Culture Warriors category archive

Haters gotta hate.

I find this particularly galling, as I was raised Southern Baptist, back when Southern Baptists were Christian, before they became Christianist. My brother once said, and I agree with him, that our father was likely the most Christian person he ever knew, but, somewhere along the line, the definition of “Christian” seems to have changed, and the Gospel of Love has become the Gospel of hate.

These “They-Call-Themselves-Southern-Baptists” worship no Jesus that I know.

Click for a larger image.

Distractingly sexy twits.

The Raleigh News and Observer’s Barry Saunders sees unanticipated consequences to Franklin Graham’s latest antics. A snippet:

It’s not exactly on a par with turning water into wine or feeding the multitudes with a loaf and two fishes, but Franklin Graham’s feat of turning a bank with nearly $2 trillion in assets into a sympathetic, caring symbol is still impressive.

By attacking Wells Fargo Bank for its ad featuring two women in a same-sex relationship, Graham, president of his daddy’s Billy Graham Evangelical Association, has made the bank look progressive.

Franklin Graham cancels account at Wells-Fargo because it runs an ad with a same-sex couple, moves to BB&T, which sponsored a Miami Beach Gay Pride fundraiser. Where will he go next?

I reckon that life becomes complicated when you base your decision-making on hating persons for being.

Afterthought:

I have an account at Wells-Fargo. It didn’t start out at Wells-Fargo, but mergers and acquisitions made it that way.

I’ve been thinking maybe I should close it, because Wells-Fargo is a wannabe Bank of America, but moving your banking is a complex task and I’ve been avoiding the issue.

After this, maybe I’ll just keep it in memory of Franklin Graham.

Haters gotta hate.

Via Job’s Anger.

Via Raw Story.

Hate still travels in the cloak of religion.

It’s not just the name of a movie.

. . . Marco Rubio is very, very afraid of “Them.”

Back when spy movies were all the rage, James Bond was still played by Sean Connery, and the villains were always faceless underground organizations with names such as SPECTRE, SMERSH, and THRUSH, someone I forget who made a parody spy flick in which the bad guys represented a shadowy outfit called THEM. As I recall, the film’s silliness made anything by the Three Stooges look like high art (unfortunately, I can’t remember enough of it to find a citation).

Leonard Pitts, Jr., reminds me that the film may not have been as much parody as I thought at the time:

For all the decades of its existence, American social conservatism has been rooted in a premise simple enough to be fully expressed in just three words:

Us versus them.

As in, an implicit promise to defend the former against the latter. This was its mission when it pushed for immigration quotas in the 1920s, when it animated the Red Scare of the 1950s, when it defined civil rights as a clear and present danger in the 1960s, when hardhats rioted against hippies in 1970. It is its organizing principle even today, as red states pass legislation to protect themselves from Sharia law and some of us define religious persecution as baking a cake for a same-sex couple.

Us versus them.

Always, social conservatism defined “them” as something faceless and frightening against which the rest of “us” must struggle with everything we had, or else be overrun. It is an ideology that has contributed virtually nothing of value to the life of the nation — unless you count mindless panic as a good thing.

He goes on to wonder whether the appeal of such tactics may be waning.

I fear that he is wrong. Fear sells, and hate always finds buyers.

Putting aside the culture warrior schadenfreude, I think it might be a bit strong to refer to a 14-year-old boy trying to navigate the teenager hormone zone while growing up in a clearly screwed-up family in the same phrases that one might use for a 50-year-old man (or woman, as recent headlines tell us seems quite possible) lurking in the bushes next to the jungle gym in the playground.

Let’s just stick with the incest thing, okay?

Via Raw Story.

Via Job’s Anger.

Via Kos.

Froma Harrop wonders who joins outlaw biker gangs. She gets an answer from James F. Quinn, a University of North Texas sociologist.

In any case, men who join outlaw biker clubs are in it for more than the money. “A lot of it is about excitement, male camaraderie,” Quinn said. “They want to live in that masculine excitement. It’s a hyper-excitement kind of atmosphere.”

Women are not invited. Women are never members of a “1 percent club,” a reference to the tiny percentage of motorcyclists not considered law-abiding citizens. Women are there to serve, which is why the Waco bikers gravitated to a Hooters clone restaurant, where the waitresses wear tops cut low and shorts cut high.