Really?

Really? REALLY?

Although not unexpected for Colorado Springs, where I spotted this today.

Subtext: OMG! The communist, homosexual-loving, Kenyan Antichrist who hates 'murika N-word in the White House is gonna sneak into your bedrooms, rape your wives and then force—force—them to get abortions!

Stupidity Gets Another Smackdown

From The Ed Show:

Another defeat for the hapless birther movement: President Barack Obama will be on the November election ballot in Kansas.

All three Republican members of the State Objections Board voted today allow Obama to be listed as a candidate for re-election, despite the protest of California lawyer/dentist Orly Taitz, one of the most prominent birthers in the country.

The board's action came four days after Joe Montgomery of Manhattan, Kansas, filed a complaint, saying he believed Obama was not a natural born U.S. citizen and therefore was ineligible to qualify for re-election.  But Montgomery withdrew his objection on Friday because of what he called intimidation directed at him and people around him.

When Taitz showed up at today's meeting, State Objections Board member Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach told her the deadline to file an objection had passed.

10 Questions to Help Determine if Your Religious Liberty Is Being Threatened

From a great little post over at Alternet:

This simple quiz will let you know if you're being oppressed.

1. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) I am not allowed to go to a religious service of my own choosing.
B) Others are allowed to go to religious services of their own choosing.

2. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) I am not allowed to marry the person I love legally, even though my religious community blesses my marriage.
B) Some states refuse to enforce my own particular religious beliefs on marriage on those two guys in line down at the courthouse.

3. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) I am being forced to use birth control.
B) I am unable to force others to not use birth control.

4. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) I am not allowed to pray privately.
B) I am not allowed to force others to pray the prayers of my faith publicly.

5. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) Being a member of my faith means that I can be bullied without legal recourse.
B) I am no longer allowed to use my faith to bully gay kids with impunity.

6. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) I am not allowed to purchase, read or possess religious books or material.
B) Others are allowed to have access books, movies and websites that I do not like.

7. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) My religious group is not allowed equal protection under the establishment clause.
B) My religious group is not allowed to use public funds, buildings and resources as we would like, for whatever purposes we might like.

8. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) Another religious group has been declared the official faith of my country.
B) My own religious group is not given status as the official faith of my country.

9. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) My religious community is not allowed to build a house of worship in my community.
B) A religious community I do not like wants to build a house of worship in my community.

10. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) I am not allowed to teach my children the creation stories of our faith at home.
B) Public school science classes are teaching science.

Scoring key:

If you answered "A" to any question, then perhaps your religious liberty is indeed at stake. You and your faith group have every right to now advocate for equal protection under the law. But just remember this one little, constitutional, concept: this means you can fight for your equality—not your superiority.

If you answered "B" to any question, then not only is your religious liberty not at stake, but there is a strong chance that you are oppressing the religious liberties of others. This is the point where I would invite you to refer back to the tenets of your faith, especially the ones about your neighbors.

Speaking of Leaving a Mark…

Fucking brilliant:

"I can assure you that gay people getting married will have zero effect on your life. They won't come into your house and steal your children. They won't magically turn you into a lustful cockmonster. They won't even overthrow the government in an orgy of hedonistic debauchery because all of a sudden they have the same legal rights as the other 90 percent of our population—rights like Social Security benefits, child care tax credits, Family and Medical Leave to take care of loved ones, and COBRA healthcare for spouses and children.

"You know what having these rights will make gays? Full-fledged American citizens just like everyone else, with the freedom to pursue happiness and all that entails. Do the civil-rights struggles of the past 200 years mean absolutely nothing to you? In closing, I would like to say that I hope this letter, in some small way, causes you to reflect upon the magnitude of the colossal foot in mouth clusterfuck you so brazenly unleashed on a man whose only crime was speaking out for something he believed in. Best of luck in the next election; I'm fairly certain you might need it.

"P.S. I've also been vocal as hell about the issue of gay marriage so you can take your 'I know of no other NFL player who has done what Mr. Ayanbadejo is doing' and shove it in your close-minded, totally lacking in empathy piehole and choke on it. Asshole." ~ Minnesota Vikings kicker Chris Kluwe, in a letter to Maryland state Rep. Emmett Burns, who has called for sanctions against a Baltimore Ravens player for supporting same-sex marriage.

Oh Suh-NAP!

This is gonna leave a mark:

"Barney Frank is a distinguished and honorable public servant. He has faced nearly 40 years of unspeakable hatred and persecution for being the most prominent and outspoken openly gay elected official in the country. Regardless of what he has to say about Log Cabin Republicans, the notion that they would suggest a man as brave and upstanding as Congressman Frank is either cowardly or a bully is both deluded and absurd.

