the right (he reportedly can recall having voted for a Democrat only once, and that was former California Gov. Gray Davis in 1998), and who might be one of those individuals who is much more intellectually accepting of homosexuality (that is, in theory) than he is viscerally accepting of it (that is, in practice) — you know, the kind of person who says that he’s OK with gays as long as he doesn’t ever actually have to see two men kissing. (Thus, we could see Tolson and Hoover kiss in “J. Edgar” only if violence was involved. [The scene, by the way, is fairly reminiscent of a similar scene in “Brokeback Mountain” in which our two conflicted lovebirds who live in a homophobic place and time pummel each other.])

“J. Edgar” probably should have picked one path and stuck with it: the documentarian path or the psychoanalytical path. Hoover’s professional life alone was interesting enough to carry a film. It was because of Hoover’s gross abuse of power, including his notoriously illegal monitoring of prominent individuals, that directors of the FBI need the Senate’s approval to serve more than 10 years, indicates Wikipedia.

But also interesting are the psychological dynamics in which those who have something to hide — such as homosexuality in a society in which homosexuality is stigmatized — react to their inner conflict and their self-loathing by becoming anal retentive and relentless moralists who viciously attack others in order to ease their own self-hatred. We saw this not only in J. Edgar Hoover, but in Roy Cohn, the gay assistant to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who isn’t portrayed in “J. Edgar.” (I’ve wondered about the sexual orientation of McCarthy, too, since he was an alcoholic who viciously attacked others and since he picked Cohn to be his assistant, but that’s purely conjecture on my part.)

If I had made “J. Edgar” and were focusing on Hoover’s personal life, I’d have left out all of the Lindbergh baby stuff and focused more on the relationship between Hoover and Tolson, and I especially would have focused on the “Lavender Scare,” which bizarrely gets no real mention in “J. Edgar.”

And I would have left out the scene in which Hoover tries on his dead mother’s dress. The account that the real-life Hoover was seen in a dress is dubious, and in any event, it wasn’t as it is portrayed in “J. Edgar,” and we gay men have enough problems as it is for Black and Eastwood to give homophobes the idea that all gay men like to wear women’s clothing (not that there is anything wrong with that; it’s just that it’s a tiresome stereotype, and Black’s screenplay shows keen gay sensibility except for this fairly unfortunate scene).

Still, despite its flaws — which include the fact that it tries to do too much and that Armie Hammer’s old-man makeup is bad (maybe there’s just no way to make such an Adonis look unattractive) — and despite the fact that it doesn’t belong in the pantheon that includes “Brokeback Mountain” and “Milk,” “J. Edgar” is worth seeing.

My grade: B

Update:I don’t think that I’ve been unfair here to Dustin Lance Black. In a recent interview with the Advocate, he remarked, “I grew up in a military family, which was also Mormon and conservative, so he [J. Edgar Hoover] was seen as a bit of a hero.” Again, Black’s conservative upbringing seems to have greatly colored his portrayal of Hoover in his screenplay. And of the historical Hoover and Clyde Tolson’s relationship, Black stated:

I don’t know how much sex they were having. I couldn’t anchor that in anything provable. I also didn’t need it for what I was trying to say. They may or may not have [had a sexual relationship], but frankly, I wouldn’t want to see it. What’s important to me is they were not straight. They were two gay guys, in my opinion.

What is it with this phenomenon of de-sexing gay men, of stripping them of human sexuality? We don’t do that to heterosexual people! I can’t say that I would have wanted to watch the historical J. Edgar Hoover (who, again, was not an attractive man) getting it on with anyone, either, but was the only alternative to making “J. Edgar: The Gay Porn” making a film that portrays him as a celibate, frustrated closet case?

True, we cannot “anchor” the assertion that Tolson and Hoover had a sexual relationship “in anything provable” — we have only the very strong circumstantial evidence that they had a decades-long sexual relationship — yet the scene in which Hoover puts on his deceased mother’s dress very apparently was fabricated from whole cloth. Why was that liberty OK, but we couldn’t take the liberty of having the two of them ever do anything more than occasionally hold hands and share only one frustrated kiss? 

Critic Roger Ebert also apparently has jumped on the no-sex-for-gay-men bandwagon, proclaiming in his review of the film:

Eastwood’s film is firm in its refusal to cheapen and tarnish by inventing salacious scenes. I don’t get the impression from “J. Edgar” that Eastwood particularly respected Hoover, but I do believe he respected his unyielding public facade.

