Once in awhile, you have a moment where you really see how the Equal Rights Amendment would, contrary to the claims of opponents, have a positive effect on our laws. Lily Ledbetter would have won her case, I suspect, because even the most law-bending reactionary justices would have had trouble denying her claims. Same story with Gonzales v. Carhart, or any abortion restriction really, since they’re all based on the idea that women are second class citizens who can legally have fewer rights than men, and in the case of Carhart, can be treated as mentally inferior as a class to men. I have to wonder if it would make it much easier to challenge abstinence-only education in schools, since the materials invariably come from religious organizations with anti-woman and homophobic agendas.

Maybe not. These groups do try to scrub some of their more offensive beliefs about gays’ and women’s inferiority out of the textbooks, with varying degrees of success. Still, it’s a strange situation, as if our government was accepting history textbooks written by SPLC-recognized hate groups, so long as they make a half-assed effort to cover up their more odious racist assumptions. Because once you get into the thick of the Christianist world, where they’re letting their hair down, their jaw-dropping ideas about women (basically, that they’re property) will shock even the hardened wingnut watchers.

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The Skepticality podcast has been doing a real bang-up job of covering the controversy over “Intelligent Design” propaganda piece Expelled, mostly be interviewing the various scientists touched directly by the controversy. The most recent interview was one of the most frustrating—Dr. Randy Olson, who moved from being a biologist to being a filmmaker. Dr. Olson has a lot of criticisms of people he calls “evolutionists”, but I got the feeling he was more interested in knocking heads than really being right, and he might do well to reconsider some of his own ideas. Even though he agrees with people who accept the theory of evolution, he insists throughout the interview in using the term “evolutionist”. This is short of calling someone a “Darwinist”, but it’s still falling for a right wing frame. The right wing frame is to suggest the the controversy is over a clash between two belief systems of equal evidential validity: Christianity and “Darwinism”, much like their other favorite clash, between Christianity and Islam. And that the battle is merely to be won on faith. But evolutionary theory is not a belief system, and nor is it necessarily in conflict with Christianity, since most mainstream Christian churches accept it the same as they accept that the Earth goes around the Sun, contrary to Biblical claims otherwise. It’s a well-established theory with no real evidence against it, and mountains of evidence for it. Mind-boggling, impossible to tally amounts of evidence for it. Using terms like “evolutionist” undermines this reality. Dr. Olson would not call people who accept the reality of gravity “gravitationalists”, so why buy into the right wing frame on this one?

Obviously, you can’t just call the defenders of evolutionary theory biologists, because more than biologists defend it—the larger scientist community and non-scientists like me are avid defenders of the importance of accepting reality. And of course, this group has religious and non-religious people in it. So what to call them? I suggest “reality-based community”, which has more syllables than “evolutionists”, but rolls off the tongue more easily. The best part about it is that it reframes the debate in more accurate terms: As one between people who accept evidence and appreciate knowledge, and people who insist on viewing the world through a magical lens.

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(UPDATE: Now that he’s going to be the GOP’s nominee, John McCain finally “discovered” how radioactive Rod Parsley is and repudiated him as well. There will definitely be a fundie eruption over this one.)

Today John McCain finally gave the boot to batsh*t fundie Pastor John Hagee of the 17,000-member Cornerstone Church in Texas after audio was released of the televangelist saying that Hitler had been sent by God to help Jews reach the Promised Land via the Holocaust. This was nothing new, however, so one wonders what rock the Arizona senator and his staff have been hiding under:

[I]n his 2006 book “Jerusalem Countdown”, Hagee proposed the theory that “anti-Semitism, and thus the Holocaust, was the fault of Jews themselves — the result of an age old divine curse incurred by the ancient Hebrews through worshiping idols and passed, down the ages, to all Jews now alive.” He also wrote that “Most readers will be shocked by the clear record of history linking Adolf Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church in a conspiracy to exterminate the Jews.”

Of course it would be interesting to know why this particular insanity crossed the line for McCain, since he had previously refused to reject the endorsement of Armegeddon proponent Hagee, who has condemned Catholics, gays, women, blacks and more from the pulpit and on video.

We’ve been blogging about the juicy-mouthed Patriot Pastor for a long time now. Apparently this influential nutbag has finally caught fire on the blogs.

More below the fold.
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And I thought I was through with the Prada-wearing pontiff after his expected bleating about man-woman marriage in light of the Cali Supreme Court’s ruling.

While gay state-side Catholics are told by the church that they can be gay — but celibate, take a look at the “ex-gay” BS Papa’s reps are shoveling over in Poland, a country where half of the population believes homosexuality is a sin. It’s right out of the Exodus International playbook. (PageOneQ):

The Catholic Church has created rehabilitation centers in Poland to rehabilitate gay people and “get them back on the right path.”

The Odwaga Center uses therapy, prayer and chastity to teach its patients to resist their homosexual impulses. Men at the center are taught to play football and women are taught to cook.

