The brilliant George Carlin once said, “If you can nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some dumb schmuck will buy it from you”. Nobody demonstrates this better than the Not So Fun Fundamentalist Right crowd.

Let’s watch as they pull out the hammer and pound a few nails:

Bryan Fischer Among the Cannibals The American Family Association’s Backward Christian Soldier, Bryan Fischer, stands in front of a billboard-sized copy of the Constitution to proclaim Conservatives should be foursquare in favor of discrimination. In the speech he compares gay Americans  to,  “people who…eat the faces off homeless people.”

Apparently, Fish didn’t hear face-eater Rudy Eugene’s mom describing her son. She said he was, “a church boy” and Miami police confirmed it. Eugene was carrying a Bible when he stopped for lunch at the Donner Party Buffet. He was apparently straight and had a girlfriend who “felt safe” with him because he was so religious. The Fischerman is no friend of the heaven-sent, people-eating grizzly bear either.

Know Your Enemy: Lesbian Jane Lynch! All you Glee fans out there turn off your sets! Televangelist James Robison is convinced the show will destroy America! And here I thought it was the blatant ripoff of the equally lame series Fame. Damn that lesbian, Jane Lynch!

A Profile in Courage Pastor Curtis Knapp of the New Hope Baptist Church thinks LGBT folks have it too damn easy. They’re just like incestuous people and polygamists and so should be put to death, “We punish incest, we punish polygamy and various things. It’s only homosexuality that is lifted out as an exemption.”

Even though incest and polygamy aren’t capital offenses, too damn bad. Off ‘em anyway. But, the good pastor is a little squeamish. When asked on CNN if he should be killing gays he said, “No, I’m saying the government should. They won’t, but they should.”

So Sayeth the Dean of Wingnuts…Of course, what’s a round-up of the odd without Pat Robertson, the Dean of Wingnuts? The man who can pray away hurricanes compares polygamy, bestiality, and pedophilia among many other things.

Beasts Making the Beast With Two Backs Ah, the gay-begets-bestiality cabal is in full voice. Pastor Tim Rabon, of Raleigh’s Beacon Baptist Church, believes in the Rick Santorum man-on-dog sex theory. The pastor thinks redefining marriage is the Devil’s Dog’s work. “What is stopping them from refining marriage from a person and a beast? We’re not far from that.”

Tamara Scott, Michele Bachmann acolyte, doesn’t see dogs in the picture, but the Eiffel Tower? That’s another story. BTW, Michele was pretty worried about being shipped off to a FEMA-run concentration camp once upon a time.

Heil Hitler! Bryan Fischer being Bryan Fischer, he gets two mentions. He believes almost the entire Nazi Party was gay. I’m not sure exactly how that would work when gays are such a small percentage of the population and that Hitler considered himself Christian and wasn’t gay and the Nazis were famously homophobic.

Nothing Hugs Like HuggiesOne of my favorite things nailed together is Pastor Patrick Wooden’s contention that gay sex causes gay men to need diapers or butt plugs. Aside from the fact he seems to think the real reason men can reproduce is because semen and sh*t don’t mix. He had no opinion on whether straight people, some of them surely Christian, engaging in anal sex would leak like a meal filled with Olestra.

I assume he also opposes sex education.

All of these people’s boss might have been a Jewish carpenter, but I’m skeptical he built the sort of house they have in mind. It would’ve had the worst foundation imaginable, paper-thin walls they’d blow out with their own unprayed away bloviations, and a roof that even a mother would wish they jump from.

George, you’re right. These boobs keep nailing things together and dumb schmucks keep tossing the money in their collection plates.

Cross posted at The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks! More than politics, more than pop culture.

Kids do stupid things. Sometimes they know no better. Other times Mom and Dad don’t teach them right from wrong because they’re morons who don’t know right from wrong either. And sometimes, kids are just evil seeds. Yes, kids do stupid and inexplicable things. It is the way of the world.

Sometimes the stupid things catch up to them as adults. Mitt Romney is in that PR hell now. He supposedly led a group of boys – there’s that leadership thing he goes on and on about – and held down a kid with a ponytail, cut it off, and badgered the kid for being gay. That’s the sort of thing that causes kids to commit suicide these days. It probably did back then too, you just didn’t hear about it as often because suicide besmirched the family reputation so much it was hidden as often as not.

The Romney Hairborne Legion Attacks One of the bully boys met the poor hairless sot later in life. He learned that, indeed, the kid had been gay and the Romneycut had been a life changing affair. The member of the Romney Hairborne Legion apologized. It came late, but at least the guy apologized and owned up to his stupid youth.

