Beating up a right-wing meme

There is a fairly standard homophobic meme, which says that decriminalizing homosexuality is a slippery slope which leads to all manner of interesting behavior. The most obvious example of this is our boy Rick "Man-on-Dog" Santorum; I talked about his use of this particular argument yesterday.

But how can you dispute this somewhat idiotic idea?

Answer: You can't. You're wasting your time. The people who find this kind of argument convincing aren't swayed by logic. But personally, I enjoy it, so let's press on.

Well, then, what is the danger, exactly? What is the inevitable result of all this brightly-colored gayness? The usual list includes two or more of the usual suspects.

1. obscenity
2. fornication
3. adultery
4. adult incest
5. bestiality
6. pedophilia (with or without added incestuousness)
7. bigamy
8. the complete destruction of marriage as we know it

And really, that last one, which occasionally stands by itself, is the easiest to rebut.

Just ask "how?" How will marriage becoming more available, to more people, destroy the entire concept of marriage? You'd be amazed how many people can't actually answer that.

Let's consider the rest of these ignorant concepts, in no particular order.

Obscenity: You don't see this one too often. "Freedom of speech" and all that. So fuck it. Let's move on.

Fornication and Adultery: Now, this is a slightly tricky area, and a vaguely sexist one, at that. Fornication is mentioned less frequently these days, but you might run across it. Sex, when not between two people married to each other, is "fornication" if the both partners are single. It's "adultery" if either partner is married.

(Really, it all goes back to the fact that, until fairly recently, women were property. The legal definition just tells you which property crime has occurred.)

But really, both of these are idiotic examples. Fornication isn't a crime, but the results of it can be. Spreading an incurable disease or not taking financial responsibility for the potential pregnancy? That's where the blame should be pointed.

And adultery is a civil matter. In most states, it can be cause for a divorce, but that's between the husband and wife.

So the right answer to this one is simply "You're saying that adultery doesn't go on now? And hasn't gone on since time immemorial? Are you going to claim that more men will fool around on their wives because some other men are in a committed, legally-binding relationship? Why?"

(Notice the pattern here? "How?" and "why?" are the two easiest crowbars to dismantle the argument.)

Bestiality and Pedophilia: You've got to remember that when our idiot wingnut friend try to start listing all the things that homosexuality will lead to, they often like to include these two. (Because, you know, if two men are attracted to each other, they'll be attracted to anything!)

These two examples are stunningly simple to rebut. Just point out the all-important word "consensual." Children and dogs can't consent to anything. If they don't immediately concede the point, go on the attack: "So, by your logic, because heterosexuality is legal, so is rape?"

Incest and Polygamy: Now, these are the only remotely tricky ground that's out there. Because it's true: once you widen the definition of marriage, you have to explain why you don't throw it open to practitioners of either of these activities.

This is particularly true of polygamy. My personal attitude toward polygamy is "why not?" Toss the idea to a couple of lawyers, let them draw up a standard boilerplate contract for multiple party marriages, and let people hook up in whatever polymorphic patterns they want. All kinds of good reasons that this would be beneficial: guidance for the kids, economic stability, and so on. But that's a much longer argument than I want to get into.

Incidentally, the most common polygamous "marriage" in America these days is the creepy cult-like one, with the ugly overtones of misogyny and rape. Those are bad. Of course, it's equally bad when dealing with an overbearing, controlling husband and his wife, too. So, really, that's another, longer discussion that I don't feel the need to open up.

As for incest, well, look into the health problems of purebred dogs: they're just a mobile mass of medical maladies, from hip dysplasia in German Shepherds and Labradors, to epilepsy in beagles, dachshunds and Dalmatians. It's the inevitable result of reinforcing genetic problems by breeding from too small a gene pool.

After all, as we've already shown, these people are making an openly false comparison, and really, there are only two types of people who’d use it:

1. People with limited critical faculties, who never actually think about the talking points they repeat.

2. People who know exactly the size of the lie they’re spewing, and don’t care.

In either case, when you’re faced with this level of lemon-scented bullshit, why should you feel constrained to stick with simple logic, when you can easily turn their own rhetorical style back on them? So, instead of getting completely sidetracked from the issue of gay marriage, I recommend, as I often do, the attack.

Just ask a simple question: Why do you oppose polygamy and incest? After all, the Bible is in favor of both of them.