“When you want a candy for example, you can resist and have it later,” said Lena Wojdan, a psychologist at the center. “And you can trade it for a piece of chocolate.

Good grief, what polluted thinking. Watch the AFP report on it below the fold.
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You knew the Prada Pope had to make a statement after the California Supreme Court said OK to marriage equality.

One day after California overturned a ban on same-sex marriage, the Holy Father has firmly stated that only marriage between a man and a woman is moral.

…While the Pope did not directly mention the ruling in California in his address to the Forum of Family Associations and the European Federation of Catholic Family Associations, Benedict XVI stressed the importance of the traditional family for the good of society.

“The union of love, based on matrimony between a man and a woman, which makes up the family, represents a good for all society that can not be substituted by, confused with, or compared to other types of unions,” he said.

He continued by speaking of the rights of the traditional family, “founded on matrimony between a man and a woman, the natural cradle of human life.” Mention of the need to defend the family is not uncharacteristic for Pope Benedict, but his statement takes on particular relevance following the California ruling.

(Here are some wonderful photos from a celebration in West Hollywood after the California Supreme Court’s historic decision.)

Since Pope Benedict has showered love on the bonds of heterosexual marriage yet again, I thought I’d post this food for thought. A horror on Long Island, NY:

Two toddlers have been placed in the care of Suffolk County Child Protective Services after police arrested their parents on drug and endangerment charges.

Suffolk police responded to a Shell Road home around 3 pm May 9 after receiving a tip of possible animal abuse, according to police reports. They discovered a dog locked with its own filth in a small cage, without water, and entered the home.

Inside, they found a 4-year-old boy naked and a 2-year-old boy wearing a dirty diaper. They also found Jeffrey Littlefield, 24, and Heather Littlefield, 23, the boys’ parents, apparently under the influence of drugs, along with more than 200 used and uncapped hypodermic needles and “at least one hypodermic needle loaded with drugs,” according to a police statement.

Needles were in “virtually every room in the house,” the statement added. Also confiscated were two rifles with ammunition, several knives, used glassine bags and other drug paraphernalia, police said.

When Jeffrey Littlefield approached officers, he stumbled to the floor; Heather Littlefield was found unconscious on the bathroom floor, police said.

Another edition of “What’s Cary Tennis been smoking?” He’s been a lot better lately, so there’s not been any reason to write posts wondering about the potency levels of his preferred smoking materials, but today’s column is a doozy. The guy who writes in has a Bible-thumping friend, and the letter writer is an atheist, and they have fun with their contentious differences. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, right?* Now his friend, who teaches at a church school, is being pressured to teach young earth creationism to the kids, and the guy is fixing to do it, after going through a hefty process of convincing himself that he’s really considered the evidence, which is impossible, because honest engagement with the evidence in this case leads to one conclusion—evolution is the reality. I don’t say this lightly. We all have biases and prejudices that color our views and in many cases, the evidence is hazy enough that people can have real disagreements with no real conclusion. This isn’t true in the contentious debate between evolutionary theory and Adam and Eve. Objectively, one side has marshaled an irrefutable amount of evidence and the other is blowing smoke out their asses.

So what his friend is doing is that he already decided to bend over for the bullshit and is looking for a rationalization for it, so he doesn’t have to admit that he’s a wanker. Our letter-writer, however, is livid. He thinks teaching creationism is a form of child abuse, and while I think the term is overheated, I agree that using children in service of whack-a-doodle ideologies is cruel to children, especially in cases where your lies to them could have serious, long-term negative consequences on their job prospects. (The whole classroom, for instance, is automatically seeing any chance of going into sciences plummet through the floor because of this stuff.) Tennis, however, has one of his goofier answers, which is for this friend to dispassionately treat the misuse of these children as if he’s reading a book on anthropology.

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The rapist/murderer-releasing, Christian Reconstructionist-supported, Man-On-Dog wannabe, former Arkansas governor, and Baptist minister-without-a-theology-degree Mike Huckabee is back in the news — at least at U.S. News & World Report, in its Capital Commerce column.

A top McCain fundraiser with access to McCain’s inner circle, as well as one of those infamous “top GOP strategists” are saying that the Arizona senator has Pastor Huck at the top of his VP pick list. U.S. News’s James Pethokoukis on the purported logic of picking Huckabee.

1) He is a great campaigner and communicator who could both shore up support in the South among social conservatives (Huckabee is a former Baptist minister) and appeal to working-class voters in the critical “Big 10″ states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio.

2) As any pollster knows, voters search for candidates who “care about people like me,” and Huckabee would probably score a lot higher on that quality than millionaire investor Mitt Romney. Plus, given all the turmoil on Wall Street, 2008 would seem to be a bad year to pick a former investment banker for veep.