So to have made the two men sexually active human beings, I suppose, would have been “cheapening,” “tarnishing” and “salacious.” Since they were gay, much better to make them celibate! And apparently “[respecting Hoover’s] unyielding public facade” means going along with Hoover’s having been in the closet, because to do otherwise would have been “disrespectful.” (Fuck the truth!)

Ebert also notes in his review:

In my reading of the film, they were both repressed homosexuals, Hoover more than Tolson, but after love at first sight and a short but heady early courtship, they veered away from sex and began their lives as Longtime Companions. The rewards for arguably not being gay were too tempting for both men, who were wined and dined by Hollywood, Broadway, Washington and Wall Street. It was Hoover’s militant anti-gay position that served as their beard.

That reading of the film is correct, because indeed “J. Edgar” intended to keep the two lovers celibate, since gay sex is so dirty, you know, and while we can posit that Hoover was gay, we just can’t go so far as to assert that he ever actually had gay sex (ick!).

Again, the real film in the story of Hoover and Tolson’s relationship is the one indicated by Ebert’s assertion that “It was Hoover’s militant anti-gay position that served as their beard,” and I still find it rather stunning that the film glosses over the Lavender Scare of the 1950s. Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn should be in any film about the very-most-likely-gay relationship between Hoover and Tolson, it seems to me.

And speaking of McCarthy, I’m not the only one who has wondered about his sexual orientation. David K. Johnson, author of The Lavender Scare (The University of Chicago Press, 2004), notes (on page 3) that although McCarthy in early 1950 first raised the specter of Communists and gay men having “infiltrated” the U.S. government, McCarthy went on to pursue only the Communist angle, having “mysteriously recused himself” from the witch hunt against gay men. Johnson goes on:

A knowledgeable observer at the time suggested that [McCarthy] did not pursue the “homosexual angle” more aggressively because he was afraid of a boomerang. As an unmarried, middle-aged man, he was subject to gossip and rumor about his own sexuality.

I find the parallels between Hoover and Tolson and McCarthy and Cohn to be striking. Maybe Dustin Lance Black can redeem himself somewhat for his wussy “J. Edgar” screenplay and pen a movie with balls about Joseph McCarthy and his relationship with Roy Cohn, the latter of whom we know for sure was gay. I’ll even give Dustin a highly creative working title: “McCarthy.”

Red scare redux

 

The Cold War still rages on for some (namely, those who are still living in the 1950s).

This book, a must-have for any home-schooling parent or parent thinking about home schooling, actually is in amazon.com’s top-100-selling books as I type this sentence.

Wow.

It’s interesting. When the wingnuts can’t find any other argument against or criticism of Barack Obama, they resort to racism. When they can’t find any other argument against or criticism of the left, they resort to red-baiting.

Yup. For the treasonous troglodytes among us, the Cold War still rages on, and when they can’t win an argument against a left-winger, they resort to visceral denunciations such as “Communist” or “Socialist” or one of their variations. It’s the adult playground equivalent of calling your opponent a doodoo head.

For all of their blather of “freedom” and “liberty,” the members of the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party don’t want our children taught that any other socioeconomic system outside of capitalism is even a remote possibility. Didn’t the actual Communists absolutely forbid that any other socioeconomic system be taught to their children? Didn’t they also wish to brainwash their children, to shackle their minds? So the actual Communists and the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are different how?

(Similarly, the members of the Taliban and other “Islamofascists” and the “Christo”fascists here at home have an awful lot in common. The content of their delusional belief systems differ, but their hypocrisy, self-righteousness and their ignorance and evil are the same.)  

Capitalism is a key method of keeping peoples in bondage, so of course the members of the radical right defend it. Especially as the excesses of capitalism have pushed the American empire to collapse, and Americans just might be considering other socioeconomic systems right about now, those who benefit from capitalism on crack want to preserve the status quo that benefits them but harms the majority of the American people.

Capitalism is based upon the idea that when thievery and virtual slavery are committed in the name of capitalism (or one of its variations, such as business), they are good. Indeed, the nexus between capitalism and “Christo”fascism, which also teaches that evil is “good” when “Christians” commit it, is so strong that the two virtually are interchangeable (along with militarism, because God and Jesus love it when we slaughter us some more Muslims!).

Capitalism is based upon the idea that getting filthy rich by paying your employees as little as you can get away — by stealing the lion’s share of the actual value of their labor from them — and by charging your customers as much as you can get away with — by stealing as much from them as you can, too — is good. The key belief of capitalism is that screwing over your fellow Americans (and others) is good. That’s an awfully weak premise for a socioeconomic system, and the capitalists know it.