First of all, Jesus didn't say that "Marriage is between one man and one woman." What he said was "at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female... For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." (Matthew 19:4-6)

So, first, he wasn't defining marriage, he was justifying not getting divorced. And it's really rude to take your Lord and Savior out of context like that. Especially since you don't then go on one more verse to where He explains, "you shouldn't get divorced, you shouldn't get married,l and you shouldn't have sex at all." (Matthew 19:8-12)

It was the Apostle Paul who later added, "Well, if you can't keep your pants on, you should marry somebody." (1 Corinthians 7:8-9) And he never even met Jesus, so why are you taking his word?

The Bible can't even figure out what incest is. The definition comes from three different places in the Old Testament: Leviticus 18, Leviticus 20, and scattered around Deuteronomy. They're all very specifically written for men (remember, women are property), and the three sources don't even agree.

Best example: nowhere in the Bible does it say you can't have sex with your daughter. Both chapters of Leviticus tell you that your stepdaughter and your daughter-in-law are off-limits, but it's apparently open season on your own girlspawn.

(Also completely available as partners: all your cousins, your step-sister, your niece, any aunt on your mother's side, and Grandma.)

This biblical confusion about incest is emphasized with the fact that Lot, the only good man in Sodom or Gommorah, had drunken sex with both his daughters and conceived two sons: his son through his older daughter founded the Kingdom of Moab, and the one through his baby girl founded the Kingdom of Ammon. (Genesis 19:30-38)

More than that, though, Abraham, the holiest man in the Bible, is considered the father of all Christendom (and all the Jews, and Mohammed); he married his half-sister on his father's side. (Genesis 20:12) His son Isaac married his cousin Rebekah (Genesis 24:15). And both of the sons of Isaac married their cousins (Genesis 28:9, Genesis 29)

I'm not entirely clear what this says about the "Children of Abraham."

And most people already know that the Bible is full of examples of polygamy. Many, if not most, of the major prophets of God had two or more wives - Abraham and Jacob (obviously), Gideon (the guy who put all the Bibles in the hotel rooms), King David and the wisest of all men, King Solomon, are all fine examples.

And if anybody tries to claim that the Old Testament doesn't matter any more, thanks to Jesus? Well, you've just hit the jackpot.

First of all, Jesus said, over and over, that the Old Testament was still important, still valid, and, indeed, "all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness." (2 Timothy 3:16; also see Matthew 5:18-19, Luke 16:17, and Matthew 5:17, among many other places)

On top of which, and possibly more important, if the words of the Old Testament don't matter, then why is it they're opposed to homosexuals again?

Religion is fun.

Speak, Ricky, speak!

In an interview last week on CNN, Rick Santorum got a little cranky when the often-tedious Piers Morgan suggested he (Ricky) might, just possibly, be a little homophobic.



Now, that's a seven-minute video, and if you don't want to wade through all that, the money shot (heh) is as follows.

...the quote that I have been, quote, "criticized" for was almost identical to a quote in a 1980 Supreme Court case where the majority decision basically said what I said. And, by the way, the minority, Justice Scalia in this case -- it was Justice White who was Democratic appointee under John Kennedy who said pretty much exactly what I said and Justice Scalia pretty much said exactly what I said which is that if the Supreme Court establishes a right to consensual sexual activity, then it's hard to draw the line between what sexual activity will be permitted under the Constitution and it leaves open a long list of consensual activities that most people I think would find rather unappealing.

And so, that's what I said. I stand by the comment. Just like I'm sure Justice Scalia and Justice White stood by their comments.

So, here we have a fine example of Frothy trying to lube up his own record, so that he can ass-rape the Supreme Court.

(Note: I left all the meaningless crap in that second paragraph of his, just to show that I'm not taking him out of context. Please compare to the original, as well.)

See, little Ricky is a lawyer, but he's been mouthing meaningless political platitudes for so long that he can't keep his case-law straight. Because that "1980" Supreme Court decision? What he's thinking of is the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision, which upheld an anti-sodomy law in Georgia. (This was the majority opinion, written by Justice Byron White, that Santorum was trying to talk about, but then he got all confused.)


