A One-Sentence Thought About the Supreme Court's 303 Creative Ruling Against Gay Rights

On this Supreme Court ruling by the six Far Right conservative Justices that okay'ed a private business' preference to not serve gay couples looking for a website design, it's become clear that the goddamn religious wingnuts running our highest court have agreed that Christianity and only Christianity has a license to be hateful, discriminatory assholes in violation of Jesus' own commandment to love each other, and did so in a way that made it clear the religious wingnuts can behave even worse towards fellow Americans using THEIR religious standing to wage war on other beliefs, other ethnics, even other Christians.

It does not help this arch-religious Roberts Court that following their ruling, more evidence emerged that the "gay couple" identified in the plaintiff's challenge weren't even gay and hadn't asked for a website, meaning this whole matter may be in violation of Article III Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution stating that the courts can only hear cases between two sides of a legal issue, also meaning these so-called Christians violated one of God's Commandments against bearing false witness against another person.

I know, that's two sentences, but more had to be said.

Christ, these assholes.

One Sentence Statement about the Passing of Pope Benedict XVI

There is a Circle of Hell dedicated to those who betrayed their position of office, there is a Circle of Hell for priests and bishops and Popes who allowed pedophiles and rapists to attack the children and families of their own parishes, there is a Circle of Hell for those who lied against the victims, there is a Circle of Hell for those who covered up crimes for the sake of power and money, and so there is a Circle of Hell tonight for Pope Benedict XVI who died knowing full well that thousands of young women and men of his own Catholic Church had their lives broken or destroyed all so he could be Pope.

Grooming Hypocrisy

In the past month or so - especially as the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation like "Don't Say Gay Florida" got signed into law - we've witnessed an uptick in a particular form of Republican attack, where they go on the offensive (by being offensive) and accusing their political opposition of crimes they haven't proven.

You've probably been overwhelmed by now from the Far Right Narrative that the Republicans are passing all these anti-gay bills to protect our families and children from the dread threat of Communism The Big Scary Blacks Satan Worshipers Feminazis Baby Parts Factories and now Groomers. The accusation is that the gays and lesbians and trans people are infiltrating our schools in order to "groom" the next generation of teenagers to be gay/lesbian/trans themselves.

It's as though the Far Right still believe that homosexuality, or any alteration of gender identity, is a "choice" rather than the personal psychological self-awareness that every person - straight, gay, bi, trans, or fluid - goes through growing up. We've had decades of studies providing some evidence that the self-identity is biological, internal, that you're born to it, and it's not something you can plug into another person like teaching them math or history.

It may stem from the fear/belief that the Far Right has - given their religious absolutism and devout faith - that such sexual identities can be programmed into people the same way churches program people into their dogma. It ignores the hard-wired nature of self-identity, and it's all projection and hypocrisy.

The hypocrisy comes from the facts that 1) there's no proof of wide-spread grooming conspiracy going on (remember Pizzagate?) and 2) the Republicans are willing to overlook how heterosexuals - especially older men - are willing to chase after the younger generation of women to "groom" them as their second (or third) wives / mistresses on the side.

These Republicans yelling and screaming about "Gays grooming yer kids" have no problem rewriting state laws like the one in Tennessee, where they were trying to create loopholes to deny gays right to marry... while at the same time getting rid of the restrictions that protected girls as young as 10 from forced marriages. Nationwide outrage finally pushed the state legislature to re-insert the age restriction, but this was how the Far Right religious bastards wanted to take it (via Jon Skolnick at Salon):

H.B. 233 gives Tennesseans "an alternative form of marriage" between individuals who have a "conscientious objection to the current pathway," according to state Rep. Tom Leatherwood, the bill's Republican sponsor. 

As WKRN ​​reported, the GOP bill, first introduced in January, establishes a common-law marriage between "one man" and "one woman" but omits any age requirements for the union, an omission that Democrats have blasted.