This blatantly greedy, selfish thievery that is capitalism isn’t called thievery or exploitation or slavery or even wage slavery or the like. It’s called “initiative” or “hard work” or the like, even though most of the rich and super-rich among us don’t actually do much work. (I don’t count protecting and expanding one’s own personal empire as work. I count as work as doing something that is productive, that benefits others.)

But to try to keep us serfs from going after them with pitchforks and torches, the plutocrats repeat this narrative that the rich and the super-rich are rich and super-rich because they are hard workers, and those of us who aren’t rich (the vast majority of us) aren’t rich because we are lazy. And the plutocrats have billions and billions of dollars with which to reinforce this propagandistic bullshit. It’s a good bet that their money is behind the book that is pictured above.

It is critical for those of us who oppose the right-wing traitors’ Orwellian attempt to snuff out Americans’ ability to even think that a better, more just and more equitable socioeconomic system is available to us to counter their red-baiting bullshit when we see it.

If I had a nickel for every time some right-wing fucktard threw the epithets “Commie” or “Socialist” at me, I’d be as rich as the Koch brothers.

But I don’t shrink away from the mindless red-baiting, which is meant to intimidate and to thus shut down the debate.

Yes, I am a socialist. I believe that the best socioeconomic system for the United States of America would be democratic socialism. It’s pretty fucking clear what runaway capitalism has done to the nation (and to the planet, with its melting ice caps), yet the treasonous, selfish individuals who are guilty of economic malpractice (and treason, because they have harmed their own nation) are the same ones who are crowing that what we need now is even more of their brand of capitalism.*

Capitalism is eating itself alive, like a serpent swallowing its own tail. Capitalism is dying because it’s a dysfunctional, defunct socioeconomic model. It brings misery for the masses and excesses for the few.

This isn’t opinion. This is just fucking fact. It’s quite measurable and observable. And it’s not just evident, but is fucking obvious, all around you.

Our children need to be taught facts and reality, not right-wing bullshit. Our duty to our children is to give them the knowledge and the tools that they need in order to make their lives and the world better. Trying to perpetuate the ignorance of the past — such as “creationism”; whitewashed versions of American history that make the conservative, “Christian,” presumably heterosexual white man the triumphant victor and keep women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, non-“Christians” and other historically oppressed groups down; Bible-based homophobia (and other Bible-based hogwash); anti-science, pro-business/pro-profiteering stances such as that climate change isn’t real; and the assertion that any discussion of a socioeconomic system outside of capitalism is “Commie” (which we can’t even define correctly but just “know” is something really, really bad) — is to cripple our children, is to diminish their chances for success in a rapidly evolving world, a world that continues to evolve around us whether we want to evolve with it or not, whether we want to reach for the stars or whether we want to retreat into our caves (you know, to go back to the “good old days,” such as the 1950s, when women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals and non-“Christians” knew their place!).

And I feel sorry for our public-school teachers, who routinely come under fire from ignorant, backasswards, wingnutty parents for not passing down those parents’ abject ignorance and backasswardsness to all of our children.

The effect of this political pressure and oppression from the treasonous fucktards on the right is that all of our public-school children get, at best, a watered-down education that instead of teaching them to strive for solutions to our problems only teaches them to perpetuate our problems, which only ensures the collapse of an American empire that cannot remain competitive in an increasingly globalizing world.

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*Amazon.com notes that Joe Kernan “is the co-anchor of CNBC’s longest-running program, the top-rated morning show ‘Squawk Box.’ Before television, he was a successful stockbroker with top firms such as Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney.” So a former Wall Street weasel sings the praises of capitalism. Oh, what a shock! And amazon.com notes that Blake Kernan is “a fifth-grade student” and apparently is the girl who is pictured on the book cover.

 Hey, why have children if you can’t infect and cripple them with your own sick belief system and use them to make a profit for you?

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Elton says that Jesus was a poof

Thank Goddess that Elton John has created a tempest in a teacup by proclaiming that Jesus Christ was gay.

Otherwise, I might have to write about the annual Conservative Action Political Conference, which began yesterday and concludes tomorrow.

What the fuck do the conservatives have to say that is new, since by fucking definition they represent the old, cold, dead hand of the past? They still have us stuck in the 1950s, accusing their opponents of being Commies when Communism pretty much died in the early 1990s, for fuck’s sake.

