Culture Warriors category archive

The Booman nails the reason for wingnut joy over the Hobby Lobotomy (emphasis added).

. . . we need to look at this not from the perspective of whether or not the decision to have an abortion is moral or legal, but from the perspective that Republicans want women to get pregnant if they have sex because that will take away their autonomy and make them reliant on their families again. If they can’t risk pregnancy because of their economic insecurity, they will have to marry to have sexual relations. If they can’t get decent pay in the workplace, they can’t overcome their economic insecurity on their own.

This battle isn’t really over abortion. It’s over female equality.

What Juanita Jean said.

Southern Beale sees them coming. A nugget:

I know, it looks the opposite, but what have I said here a gazillion, bajillion times, folks? When religion gets forced on people by government or corporations, religion always dies. People don’t want this shit foisted on them. As I’ve said a thousand times before, the surest way to kill off religious belief is to declare a “state religion.” The bigger religion’s role in the secular aspects of life, the more people run away from it.

Be sure to read the FAQ.

Image via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Chauncey Devega considers the Hobby Lobby decision, a repugnant act which enables persons who happen to be “employers” to impose their religious beliefs on persons who happen to be “employees.”

It is thoroughly a transgression of the United States Constitution on the part of those who are expected to uphold and interpret it, in that it allows the “establishment of religion” on the part of those who issue paychecks to others.

Devega points out that, by its own reasoning, the decision violates the establishment clause of the Constitution.

The Roberts and Scalia court is operating under an assumption that Christianity is the United States’ semi-official religion and that it should be legislated and protected in a way that other faiths are not. This is, of course, a misreading of the Constitution–despite what the deranged members of the Fox News Christian Evangelical Dominionist American public would like to believe.

Unintended consequences may lay bare the hypocrisy of the Right-wing and its agents on the Supreme Court.

How would conservatives and their agents respond if a company with Islamic beliefs (however defined) decided to impose its religious values on white, Christian, American employees?

I’m not surprised by the decision. The venality, politicization, and subservience to right-wing doctrine of the Roberts court has already been amply demonstrated.

I am disgusted. However many times someone enters an outhouse, the smell is always the same.

Do follow the link and read the rest.

Image via Balloon Juice.

Below the fold in case it autoplays.

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F. T. Rea reminds us ignore the labels and watch the deeds. A nugget:

Let’s get real: regardless of their party labels, the truth is it was conservatives who worked to deny voting rights to citizens along ethnic lines in the Jim Crow era, and they‘re still trying to do it today. It was conservatives who opposed Social Security and Medicare when they were instituted. And, today whether they wear labels that say Republican, Tea Party or Libertarian, it’s conservatives who still oppose those programs. It’s still conservatives who scoff at protecting the environment, too.

. . . Labels come and go like other styles, but that wicked sense of entitlement hasn’t changed much.

It’s not an exaggeration, folks.

Eyes on Texas twits.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Laurie Essig tries to understand wannabe frat boy George Will’s decision to claim that rape isn’t.

In a related post at the same site, Jennifer Baker observes

Or maybe he (George Will–ed.) isn’t really putting himself in any one’s shoes because he can’t even identify with being a woman. Does that explain his callousness? Is imagining being a woman is some kind of total obstacle? He should imagine being raped in prison, perhaps, by someone he had met, been polite to, or knew. Then he might have more sympathy. My husband came up with this trick, and I’ve already seen it work on a few of his friends.

I’m old. I’m so old that I can remember when George Will could pass for someone who has a clue.

The Booman points out that, despite the pontifications of the punditocracy, Eric Cantor’s loss is not complicated at all.

You can poll the people of the 7th District all you want, but they just voted for the guy who ran on opposing the DREAM Act. That is not a moderate position, at all. That is the position of people who don’t like brown people. Period.

The Booman is not a Virginian. I am.

That’s why I know he’s correct. The opinion polls won’t show it, though, because most persons know that it’s no longer generally acceptable to be a public bigot.

Dick Polman wonders why suicide shooters are not described as terrorists. A nugget:

The losers dumped the dead cops on the floor, sprinkled them with Nazi swastikas, covered them with a replica 18th-century “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, and yelled “This is a revolution.” Yet this episode is typically being described, in the media, as just a random act of “antigovernment violence.” The NBC Nightly News devoted a lot of air time to the shootings, yet never once dared use the T-word.

Here’s a little test: What if the shooters hadn’t been white Americans (a married couple, “the Millers”)? What if, instead, the shooters had been extremist Muslims who covered the dead cops with an Al Qaeda flag and yelled “Allahu Akbar”? Rest assured, we’d all be invoking the T-word in a climate of national hysteria, with Fox News fulminating about the lone wolves roaming among us.

Pakistan has suicide bombers. We have suicide shooters.

Other than the choice of weaponry, there is no damn difference between the two.

Field expects more. A nugget:

We should get used to it, because I suspect that there is going to be a lot more of this type of deranged behavior coming from certain types of people in American society.

You can only foam at the mouth for so long over your computer keys, and shoot beer cans in your backyard before you want to act out on the hate that has been building up for years from listening to white right wing hate radio, and conspiracy nuts like Glen Beck and Alex Jones.

A word cannot be separated from its history.

Reg Henry traces the history of opposition to a humane social order. A nugget (emphasis added):

Those opposed to progressive social change have always invented horror stories that inevitably don’t come true. Get the kids out of the mines and they will become hopelessly spoiled. Let the women vote and they will have no judgment. Pass Social Security and the elderly will become idle in their golden years. Pass universal health care and the nation will be lost.

So much for all of that. So many horror stories, so little actual horror. . . . As it is, future generations will marvel that conservatism was here defined as denying some Americans basic rights.

Read the rest.

This is tough to get through because of a big steaming pile of Glenn Beck in the middle, but the message is worth it.

Excerpt:

Just because you don’t know something bad has happened to you doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.

Warning: Language