'We Will Never Have the Smart People on Our Side'

Watch Rick (Frothy Mix) Santorum call his supporters a bunch of dummies at the Values Voter Summit.




Proudly ignorant. It's an epidemic.


h/t Joe. My. God.

Republican family values.

LuLu at Canadian Cynic: Republican family values. brings this gem to our attention.

What I find perplexing is not the tactic that the fundamentalist religious right might champion as a double whammy - a strike against homosexuality and safe, responsibility-based sex education - but the reasons that the Republican leadership claim as the source of the problem.

Consider the following. DAMMIT JANET! comments the sub-text (our annotations are italicized).

A few minutes into his speech, Schwartz moved to the topic of pornography, calling it a “blight” and a “disease” that parents’ “sons” would encounter. (But not their daughters who might be coerced, likely by older men, to re-enact the brutalizing scenarios?) Noting that he was about to get “politically incorrect,” Schwartz said that it is his “observation that boys at that age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people”:

SCHWARTZ: But it is my observation that boys at that age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people. (If you exclude Pat Robertson and his thousands of acolytes.) They speak badly about homosexuality. (Peer pressure and bullying?) And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. (Given the choice between being beaten or killed by their peers and likely rejected by their family, the boys who feel the stirrings of their homosexuality will bury those feelings and over-compensate with violence against class-mates who are 'sissies'.) They don’t want to fall into it. (But they just might commit suicide.) And that’s a good instinct. (Survival? Yes that is a good instinct.) After all, homosexuality, we know, studies have been done by the National Institute of Health to try to prove that it's genetic and all those studies have proved it's not genetic. (Scientific studies are bogus if they don't support his beliefs.) Homosexuality is inflicted on people. (No. It is a scientifically documented sexual orientation. The bigotry of fundamentalist religious conservatives is inflicted on people.)

Schwartz then recalled “a very good friend” of his “who was in the homosexual lifestyle for a long time,” saying that he “had good conversations about, about the malady that he suffered.” (Your words? - likely not his, but then again if your gay male friend is a Republican he has learned to use the words of his persecutors judiciously to placate them.) He then relayed “an astonishingly insightful remark” his friend had made about the relationship between pornography and being gay:

SCHWARTZ: And one of the things that he said to me, that I think is an astonishingly insightful remark. He said, “all pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards. (Schwartz, you are really clueless. Your astute "very good friend" is telling you that most porn is androcentric and gynophobic.) Now think about that. And if you, if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to go out and get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants.” (And your "very good friend" just told what he knew you wanted to hear.) You know, that’s a, that’s a good comment. (And it's all part and parcel of your "very good friend's" lifelong strategy of how to escape from the murderous hatred of schoolyard and religious rightwing bullies.) It’s a good point and it’s a good thing to teach young people. (Your sons, you mean. The girls get to attend Purity Balls with their daddies.)

Schwartz then added a slight caveat, saying, “if it doesn’t turn you homosexual, it at least renders you less capable of loving your wife.”

Or more likely to grow up to become a Republican politician who gets caught with his pants down.

The four women found in the Rideau Canal were murdered.

Remember this disturbing news story in late June?

Police are investigating the circumstances surrounding the deaths of three sisters and another relative who were found inside a submerged car in locks northeast of Kingston.
Ontario Provincial Police divers removed the bodies of three teens, aged 13, 17 and 19, and a 50-year-old woman described as a relative, from a vehicle found in the Kingston Mills locks around 4 p.m. Tuesday. The identities of the victims, who were all from Quebec, have not yet been released. They had been on vacation in southern Ontario and were on their way back to Quebec, police said Wednesday. They were reported missing by relatives.
"It breaks my heart just saying it," Const. Michael Menor, spokesman for Kingston Police, said in an interview with The Canadian Press. "You have a family, they've all drowned. It's just horrifyingly tragic."

The circumstances were particularly troubling when it became evident that the presence of the car in that particular section of the Rideau Canal could not have have been caused by accident or driver error.

The Kingston police have charged 3 suspects, two men and one woman, with the murders of Zainab, Geeti and Sahar Shafia as well as Rona Amir Mohammed.