3) Economic conservatives and supply-siders may balk, but the threat of four years of Obamanomics and higher investment, income, and corporate taxes might be enough to keep them on board.

More below the fold.
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God, I’m so scared this will turn out to be a forgery, but let’s hope not. I mean, it makes perfect sense that Einstein would have been an atheist, but he’s been held up by religious people as a “good” guy who said all the right things about how god is real and great and the universe is beyond comprehension, that part of me has bought into it. Maybe he issued pandering statements in public but felt differently in private?

But what really makes this letter awesome is that he doesn’t play around.

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

“No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this,” he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper……

“For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions,” he said.

“And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people.”

Please let this be true. It’s just so awesome.

Kudos to Catholics for Choice for putting together a report exposing that Bill Donohue is not who he says he is. He claims to be a defender of Catholics against bigotry, but instead, he’s a right wing shill who mainly focuses on partisan political attacks. Scott Swenson has the story. Here’s a taste.

In a 43-page report released Monday, The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights: Neither Religious, Nor Civil, Catholics for Choice documents a pattern of media and political manipulation by Donahue, his organization, and his supporters. His base of support comes from the most politicized leaders of the Catholic hierarchy, including Cardinal Egan, and a board that reads like a Who’s Who of partisan Republican politics (L. Brent Bozell III, Alan Keyes, Kate O’Beirne, Linda Chavez, Kenneth Whitehead, Lawrence Kudlow, Thomas Monaghan, William Simon, Jr.). Far from protecting Catholics from bigotry, Donahue plays the victim card to advance a narrow, socially conservative, hierarchical and patriarchal political view.

Read the whole thing.

The emergency room at hospitals are surreal places, and I always wonder how people who work there full time deal with it. One broken bottle of salsa on our tile floor, one misplaced foot, one aborted attempt to remove the sliver of glass with tweezers, one sinking realization that the attempts were just pushing it in further, and I find myself face down on a hospital bed with the doctor rolling up one of the bells on my cute new corduroy pants to keep from getting iodine and blood on them while he pulls out the sliver. Now I’m moving slowly and cautiously all along my left side, because not only does my foot hurt, but so does my entire left arm from the tetanus shot. To add to the surreal nature of my afternoon, after we got home, a short thunderstorm dumped giant, ill-formed hail all over our apartment complex, putting a dent in the top of my truck.

The hurry-up-and-wait nature of the E.R. meant I had a chance to finish Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer. My mother gave me her copy a long time ago, and I figured with the recent raid on a polygamous cult in Texas, I should bone up on the information about Mormon fundamentalism inside this book. I found the book to be a fair book, empathetic towards why people are drawn to Mormonism and fascinated by the religion’s perseverance while pulling no punches in exposing how the history of the church breeds this conservatism that made the fundamentalists inevitable, along with the sexual abuse they dish out to young people of both sexes.

The ostensible purpose of the book is to chronicle the story of the Lafferty brothers, two men who, angry that the wife of their youngest brother was resisting their attempts to transform their entire family into a polygamous fundamentalist Mormon one, decided to murder her and her baby daughter. The daughter’s death was justified because of her gender; daughters of “bitches” grow up to be forbiddingly independent-minded women as well was the theory, a theory that makes more sense if you really understand the Mormon obsession with lineage. In telling this story, though, Krakauer also tells the story of how the LDS church evolved, especially how the doctrine of polygamy was, at various times, fiercely defended and just as fiercely rejected, depending on the need to either separate the Mormons from the mainstream of America, or to embrace it.*

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Secular and religious schlock: Separated at birth.

As much as I’d like to puzzle over why evangelical Christianity does so well by putting out mediocre pop culture products to compete with the larger world—why do people take the imitations over the real thing?—the answer seems obvious enough to me. Could it be that Christian pop culture really isn’t significantly worse than the steady drumbeat of mediocre product put out by the secular entertainment industry? I mean, you look at the pop culture ripped off described in this article and the resounding realization is that it’s not like Christians are really going to make the products more mediocre as a rule.

At a Christian retail show Radosh attends, there are rip-off trinkets of every kind—a Christian version of My Little Pony and the mood ring and the boardwalk T-shirt (”Friends don’t let friends go to hell”). There is Christian Harlequin and Christian chick lit and Bibleman, hero of spiritual warfare. There are Christian raves and Christian rappers and Christian techno, which is somehow more Christian even though there are no words. There are Christian comedians who put on a Christian version of Punk’d, called Prank 3:16.

And if they are more mediocre, then they’re closer to the baseline of mediocrity that defines the initial products, a mediocrity that is central to profitability. Mediocre pop culture and fundamentalist Christianity are a perfect marriage, because the dimwittery of America that finds thinking and developing tastes too hard—the people who would have liked Creed, Christian messages or not—is fundamentalist Christianity’s audience.