"I don't think any normal person thinks we shouldn't have an age requirement for marriage," said Democratic state Rep. Mike Stewart. "It should not be there as it's basically a get out of jail free card for people who are basically committing statutory rape," Stewart. I mean it's completely ridiculous, so that's another reason why this terrible bill should be eliminated..."

The measure is a significant step back from a Tennessee law passed in 2018 that prohibited minors under the age of seventeen from getting married. 

According to Unchained at Last, Tennessee ranks the 13th highest state in child marriages per capita. Nearly 10,000 children were granted marriage licenses in the state between 2000 and 2018... 

While the original intent of that law - which is still getting voted on - was to get around the gay rights to marriage, the fact that the Far Right didn't care they had removed the protections for children vulnerable to older sexual predators spells out their utter hypocrisy when it comes to "think of the children". The fact they didn't address this as a problem until 2018 (!!!) and were happy to undo what they had done just six years prior ought to horrify people.

Republicans - especially the religious wingnuts - look at gays and lesbians and bi and trans going public with their gender identities and scream "THEY'RE GONNA BRAINWASH YOUR KIDS INTO TEH GAY." Those same Republicans will then look at hetero men in their 20s and 30s chasing after 14-year-olds to get them pregnant and proclaim "Well this is the natural order of things as God intends."

Statutory rape means nothing to them. Actual rape - where the young girls are abused one way or another (physically or emotionally) into submitting to those men's wills - means nothing to the Far Right. The age differences between the sexual predators going after teen girls means nothing to them. Republicans pushing their religious wingnut agenda are going to make sure rape victims are forced to bear babies they didn't want for the glory of the sons-of-bitches who raped them. All they see is their sexist "make 'em barefoot and pregnant" agenda regain its "proper place" in the goddamned Patriarchy.

They've been like this for decades. We've seen their behavior in public over and over again. This blog has railed against the likes of Roy Moore - who was chasing after teenage girls while in his 30s, so much so a local mall had to trespass him to stop him stalking girls there - and other religious extremists like the Duggar family, which had sided repeatedly with their sexual predator son Josh who molested his own sisters (the parents' own daughters!) and was convicted in 2021 for possession of child porn. 

That is all young women are to these forced-birth zealots: Sexualized targets regardless of age, whose only purpose in their Christian Utopian is to breed. As often as possible, as early as possible.

The threat of "gay grooming" is a fake news story compared to the real threat girls and women from the ages of 10 to 50 are facing from the wingnut Religious Right the very minute Roe v Wade gets nuked by this ultra-conservative Supreme Court.

Gods help this nation the minute we turn half of our population into cattle.

trump, Blasphemous King of Ashes

The Implications Are Horrifying. Via Emma Goldberg at The Guardian:

There’s a sordid history to charges of Jewish dual loyalty in the U.S. In the early years of the Second World War, Isolationists opposed to American involvement dismissed the war as little more than a “Jewish cause”. Charles Lindbergh berated Jewish leaders for “agitating for war”. Decades later, when the US senator Joe Lieberman ran on the Democratic ticket for vice-president, pundits questioned whether he was more loyal to Israel than to the US. During the democratic primaries in 2015, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders was challenged on his “dual citizenship” with Israel...

Which is all to say that this week Donald Trump finds himself in broad, though unfortunate, company. On Tuesday, the president said that any Jewish person who votes for a Democrat is guilty of “great disloyalty”. Then Trump repeated his smears against the congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, following his impassioned demand last week that the Israeli government block their entry to the country due to their support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

“Where has the Democratic Party gone?” Trump said. “Where have they gone where they are defending these two people over the state of Israel? And I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”

Trump’s latest statement, laced with centuries of antisemitic tropes, is no surprise for a president who has fraternized with avowed white nationalists and blamed white supremacist violence on “mental health”. Still, Trump’s rhetorical gymnastics would be impressive if it weren’t so threatening – he manages to weaponize Zionism, dog-whistle antisemitism and land on his feet, calling himself “the king of Israel”. He’d haul home all the medals if bigotry were an Olympic sport...

trump lays bare his opinion of Jewishness: It's only "good" if it centers around Israel, and only if it aids Israel - actually if it aids Evangelical Christianity - in the ongoing war against Muslims.

