Liberty Counsel: Not Hateful Enough!

Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver (left) with his wife and Liberty Counsel president Anita Staver. Credit: Liberty University.

Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver (left) with his wife and Liberty Counsel president Anita Staver. Credit: Liberty University.

After months of preaching that the so-called First Amendment Defense Act was the only way to protect the “religious freedom” of those opposed to marriage equality, one of the nation’s leading anti-LGBT organizations has done a complete 180.

In a press release published Wednesday, Liberty Counsel explained why it abruptly stopped supporting the sweeping federal legislation. As it turns out, the anti-LGBT legal nonprofit that represented antigay Kentucky clerk Kim Davis and a host of other right-wing dissenters wasn’t all that worried about religious freedom. It appears the group was instead primarily concerned with making sure individuals, businesses, and federal contractors could discriminate against LGBT people without “punishment” from the government.

So after the bill’s lead sponsor in the House, Idaho Rep. Raul Labrador, revealed a change in the language of House Resolution 2802 that would protect people from adverse government action regarding any “religious belief or moral conviction” about marriage, Liberty Counsel balked. While the draft bill posted on Rep. Labrador’s website is dated July 7, the official congressional page for the bill has not been updated since it was introduced June 17.

“For the first time, the federal government under the proposed FADA will formerly [sic] recognize and condone same-sex marriage on par with the natural marriage,” read Wednesday’s press release. “Liberty Counsel can no longer support FADA unless the proposed amendment is abandoned and FADA returns to its original language of marriage being between one man and one woman.”

Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver went on to “urge all members of Congress to reject the proposed amendments to the First Amendment Defense Act that include same-sex marriage,” promising that “pro-family” organizations will not be able to support the legislation unless it singles out same-sex couples for legalized discrimination. The antigay language in FADA is “necessary to protect people of faith,” Staver concluded.

Seems to me that what ‘people of faith’ need is lot of quiet time. Quiet time used to reflect on your personal morals not only being evil, but being used as the justification to treat other people as objects to be crushed.

The Advocate has the full story.

Seceding Over Slavery.

fox_of_trump_jesus_160511e-800x4301-440x270Most people know about Bill O’Reilly’s unbelievably idiotic remarks about slaves building the White House, and his subsequent doubling down, attempting to justify his previous commentary and digging quite the hole for himself. O’Reilly spent a fair amount of time opining that liberals literally want him dead. I don’t want you dead, Bill, I want you off the air.

Anyroad, the idiotic remarks about slaves and the astonishing distortion of actual history inspired Marcus Ranum to do a very in-depth post about slavery. Here’s a little bit:

The Odious Institution

The colonies in America had been priming themselves for a revolution for some time. Unpopular legislation from England, in the form of taxes and regulations – notably The Stamp Act, The Sugar Act, The Townshend Act – had provoked protest, violence, tax collectors being brutalized, and civilian protestors shot down by redcoats. England was trying, simply enough, to extract some of the colony’s massive wealth through taxation, to pay for its various wars. The colonial leaders were trying, simply enough, to keep their wealth – a great deal of which was at best semi-licit: whenever the crown would levy a new tax, the colonial entrepreneurs would smuggle the goods, anyway.

The “triangle trade” was taking place “off the books” to a significant degree, and was at least partly designed to facilitate smuggling. It was a hugely profitable trade-route, and underpinned much of the New England economy as well as that of the American south’s most powerful and wealthy state, Virginia. From 1770 to 1780 the people who became the political leaders in the colonies were all wealthy, and that wealth depended on smuggling, slavery, land speculation, tobacco or cotton farming, or “trade” (which meant: buying and selling alcohol, tobacco, slaves, etc) – the unhappiness the colonial political leaders were feeling with England was that their tax-sheltered existences were threatened. They were already hugely wealthy, in terms of the time, with some notable exceptions (Jefferson was really really good at spending money!) George Washington was the largest land speculator in the colonies, John Hancock was a smuggler “trader” of large but unknown fortune, Jefferson owned lots of land, slaves, and farmed tobacco and cotton.* They had time and inclination to get involved in politics because they had a great deal of wealth at stake and had enough wealth that they could take the time – literally afford – to travel about protecting their interests.

For the colonial elite, the Somerset decision had the attention-riveting effect of a dagger pressed against the throat. It was immediately seen as a threat to their interests for the simple reason that: the colonies were under England’s law. If English law had finally come down on the issue of slavery as odious, immoral and – what really mattered: unenforceable – the colonial elite had a serious, serious problem on their hands.

So they did what any justice-loving group of leaders would do: they worked out how to emancipate the slaves, apologized and compensated them with grants of land** and started tithing a reasonable percentage of their gains to England.

Of course they didn’t.

It’s an excellent read, so click on over for the full article.

Cool Stuff Friday.

Furoshiki-bat

Hanging Animal Furoshiki! Eeeee, so cute!

A fun and adorable, contemporary twist on the furoshiki (風呂敷), a traditional wrapping cloth that’s been around in Japan since the 700s. With a few simple folds these unique furoshiki transform into a carrier that resembles hanging animals that will transport your stuff anywhere!

Literally meaning “bath spread,” furoshiki were used to bundle clothes while at public baths. But nowadays people use them to bundle or gift-wrap all sorts of things like lunches, accessories and bottles of wine or sake. Nothing to carry? You can use it around your neck as a scarf too!