I have a response piece up at RH Reality Check to Matt Taibbi’s article about John Hagee’s church, and it’s clear to me that as odd as the megachurches are—especially when they have speaking in tongues and demon explusion, as Hagee’s church does—they also gain popularity from having a really good grasp of the American middlebrow mediocrity culture that maximizes audiences so easily. The Rush Hour movies, American Idol albums, dinner at Chili’s, and embracing your inner child at Hagee’s church all inhabit that area of of mindless posing as engagement that marks this culture. Christian pop culture isn’t odd, but the most natural thing in the world. It’s something that I really realized after going to karaoke a few times where someone inevitably sings the Carrie Underwood song “Jesus Take The Wheel“. Is this mainstream schlock or Christian schlock? Both, and the two are firmly intertwined and not as easily separated as this article implies they can be.

From Echidne, a jaw-dropping tale from the fundie vs. reason battleground in our public schools.

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.

But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land ‘O Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.

“I get a call the middle of the day from the supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue. You can’t take any more assignments. You need to come in right away,’” he said.

When Piculas went in, he learned his little magic trick cast a spell that went much farther than he’d hoped.

“I said, ‘Well Pat, can you explain this to me?’ ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’ [he said]. Wizardry?” he asked.

Read that next to this post by tristero, to really get that he’s not kidding when he says this.

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From the Golden State, a bizarre and ridiculous firing of a teacher for not signing a loyalty oath.

When Wendy Gonaver was offered a job teaching American studies at Cal State Fullerton this academic year, she was pleased to be headed back to the classroom to talk about one of her favorite themes: protecting constitutional freedoms.

But the day before class was scheduled to begin, her appointment as a lecturer abruptly ended over just the kind of issue that might have figured in her course. She lost the job because she did not sign a loyalty oath swearing to “defend” the U.S. and California constitutions “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

The loyalty oath was added to the state Constitution by voters in 1952 to root out communists in public jobs. Now, 16 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its main effect is to weed out religious believers, particularly Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

This arcane requirement offended Gonaver, who is a Quaker. She in fact offered to sign the oath if she could also submit a statement explaining her objection, something commonly offered in other states under circumstances like this. That didn’t fly either.

Cal State Fullerton rejected her statement and insisted that she sign the oath if she wanted the job. “I wanted it on record that I am a pacifist,” said Gonaver, 38. “I was really upset. I didn’t expect to be fired. I was so shocked that I had to do this.”

California State University officials say they were simply following the law and did not discriminate against Gonaver because all employees are required to sign the oath. Clara Potes-Fellow, a Cal State spokeswoman, said the university does not permit employees to submit personal statements with the oath.

“The position of the university is that her entire added material was against the law,” Potes-Fellow said.

Are we going to hear from all the religious freedom “experts” on this, you know, the fundies who are quick to declare that they are being victimized by the state for their anti-gay, allegedly bible-based beliefs?

Oh man, the more I hear about this movie Expelled, the funnier it gets.

The producers of “Expelled” spent two years interviewing scores of scientists, doctors, philosophers, and public leaders, including University of Minnesota biology professor P.Z. Myers, who does not support alternative theories of evolution. The clip of “Imagine,” which is audible for approximately 15 seconds, is used in a segment of the documentary in which the film’s narrator and author Ben Stein comments on statements made by Myers and others about the place of religion. In the documentary Stein says: “Dr. Myers would like you to think that he’s being original but he’s merely lifting a page out of John Lennon’s songbook.” This is followed by an audio clip of Lennon’s song “Imagine,” specifically, the lyrics “Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too.”

That wingnuts have held a grudge against that song for 37 years tells you how small their world really is. Did they really think the plebes could be sheltered from doubt in god if that damn former Beatle hadn’t penetrated the Berlin wall of religious censorship? Or do they really think John Lennon invented atheism?

The more I hear about this movie, the more clear it becomes that it’s patched together using email forwards.

I’ve been hanging onto this awhile, but I knew it would come up: the Anti-Defamation League has condemned Expelled for using the tragedy of the Holocaust in service of an anti-science agenda.

Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness.

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

It’s initially bizarre to see creationists—who are largely fundamentalist Christians—hide behind Holocaust accusations on this issue, since the major factor that led Jews to be the scapegoated group was centuries of Christians scapegoating Jews, accusing them of killing Jesus and of course reserving them the place of the especially not-saved, ideas that would pretty much die if fundies didn’t keep them alive. But it’s not actually that big a surprise to anti-choice movement watchers like myself, because the Holocaust allusions are big with the anti-choice nuts.* And in the annals of wingnuttery, abortion (and birth control for some) and evolutionary theory are like the same thing pretty much, so of course they’re going to use the same language to describe them. The two get conflated all the time, like in this trailer for Expelled.

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I will give Ronald Rychlak props for one thing — bringing the objection of religious institutions to gay and lesbian couples marrying to the bottom $$$ line.

Regardless of what it is called, legal sanctioning of homosexual relationships creates a host of unintended consequences and constitutes a serious threat to religious liberty.

