We Are DUNG

There are a bunch of wonderful parodies of what Montreal Simon calls The Attack of the Homophobe Zombies ad. (If you haven't seen the original, Simon has it at that link.)

Having spent the last little while giggling at these creations, I want to share the best one -- so far -- with our readers.

Enjoy.

Bonus! The Red Cross is providing marshmellows.

There are far, far, far worse things in the world than having Stephen Harper as a prime minister.

Such as ....?

The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi ... said the 17,000 people made homeless by Monday's earthquake should think of themselves as being on a "camping weekend". ... The quake, which devastated the city of L'Aquila and surrounding towns and villages, has now claimed 260 lives.

Berlusconi told the reporter for the N-TV channel that the homeless quake victims "lacked nothing". "They have medicaments. They have hot food. They have shelter for the night," he said. "Of course, their current lodgings are a bit temporary. But they should see it like a weekend of camping." ...

His remarks – which seem to have been intended to reassure the public – scarcely correspond to the experiences of the homeless. Between Monday and Tuesday, they had to endure a night of driving rain and hail during which temperatures fell to 4C ...

Meanwhile, the Vatican reports that the Pope will visit the disaster area after Easter Sunday or when the ground in L'Aquila stops shaking.

Update: The Italian press is reporting that questions are being raised about the materials and techniques used to build a recently constructed residential complex which collapsed, trapping and injuring dozens of people. A firefighter observed that it wasn't the earthquake that killed people but the buildings.

Could the earthquake in Italy be a providential sign?

Though I'm really shocked and appalled that God the Father would cause all those people to die just to get Benedict XVI's attention and to let him know that the Catholic Church is MASSIVELY wrong by not supporting women who, by virtue of their familial role and responsibilities, are most likely to ensure continuity and perseverance of religious faith in Africa.

Most fundamentalist Christians view their God as cruel and vengeful but isn't there another way to let the Pope know that his position on condoms should be revised? Hopefully those members of the Catholic Church that God punished for blind allegiance to ecclesiastical ideology, as well as those who are collateral damage, will experience illumination, healing and divine consolation.

By the way, this post was inspired by the pithy response that the habitually verbose Blob Blogging Wingnut posted at her site on March 24:

Unreported in the MSM: children of abortion chain owner died in MT plane crash...just feet from Tomb of the Unborn Just has that ironic feel about it. But what the news sources fail to mention is... the [cemetery] contains... the Tomb of the Unborn... erected as a dedication to all babies who have died because of abortion.What else is the mainstream news not telling you? The family who died in the crash near the location of the abortion victim's memorial, is the family of Irving 'Bud' Feldkamp, owner of the largest for-profit abortion chain in the nation....It strikes me as a providential sign.Though I'm really sad the abortion chain owner lost his kids. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. I genuinely hope he and his wife experience healing and divine consolation.

Now we wait for the shrieeeking to start, because when progressives try to make sense of rightwingnuttery and attempt to verify if there is any logic to their pontifications by applying them to similar events, fundamentalists become quite wrathful.

Sebelius v. Fetus Fetishists, Round Umpty-two

Oy. Seems both JJ at Unrepentant Old Hippie and I here spoke too soon.

At the federal level, while not one fetus-fetishizing senator brought up her pro-choice credentials as an impediment to her confirmation as Health and Human Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius is still governor of Kansas and her home-grown fundies have just thrown her a doozy.

Across the Excited States, various state legislatures have been busily erecting more legal barriers to abortion. In Kansas, they recently passed a law requiring doctors to make an ultrasound available to women seeking abortions.

As a Kansas City Star editorialist puts it:

The bill was a win-win situation for abortion opponents. If Sebelius signed it, they'd get what they wanted. If she vetoed it, they'd raise a fuss in advance of her Senate confirmation hearings for the job of U.S. health and human services secretary.

She signed the bill.

They came up with a new one -- a bill

that would allow patients and their relatives to sue doctors for damages if they came to believe that a late-term abortion was illegal. Physicians would also have to give a detailed medical accounting to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment after performing a late-term abortion.

The editorialist and I agree -- she has to veto it. Imagine the shenanigans of zygote zealots trying to manipulate a woman who's had an abortion into 'coming to believe' that it was illegal. (WTF does that even mean?) And the detailed medical 'accounting' puts patient privacy at risk.

Sadly, while the grown-ups seem to be taking charge at the national level, the state houses are still full of panty-sniffers.

And those who defend pedophilia crawl out ...

from the underside of a big rock that was lifted to shed some light upon the sexual exploitation of children (emphasis ours).

oldowleyes wrote: "Wow, if your male your not even allowed to pay cash or ask for a quiet private room w/o out being suspected of being a pedophile. What a bunch of clowns Canadian governments are turning out to be, go back into your holes of institutional discrimination. While your at it, I suggest you get those illegal Family Relation Laws* off your books, or someday soon your going to be on the hook for billions in a class action law suit."

boardhead wrote: "Great. Now any 35 year old man with a young looking 20 year old girl will get a label. I'm all for the initiative as well, but most 18 yr. old girls these days are promiscuous with older men, and some look younger than 18, which will cause problems for some guys who are doing nothing wrong."

