Culture Warriors category archive

In the Roanoke Times, Halford Ryan traces the lineage of the “religious right.” A snippet:

At the end of the Civil War, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, a Northerner, recalled that secessionists left the Union in 1860-61 with the U.S. Constitution in one hand and the Bible in the other. Bible-based conservative preachers sermonized to their Confederate congregants that the Old and New Testaments revealed God’s imprimatur for Dixie’s Christians to own slaves (Genesis 9:22-29, I Timothy 6:1, and I Peter 2:18).

(snip)

One hundred and fifty years later, the same backward mindsets, still mired in the miasma of scriptural fundamentalism, are even now hawking their biblical bigotry with regard to human sexuality.

Do read the rest.

Via The Bob and Chez Show Blog.

Jason330 figures it out.

David Kyle Johnson takes a statistician’s eye to anti-abortion lawyer Gene Schaerr’s assertion before the Supreme Court that gay marriage causes abortions.

Would you be shocked to know it doesn’t stand up?

Via Job’s Anger.

Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce,
Special orders don’t upset us.

Via Job’s Anger.

In related news, GoFundMe is trying to get out of the business of subsidizing the hate-full, to the dismay of Wingnutistan.

Via Kos.

Dick Polman sees cracks in the Republican coalition between the Masters of Mammon who would run the Republican Party and the Miss Grundies on whose votes they rely.

But on this day when gay marriage is being argued in the U.S. Supreme Court, the God squad and the corporate world are seemingly on the verge of divorce.

Third-tier Republican presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal is trying to repair the breach, in a hilariously ham-handed fashion, and we’ll get to him soon.

Marriage equality is the key point of contention between the factions, and their differences seem irreconcilable. Christian conservatives, who comprise a huge chunk of the party base, believe that gay unions are bad for the nation’s moral character. But corporate leaders have come to believe that right-wing intolerance is bad for business.

Jim Wright attacks the myth of the “national moral compass.” A nugget:

Any discussion of crime or patriotism or guns or the current generation or gay rights or women’s health or voting reform or taxes or politics will eventually lead to the moral compass statement.

Our country has lost its moral compass.

Right.

Listen, as soon as you say to me “the country has lost it’s moral compass” you and I are done talking.

Because you are engaged in a logical fallacy, a fantasy of your own making, and while that may be your right, it’s my right not to participate in your delusion.

The very notion of a national morality is counter to liberty; it is tyrants and the totalitarianism of theocracies and ideologues which attempt to impose morality on the citizenry by force or threat.

Do read the rest.

Via C&L.

The party of stupid tries to legislate yet more stupid.

A North Carolina bill introduced this month would prevent state medical school departments from allowing employees to perform abortions or to “supervise the performance of an abortion”. Essentially, the bill’s sponsors and supporters wants to make teaching how to perform an abortion – a safe, legal and necessary medical procedure – illegal. As The New Republic’s Jamil Smith wrote, if passed, the bill would “produce less intelligent doctors.”

Without discussing abortion,* what these idiots don’t seem to realize that, if a woman suffers a miscarriage, she may need to undergo the same procedure that is commonly used for early-term abortions so as to heal properly and possibly to serious infection.

Next, they’ll want to return to throwing women into the river to find out whether they are witches.

__________________

*I’ve stated my position before: It’s the woman’s decision and no one else’s.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., ponders how Wayne LaPierre so creatively turned the polysyllabic latinate phrase, “demographically significant,” into a slur. A snippet:

Here’s the thing about “demographically symbolic” presidents and candidates: They tend to function like Rorschach inkblots. Meaning that what we see in them reveals more about us than them. Where Barack Obama is concerned, the right-wing panic over birth certificates and fist bumps and the left-wing tendency to idealize and canonize his every exhalation revealed the rank bigotry and messy irresolution beneath our “post-racial” happy talk. Where Clinton is concerned, these very early indications suggest her woman-ness will likewise be a minefield for friend, foe and media — even more, perhaps, than in 2008.

One side effect of Barack Obama’s presidency is this: The right no longer even tries to hide its racist, bigoted roots. Indeed, it now flaunts them.

Der Spiegel believes it has uncovered the blueprints for ISIS and reports that, far from being a band of fanatics, it is a cold and calculating outfit, as rational as it is beastly. A snippet:

Sharia, the courts, prescribed piety — all of this served a single goal: surveillance and control. Even the word that Bakr used for the conversion of true Muslims, takwin, is not a religious but a technical term that translates as “implementation,” a prosaic word otherwise used in geology or construction. Still, 1,200 years ago, the word followed a unique path to a brief moment of notoriety. Shiite alchemists used it to describe the creation of artificial life. In his ninth century “Book of Stones,” the Persian Jabir Ibn Hayyan wrote — using a secret script and codes — about the creation of a homunculus. “The goal is to deceive all, but those who love God.” That may also have been to the liking of Islamic State strategists, although the group views Shiites as apostates who shun true Islam. But for Haji Bakr, God and the 1,400-year-old faith in him was but one of many modules at his disposal to arrange as he liked for a higher purpose.