It’s much more interesting to write about Elton’s assertion that Jesus was a fag.

Reports AFP:

British pop superstar Elton John stirred controversy in a magazine interview [today] when he claimed that Jesus Christ was “gay.”

“I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems,” John said in an interview posted on the website of U.S. celebrity news magazine Parade.

“On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don’t know what makes people so cruel. Try being a gay woman in the Middle East — you’re as good as dead,” said John, who is gay.

The Catholic League, the largest U.S. Catholic rights group, condemned the comments.

“Jesus was certainly compassionate, but to say he was ‘super-intelligent’ is to compare the son of God to a successful game-show contestant,” league president Bill Donohue said in a statement.

“More seriously, to call Jesus a homosexual is to label him a sexual deviant. But what else would we expect from a man who previously said, ‘From my point of view, I would ban religion completely’?”

The self-anointed “Christians” really need to get over their hangups over sex. To hate sex is to hate the human race, since the human race is impossible without sex.

However, making the masses feel guilty about sexual urges — which are as innate to human beings as are such other biological impulses as hunger and thirst and sleepiness — sure the fuck is a great way to (try to) control the masses, which is all that the fucking Catholick church and the other “Christo”fascist institutions, such as the Mormon cult and the plethora of right-wing Protestant sects, want to do.

“To call Jesus a homosexual is to label him a sexual deviant,” the Catholick League’s president asserted.

Because the anti-sex Catholick and other “Christian” cults have portrayed Jesus Christ as having been entirely asexual — to the insane degree that they assert that he was not even the product of sex, but was “immaculately” conceived — of course the assertion that he was gay, or even might have been gay, is modern-day heresy.

But to those of us who live in the world of reality, we have to assume that the historical Jesus, if he did exist (I tend to believe that he did), was a human being, and that as a human being, he most likely was not asexual.

To the question as to whether or not Jesus was gay (or bisexual, if bisexuality in men truly exists), if we are sane, rational and honest, we can only answer: Who knows?

Jesus certainly might have been. He lived more than two millenia ago and we just don’t know anything about his actual sexual practices (or unlikely lack thereof). I find it highly unlikely that he never had at least one orgasm in his entire life.

What the “Christians” say about Jesus’ life certainly doesn’t point to heterosexuality: He never married and he surrounded himself with 12 other dudes… Let’s face it: the “Christian” account of Jesus’ life does not exactly paint him as a pussy hound. (Even the Buddha is said to have married and fathered a child before he went off and became enlightened.)

Jesus’ reputed verbal skills, compassion, sensitivity and wisdom (including his being a huge proponent of forgiveness and of cooperation over competition) — and his penchant toward teaching and healing — all point to the feminine, which, when strong in males, usually indicates homosexuality. Although people like Joe the Plumber have come to represent “Christians,” Jesus Christ is not portrayed as anything like Joe the Plumber, either in the New Testament or even in the twisted versions of the New Testament that the “Christians” love to propagate.

Indeed, it was ignorant, fearful people like Joe the Plumber who crucified Jesus, so yeah, it’s plausible that Jesus Christ indeed was queer.

While Jesus’ sexual orientation is debatable, what is not debatable is that he was a socialist, advocating that we take care of everyone and proclaiming that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. He was a pacifist, too. He said to pay your taxes, not to charge interest on loans (indeed, he even taught not to even expect your loan to be repaid!), and not to hoard worldly wealth, but to lay your treasures up in heaven (that is, to work on your spirituality instead of your materiality). And he certainly would have opposed the death penalty, having been a victim of it himself.

Yet today’s “Christians” worship the golden calf and are bitterly opposed to helping the poor (unless they “convert” them first, of course; their “help” almost never comes without strings attached), hate paying their fair share of taxes,* love war and bloodshed — especially in Jesus’ name — and cherish the death penalty. 

If Jesus ever does come back in his promised second coming, he’d better be careful, because his “followers” will crucify him.

*On the issue of taxes, let me say that the middle class — what is left of the middle class — is way overtaxed and that the plutocrats and the corporatocrats are way under-taxed. They benefit from what tax revenues give them, but they do everything in their power to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, while the little guy, like Joe the Kamikaze, have to keep the nation fiscally afloat. (Well, not that we are fiscally afloat now, but you know what I mean…)  

On the anniversary of Obama’s election

Today I received an e-mail from Organizing for America*, the remnants of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, titled “One year ago.” It’s meant to be nostalgic.