As a result, he's opening up the Jewish Americans who don't support this view - which is a vast majority of Jewish Americans - to accusations of "disloyalty" not so much to Israel but towards the United States... which increases the likelihood of direct assaults on their persons and their communities.

There has already been an uptick in violence and vandalism directed toward Jewish communities. A lot of it already tied to trump's support of neo-Nazi supremacists who revel in his diatribes against "The Other" that justifies their violence towards every Non-White ethnicity (which includes Jews in the supremacists' opinions).

Adding onto this is trump's obsessive need for adulation and worship (in this moment, literal). he eagerly tweeted out a reply from a Far Right media host who proclaimed "Israeli Jews love trump like he's the King of Israel. They love him like he is the Second Coming of God." It's irrelevant in trump's worldview that A) Israeli Jews don't believe in Kings anymore and B) Jews do not share the Christian/Evangelical idea of the Second Coming. All that matter is trump buys into the worship that he's the Chosen One... and the rest of us are screwed.

In the last two days, trump insulted Jewish Americans, Jewish faith overall, and the patriotism of Jewish Americans who remain loyal to America.

And he's not finished. trump's work to destroy the faith of every honest Christian and the hearts of every living soul is not yet complete.

Gods help us.

The Fugitive Women Acts of 2019

The more I look at these "heartbeat" anti-abortion bills - I already railed against Georgia's, Alabama just passed an anti-abortion bill that's worse, Ohio is close to getting there, Missouri's voting on their own, Kentucky's is messed up - the more I see a repeat of the harsh laws our states had passed back in the 1800s to punish Blacks not just the slaves but also the Freed Blacks who were born and raised free in northern states.

I'm thinking of the Fugitive Slave Acts that the Slave states passed to force the Free states to return "their property" of human beings.

When I saw the Georgia law applying penalties to any woman "leaving the state to receive an abortion" and noticed it gave room for the state to punish anyone who helped her, it reminded me of how the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act forced local police and even ordinary citizens - under penalty of high fines - to help bounty hunters capture anyone they deemed - without evidence - an escaped slave (even when entire communities could prove that Black person was born free).

These bills aren't designed to help or protect the fetus. These bills are designed to hurt and punish people.

The Alabama anti-abortion law got rid of the exemptions "in cases of rape/incest" meaning women will be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies (and even be forced to share custody with the rapist!) and likely face severe health risks that could mean their death. Or else face life in prison. Any doctor helping to end that rape pregnancy can face longer jail time (life in prison) than the fucking rapist.

There's your slave chains tightening on women's necks.

There's your Far Right wingnuts imposing Sharia law.

There's the Republican Party ignoring every signpost warning them that banning all abortion will cause a backlash. They may argue that "everyone hates killing babies" but a vast majority of Americans accept and approve of the rape/incest/health of mother exemptions. Welcome to the paradox of abortion: Most Americans don't like the practice but they also realize there are situations where abortion is needed and should be available to the woman making that choice.

The anti-abortion fanatics may see those polls but they're still driven by their absolutist obsessions. They don't care what the majority think, only what they are willing to do to enslave the rest of us.

Just remember those Fugitive Slave Acts stirred a public outrage among Northern states that led to the rise of an abolitionist Republican Party - back when that party knew what it was doing, before the dark times of Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan and Newt - and to the Election of 1860 which found the Slave states outnumbered and outvoted... and we all know what that led to.

So Welcome to 2019, deep into the trumpian Darkest Timeline.

Welcome to the American Second Civil War. Whose side are you on?