Consider what happened in Massachusetts in 2004: Justices of the peace who refused to preside over same-sex unions due to moral or religious objections were summarily fired. Since same-sex unions were entitled to be treated the same as traditional marriages, this refusal was discrimination and a firing offense.

What about a priest or minister who similarly refuses to preside at such ceremonies? Obviously the state can’t fire such people, but it is easy to foresee other sanctions — such as loss of tax benefits — being imposed on churches.

The piece cites the NJ complaint by a lesbian couple who wanted to use a Methodist ministry-owned pavilion for their civil union ceremony. While it was allowed to ban same-sex couples, the Garden State revoked the ministry’s tax-free status.

These people fail to realize that the government doesn’t have to subsidize, through tax-breaks, a church’s ability to discriminate. More whining:

If homosexual marriages or civil unions are the equivalent of traditional marriages, you can’t discriminate. If you do, at the very least you put your government benefits at risk.

This is the same rationale that was used by the Supreme Court in 1983 to uphold stripping Bob Jones University of its tax-exempt status due to its racial policies.

And so, this means what? Should BJU be allowed to ban interracial dating? It appears the world didn’t come to an end when that onerous policy was abandoned. These folks want Uncle Sam to subsidize their ability to discriminate.

Carr2d2 has a post up at Skepchick examining whether or not “Battlestar Galactica” is propaganda-through-subterfuge, luring fans into Mormonism against our wills. She’s responding to emails and websites that reference the show’s peculiar history to make the leap into arguing that it’s propaganda. But calling the show Mormon propaganda is a strained argument on its surface, as carr2d2 explains. The premise of the show—taken from the original, which was created by a devout Mormon writer—does resemble the Book of Mormon, particularly the central importance of the Lost Tribe of Israel (Earth on the show). But beyond the bare bones of the mythology, there’s no reason to think the re-imagined version that is so popular today is promoting a particularly Mormon point of view. As carr2d2 points out, if anything the show (as it currently stands) seems to argue for religious pluralism coupled with heavy doses of tolerance to keep the peace. It’s worth waiting to see what evolves from the struggle between polytheists and monotheists that’s emerged in recent episodes, though. (I haven’t seen last night’s episode—we were at Harold and Kumar, which I probably should review—so maybe something changed.) She also argues that the show’s remarkably non-judgmental attitudes towards drinking, sex, and swearing discourages the Mormon propaganda reading. I would strenuously add that women have more power, freedom, and access to public roles in the 12 colonies than Mormonism would allow. Changing some major male characters on the original show to female characters (notably Boomer and Starbuck) is a big raspberry to the religiosity of the original.

But what really bothers me about the “OMG MORMON” thing is touched on in this part of carr2d2’s post:

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I can’t believe the MSM has spent all this air time on a pastor who isn’t running for president. Oh, OK, yes I can. Since Obama “divorced” Wright in the press conference yesterday, my question is whether the bar for the media will move even higher. His former pastor’s ego was obviously bruised from the (quite frankly, sensitive) rebuke of his past comments that he received from the presidential hopeful in Obama’s A More Perfect Union speech.

Some of what Wright said at the National Press Club was clarifying and on point:

Maybe this dialogue on race, an honest dialogue that does not engage in denial or superficial platitudes, maybe this dialogue on race can move the people of faith in this country from various stages of alienation and marginalization to the exciting possibility of reconciliation.

Other parts added nothing positive to the dialogue showed a public unraveling of the id. Wright felt dissed, and took it before the cameras, damaging his own credibility — and he either doesn’t seem to realize it — or care.

I see clips from the NPC appearance and wonder what’s next — Rev. Wright lobbying for additional 15 minutes of exposure to “play the dozens” with Barack Obama? I’m sure the media would be down with that too. And that’s because they never dig deeper to see what’s really beneath the surface.
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Back from NYC and onto everyone’s favorite game: catch-up. Of which I have a lot to do, because JFK airport didn’t have wifi. Still, absorbing stuff to blog about later is never far from my mind, and Marc and I watched nearly the whole first season of “Mad Men” while waiting for our delayed plane to arrive and take off. Will report later on it, when we’re done.

In the meantime, I’d like to point everyone to this article by Katha Pollitt in The Nation about the national hypocrisy that was evident during recent events, notably the way that people managed to be simultaneously scandalized by FLDS while also kissing some Pope ass, when the difference between the attitudes of Warren Jeffs and Pope Ratz towards women aren’t all that different by objective standards. Okay, to be fair, the Pope believes that any individual man should only be assigned one wife to control in a lifetime, and I doubt he’d be be against making women stay virgins a bit longer in life before they submit to a lifetime of having one baby after another. But the basic principles are the same: Women are for making babies, and should do that extensively and to the exclusion of having a full life of their own. If women don’t volunteer for this—and let’s face it, most won’t, since it’s cruel—they should be coerced through religious threats of burning in hell or ex-communication. In addition to making up mystical punishments for errant women, both the Pope and Warren Jeffs are happy to use physical coercion. Jeffs employed a system where young women barely out of childhood were married to older men, who would rape them into submission if need be. The Pope prefers to rely on state authority to do his dirty work, supporting measures enacted by the state to force childbirth onto women who have shown their unwillingness to go through with it by seeking abortion. And, as Pollitt notes, the Catholic Church uses state and social coercion instead of persuasion in other ways.