 Ah, yes — memories:

It was almost one year ago, on November 4, 2008, that I walked into my neighborhood polling place knowing that I’d vote for either Democrat Barack Obama or independent Ralph Nader, for whom I had voted in 2000 (when he ran for president on the Green Party ticket). Even as I walked through the polling-place door, I still wasn’t 100 percent sure which of the two candidates ultimately would get my vote.

In the end, I ended up darkening, with my black ballpoint pen, the oval next to the name “Barack Obama.” I knew that he’d win California anyway, and in the end I found the opportunity to vote for the nation’s first non-completely-white president to be rather irresistible.

Today, I wish that I had resisted.

Barack Obama has turned out to be pretty much another Bill Clinton — a “centrist.” Which means a coward. An appeaser. A politics-as-usual kinda guy.

There was nothing “centrist” about the eight long years of nightmarish rule by the unelected BushCheneyCorp. When the Repugnicans have the power, they don’t hesitate to use it. Remember when Gee Dubya was “re”-elected in 2004 with only 50.7 percent of the popular vote, but the members of the Bush regime called this a “mandate” from the American people nonetheless?

Here is Obama, having been elected by 53 percent of the people, which by the opposition’s definition, anyway, is a huge ol’ fucking mandate, and here is Obama with both houses of Congress dominated by his party, yet what accomplishments has he made?

That “Saturday Night Live” skit in which Obama reassures his opposition not to worry because thus far into his presidency he’s done nothing — it’s pretty accurate.

While the Democrats, led by the Obama White House, aren’t owning their power, I see that the wingnutty Repugnicans (which, in most cases, is redundant) were even successful in forcing out the Repugnican candidate in a U.S. House of Representatives race in New York state (the special election is on Tuesday and she dropped out of the race yesterday) because they consider her to be too moderate — and I think: Damn, why can’t we progressives force out those “Democrats” who are too moderate?

Instead, we have “Democrats” like Harry Reid and my U.S. senator, Dianne Feinstein, whom I have always thought of as Mrs. Joseph Lieberman.   

“Base sends GOP warning shot in NY-23,” a Politico headline reads, and I think, Why isn’t the base firing warning shots at the “Democratic” obstructionists in Washington?

Why can’t we progressives be as aggressive as the wingnuts are? Especially when they’re wrong about just about everything and we’re right about just about everything?

It’s too early to know whether the wingnuts’ victory in New York state in pushing out the Repugnican candidate they deem to be too moderate will help or harm the Repugnican Party in the short term, I suppose, but, it seems to me, pushing out the woman candidate (Diedre Scozzafava) for yet another conservative white male candidate (Doug Hoffman) will harm the Repugnican Party over the long term because, although the stupid white men are trying to fight it, rule by stupid white men is going the way of the dinosaurs in an increasingly diversifying nation. 

That Hoffman is running on the “Conservative Party” ticket doesn’t seem to bode well to me. It was when the Southern racists broke off from the Democratic Party, apparently starting with racist Strom Thurmond’s running for president on the “Dixiecrat” ticket in 1948, that the Democratic Party lost the South.

Should the wingnuts succeed in gaining some third-party strength, it seems to me, this will only help the Democratic Party. As The Associated Press notes, in the 1992 presidential election, billionaire businessman Ross Perot’s third-party ticket (the “Reform Party”), which had a bent to the right, won 19 percent of the popular vote; “Perot vastly altered the dynamic of that contest,” the AP notes, adding, “Democrat Bill Clinton was the beneficiary of that three-way contest, taking away the presidency from [Repugnican] George H.W. Bush with just a plurality of the vote.”

Any third party that might emerge over the coming years that comes even close to the success of Perot’s Reform Party in 1992, it seems to me, probably would stem from white angst and thus probably would siphon away Repugnican votes.

That scenario probably wouldn’t give progressives much leverage, however, because the Democratic presidential candidate could win with a plurality, like Bill Clinton did in 1992.

Those of us on the far left and the far right aren’t really represented in Washington, D.C., however, and I’d be fine with a four-party (or multi-party) system: the Democratic Party could be for those who are center-left, the Repugnican Party could be for those who are center-right, the wingnuts could have their own party (the “Conservative Party” or whatever the fuck they want to call it), and we progressives could have our own party, too — the Green Party, preferably. 

Or maybe it just needs to be a fight to the bitter end, a (bloodless, hopefully) rematch of the Civil War. That seems to be what those on the far right want, and as a member of the far left, I say: Let’s give that to them.