On the other hand, Mitt first categorically denied it happened. Then he said it, um, MIGHT have happened and if it did he apologized. He defended his stupid youth by passing off the incident, if it happened at all, as a “prank” and using the bee’s knees, 1930 buzzword of the day, “hijinx”. Very jolly. Very fun. Twenty-three skidoo.

Now I’ve been on the receiving end of bullying up close and personal and stupidly reciprocated a time or two. But, a wedgie is a prank. Holding someone down, roughing them up because they’re gay, and cutting off their hair is a prank,  if by prank you mean something like waterboarding.

But hey, maybe it didn’t even happen. Never know. Mittens forgot. Besides, Mitt says he didn’t know the kid was gay.

Now the Mittenites have ferreted out a passage from Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father, in which he cops to once shoving a girl because his classmates teased him about the possibility that she was his girlfriend. He yelled at her and she ran away.

Some conservative pundasses – like Sean Hannity – rejoiced at this “good news”. “We have uncovered somebody who has actually admitted to engaging in real inappropriate behavior as a youth.”  He pointed out that Obama also openly admits he used drugs and alcohol as a youth, saying it “puts Romney and the bully issue to shame.”

A Drinking, Stoned College Kid…Really? Sean, a college kid who drank too much and fired up a doob or two…in 1980 fer chrissakes? Really? Now that’s some outlaw behavior. Real send ‘em to the gallows stuff. Nothing like your fellow anti-bully Rush Limbaugh’s brush with OxyContin and hydrocodone. Good thing he took his rehab time to reflect on his contention that drug addicts deserved life sentences. Change is good, eh Rush? Especially when yours is the life being sentenced.

But if you’re truthful about your own youth – face it, if you are this stupid as an adult you must’ve been a colossal moran [sic] as a kid – you probably kicked the crap out of some kid every morning before smoking the third  joint of the day while cooling your bruised dukes with a 6-Pack of Old Milwaukee. But we’ll never know because I suspect your memory on that score is as bad as the Scion of Salt Lake’s.

No true blue conservative would ever engage in such brutish, bullying behavior except, well, George the Lesser. Sort of a reverse noblesse oblige and all that. His cocaine and Wild Turkeyfests are well known. He looks like he has a little Captain in him if you catch my drift. I’d wager Skull and Crossbones had some ass-kicking hazing rituals too. But let bygones be bygones shall we?

So yes, Obama admitted his dirty deeds. Admitted them without anyone even asking. Sean, your boy can’t even remember if it happened. But you know what, however lopsided the rights and wrongs appear to be in both these cases it doesn’t much matter.

Both of them did something wrong. But once you’ve done a wrong, there is really no way to stuff it back under the rock from which it came. It sticks to you like glue.

The only thing you can do is apologize and try to make amends. Adults, when charged with stupid childish behavior, do not say, “Mom! It’s OK if I do it, he did it too!”  To which any wise Mom (or voter) would answer, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Two stupid kids don’t make a President either.

Cross posted at The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks! More than politics, more than pop culture

NICOLAUS COPERNICUS – 21st Century man.

I know how Copernicus must have felt.  He’s the fellow who first posited that the Sun, and not Earth, was at the center of the universe. For his trouble he was branded a heretic and ostracized by the Catholic church. It turns out Nicolaus was right and the Pope, not so much. It’s a familiar story. It has legs. It’s still happening at the hands of the far right ignorati.

Burying the Copernican HatchetI’m not sure some of America is even in the 21st century. After all, the Catholic church didn’t officially bury the Copernican hatchet until 1999. There’s careful consideration of the facts and then there’s a rip in the Catholic Space/Time Continuum. Or just plain denial like many other things, “Johnny, meet Father Bosco. He’ll be molesting you today.”

Across the nation, the electorate keeps putting people in office that are ignorant at best and willfully brain dead at worst. TN State Sen. Stacey Campfield (R), thinks heterosexual people are nearly immune from HIV and the disease reached humans via a gay airline pilot sexing it up with a monkey.

“Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community,” Campfield said. “It was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall.”

“Damn you United! Isn’t it enough that you charge us to check baggage?!”

Still, it’s not as if Campfield is alone in his ignorance. No lesser a Far Right-O-Con luminary than Rick Santorum once tried to explain how those filthy homos put us on a sure road to man-on-dog sex (though he denies it today).