If it was up to Benedict, we might be more stylish than the plural wives of the FLDS, but we’d be trapped in marriage and have fifteen children just like them. In the United States the Catholic church has lost some of its moral authority–thank you, pedophile priests–but it has more temporal power than you might think. Around 12 percent of US hospitals are church-affiliated, which entitles them to refuse modern reproductive healthcare to women. The church is the major opponent of the drive to make health insurance plans cover birth control, forcing women to pay up to $600 out of pocket every year for contraceptives. Along with evangelical Protestants, it is the main force behind every attempt to restrict abortion, defeat prochoice politicians, make contraception and the morning-after pill harder to get, promote false and sexist abstinence-only education and discourage the use of condoms to prevent HIV by spreading unfounded doubts about their effectiveness.

Of course, persuasion has the downside of being ineffective. Most American Catholics use contraception, and a hefty percentage also use abortion when necessary. They may or may not feel guilty about this on an individual level, but the result of freedom is clear to them and to the Pope: When people are free, they are likely to take care of themselves and their families, even when under immense pressure not to. So, no wonder the Pope looks to the law to help him accomplish what persuasion cannot. Perversely, it’s because American Catholics are free to disregard the dictates of the church that the nation can be so welcoming to the Pope. His sick attitudes towards women seem harmless because the American government restricts him from employing them. For now. To a lesser degree all the time.

Shorter Rod Dreher: Rape and child abuse should be legal long before we allow consenting adults of the same sex to marry. (Hat tip.)

What a massive, stinking asshole.

First, he tries to show his bona fides before he suggests that selling your daughters to your friends as rape toys should be legal.

Regular readers know that very little upsets me as much as child abuse. My default position is that the authorities must not hesitate to go in to protect children who may be being abused.

But then he immediately backs off this and gives people an exception if they say that god told them to rape girls that are barely past puberty. And he notes that raping young teenage girls has been considered a perfectly fine way to past the time throughout history, so we should take that into consideration when we decide to tolerate the practice of men raising daughters to give to their friends as sex toys, what you might call an FDLS compound, but I call a rape farm. By Rod’s argument, we should also be lenient on slavery (though it’s worth noting that the FDLS definition of wifehood is close to indistinguishable from slavery), infanticide, rule by kings, torture chambers for heretics, witch-burning—ah shit, what am I saying? All these injustices tend to fall on the shoulders of those who are not in his privileged shoes, so he’s probably see all of them as tolerable as long as you hid behind the “people of faith” label.

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In the past, I’ve tripped over the fact that it really upsets people to suggest that free will is an illusion, even though it’s hard for me to see how you could arrive at any other conclusion. The problem of free will is this: If you could make two absolutely identical people, with the exact same experiences and thoughts and lives, and give them a choice—any choice at all, from abortion or not to chocolate or vanilla—would they choose differently from each other? The only way I can see that being possible is if the choices presented were of equal value to the person, and then the different choices would be more a matter of chance than will.

Most people probably don’t think about that sort of thing much, but one of those who does is the blogger writerdd at Skepchick, who denies that we are either ensouled (which is important and I’ll come back to it) or that we have free will. And she has some scientific evidence that’s unsettling to people attached to free will.

ou may think you decided to read this story — but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it.

In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people’s decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.

The decision studied — whether to hit a button with one’s left or right hand — may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction. Regardless, the findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion?

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These days, Little Ricky Santorum, who went down in flaming defeat in his Pennsylvania U.S. Senate re-election bid in 2006, earns his living these days bashing all things related to Islam. He recently appeared at a Yale Political Union to debate the “War on Islamic Extremism.” The reception was, well, less than a standing ovation. (Yale Daily News):

Amid a chorus of condemning hisses, supportive banging and outright laughter, former Republican Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum argued for war with radical Islam at the Yale Political Union debate Thursday night.

…Santorum seemed to remain unfazed by any skepticism in the audience and only got louder as he argued for the origins of Islamic extremism in the religion’s founding.

He offered a contrast between Jesus Christ and Muhammed as the basis for the irreconcilable differences between Christianity, which he linked to the West, and Islam, which he linked to the Middle East.

“The greatest Christian, the Messiah, is Jesus — he never ruled a country, never forced anyone to convert,” Santorum said. “Islam, on the other hand, was founded by Muhammed who went on to conquer much of the Middle East and Northern Africa.”

