You could tell that she knew she was on shaky moral ground from the beginning of the interview:

“This is a court that ruled… that orientation is going to be treated like race under California law. It really means that our government is now in the business in California of saying that people like me who think marriage is the union of husband and wife are exactly like bigots who opposed interracial marriage.”

The thing is, Maggie, that people like you are exactly like racist bigots earlier in the century who opposed interracial marriage.  Let’s go through a short list of the reasons:

1. For starters, I have yet to hear a pro-family group come up with a justification for banning gay marriage that didn’t involve their slightly fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible.  We live in a secular society with a secular government and a secular constitution, so attempting to argue and legislate from a position is not only irrelevant, it’s also illegal.
2. Opponents of interracial marriage made sure that there were unjust laws on the books that made the practice illegal, and when someone protested they pointed to those laws and said it was the will of the people.
3. Proponents of slavery and later of Jim Crow laws certainly had a Biblical justification for their bigotry ready to trot out whenever someone protested, but that didn’t make them right.
4. Opponents of gay marriage in California point to civil unions as a way for homosexual couples to be “separate but equal” under the law.  Can you think of another example of a minority group that was oppressed under the flimsy legal justification of “separate but equal”?

So I’m sorry, Maggie, but groups who oppose gay marriage today are exactly like groups who opposed interracial marriage.  My fervent hope is that history remembers you and your colleagues as the bigots that you are after the dust has cleared and the legality of gay marriage has been established once and for all.

“That means people in these faith traditions are going to be treated like racists in the public square if we don’t overturn this decision.”

Sometimes, Maggie, you have to call a spade a spade.  Anyone who treats you or your friends in Christ like bigots in the public square would be perfectly justified in doing so, because that’s what you are.  You’re trying to keep basic human rights that don’t harm anyone from a minority group because your invisible friend in the sky wrote down a few lines six thousand years ago that vaguely condemn one man lying with another man if you interpret it through the proper fundamentalist theology.  Your argument has no basis in modern morality.  The best you can come up with is that it’s the will of the people, but one of the great things about this country is that the will of the people can be overturned when the will of the people is wrong and violates the law.  The constitution is the highest law in America, not God.

“The next step is to raise $10 million to wage a media war.”

This is where conscientious people from all walks of life need to step in and step up.  You can see from the interview above that even when they come close to the truth, these fundamentalist nutjobs are still so set in their ways that they’re going to fight for a constitutional amendment tooth and nail.  We need to fight against them and make sure that this amendment doesn’t pass.  Of course all is not lost if it does pass, that just means that the decision will likely go to the Supreme Court to see if a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is unconstitutional, but we have the opportunity to defeat this now and protect basic human rights for everyone, not just heterosexuals.

I’d like to leave everyone with one last thought from the duplicitous Maggie Gallagher:

“My concern is to protect marriage and religious liberty in the state of California and the rest of the United States.”

Sorry, Maggie, but heterosexuals have already destroyed the institution of marriage far more thoroughly than gays could ever hope to.  Heterosexuals have waged a vicious scorched earth campaign against marriage that has stretched across divorce courts, Jerry Springer, and reality shows like “Who Wants to Marry A Millionaire.”  You can’t fight for the integrity of marriage, because as it stands today heterosexuals have made sure that there is almost no integrity left in the institution.

And let’s remember that this is a society where we are guaranteed freedom from religious oppression.  The Establishment Clause was put in to prevent exactly the sort of thing that you are trying to do right now.  Your religious liberty does not extend so far that it should prevent the basic civil liberties of others.  This is a secular society, not a theocracy, and if your religious beliefs are so outdated as to become immoral then it’s probably time to examine them and make some changes.

Technorati Tags: Maggie Gallagher, National Organization for Marriage, NPR, Day to Day, marriage debate, fundamentalist, christianity, religious bigots, bigotry, gay marriage, California gay marriage

Of course it isn’t going to be easy. Project Marriage, a Christian organization touting itself as a “loose alliance of pro-family and church organizations” (which is press release code for “fundamentalist bigots”) has gotten over 1 million signatures on a proposal to amend the California constitution to ban gay marriage, thus invalidating today’s supreme court decision.

