Culture Warriors category archive

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.

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*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.

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*Look it up.

Britney Cooper deconstructs the religion of right. A snippet:

Nothing about the cultural and moral regime of the religious right in this country signals any kind of freedom. In fact, this kind of legislation is rooted in a politics that gives white people the authority to police and terrorize people of color, queer people and poor women. That means these people don’t represent any kind of Christianity that looks anything like the kind that I practice.

(snip)

This white, blond-haired, blue-eyed, gun-toting, Bible-quoting Jesus of the religious right is a god of their own making. I call this god, the god of white supremacy and patriarchy.

Read the rest.

Via Progressive Populist.

Jeffrey Gillespie finds the response to the non-debunked Rolling Stone UVa. rape story to be dismaying. An excerpt (emphasis added):

The Rolling Stone profile, which reported on a now-discredited story about a gang rape at a University of Virginia frat house, has received much scrutiny. There is a tone to the backlash that is disturbing; much like the Bernie Madoff affair in 2008, which gave bigots nationwide the perfect anti-Semitic foil, the falsified UVA story is already being gleefully exploited by right wing elements in the press as an exemplar of the hysterical feminist agenda. In extreme cases, conservative elements in the media are attempting to conflate the issue to the point of suggesting that the rape culture is some fantastic invention, a simple effect of feminist propaganda combined with left-wing political maneuvering.

But when you live in a country where 20 percent of women have been the victims of sexual violence, there’s really no possibility for overreaction. There’s only the need for a moment of silence, a moment to let that shameful statistic sink in, and then there’s work to be done.

The irony is that, except for some details, such as names, dates, and places, the Rolling Stone story was true. What it described does indeed happen all too frequently and authorities and society regularly wink at it until forced into action.

In the Charlotte Observer, Taylor Batten sums up South Carolina’s amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court gay marriage case. The crux:

(South Carolina Attorney-General–ed.) Wilson’s argument in a sentence: The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment were OK with the states discriminating against women, so surely they’d be OK with us discriminating against gays.

Looks as if South Carolina called Saul.

It seems that the anti-gay folks are having trouble getting good lawyers to advocate for bigotry and homophobia.