He pointed to how Muslim leaders of Spain, centuries ago, gave nonbelievers the option of converting or facing death. He did not mention the Spanish Inquisition, and he excused episodes of Christian violence as “misguidance.” This message did not sit well with some in the audience who did not appreciate what they termed a “history lesson.”

“I don’t think Rick Santorum is qualified to give us a lecture on the history of Islam,” Benjamin Chaidell ’11 said. “He oversimplifies the religion of Islam and the struggle against Islam as an ‘us vs. them’ phenomenon.”

Hat tip, Bob in Raleigh.

Do you think the planned vigils and demonstrations are going to do anything to sway Benedict, or is this simply a matter of letting him know the dismay about his hateful rhetoric on key issues? (PageOneQ):

Gay Catholic activists, who plan to demonstrate Tuesday along the papal motorcade route in Washington, have compiled a list of statements by Benedict during his career which they consider hostile to gays and lesbians. These include forceful denunciations of gay marriage and of adoption rights for same-sex couples.

“He has issued some of the most hurtful and extreme rhetoric against our community of any religious leader in history, and we want to call him into account for the damage that he’s done,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA.

Duddy-Burke said she hopes the protests will be coupled with celebration of the gains made by gay Catholics in America in recent years. She cited the growing number of parishes welcoming openly gay members and the dozens of Catholic colleges that now have gay-straight alliances.

…For many American Catholics, the most distressing church-related issue of recent years has been clerical sex abuse. Thousands of molestation allegations have been filed against Catholic clergy, and dioceses have paid out more than $2 billion in claims since 1950.

David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abuse by Priests, said his advocacy group would not be mollified even if the pope meets privately with abuse victims.

BTW, he’s not doing a stop in Boston, where the scandal exploded — imagine that?

Other Qs —
* What about churches that are welcoming to non-celibate gay parishioners - will there be a “crackdown”?
* Is it reasonable to expect any meaningful progressive change during this Pope’s reign?
* For Catholics out there, how do you reconcile Benedict’s positions with your faith?

I’m just tossing these out there for discussion. It’s clear that Prada Papa Ratzi’s arrival on U.S. soil will generate a lot of press, and a good amount of dismay among women, gays, health advocates who are promoting condom use to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS, and other progressive members of the Catholic community who believe that the conservative Benedict has hurt the church, particularly in light of the clergy sex abuse scandals.
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Update: I have more at the podcast.

PZ links to the terrible situation in West Texas where an FDLS compound is being dismantled by the authorities, because like all the other little empires Warren Jeffs has built, it’s a religious patriarchy taken to its logical conclusion, i.e. built around the practice of raping underage girls. For those who don’t know the story, a teenage girl that was handed over as a rape victim/wife to a 50-year-old man managed to get to a forbidden phone and called the authorities for help. So far, 416 children have been removed because they were being beaten, raped in “spiritual marriages”, or slated to be lifelong rape victims for crazy old fucks drunk on male privilege excused by their Sky Fairy. Considering that atheists supposedly have our own fundamentalists, I’m sure any day now we’ll find out that Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are running rape farms where they swap daughters with their friends because Darwin told them they have a right.

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Don’t you love these creepy prosyletizing pastors who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time traveling the country on a mission to pollute college campuses with insane homophobic, sexist diatribes?

You have to wonder do they realize how crazy they appear to the average person? Take “Brother” Micah Armstrong, a “preacher” from the “Miami Open Air Mission” (Brian, aka Incertus, had to deal with this whack job when Micah turned up at his campus). Watch the action after the jump.
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It’s kind of fun to be treated like a marauding threat to civilization itself.

Via Sadly, No, Michael Medved wrote a rather revealing column. I mean, it’s stupid, but as this quote that Travis plucks out shows, it’s revealing.

Now that we’ve broken barriers with history’s first viable female and African-American candidates, opponents of organized religion hope for a new campaign in which a brave politician makes a credible run for the highest office even while proclaiming his non-belief.

Considering that this entire article is bashing atheists, you can piece together what he’s saying, which is that the country is going to hell now that black people and women can run for President, and now that he’s been deprived of an opportunity to bash either group, he’s going after atheists.

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So this little incident is flying around the atheist-o-sphere. What makes the story especially juicy is that atheism actually doesn’t seem to have anything initially to do with the story, which was about misappropriation of funds, albeit in a way that involves a church. I get the impression that secular activists are agitating, because they don’t think the government should be in the business of buying real estate for churches. But to summarize, Rep. Monique Davis (sadly, a Democrat), all but said that atheists have no right to testify in from of state legislatures, and her logic seems to be that speaking about atheism in public is criminally offensive in the way it would be to film a porn in broad daylight at a jungle gym in a public park. You know, because of the children. Davis loses her mind on atheist activist Rob Sherman.