Now, while Santorum is trying to shove his "man on dog" quote down Justice White's throat, what White actually said was, in short, "There are victimless crimes, but they're still illegal. So even if you want to do something in private, there are other sexual crimes that we'd have to start listing and debating, and we don't want to do that." (Or, in his words, "We are unwilling to start down that road.")

So, not quite as extensive as Santorum's statement. And, more important, it was kind of stupid of Frothy to bring it up, since in 2003, Bowers was formally reversed by Lawrence v. Texas (which destroyed a sodomy law still on the books). That case was when Scalia wrote a pissy minority opinion (and that's why Frothy couldn't keep his "minority" and "majority" opinions straight).

Now, in dissenting against Lawrence Scalia whined:

...(the Texas law says that) certain forms of sexual behavior are "immoral and unacceptable," ... the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity...

If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, none of the above-mentioned laws can survive rational-basis review.

So that was at least a little closer to what Santorum actually said. He misquoted the losing side of an argument.

Which I think pretty much sums up his candidacy in one fell swoop.

A New Post on the Previous Issue: Civility

Since receiving comments in my inbox whose subject line automatically begins with an obscenity is getting a bit old now, I thought I might take the liberty of posting a brief new remark.

The people who have hijacked and nearly destroyed the political process in America take kindness, generosity and civility for weakness and are, therefore, both STUPID and EVIL. These people aren't simply misguided and in need of a little TLC and education – I've never fully bought the old Platonic saw that people never do what they themselves consider wrong but instead are just misguided in their thinking about what's right. Too many members of the American Right loathe multicultural, modern America intensely and obviously want to replace it with a perverted, primitive theocracy or a demented fascist nightmare, or both if possible. "Ignorance, Irrationality, Cruelty and Hate" are their watchwords, and there's no need to be delicate in denouncing this noisy faction or the depraved inhumanity it promotes. The chilly, blasted heath where King Lear rages in madness is a holiday resort compared to the world these morons want us all to live in. We owe them nothing but honest scorn. Foul language is another matter and isn't necessary, in my view.

Attention Republicans: Bugger Thyself

Short, sweet, and to the point!

Update: Our redoubtable raccoon, who is still recovering from a recent injury, has remembered us in our darkest hour.  Here is her comment which sums up the Swash Zone consensus:

As much as I abhor uncivil discourse, there has come a time now when our country and our lives are in the greatest of danger and we need to get loud and angry and if the "F" bomb gets us attention then I say drop it.

I'm tired of their glassy eyed, manical rantings and their disrespect for the political process and the judicial process and the president. I'm tired of hearing about some god that hates fags, wants Jews and blacks and liberals to die, and wants us to toss our constitution for good ole Kristian Law that will set us back 100 years. I would take the high road if it still existed but it does not - they have torn it down and ground it under their heels, now we fight fire with fire or we will lose everything we hold dear (Rockync, 10:02 AM - September 05, 2011).

Nonetheless, my original title was a bit over the top even for a stalwart dinosaur. In deference to the Saurischian, I have removed the F-Bomb and retitled this post ... with my humble cephalopod apologies.

Forget national politics.

This series is an attempt to explain (rather convincingly) where the real world is heading. And the people we elect are making it happen. Take a couple of hours to watch it, or not. It's up to you. Darkness can also be your friend.

INHERIT THE IGNORANCE

Apparently, in order to be supported by the GOP's base, a presidential candidate must debase him/herself and announce to the world his/her distrust of science. All of the presidential contenders, save for Jon Huntsman, have proudly voiced their doubts about Evolution as settled science, thus making monkeys of themselves in the eyes of enlightened minds in all corners of the world. All corners except in America, where we are at the bottom of the heap in all surveys that ask what percentage of our population accepts Evolution. Only Turkey is lower than we are.

This will warm the hearts of wilfull know-nothings and ensure that their children will carry on in their tradition of believing in a book written by Bronze Age superstitious, women-hating, old men. Good on them.

No amount of evidence will ever dissuade these types from their inscient world view. And as the presidential popularity polls show, the dumb and the ignorant will surely inherit the top Republican polling spot.

Here is Richard Dawkins, eminent ethologist and evolutionary biologist with his take on the lastest embarrassment from the GOP, Governor Rick Perry:

　
"There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party (I disavow the ridiculous ‘GOP’ nickname, because the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has lately forfeited all claim to be considered ‘grand’) is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.