As in Copernicus’s day, religion plays a key role in sewing the seeds of dumbassness. The Catholic Church thinks Obama probably wears the mark of the beast and Intelligent Designers think the Earth is 6,000 years old.

Noted Family Research Council crackpot, Tony Perkins, thinks homosexual characters in a Star Wars video game will damn all who play it to hell. Just to be clear software maker Bioware says there aren’t any scum sucking homosexual relationships in the game…yet. So Perkins must be launching a peremptory Iran-like strike against the Dark Side.

The far-right’s fear and loathing of the modern world is astounding. (Oklahoma Is Not OK) State Sen. Ralph Shortey is introducing legislation to keep you from getting an aborted fetus to go with that Big Mac.

“There is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors,” he said. “I don’t know if it is happening in Oklahoma, it may be, it may not be. What I am saying is that if it does happen then we are not going to allow it to manufacture here.”

The Right-O-Cons Seem Sane…to ThemselvesFear is what makes the Right-O-Con’s positions seem so sane…to them. It is the same fear that says a Muslim who has lived next door to you for decades has suddenly become a jihadist because they asked you to celebrate Ramadan with them. It is the same fear that is driving several state and local legislative bodies to enact anti-Sharia laws.

North Carolina state Rep. Larry Pittman,  is borrowing from Sharia because he’s rightfully up in arms over death row inmate Danny Robbie Hembree’s bragging about how easy life is in prison. No doubt the guy is scum and may deserve the death penalty. I don’t know. However, I’m not sure that hanging is any more beneficial than lopping off a hand for stealing.

“We need to make the death penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out. Every appeal that can be made should have to be made at one time, not in a serial manner,” Pittman wrote in a personal email. “If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them. For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well.”

Some of us look at these cases through the lens of Copernicus’s time. We fear what we do not understand and that fear drags us back into the Dark Ages. The human race has been there and done that.  Now it’s time we check this insane time travel and face the 21st Century instead of acting like a village full of superstitious peasants who believe a beast eats the moon each night.

We owe ourselves better than that or it’ll be, “Welcome to 1473.”

Cross posted at The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks!

Sex work holds an odd niche in America. To some, it’s strictly taboo in any situation. To others it’s a personal choice based on pay, circumstance (both private and public), or genuine preference for the work. Even sex workers have a difficult time in defining it as empowering or misogynistic.

The line between moral turpitude and hating both the sin and the sinner is a thin one indeed. Many people suggest Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart‘s definition was a too-weak copout that opened the floodgates to all sorts of naughtiness and moral rot.

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]“; Stewart wrote in an opinion, “and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…”

Last week a perfect example popped up in the news. Former porn star and current mainstream actress Sasha Grey participated in Read Across America by reading Dav Pilkey‘s Dog Breath to first and third graders. A predictable screed-screaming uproar immediately followed.

A Fatal Psychological Blast
How dare a filthy tramp read a kid’s book in a kid’s class? Just her meer presence was a fatal psychological blast to pious kids’ mental health. But, a few things further confuse an already confusing situation.

Dog Breath is a run of the mill elementary school page turner. There was no mention of sex in the book or classroom. The accused trollope was presumably approved by the Los Angeles school district (though they insisted she never appeared – photos to the contrary). Teachers monitored the readings to help protect the tikes from life’s fleshy evils. And, I assume the complaints probably came from a member of the pious set slogging through the evil porn muck they condemned.

But, there’s another Sasha Grey. She volunteered to read in a successful program. That’s a rare thing in these budget-decimated days. She said she’d volunteer again, though that’s a remote prospect given the current uproar.

Why Were Mommy and Daddy Showing Their Kid Porn?
If you’re one of the stone-casters, remember that she quit several years ago to follow a mainstream career – a move that would seem consistent with the view that she should cast the sin from her life to pave the way to salvation. Further, the morbid preoccupation over who she was didn’t extend to the young scholars. If it did, why were mommy and daddy showing the kid porn? Otherwise, how would they know who Sasha was.

Sex – whether for work, pleasure, or procreation – is a personal choice. How does it matter if you’re an Alabaman needing a vibrator to tingle your nether reasons? How is gay sex something that should offend one who’s never seen what goes on behind closed homo-doors? BDSM? Tickle fetishes? Furry fetishes? The list goes on.

The more important thing here is that she did a public service for the community. We should give her a medal for her public service, not tearing her down for having a perfectly legal career that ended several years ago. Your private sexual behavior boils down to this:

Whatever blows up your skirt (pun intended) should be OK.

Cross posted at The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks!