Culture Warriors category archive

Because Republican Jesus is all about hatin’ on folks.

Businesses in Washington would get the right to refuse services to gay and lesbian customers if “providing those goods or services” conflicts with the religious or philosophical beliefs of the business owner, under a bill introduced Thursday in the state Senate.

The bill, sponsored by 12 of the Senate’s 23 Republicans, is in response to an anti-discrimination suit filed by Attorney General Bob Ferguson against a floral shop in Richland whose owner refused to provide flowers for the wedding of a longtime customer who is gay. She cited belief in Jesus Christ as grounds for refusal.

The legislation, Senate Bill 5927, is worded broadly, going beyond a religious objection in allowing discrimination against gays and lesbians.

Katherine Stewart takes a peep at the man behind the curtain, and sees that he’s a plutocrat who’s only in it for the money.

That’s where the culture wars come in. Pushing complicated tax schemes to sustain oil companies in their riches won’t get a lot of state legislators and their supporters up in the morning. On the other hand, opposing abortion, stopping sodomy, and taking back the country for God will.

The culture war also allows this militant minority to sustain the delusion that it speaks for the majority. By wrapping guns and crosses in American flags, they derive power from falsely believing that they represent the “real America”. And as they become bolder in their claims, those of us who, in fact, represent the majority – supporting equitable policies on taxation, gun safety, access to reproductive care and the like – tend to limit ourselves. We begin to believe that we represent a minority in our country. We don’t.

Read the rest.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., attacks the stupid premise of Brad Paisley’s (and L. L. CoolJ’s) “Accidental Racist,” the idea that symbols of bigotry are, somehow, not symbols of bigotry, but just sweet little mementos, harmless fashion statements, like high-heel shoes or a little black dress.

Every day, we imagine the lives of people who aren’t like us. Those who care to try seem to have no trouble empathizing with, say, Cuban exiles separated from family, or Muslims shunned by Islamophobes. For a songwriter, inhabiting other people’s lives is practically the job description. Bruce Springsteen was not a Vietnam vet when he sang “Born in the USA.”

But where African-American life is concerned, one frequently hears Paisley’s lament: how a white man is locked into his own perspective. That’s baloney. Both history and the present day are replete with white people — Clifford Durr, Thaddeus Stevens, Eleanor Roosevelt, Leon Litwack, Tim Wise — who seemed to have no great difficulty accessing black life.

One suspects one difference is that they refused to be hobbled by white guilt, the reflexive need to deny the undeniable, defend the indefensible, explain the inexplicable. They declined to be paralyzed by the baggage of history. One suspects they felt not guilt, but simple human obligation.

Do please read the rest.

Mirror images. (Don’t stop with the headline–read the whole thing–it takes only a minute.)

Nothing more to say.

Have you noticed that Republicans and Bible-thumpers are preoccupied with sex?

Excerpt:

The sponsors of this legislation are not just some random bowl of mixed nuts. . . .

Nuts, yes. Just not random.

Via Raw Story.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Addendum:

Dick Polman ponders “evolution” vis-a-vis “flip-flops.” Read it.

When an ethnic slur can be defended as tradition, that’s privilege.

Noz has a question about them:

but then once the evaluation system is up and running it finds that 97-98% of the teachers perform at or above effective levels. education reform people seem to think this means that teachers weren’t evaluated properly. but isn’t it just as likely that teachers aren’t as big of a problem as policy-makers has assumed them to be? and if policy-makers won’t budge from the “bad teacher” hypothesis no matter what new information they get, why should anyone listen to them?

Holy foregone conclusions! No! Batman! Facts delendi est!

Flawed and perverse policies must be defended against facts at all costs.

Via PoliticalProf.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

I’ve told this story before, but any joke worth telling once is worth telling again.

So the fellow settled down on the shrink’s couch. The shrink, being an old-line Freudian, decided to start with the Rorschach test.

He held up an inkblot. “What does this remind you of?” he asked.

“Sex,” answered the patient.

He held of another inkblot. “What does this remind you of?” he asked.

“Sex,” answered the patient.

This went on until the entire library of inkblots was exhausted.

After a long pause, the shrink stroked his goatee (I said he was an old-line Freudian) and said, “I think you are obsessed with sex.”

“Me!” screamed the patient, jumping off the couch. “You’re the guy with all the dirty pictures!”

Meanwhile, over at Delaware Liberal, Pandora wonders what it is about the word “consent” that some folks don’t understand.

At the Roanoke Times, Stratton Wayne St.Clair thinks our society’s attitude towards sex may have something to do with it. A nugget:

The problem we have with sex in this country is it’s juvenile. We are saturated with sexual images. Have you ever seen a Little Miss beauty pageant? It’s obscene. And yet for all the sexual innuendoes, poorly disguised jokes (think “Two and a Half Men”), movies (think “American Pie” or “Girls Gone Wild” or any other films aimed at teenagers), advertisements, etc., all done with a snicker and a wink, we have a shortage of images of what an adult, mature sexual life looks like.

Add to this mix the ongoing puritanical attitude toward sex that actually goes hand in hand with the above, is it any wonder kids (not to mention adults) are confused and messed up regarding sexuality?

Until Americans can talk about sex and sexual conduct without either giggling or getting the vapors, silly, stupid, vicious sexual conduct will continue to be common.

In my local rag, Margaret Matray writes of the effort by the Virginia State Historical Society to make historical information about slaves available for genealogical research.

It is a difficult task, as little is preserved, other than sales transactions, bequests, and gift records, for black slaves were considered on par with cattle. Indeed, as anyone who has ever dealt with prize cattle will know, more attention was likely paid to the ancestry of cattle.

The whole article is worth a read (it appeared in the print edition two weeks ago), but a few nuggets will remind you that, when persons speak nostalgically of “The Lost Cause,” this is the cause that was lost:

• A receipt from a slaveholder in Richmond in 1850 details the sale of a man named Nate for $850, his condition listed as “sound and healthy.”
• In a written agreement from King George County in 1762, a slave owner gives his daughter a wedding gift: a slave named Diana.
• In a 1758 estate inventory from Essex County, a woman named Leek is valued with her child, London, at 65 pounds. Their names appear on a list with other slaves, alongside silverware, furniture and cattle.

Via Bartcop.

Arizona Republicans, skeevier than ever.

Is this their next step?

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Lee Jussim:

Just because people on both sides think the other side is out of touch does not necessary mean both sides are equally out of touch with reality. If you believe there are demons under the bed and I think you are delusional, one of us is actually right and the other is actually wrong.

So who engages in more science-denial — liberals or conservatives?

Read the rest.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Laurie Essig cuts through the crap about the Steubenville rapists.

But the real story shouldn’t be about the mainstream media behaving badly or even the mock media’s hoisting them on their sports-obsessed petard. The real story isn’t even that a young woman was violently raped and then violated over and over again by the people in her community and then again by the media. The real story is that there is something seriously wrong with a culture so twisted that it values male athletes so much that it refuses to hold them accountable for anything but winning.

Read the rest.