Any other organization -- a big corporation, say, or a university, or a learned society - -when seeking a new leader, will go to immense trouble over the choice. The CVs of candidates and their portfolios of relevant experience are meticulously scrutinized, their publications are read by a learned committee, references are taken up and scrupulously discussed, the candidates are subjected to rigorous interviews and vetting procedures. Mistakes are still made, but not through lack of serious effort.

The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.
A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry’s and the Tea Party’s pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well.
Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.
[skip]
There are many reasons to vote against Rick Perry. His fatuous stance on the teaching of evolution in schools is perhaps not the first reason that springs to mind. But maybe it is the most telling litmus test of the other reasons, and it seems to apply not just to him but, lamentably, to all the likely contenders for the Republican nomination. The ‘evolution question’ deserves a prominent place in the list of questions put to candidates in interviews and public debates during the course of the coming election."
Richard Dawkins wrote this response to Governor Perry for
On Faith, the Washington Post’s forum for news and opinion on religion and politics.

Montezuma’s Revenge (Hint: Human Sacrifice is Good for You)

By Octopus

I have often wondered where John F. Kennedy cribbed the phrase, “ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.”

Researching the Internet yesterday for a clue, I finally located a source: Huitzilopochtli (plus a curious codicil from House Republicans, Eric Cantor and Ron Paul).

If you want to serve your country and heed the call of Cantor and Paul - which means pull the plug on FEMA, emancipate seniors from Social Security slavery, cast out MediScare, and gut food safety regulations - please note: Human sacrifice is pleasing to Huitzilopochtli.

No money for disaster relief?  No problem!  Let hurricanes drown all deadbeats on the Federal dole.  Distribute emergency food to the hungry?  Let them eat brioche!  Only 28,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths from tainted food each year?  Save money with salmonella!

With fewer folks making demands on the gubbermint, more supplies will surely trickle down to the rest of us. After all, human sacrifice is pleasing to Huitzilopochtli.

How many sacrificial human beings will it take to balance the budget?  To reach a savings of $2.7 trillion, a mere 100 sacrificial billionaires will suffice - compared to 163,279,483 middle-class Amerikaners.  But everyone knows billionaires have no hearts worthy of sacrifice, which is not pleasing to Huitzilopochtli.

Huitzilopochtli will be counting on us to do our civic duty.  So ask not what House Republicans can do for you - ask what you can do for House Republicans.

Math is hard, Barbie!

The Trophy Wife asked me a question, which turned out to have a slightly different answer than she thought. Her question was "When was the last hurricane to hit New York?"

Because Irene got more media attention than normal, she figured it had been a while.

As it turns out, there have been 84 "tropical or subtropical cyclones that have affected the state of New York since the 17th century." About one a year, recently.

However, looking over the list, I noticed something. The groups seemed roughly the same size, but the last one, up to modern day, was a decade. The groups preceding it were quarter centuries. Then a half century. Then a century.

So I charted it (thank you, Excel). Filtering out Irene (to keep it in even decades), the X Axis (that's the horizontal line, for those of you with a standard American education) is decades. The Y Axis (that's the other one) is the number of storms. (Feel free to do the math yourself.)



I'm not saying it means anything. Because we all know that climate change (a.k.a. "global warming") is a myth, right? Just because there have been increasing numbers of storms hitting New York since the Industrial Era? Coincidence, right?

Tropical Storm Irene and the Meteoric Rise of Ron Paul's Descent

Perhaps it won't be amiss to post this little piece alongside Capt. Fogg's now since we've gotten onto the subject of cynicism, snark, Irene and Ron Paul.  So here goes....

It was bound to happen, you know. While Ron Paul is by no means what you'd call an extremist – at least not, that is, if you go by a sufficiently rigorous definition of the term that involves forcing people to accept your beliefs and being willing to kill or imprison them if they don't – at a certain point the out-thereness of the man's philosophy, the almost infinite impracticability of it in the real world, couldn't hide under all the copies of Atlas Shrugged in the world piled up in one blessed spot.