On the positive side, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has publicly stated that he will “always be there to fight against” this group and their efforts. The bad news is that the proposed constitutional amendment will go on the November ballot for a vote no matter what the governator says as long as they have enough valid signatures.

So we have a Christian group that is trying to pass legislation that will make their religious beliefs part of the secular constitution of their state. I don’t know about everyone else, but this boldfaced attempt by religion to hijack what should be a secular decision seriously pisses me off.

I’d just like to say that this is ridiculous. As Dan Savage is fond of pointing out, heterosexuals have proven with the divorce rate that they don’t give a rat’s ass about the sanctity of marriage, so that argument in favor of keeping gays from marrying falls flat. Leviticus has a pretty strong condemnation of homosexuality if you’re reading the right translation with the right interpretation, but Christians conveniently and consistently ignore Bible passages condemning divorce, adultery, and sacrificing a goat every time a woman is menstruating. Obviously they’re willing to overlook Bible passages when it makes their life more convenient, so there’s no reason why they can’t just agree to consign the anti-gay passages to the dustbin of religious history. There is absolutely no justifiable reason for all of this anti-gay sentiment amongst Christians. Even Jesus seemed like a live and let live kinda guy, not counting his cameo in Revelation.

The truth is that homosexuals provide a convenient “other” for conservative groups and conservative politicians to demonize for their own gain. Conservatives have discovered that nothing gets their fundamentalist religious base out of the church and into the voting booth better than the idea that somewhere two women or two men might be having sex with each other with the blessing of the state. And if they happen to vote anti-gay posturing politicians into office while they’re in that voting booth rallying against the perceived evils of homosexuality then that’s all the better for these Machiavellian bigots. Perhaps if conservatives ever pulled themselves away from the withered teats of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity long enough to think an independent thought then they would be appalled at how easily they as a group are manipulated and herded, but that’s about as likely as Rush and Hannity taking advantage of the new pro-gay atmosphere in California to finally consummate their forbidden love.

Heterosexuals and homosexuals alike need to fight for the basic human rights of the homosexual community. Any society that is willing to marginalize one group could just as easily marginalize everyone else, and America is better than this. If you’d like to help out then you can start by checking out the ACLU’s Get Busy Get Equal campaign. I enjoy the legal protections of marriage, and I’m sure there are many others reading this who are married themselves. It’s time that we make sure our gay friends, relatives, and neighbors enjoy those same protections. And most importantly, it’s time that we send a message to the religious right that they can’t hijack the legal process to try and legislate their religious beliefs into law.

America is not a theocracy, and we need to make sure it stays that way.

Technorati Tags: gay marriage, California supreme court, California gay marriage, Project Marriage, religious right, theocracy, religious law

Don’t worry fundies (or trekkies), this isn’t going to happen any time soon thanks to strict regulation!

 I don’t imagine for a moment that the strict regulation surrounding this endeavor will stop religious groups from protesting it long and loud, despite the potential medical advances that could be made by studying these modified embryos. The fundies would rather live in a world where their invisible friend in the sky got to pick who wins and who loses in the genetic lottery rather than having humanity work it out for ourselves so we can fix all of those potentially lethal errors that the great Creator left lurking in our base pairs. At the very least they’re destroying fertilized embryos, and we’ve seen how they all get their panties in a twist every time a blastocyst is blended in the name of science rather than being thrown out and wasted.

There are serious ethical concerns that need to be raised and dealt with when it comes to genetically modifying embryos. If scientists perfect these techniques then it might only be a quick hop, skip, and a jump from curing alzheimers in the womb to a visit from ‘ol Khan up there. But the debate over these legitimate ethical concerns are going to be clouded by masses of religious sheep bleating about the sanctity of a non-sentient clustering of cells that will otherwise never see the light of day.

Technorati Tags: designer babies, genetically modified embryos, embryos, religion, sanctity of life, fundamentalists

Their press release even managed to hit all the right notes almost all the way through:

“We want the next President to know that failure to vigorously enforce federal obscenity laws is undermining government efforts to, among other things, strengthen the family, protect children from pornography, curb sexual exploitation of children and curb sexual trafficking.”