Most of the commenters who responded favourably to this campaign appeared to be women. The purpose of this initiative from the government of Alberta, Child and Youth Services division is to target adults who sexually exploit vulnerable girls and boys in rooms rented from commercial lodging establishments such as resorts, hotels and motels.

I have traveled with my daughter and her girlfriend, when they were teenagers. If I had seen hotel staff chat informally with them to ensure that neither had been kidnapped or were being coerced to participate in child prostitution, as part of precautionary measures that screened all guests, I would not have reacted in anger or fear. But perhaps men like Dickie Evans who engage in duplicitous sexual behaviour know that they have something to hide.

* This appears to be the legislation that oldowleyes finds objectionable.

The Queen gets hug. In public view. From commoner.

"Bet that's the first time a black woman ever put her arm around your Queen!" said my New York friend on the phone. Oh, come on, I said. Aren't you being slightly racist here, for a good East Coast Democrat? She's Queen of Jamaica, too, you know, and half the Caribbean, and Tuvalu and Papua New Guinea. I'll give you that Michelle Obama is the tallest black woman who ever embraced the Queen, but no way is she the first.

From here. There was a frisson that rippled through the media when Queen Elizabeth II was photographed at an official G20 function with US First Lady Michelle Obama, arms extended around each other's waist ... errr, given the difference in height, Obama actually reached around The Queen's shoulder, in a spontaneous BFF gesture.

It always helps to have the right touch, and the Obamas apparently do. ... The latter gesture — a near hug that caused the British press to drop its crumpets — was the touch heard ’round the world, rehashed and analyzed on television and the Internet as both a major breach of protocol and a kindly, inoffensive act.

The photographs of the event, and some of the tongue-in-cheek discussion that followed was a welcome antidote to the shameful removal of two Israeli cabinet ministers from public view by two fundamentalist Jewish publications this week.

North Dakota: Grown-Ups in Charge

There are several 'personhood' initiatives at various stages in various US state legislatures. Fetus fetishists want to use a religious -- as opposed to accepted medical -- definition of pregnancy and to create rights for a two-celled blastocyte.

While the measure passed the House in North Dakota, the Senate is obviously saner.

Senators voted 29-16 Friday to reject legislation that sought to define as a human being "any organism with the genome of homo sapiens." The "personhood" status would include a developing embryo from the moment of conception, whether inside or outside the womb.

Hmmm. 29 to 16. Pretty convincing majority of normal people, eh?

Yeah, well, we know they will never give up. Blob Blogging Wingnut said of the 'personhood' initiatives:

It's only a matter of time before the equality of all human beings is recognized. Get used to it.

Um. No. YOU get used to having grown-ups in charge.

Hundreds of women were murdered on Terrazas' watch.

Demonstrations in Montréal, Ottawa and Mexico were held today to express opposition to the presence of Francisco Barrio Terrazas, Mexico's new ambassador to Canada.
From here:

[He] assumed the cushy diplomatic posting on February 26th, 2009. He had previously served as mayor of Ciudad Juarez, known as the Murder Capital of North America, and later as governor of Chihuahua state.
...
Representing the regime of Felipe Calderón in Canada is a man who governed a city where more four hundred women have been killed since 1993. Many of the women killed were sexually assaulted first. Barrio Terrazas refused to call for an investigation until 1998.

"We can't accept that Canada, a model country that's culture is based on the respect of human rights and rule of law, could shelter a person who tolerated the murder and rapes of women and girls," reads a statement concerning Barrio Terrazas' appointment from May our Daughters Come Home, a women's group based in Juarez.

In Montréal several organizations, including la Fédération des femmes du Québec released statements protesting his appointment and deploring his complicity in allowing the murders of women to continue unchecked and undermining investigations into the criminal activities that have brutalized women in Ciudad Juarez.

Removing women from the picture, deliberately.

Two fundamentalist Orthodox Jewish newspapers in Israel altered an official photograph of the new cabinet picture to remove the two female cabinet ministers.

Limor Livnat and Sofa Landver were grouped with the rest of the 30-member cabinet for their inaugural photo.

But Yated Neeman newspaper digitally changed the picture by replacing them with two men. The Shaa Tova newspaper blacked the women out.

Publishing pictures of women is viewed by many ultra-orthodox Jews as a violation of female modesty.

I heard about this on Radio-Canada this morning. Are fundamentalist zealots in the planet's three major religions conspiring and competing to see who can put on the most MASSIVE display of misogyny? The actions taken, which range from allowing men to rape their wives with impunity in Afghanistan to the Pope's deliberate obfuscation of scientific research, are a clear violation of women's basic human rights. Using photoshop to remove women from view seems benign, in comparison but such incidents demonstrate that religious clerics persist in using doctrine and ideology to punish women who dare to act like human beings.