I believe we have reached that point in the current presidential campaign. If you weren't too busy battening down your own hatches against H/TS Irene today or worrying about how poor old Uncle Harry and Aunt Matilda are doing over there on the East Coast, you may have noticed Rep. Paul popping up on your tv screen (here's an MSNBC clip, for example) explaining with patient passion that FEMA really shouldn't be involved in this whole operation since there's "no magic" about that outfit whatsoever. It's unnecessary, you see, because as we all know, helping people is a task best relegated to the various states and local government entities. That apparently remains true even when the help may need to be provided to millions across a huge swath of the country swamped and blasted by a storm itself the size of Texas or California.

When Ron Paul makes such a statement, he might as well have just admitted that he likes to cuddle up every night with a big stuffed bear named "Aynie the Pooh." The effect on anyone's ability to take him seriously is approximately the same. The word for the day is "Galveston," where a huge hurricane took thousands of Texans' lives back in 1900 – a period back to which Mr. Paul evidently looks nostalgically: "We ought to be like 1900…."

Perhaps his recent pronouncements are admirably consistent of Rep. Paul, but they're also apt to be taken rather badly by the 99.99999999% of the American public who don't insist on their libertarian ideologism in the middle of a monster storm that's pelting them with uprooted trees and flooding their homes. The healthy core of libertarianism has always been that its proponents genuinely favor civil liberty -- government shouldn't be snooping on you in your bedroom and meddling in your private life generally. But if the bed that was in your bedroom yesterday happens just now to be bobbing wildly in debris-strewn storm surge with you hanging on for dear life atop it (and the bedroom itself is you've no idea where), I think you really WANT some nosy government types on the lookout for you – as many as possible, to be precise. Even if there's nothing "magic" about them.

When libertarian philosophy meets the real world, the former almost invariably comes off looking mighty foolish and ineffectual, the helpless victim of massive forces like hurricane-force winds and corporate monopoly that it simply cannot process, not even in its dreams, if it has any. This is the proper stuff of college kids hashing out pure ideas in their dorm rooms, not something that belongs in the company of serious political deliberation for the benefit of anyone with a fair amount of life experience.

Manha de Carnival

Baseball? Football? Hell no, the American national pastime is snark, that kind of idiotic cynicism that makes the worthless hunk of big city, small minded protoplasm feel wise and worthwhile.

No, I didn't wake up this way this morning, but I did go looking for live streaming of the remnants of TS Irene on her way through New York. I do, after all have friends and relatives in the area and as of 10 AM today it looks like it won't be all that bad for those not foolish enough to go surfing or walking out on piers to see the waves as idiots are wont to do to the delight of the sharks.

No, what got to me were the endless comments from people using their good fortune to scream the usual brainless things about the inaccuracy of storm strength predictions. Ha, ha, ha -- the worst case scenario seems not to have occurred and as the first licks of wind began to affect the wormy apple, the giggling about the "experts," the government and their liberal inadequacy began.

So perhaps there were ten good heterosexual Christian people in the greater New York area and so God, who as you know is in control of all natural disasters affecting America, decided to spare the city. If so, that small group isn't evident in on line news commentaries. But God or no God, hurricane strengths are subject to too many variables to be accurately forecast so the smart person, the person who has been there, done that and had the T-shirt ripped off his back by the wind, ignores the giggling and prepares for the worst.

There aren't a hell of a lot of New Yawkahs who remember the storm of 1938. Even in Florida in 2004 the locals, many of them from New Yawk were smirking and snarking about the silliness of taking Francis seriously. It was fun to see them lined up at FEMA in their big Republican cars waiting sheepishly for food and water. Many of them no longer have houses in my part of Florida after a cat 2 and a cat 3 hitting the same town in the same month. Even so, in the following year some were still talking about Chicken Little when Wilma was predicted to be a weak Cat 1 yet by the time it came down my street, there were big oak trees rolling like tumbleweed in a Western movie and tall palms flapping like overcooked pasta or being torn to pieces and I still can't sleep through a storm for remembering the deafening noise of that storm.

So keep laughing you smug, know-it-all New York nitwits. Keep telling us we don't need FEMA or the National Weather Service or any silly thing that sounds like government -- just don't go looking for help when the looters come to your door, if you still have a door or are floating out to sea on the remnants of your house after a phone pole came through the wall at 160 MPH. Go have a Tea Party meeting in the soggy rubble stinking of drowned rats and dead crabs and tell yourselves about the every-man-for-himself paradise that comes from having no "government programs." I'm 800 miles away and it ain't my concern.