So they seem to be protesting child pornography and sexual trafficking.  I think just about everyone can agree that those are admirable goals.  And I’m sure that most people who read through the article will focus on that alone, but in the next paragraph they take a sharp swing into left field:

“We also we want the next President to know that widespread availability of obscene materials is not proof of community acceptance. According to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive in April 2008, 75% of adult Americans said they would support the next President were he or she to ‘do all in his or her constitutional power to ensure that federal obscenity laws are enforced vigorously against commercial distributors of hardcore pornography.”

And now we’re safely into familiar territory for the Christian moralizers.  First off, I have to wonder about that survey where 75% of Americans said they want to get rid of hardcore pornography.  I imagine that a fair number of that 75% has their own private collection that they feel entitled to while they’re publicly denouncing the stuff.  It’s more than 25% of Americans keeping the porn industry chugging along rather nicely through the recession, after all.

The real problem here is that they’ve gone from supporting better enforcement of the law to supporting censorship by lumping hardcore pornography in with child pornography and human trafficking.  I’m sure that there is exploitation going on out there in the mainstream porn industry, but the fact remains that it is completely legal to make, distribute, and sell those materials in most of the country.  Saying that something should be banned just because a large chunk of the population publicly disagrees with it is stepping dangerously close to the tyranny of the masses.  Sure Debbie Does Dallas 42 isn’t on par with great works of literature or film, but censorship tends to be a slippery slope once you start down that path.

Besides, people are going to continue to cry and beg God for forgiveness after they finish using their private collection whether or not it’s illegal to own those materials.  These groups almost had me, but then they had to overstep themselves and try to lump the prosecution of a reprehensible illegal action with the censorship of a legitimate and completely legal business venture.  Sorry guys, but you can’t ban something just because your invisible friend in the sky makes you feel bad about using it.

Technorati Tags: censorship, christians, pro-family

“The National Center for Science Education is antichrist.”

Just about anything that is said afterwards can be discredited by this first sentence alone.  This is a debate about whether or not religion should be taught in public schools under the guise of Intelligent Design.  Intelligent Design has been proven time and again to be a slapdash repackaging of creationism in secular sounding terms in a feeble attempt to get it into science curriculum.  The National Center for Science Education isn’t antichrist, they’re simply asking that science curriculum reflects the separation of church and state that was established with the founding of this country.  To call the NCSE antichrist is to call America and most of the founding fathers antichrist while at the same time revealing your true religious motives right from the get go.

“Text taken from The Quest for Right, a 7-book series on origins based on physical science, the old science of cause and effect:”

As far as I know science is still operating under the same old system of theorize, test, modify, and test again until you get it right or get as close to right as is possible with current technology and methodology.  It’s the same system that has been in use since the beginning of the Enlightenment, and it’s the same system that has consistently validated ideas like evolution that have gotten your panties in such a twist.  Could it be that you’re hearkening back to the pure science of the dark ages that served humanity so well for so long?

“Special note on obstructionism: In 1916, one thousand scientists were polled as to their belief in a deity (i.e., God). Of the ones responding, 60 percent had no religious belief. A follow-up study 80 years later revealed that the percentage of atheists, someone who does not believe in or denies the existence of God, among scientists remains shockingly high: 78 percent of physicists, 58 percent of biologists, and 55 percent of mathematicians are atheists.”

This is one of the biggest gripes that I have with modern religions.  Why is it shocking that scientists don’t believe in God?  Why is this such a scandal?  Why do the religious have this impulse to convert everyone around them to their particular belief system?  In short, who cares if they don’t believe in God?  It doesn’t surprise me that a good deal of scientists don’t hold a religious belief one way or the other.  Their whole life revolves around coming up with a suitable cosmology that is based on observable evidence and rigorous testing, which is something that no religion in the world can stand up to.  There is no case for God other than taking it on faith, and you’ll forgive me if I prefer scientists who question the world around me rather than taking it at face value based on ancient and outdated tribal morality.