American Women: Time to Fight For Your Lives

I wrote awhile ago about abortion as a political issue. How on the one hand it was never the big issue the Far Right wanted it to be, on another hand how Republicans pretty much gave it lip service because they knew if they pursued pro-fetus bills to their logical conclusion they'd lose most women voters forever... and then on a third hand recognized the reality that Republicans knew they were running out of time to appease their base and were ratcheting up anti-abortion laws anyway to the detriment of the nation.

So when it came to pass that my birthstate of Georgia decided to go full wingnut, I had to pay notice (via Kathleen Krawczyk at The Week):

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed a "heartbeat bill" into law on Tuesday, effectively outlawing most abortions after a doctor is able to detect a fetal heartbeat, which typically occurs around six weeks. While it does include some exceptions for rape, incest, or a mother's health, it also makes women liable for murder charges if they have an abortion — and could land them in prison for life...

Under the new law, different murder charges apply to women who terminate their pregnancies in different ways. A woman who self-terminates — something that wasn't punishable under a previous Georgia law — will have technically committed murder and could be imprisoned for life or face the death penalty. Those who get an abortion via a health care provider could be found guilty of being a party to murder, punishable by life in prison.

My immediate reaction to this news was "Girl, get your shit together in a bag and get the hell outta there."

After that, I calmed down a bit. Given how these anti-women laws tend to affect the poor the worst, many of them can't afford to flee the state for safer climes (like say Illinois or California or Oregon). The women of Georgia can't just head to Ohio (passing their own harsher bill) or neighboring Alabama (oh hell no) or even Florida (I do not trust the GOP in Tall Hassle).

So the women of Georgia are going to have to consider other options.

I know I joked before about Utopian-like compounds where the Far Right fantasized about fleeing a librul world, and that it would be hypocritical of me to suggest this to women. HOWEVER, desperate times desperate measures.

It's time to pull a Lysistrata Gambit, ladies. Before the men decide to round you up for breeder camps, you should flee and build your own defensive compounds. Every one of you from puberty to menopause. There's like 5 million women in Georgia. If you're stuck in the Peach State and you can organize that 5 million, find the smallest populated counties - there's a lot of 'em barely under 3,000 total - where 50,000 women per group can relocate to seize control of the biggest towns, throw up some barbed wire and chain-link fences, put sentries everywhere armed to the teeth (this is Georgia, you should be able to find gun stores every five miles and raid them accordingly), and claim your new homes with the determination to stay put until these damn anti-women laws are gone.

Why should crazy wingnuts have all the fun forming their own militia protests? Only this time, with women at the helm, they'll be better organized.

It's time to let the crazy-ass men obsessing over controlling women's bodies and choices to wake up one day and find out their slaves to the kitchens have all fled without cooking anything, or doing any laundry, or balancing the family checkbooks.

They're expecting women to keep playing by the rules of social hookups? Dating (with the likelihood of unwanted pregnancies) or getting married (with the likelihood of pregnancies suffering miscarriages)? Time to turn half of Georgia into one big stag party, where there's no women to even date or chat up.

Women can't afford to run the risk of pregnancy, then or now. Pregnancies aren't safe, they aren't cheap, they aren't healthy. The United States already has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the Western world. And these laws don't do anything to fund more prenatal and birthing care. These laws won't help women improve their ability to survive the difficulties of birthing. These pro-fetus bills will make all of that worse.

But the assholes passing these "heartbeat" bills don't give a flying fuck. They enjoy being judgmental holier-than-thou pricks. They don't even care if these Godly laws even reflect the faith these women have on their own terms. They just want women to know their place.

But women's place in society is more important than you assholes realize. What will happen if all the women flee for safety, leaving behind their clerical jobs... their nursing jobs... their college enrollments (just think of the state universities suddenly losing most of their students)... how many things in our economy and society will grind to a halt if the women of America realize they no longer have a say in The Game and decide "Fuck it, we're out of here"?

Maybe now's the time women should. If we can't value women as full and equal citizens of this nation, if we keep treating women as though they're cattle, if we take away their choices and their own values and chain them to someone else's, they should break from such a dark and unloving country.