"The true bullies are the hate-mongers in the GOP who want to strip us of our rights and shove us back into the closet. And 'cowardly'? Cowardly is making pathetic excuses for the backward and misguided anti-LGBT policies of your Party. The Log Cabin Republicans are the most weak-kneed, sycophantic apologists I've ever encountered. After their dismal performance at the RNC convention driving the GOP platform even farther to the right, they should give back all the money they've fleeced from their donors and close the doors." ~ Jerame Davis, National Stonewall Democrats executive director, via press release, in response to this.

I Will Answer Any Questions…


…except those related to abortion.

And Todd Akin.

And my years at Bain.

Also I will not be answering any questions about my family, my residences or my term as governor of Massachusetts.

Questions about my religion or my taxes are also off-limits, as are all questions about my vice presidential nominee's positions, my Party's  platform and the entire Bush Administration.

Also no questions about droughts.

Source.

How to Destroy Your Organization's Reason for Existence in a Single Sentence

"Because you believe something is wrong, doesn't mean you make it illegal." ~ Brian Brown @ 47:55

After watching this, I am convinced Bryan Brown, Maggie Gallagher and the rest of these "protector of traditional marriage" buffoons will never move out of the 16th Century, no matter how many facts are presented to them.

And y'know, I kind of feel sorry for them, living out their pathetic little lives locked in such a rigid mindset, totally unable or unwilling to admit they're wrong.

Sad, really.

Here Comes the Whaaaaaambulance!

The billboards are being called "incendiary" by all the usual suspects, but personally I feel the time is long overdue for all bigoted, hateful religions to get a major public smackdown.

Okay, Let Me Get This Straight

According to Christian mythology, God is omniscent. God created Adam and Eve (not Adam and Steve, as we're so often reminded). Eve was tricked by Satan (in the form of a talking snake) into eating of the Tree of Knowledge.

Because of that, we lost our immortality and were cast out of the Garden of Eden to live out our lives in pain and suffering. (And apparently snakes were also stripped of the gift of gab as part of the punishment…just because.)

Let's stop right there for a moment.

The Christians' invisible friend-in the-sky is perfect and all knowing. Yet he created beings who—by being omniscient—he knew from the very beginning would be flawed. In other words, humans were built broken (and therefore created imperfectly) to begin with. So if God is incapable of making mistakes, that means he intentioinally created humans imperfect and subject to sin.

WTF? I mean seriously. WTF?

He created imperfect humans so they'd sin and "force" him to cast them out of the Garden.

What kind of sick fuck would do this?

Good ol' Yaweh, that's who.

This Christian God sounds like a real asshole.

And if Adam and Eve (and later, their two sons) were the only people on Earth, where the fuck did Cain and Able get wives? Were they screwing Eve? So they married their own sisters? Where in the Big Book of Traditional Marriage does that option appear? (Turns out, more often than you'd think.)

But hah, not this time. Instead they went east into the Land of Nod, where there were apparently already a large group of people living quite contentedly without any knowledge whatsoever this wondrous Garden and its psychotic keeper to the west.

W…T…F?  Where the hell did these people come from if there were only supposed to be four living people on the entire face of the planet up until this point?

If you ask any man of the cloth this question (when he's not busy raping pre-pubescent boys) the answer is generally, "Some things are just taken on faith." In other words, shut up and don't ask questions.

My brain hurts.

But let's back up even further.

Perfect, all knowing Christian sky-fairy creates everything—including another product of the fevered Christian imagination—angels.  But one of them rebels and is "cast out." So once again we're shown that God isn't perfect, or that he just intentionally creates imperfect things that he enjoys torturing, like a kid with a magnifying glass encountering an ant hill on a sunny day.

Why does the word "psychopath" keep coming to mind?

Later on in the Big Book of Lies (aka the BuyBull), God says "Whoopsie!" and decides that humanity—after being fruitful and multiplying—didn't turn out exactly like he'd intended again and should be killed…except for one small family who is then tasked with saving a pair of every living creature on earth. Or at least within walking distance of their home.

What's the matter? Isn't this God quite capable of saving all the animal life he wants on his own? Or is Norman Bates already growing impotent? And what about the plants, for chrissake? If the planet needs a reboot to rid it of the sin that Mr. Invisible created in the first place, why not just send it careening into the sun and start again from scratch? Or is that now beyond his power? I mean seriously…a flood?

And one more question: If all current humanity sprang from that one little family, where did all the races come from?

But going back to the Garden of Eden for a moment. Let's play a little game and say that Eve didn't eat of the Tree and humanity was never cast out from the Garden or lose its immortality. Can you imagine what a sty that place would be with fifteen to twenty billion of us trying to squeeze in there now? (Remember, people don't die, but they sure don't stop reproducing either!)