 ”Sixty percent of those polled by the University of Georgia historian Edward Larson snubbed Judaism, Islam, and Christianity by equating “belief in a deity and an afterlife with superstition based on fear and wishful thinking.” Nature, 4-09-1997″

At the risk of sounding pedantic, here is the dictionary.com definition of superstition:

1.	a belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge, in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like.

2.	a system or collection of such beliefs.

3.	a custom or act based on such a belief.

4.	irrational fear of what is unknown or mysterious, esp. in connection with religion.

5.	any blindly accepted belief or notion.

Sounds like religion fits the definition of superstition perfectly!  Moving on.

“Even more disturbing, only 10 percent of those polled “expressed an intense desire for immortality” (that is, going to heaven), thus, signifying that on the average only 10 percent of physicists, biologists, and mathematicians are under covenant.”

Again you’re showing your ass by revealing your true motives.  Basing an argument against science on the fact that scientists aren’t “under covenent” is ridiculous.  Freedom of religion means they have the freedom to no religion, but that shouldn’t affect how they do their job either way.  Ethical scientists have their own system, the scientific method, that has done pretty well so far.

“The great majority (90 percent) have little or no regard for God but, rather, oppose Him, promoting the error that the earth and all that is in existence happened by chance. The mystical tenet governs every aspect of academic science”

There is a subtle but very distinct difference between actively opposing God and teaching a cosmology that has no room for God, though that’s a distinction lost on the religious.  If an experiment was carried out tomorrow that proved once and for all that God did exist then that would be put into the science textbooks, but so far the almighty creator of the universe has been strangely silent for the past five thousand years.  Science teachers aren’t actively trying to convert their classrooms to radical atheism, they are simply teaching the sum total of centuries of scientific inquiry.  It’s not the scientists’ fault that God hasn’t shown any evidence of his existence once in all that time, and it isn’t the teacher’s job to teach religion to students.  Religion and schools are separate, and that’s how it should be.  If you’re interested in theocracy then you can move to Iran where they’re more welcoming to that brand of close-minded thinking.

“To the point, obstructionists: scientists, biologists, mathematicians, and the NEA, teach the innocents within the classroom that there is no God.”

Again, God and religion shouldn’t be taught in the classroom.  We are a secular society that has the basis for that secularism written into the Constitution.  I for one am glad that I live in a society where freedom of inquiry and freedom of thought is considered a basic human right that is part of the highest law in the land.  Otherwise we might live in a world where creationist theocrats such as C. David Parsons got their way and stifled true understanding of the universe with a tragically limited cosmology written by primitive nomads six-thousand years ago.

Technorati Tags: C. David Parsons, secularism, religion, creationism, intelligent design, The Quest For Right, theocracy

The “academic freedom” tactic is just another example of Intelligent Designers taking a good idea and perverting it as a means to their own disingenuous ends. I wholly agree that academic freedom is a good thing, but that freedom doesn’t extend to allowing teachers to dress up their religion in vaguely scientific terms and poorly thought-out logical fallacies and teach it as fact in the classroom.

Let’s be clear, what the ID crowd is advocating isn’t academic freedom, it’s institutionalized ignorance. Intelligent Design can’t be proven. Religion is taken on faith, and as such there is no test that man could ever devise to prove or disprove the existence of God. Any student who has taken biology and genetics courses in college can easily poke thousands of holes in the “scientific” rationale for Intelligent Design with evidence to back up their claims while the Intelligent Design groups are forced to rely on facile appeals to the ignorance and incredulity of the masses. As the courts and the overwhelming evidence has proven time and again, Intelligent Design is nothing more than an attempt to sneak religious teaching into the school system, and teaching religion is most definitely verboten.

Of course that didn’t stop the Alabama legislature from trying to use a false appeal to “academic freedom” in the language for the bill:

“[teachers have the right to] present scientific information pertaining to the full range of scientific views in any curricula or course of learning “

The last time I checked, no reputable scientist opened up their copy of the Bible and took every cosmological statement found therein at face value. Even people who study the Bible for a living admit that there’s a lot in there that’s contradictory and just plain wrong when seen through the lens of a modern world view. Intelligent Design and creationism are not part of the scientific debate anywhere but amongst the creationist academic pariahs at the Discover Institute. The ID crowd is attempting to create the illusion of scientific controversy where none exists, because the hard evidence consistently disproves just about every idea they espouse.