Why should women pay anything into a United States where their health, their souls, their voices are denied?

When Churches Betray Faith, Churches Become Conspiracies

God. (via the Houston Chronicle and reporters Robert Downen, Lise Olsen, and John Tedesco):

In the decade since Vasquez's appeal for help, more than 250 people who worked or volunteered in Southern Baptist churches have been charged with sex crimes, an investigation by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News reveals.

It's not just a recent problem: In all, since 1998, roughly 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers have faced allegations of sexual misconduct, the newspapers found. That includes those who were convicted, credibly accused and successfully sued, and those who confessed or resigned. More of them worked in Texas than in any other state.

They left behind more than 700 victims, many of them shunned by their churches, left to themselves to rebuild their lives. Some were urged to forgive their abusers or to get abortions.

About 220 offenders have been convicted or took plea deals, and dozens of cases are pending. They were pastors. Ministers. Youth pastors. Sunday school teachers. Deacons. Church volunteers.

Nearly 100 are still held in prisons stretching from Sacramento County, Calif., to Hillsborough County, Fla., state and federal records show. Scores of others cut deals and served no time. More than 100 are registered sex offenders. Some still work in Southern Baptist churches today...

And these are just the ones we know about, from 20 years or so. This is rape and sexual assault that likely had been going on for decades earlier.

For all the goddamn Christian wingnuts yelling and screaming about Muslims, the greatest threat to our families in the United States are the goddamn Christian wingnuts.

Did you catch that last bit? Some still work in Southern Baptist churches today.

Did you catch that earlier bit, where some of the victims were forced to get abortions? The Southern Baptists are one of the biggest religious groups to rail against abortion, but by God if their own should rape a woman or young girl then hey let's just make sure that medical procedure we don't talk about that it gets done in another state where nobody will find out.

Goddamned hypocrites. (Edit: I used an offensive word here earlier, I removed it for the sake of good friends)

How is this any better than what the Catholic Church has been doing for decades (if not centuries) covering up their own pedophiles and rapists? The Pope just had to come out recently and confess his church has been covering up the rape and sex slavery of nuns, on top of the recent revelations of what priests have been doing to children.

This isn't about God (other than perverting the Lord's work) this isn't about Faith (other than destroying it for thousands of victims) this is about Power, the power of institutional control that a church can grant to those in charge. This is about a blinded, lustful Patriarchy that views their flock not as followers but as the next meal.

There is no God in these churches the second their own politics demanded they protect the rapists and abusers instead of their children and victims.

To hell with these scandal-plagued institutions. For all that the laws of man have brought against them - charges and convictions and jail time - the churches themselves remain relatively unpunished, still standing, still seeking more converts and members (and victims for their abuses). Utterly convinced God has forgiven their sins as though THEY can judge their own corrupt selves.

To hell with them. We need our government to step up here. We need accountability.

These churches need to lose their tax-exempt status.

It is an argument cropping up across the world wherever these Church scandals have struck. A lot of nations grant tax-exempt status to churches out of respect to the idea that churches are charitable institutions, looking out for the well-being of their parishioners and their communities. They also do it as a sign of separation of Church and State, to avoid the political abuse of faith that history has shown doesn't end well for a lot of innocent people.

But these sex abuse revelations are exposing that concept as a lie. These churches are so horrified by exposure they've covered up, lied, betrayed victims, all because the threat of liability - of paying restitution to victims - drove them to cover up.

These churches love Money and Power more than they love God and People.

So if money is what they love(worship), that's where the punishment should be.

End their tax-exempt status.

Oh, they'll yell, they'll scream, they'll claim we're violating their First Amendment rights to free worship. Which won't be true. If they want to keep gathering and praying, they can do that. It's just they can't keep all the goddamned cash that rolls in when they do.

We have to recognize this truth: These churches that protected sexual predators and abused their own members are no longer churches. These organizations are now criminal conspiracies.

Goddamn them.