Anyway…

Later on, magic sky fairy realizes that he's fucked up again and Noah's descendants turn out just as bad their predecessors. You'd think that by now the idiot would realize this, right? (Definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.) But this time, instead of flooding the place (or sending it careening into the sun) he's going to go down there as himself…as his son…to torture and descend into hell so that whoever believes in this ultimate sacrifice latest bit of crap doesn't have to go to that make believe place themselves.

These fairy tales are fine for iron-age savages who don't have the deductive reasoning—or scientific history to back them up—that modern men do, but c'mon guys…it's the 21st Century. We've landed men on the moon and have just put a probe the size of a car on Mars. If ever there was a time for the "All Powerful" to come down and say "Great job, guys!" it's now. But since he's been conspicuously absent from the goings on of our daily lives going on 2000 years now and from all accounts is a major DICK, I think it's high time for him to put up or shut up.

This is why I'm an Atheist. Because all these magic stories are pure, unadulterated bullshit.

So What?

So what if Chick-Fil-A is now reporting that the amount of bigot-fueled money they raked in on "Chicken Appreciation Day" was record setting? Does that mean that the same troglodytes who took time out of their busy day of Bible Study and gay obsessing to stuff their pie holes with hormone-injected, genetically modified chicken tits are going to do that EVERY DAY?

I think not.

But what the professional gay-haters fail to realize is that unlike this one day spike, the continued avoidance of Chick-Fil-A by GBLTs and their supporters is going to affect their overall bottom line as time goes on—and had the added benefit of showing us exactly who our real friends aren't.

I will admit that prior to all this happening I'd eaten at the restaurant only a handful of times so I was never a huge consumer, but now, myself, friends and family have vowed to never set foot in the place again.

Enjoy your one day of hate-fueled financial splendor Mr. Cathy. It's not likely to repeat often enough to offset the business that your stupid, prideful pronouncements have permanently lost your company.

 

Oh, SuhNAP!

From AMERICAblog:

God is in the nuggets

The God of Gluttony smiled upon all those waddling through long lines at Chick-fil-a Wednesday to celebrate their pride in being heterosexual, bigoted and obese.

Sitting in their idling cars with the AC running, they waited their turn to take communion in the form of a typical American factory-farmed chicken breast laced with all the natural goodness of antibioticsBenadryl, and arsenic (sorry, "organic" arsenic), then rolled in white flour, powdered sugar, butter, salt and deep fried.

In a culture that readily accepts highly-processed substances as "food," it was only a matter of time before we found people going to the same trough to meet their other needs, from spirituality to political expression.

In a matter of days, we've seen the meteoric rise of a brand new symbol of moral righteousness: the greasy fast food bag. Long thought of as mere garbage, this former agent of death is now the exulted symbol of a desperate people's moral compass (life imitates art). Politicians like Sarah Palin and Lindsey Graham proudly pose with it (oblivious to how gay their photo opps actually came off). I imagine Republicans will soon be signing pledges of loyalty to their chicken god.

The scenes were repulsive. Supposedly civilized people turning to the drive-through window for a super-sized order of malnutrition, warped spirituality, and bigoted political discourse.  (Obesity and arteriosclerosis all being part of God's plan, praise the Lord.)

Though not a God you or I might be familiar with.  Rather, a cheap fast-faith God who shares their prejudices, along with free refills of hate and intolerance

10 Things Most Americans Don't Know About America

From Postmasculine:

Imagine you have a brother and he's an alcoholic. He has his moments, but you keep your distance from him. You don't mind him for the occasional family gathering or holiday. You still love him. But you don't want to be around him.

This is how I lovingly describe my current relationship with the United States. The United States is my alcoholic brother. And although I will always love him, I don't want to be near him at the moment.

I know that's harsh, but I really feel my home country is not in a good place these days. That's not a socio-economic statement (although that's on the decline as well), but rather a cultural one.

I realize it's going to be impossible to write sentences like the ones above without coming across as a raging prick, so let me try to soften the blow to my American readers with an analogy:

You know when you move out of your parents' house and live on your own, how you start hanging out with your friends' families and you realize that actually, your family was a little screwed up? Stuff you always assumed was normal your entire childhood, it turns out was pretty weird and may have actually fucked you up a little bit. You know, dad thinking it was funny to wear a Santa Claus hat in his underwear every Christmas or the fact that you and your sister slept in the same bed until you were 22, or that your mother routinely cried over a bottle of wine while listening to Elton John.

The point is we don't really get perspective on what's close to us until we spend time away from it. Just like you didn't realize the weird quirks and nuances of your family until you left and spent time with others, the same is true for country and culture. You often don't see what's messed up about your country and culture until you step outside of it.

(continue reading)