Davis: I don’t know what you have against God, but some of us don’t have much against him. We look forward to him and his blessings. And it’s really a tragedy — it’s tragic — when a person who is engaged in anything related to God, they want to fight. They want to fight prayer in school.

I don’t see you (Sherman) fighting guns in school. You know?

I’m trying to understand the philosophy that you want to spread in the state of Illinois. This is the Land of Lincoln. This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their children.… What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it’s dangerous–

Sherman: What’s dangerous, ma’am?

Davis: It’s dangerous to the progression of this state. And it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! Now you will go to court to fight kids to have the opportunity to be quiet for a minute. But damn if you’ll go to [court] to fight for them to keep guns out of their hands. I am fed up! Get out of that seat!

Sherman:Thank you for sharing your perspective with me, and I’m sure that if this matter does go to court–

Davis: You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon. [Chicago Tribune]

You can hear the audio here. She seems to all but think his atheist self is contaminating the building.

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(There’s a Q of the day at the end.)

This 11-year-old child did not have to perish. She had diabetic ketoacidosis, which means that had she gone to a hospital, doctors could have saved her. For her to get in this condition, she had to have been exhibiting symptoms for quite a long time, but her parents chose to pray away clear signs of distress - nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness. (AP):

The girl’s mother, Leilani Neumann, said that she and her family believe in the Bible and that healing comes from God, but that they do not belong to an organized religion or faith, are not fanatics and have nothing against doctors.

…”We just noticed a tiredness within the past two weeks,” she said Wednesday. “And then just the day before and that day (she died), it suddenly just went to a more serious situation. We stayed fast in prayer then. We believed that she would recover. We saw signs that to us, it looked like she was recovering.”

Her daughter — who hadn’t seen a doctor since she got some shots as a 3-year-old, according to Vergin — had no fever and there was warmth in her body, she said.

The girl’s father, Dale Neumann, a former police officer, said he started CPR “as soon as the breath of life left” his daughter’s body.

…”My sister-in-law, she’s very religious, she believes in faith instead of doctors …,” the girl’s aunt told a sheriff’s dispatcher Sunday afternoon in a call from California. “And she called my mother-in-law today … and she explained to us that she believes her daughter’s in a coma now and she’s relying on faith.”

Now the parents are entitled to their religious beliefs, even with tragic outcomes like this.

Q of the day:
What I don’t understand is that if they believe in a higher being, logic (I know, I know) follows that the deity enabled humans to create and discover cures for common diseases, and thus prayer, while helpful, can be assisted by modem medicine, no? Even in biblical times humans had folk remedies — some that worked, some that didn’t. How do some religious fundamentalists reach the conclusion that medicine in any form must be supplanted by prayer?

(UPDATE: Jesus’ General has a hilarious letter to Smid: “I’ll never forget the day I first heard you speak about how your “wife’s vagina was enough.” I remember silently praying as I heard it, ‘please God, give me what this man has. I too want to be satisfied by my wife’s vagina.’”)

“I’m sorry, but my wife’s vagina is enough. I’m going to be honest. It’s enough. It is enough for me. If it is not enough for me, then that’s my problem. You know, I really have to be honest about that. God created her for my fit, he created that and I need to honor and respect my wife. I need to respect that.”

Those are the words on why he has no need to spank the monkey of now-former head of the ex-gay camp Love In Action John Smid. As Jim Burroway reports, he’s stepped aside.

The rumors are true. I spoke with Josh Morgan, communications manager at Love In Action. He has confirmed that John Smid has resigned from the Memphis-based residential ex-gay program. A quiet announcement was made to staff and supporters, and an official announcement will be made in their April 1st newsletter to subscribers. Josh had no further details or statement about the announcement.

As director of LIA, Smid gave a workshop on masturbation at an Exodus conference that boggled the mind. Watch it after the jump.
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The NYT’s Deborah Solomon interviewed anti-gay, Catholic-bashing, Armegeddon-worshipping, John McCain-endorsing megachurch pastor John Hagee. He was asked about his rant about gays bringing hellfire to New Orleans via Katrina.

All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are - were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing.“

This is what he said about the above in the interview.

Let’s talk about your much-quoted comment that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for a gay rights parade in New Orleans . We’re not going down there. That’s so far off-base it would take us 33 pages to go through that, and it’s not worth going through.

I am not eager to rehash it either, although I wish that evangelicals were not so hard on gays. Our church is not hard against the gay people. Our church teaches what the Bible teaches, that it is not a righteous lifestyle. But of course we must love even sinners.

Do you have any gay friends? I don’t want to say that I have any friends, because when you say, “Who are they?” I don’t want them jumping off the balcony.

He must have those same imaginary self-loathing, potentially balcony jumping gay buds these bigots always refer to whenever they are asked that question. You all have any ideas of about a few closet cases that might be buds with Hagee?

Listen to McCain’s pathetic defense of Hagee to moral gambling man Bill Bennett after the jump.
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