“no student in any public school or institution of higher education … shall be penalized in any way because he or she may subscribe to a particular position on any views.”

I don’t know about you, but I certainly hope that the future doctors and scientists of America are flunked if they fail basic 100 level science courses because they insist that religion trumps reason and evidence. The country will be in a sad state in a few decades if the people who wrote this bill eventually have their way. Of course I do have to admit that it would have made the biology and genetics classes I took in college much easier if we were simply allowed to say “God made it happen” on exams instead of drawing detailed cladograms and blending nasty smelling chunks of beef to isolate and analyze the genetic material over the course of several weeks.

On the plus side, the language in that bill would have provided legal protection for the teaching of Pastafarianism in the schools, but it’s probably a better idea to just keep all religion out of the classroom no matter how noodly and delicious it may be.

via Bad Astronomy

Technorati Tags: alabama, creationism, intelligent design, HB923

Well boy are you in luck today.  There’s a new online bookseller in town.  Abunga.com is their name, and censorship based on the ignorant ravings of the masses is their game.  The problem is, people who are buying from sites such as Amazon.com are actually unwittingly supporting the evils of Internet pornography with each one of their purchases.  Of course porn is estimated to be the source of roughly 80-90% of all online revenue, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before Amazon got into the business.  Don’t believe me?  Just ask Abunga’s chairman, Lee Martin:

“Many consumers are unaware that by purchasing books from these major online retailers, they are unknowingly supporting the growing Internet pornography industry.”

“In addition, people should not have to worry that they – or their spouse or children – may be one book search away from unwanted materials when shopping for books on the Web.”

Yes, because everyone is well aware that Amazon donates at least 10% of their proceeds to Bangbus and other similar sites.  And I’m sure we’ve all had that embarrassing experience where we were checking the price on the Complete Calvin & Hobbes when our browser was suddenly redirected to backdoorsluts9.com.  Please.

So Abunga allows people to censor books that they find indecent, and if enough people censor a book then the site removes it from its catalog and presumably gives those sales back to the hedonistic porn-mongers over at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  I have to commend this guy for finding a way to cash in on conservative Christian paranoia, but at the same time it makes me sad that there is actually a market out there for people who have more fun censoring great literature than reading it.

Technorati Tags: abunga, censorship, book burning

From the candidate:

“I think it’s just and I think it’s proper to have Pro-Life on the ballot,” he told the Idaho Press-Tribune of Nampa. “If I save one baby’s life, it’s worth it.”

Yes, putting the slogan “pro-life” on the ballot box is going to make young potential mothers between the ages of 18-29, who as a voting bloc are notorious for their 100% attendance at the polls, think twice before they decide to hobble themselves with a pregnancy that they don’t want or can’t handle because a strawberry farmer from Backwater Idaho’s all-loving invisible friend in the sky will send you to hell for destroying a fertilized egg.

Pro-Life doesn’t stop the crazy there, however:

He says he will run for the highest state office on the ballot every two years for the rest of his life, advocating murder charges for doctors who perform abortions and for women who obtain the procedure.

Why stop there?  If we’re going to go down the road of religiously mandated murder charges then we might as well round up every guy who has ever masturbated.  That’s billions of potential humans who are being killed according to the narrow religious definition of life.  We should probably also grab any woman who uses birth control or anyone who purchases a condom, because it’s a well known fact that Trojan brand and Ortho Tri-cyclen are long-running government-sanctioned mass murderers that would make Hitler and Stalin look like kittens in comparison.  And it goes without saying that anyone who uses the morning after pill should probably just be sentenced to death on the spot so we can stop the moral threat that birth control poses to society as a whole.

Technorati Tags: pro-life, Idaho senate, abortion debate, Idaho politics, Idaho, religion