*Remember when the remnants of Howard Dean’s failed campaign for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination became Democracy for America? Damn, are the Obama people copycats… They act like Obama did it all on his own, when, in fact, Obama only rode in on the wave that Dean and his supporters created…

We liberals need to stop resting on our laurels and start slaying the vampires

 

These wingnutty titles, for which trees actually died, are typical of amazon.com’s top 100 best-selling books list right now.

So I was perusing amazon.com’s top 100 best-selling book titles just now, and among the top 100 are these lovely wingnutty titles:

• Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto
• Liberty Versus the Tyranny of Socialism: Controversial Essays (gee, the wingnuts just can’t get enough of that “tyranny” thing; funny, for some reason it wasn’t tyranny when Repugnican George W. Bush stole the White House in late 2000, but it’s “tyranny” when the majority of American voters actually do elect a Democratic — er, I mean, “Socialist” — president)
• Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America (this is by the same wingnut dipshit author of Liberty and Tyranny, so his argument probably is not that the Supreme Court destroyed the United States of America by having appointed G.W. Bush as president in late 2000)
• A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media (of course, it was perfectly fine with the wingnuts when the mainstream media just rolled over and played dead when the Repugnican-dominated Supreme Court, not the majority of American voters, elected Bush in 2000, and it was perfectly fine with the wingnuts when the mainstream media were nothing but fucking cheerleaders for the unelected Bush regime’s bogus Vietraq War in early 2003 [“shock and awe” makes great television!])
• Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (replete with a cute little picture of a smiley face with a Hitler ‘stache, comparing liberals to Adolf Hitler; nice!)
• Atlas Shrugged (the dead Ayn Rand’s ancient wingnutty novel that apparently is like Dungeons & Dragons to conservative geeks; Rand also wrote a nonfiction tome lovingly titled The Virtue of Selfishness*)
• The American Patriot’s Almanac: Daily Readings on America, by wingnut William Bennett (wingnuts almost always wrap their toxic ideology in such nice sheepskin as “patriotism” and “liberty”)
• Ann Cunter’s latest drivel (does it even matter what the title of it is?)
• Bill O’Reilly’s latest drivel (ditto)
• In Praise of Stay-at-Home Moms, by wingnut dingbat “Dr.” Laura Schlessinger (hey, if a woman wants to be a stay-at-home mom, that’s fine by me, as I support a woman’s right to choose, but why do I have the sinking feeling that Schlessinger’s stance is that a woman should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen?)

While it’s a virtual wingnut extravaganza on amazon.com’s top 100 best-selling books list, there is a dearth of liberal titles on the list, which makes me suspect that we libbies are resting on our laurels now that centrist Barack Obama is in the White House.

My fellow libbies, let me remind you that the wingnuts are like Freddy or Jason: They have a tendency to come back.

The ideological war continues; there is no hiatus just because we finally have an actually democratically elected president in the White House who is a Democrat.

Just like Team Bush hijacked the White House in late 2000, the wingnuts have hijacked such terms as “liberty,” “freedom” and “patriotism” — while calling their opponents (who would be us, the majority of Americans, who voted for Barack Obama in November 2008) “tyrants” and “fascists” and “traitors” and the like.

We need to put an end to this shit now — and not allow Freddy or Jason to return from the dead.

Speaking of the undead, I also noted that amazon.com’s top 100, curiously, is chock full o’ vampire titles.

Hmmm… Conservatism, vampirism… Same thing…

We liberals need to get off of our laurels and finish the job of driving that stake through the heart of the vampire that is called conservatism.

(Maybe we can start with the queen of the damned wingnuts, Ann Cunter…)

*Library Journal says this of The Virtue of Selfishness:

…[A] good essayist with a flair for the dramatic turn of phrase, [Rand] wasted her obvious writing skills in an effort to support outlandish personal opinions cloaked in the guise of logic. An absolutist thinker, she devotes one whole essay to an effort to persuade us that we really should see things as black and white, with no shades of gray.

Born in Soviet Russia, Rand so despised socialism and collectivist thinking that she leapt to the furthest extreme possible to become the champion of unbridled capitalism, the rights of the individual at the expense of the community, and the diminution of all regulation by the state, with the exception of a judicial system and the control of crime.

Among the sadly dated ideas she conveys are the attitude that homosexuals are mutant symptoms of a sick society and the belief that anyone with an interest in internationalism is a “one world” proponent.

To use one of her own favored words, Rand’s political and social philosophy is critically “muddled.” …