The presumed motive for the alleged quadruple homicide? The disposal of an older, inconvenient relative who happened to be Mohammed Shafi's first wife and three rebellious teenage girls who were perceived to be on a path that would bring dishonor to him? Were there life insurance benefits to be claimed? Thus it may be simply greed, the grease that helps to crank the wheel of fundamentalist religious and rightwing zealots the world over.

Update: This is the information released by the Kingston police at the press conference that just concluded, minutes ago. The news item is closed to comments

"because an overwhelming number of readers were making offensive statements about other commenters and/or the individual or individuals mentioned in the story".

No surprise there; judging from the types of comments that have appeared at the CBC website, I'd guess most were islamophobic. And yet, the patriarch in this case probably shares the same "family values" and gynophobic views as Randall Terry. Go figure.

Update: All three members of the Shafia family charged with first-degree murder were convicted of these crimes. They are currently serving 25 years sentences.

Love: sex on the side, hold the marriage?

Shorter Ross Douthat, The Way We Love Now in the weekend New York Times: "Middle-aged guys have dangerous and reckless liaisons; middle-aged women crave dangerous and reckless liaisons".

His op-ed is a shallow response to a couple of thoughtful essays written by two women reflecting upon their recent experiences as well as to the tabloid-sensationalized sexual shenanigans of men who gave lip service to US religious conservative Family Values©™.

In What's Love Got to Do With It?, author Seth Michael Donsky looks to Dagmar Herzog, a CUNY history professor and the author of Sex in Crisis for insight.

She states that, because of AIDS in the mid-1980s, there were legions of young men, mostly in New York and San Francisco, in their twenties, who were faced with the sort of mortal, life decisions—such as health-care proxy and inheritance rights—that men in their twenties rarely have to deal with. “People would be dying in the hospital, and families, often estranged, who hadn’t seen their sons in years, and who didn’t accept their lifestyles, would show up and kick their sons’ lovers out and take over the whole operation. It was one of the first times that the queer community sensed, en masse, how vulnerable it was without those civil rights.”

Herzog further contends that, at the same time in the mid-’80s, as a direct result of the woman’s movement in the 1970s, women with school-age children from previous heterosexual marriages were now living in lesbian relationships.“There were great complexities,” she explains, “in attempting to co-parent with a partner who didn’t actually have any legal, parental rights over the children.” According to Herzog, however, it wasn’t marriage that people sought in the beginning. It was civil rights. “I don’t think that people really thought that marriage, as the solution, was even possible at the time.”

She poses that the next big shift occurred in the early ’90s when the Republicans, who had just lost the presidential election to Clinton, in their desire to rally the troops and to court the religious right, spearheaded the Defense of Marriage Act, before many people on the other side of the issue were even talking about marriage.

On the 40th year anniversary of Stonewall, one does wonder about love, marriage and the whole damn relationship thing.

Religious Wingnutty Factor Gets Wingnuttier.

The saga of lost-and-found South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford just keeps getting wingnuttier.

He's now back at work and, needing a powerful metaphor to gloss over his little escapade, he reaches for the Old Testament. Appropriate, you'd think, for a Republican who based his campaign on the GOP's obligatory fundamentalist religious Family Values©™ - right?

First Mrs Sanford, with the obligatory stand-by-your-man sound bite:

South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford says she discovered her husband's affair in January when she found a letter to the governor from his mistress. Jenny Sanford told The Associated Press on Friday she told him to end the affair and was shocked this week when she found out he'd gone to Argentina to see his mistress. She says she believed Gov. Mark Sanford had gone somewhere to work on writing a book.

The scripted standard of a good, loyal political spouse response that's become a cliché.

Meanwhile, Sanford was back at work today, telling his state agency chiefs that he's sorry for keeping them in the dark when he went to see Argentina to see his mistress. The Republican on Friday held his typical public meeting with the agency chiefs, but started with apologies and likening his confession and future to the biblical plight of King David. Sanford says King David fell mightily but picked up the pieces and built from there.

The question remains though - will the Republicans require Sanford to fall on his sword? Or will it all get swept under the carpet, as it was for other GOP presidential candidates? I'm thinking that Sarah Palin will throw a spanner in their well-lubricated presidential electoral machine if the old boys try any of their old tricks.