They’re newly available in the Spoon & Tamago Shop for $35.

I must have the bat! Must have.

Now we have what might just be the best candle ever. I think protesters should be bulk ordering these.

middle_finger_candle_DSC_0063_1024x1024

Living in New York, artist Nao Matsumoto had found himself relying on the middle finger gesture quite frequently. But when he nearly sliced off his middle finger while cutting wood in his studio it made him realize the severity of the potential loss – an accident, he says, that would have been equivalent to losing his voice.

So the Brooklyn-based Japanese artist created a series of middle finger candles. Each candle is hand-made by Matsumoto himself and comes from a mold made from his own hand. The candles were originally used to protest the use of nuclear energy in Japan on the anniversary of the March 2011 tsunami.You can read more about the protest Here.

Nao-Matsumoto-No-Nukes-Tokyo-1-580x384

You can order your very own middle finger candle here.

Orlando Cops and the Krispy Kreme Meth Incident.

Daniel Rushing buys a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other week. (July 27, 2016) (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda / Orlando Sentinel)

Daniel Rushing buys a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other week. (July 27, 2016) (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda / Orlando Sentinel)

Orlando cops decided to arrest a 64 year old man who was guilty of driving and doughnut eating – everyone be careful, if you’re going to do the same, stay away from the glazed!

Daniel Rushing treats himself to a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other Wednesday. He used to eat them in his car.

Not anymore.

Not since a pair of Orlando police officers pulled him over, spotted four tiny flakes of glaze on his floorboard and arrested him, saying they were pieces of crystal methamphetamine. The officers did two roadside drug tests and both came back positive for the illegal substance, according to his arrest report.

He was handcuffed, arrested, taken to the county jail and strip searched, he said. A state crime lab, however, did another test several weeks later and cleared him.

“It was incredible,” he said. “It feels scary when you haven’t done anything wrong and get arrested. … It’s just a terrible feeling.”

[…]

That’s when she spotted “a rock like substance on the floor board where his feet were,” she wrote. “I recognized through my eleven years of training and experience as a law enforcement officer the substance to be some sort of narcotic,” she wrote.

She asked for permission to search his vehicle, the report says, and Rushing agreed. “I didn’t have anything to hide,” he said. “I’ll never let anyone search my car again.”

Riggs-Hopkins and other officers spotted three other pieces of the suspicious substance in his car, according to the report.

“I kept telling them, ‘That’s … glaze from a doughnut. … They tried to say it was crack cocaine at first, then they said, ‘No, it’s meth, crystal meth.'” His arrest report confirms that he tried to tell them.

[…]

She booked him into the county jail on a charge of possession of methamphetamine with a firearm. He was locked up for about 10 hours before his release on $2,500 bond, he said.

According to FDLE, an analyst in its Orlando crime lab did not try to identify what police found in his car. She only checked to determine whether it was an illegal drug and confirmed that it was not.

Three days later, the State Attorney’s Office in Orlando filed paperwork, saying that it was dropping the case.

Rushing, who retired after 25 years as an Orlando parks department employee, has hired a lawyer and is asking the city to pay him damages.

“I got arrested for no reason at all,” he said.

[…]

The Orlando Police Department did not explain why the two drug field tests that Riggs-Hopkins conducted were wrong.

When asked how many other road-side drug tests have produced false positive results, an OPD spokeswoman wrote, “At this time, we have no responsive records. … There is no mechanism in place for easily tracking the number of, or results of, field drug testing.”

FDLE spokeswoman Molly Best wrote that her agency has no information about the prevalence of false-positive field drug tests.

The New York Times reported on July 7 that its review of FDLE data showed that 21 percent of the time, drug evidence that was listed by local authorities as methamphetamine turned out to be something else.

In its statement, OPD described the arrest as a lawful one.

Full story at the Orlando Sentinel.

The Cost of McCrory.

Gov. Pat McCrory (R-NC) (nc.gov, Screengrab)

Gov. Pat McCrory (R-NC) (nc.gov, Screengrab)

The costs keep mounting in NC, and going by all appearances, McCrory simply doesn’t care in the least. I keep trying to figure out why there is this pig-headed obstinacy in hanging on to HB 2, and all I can come up with is that McCrory is doing this to save face. Or he thinks this is face-saving, because it seems to me that any idiot could figure out the costs far outweigh any perceived benefit.

The price tag for keeping North Carolina’s HB2 on the books just keeps getting more and more expensive.

In a review by the Associate Press, Gov. Pat McCrory and state legislative leaders have run up more than $176,000 in legal fees to defend the law, which prevents transgender people from using restrooms and changing rooms matching their gender identity.

That’s likely not the total because some firms have yet to bill the state for their work on the legal battle between the state and the Department of Justice.

State taxpayers will have to eat those real costs, in addition to the estimated $100 million in lost potential revenue after the NBA withdrew the 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte over the controversial law.

There’s also that $500,000 that was pulled out of the state’s disaster relief fund a while back. Taxpayers cannot be happy with this, any more than the massive tab some Arizona taxpayers are faced with over Arpaio. I don’t know why people keep such assholes in office, but it’s time to kick them out on their arses, and get competent representation.

Via Out.

Meet Chalice, Transgender Comic Hero.

alters_collage

For the most part, comic books have always kept relatively quiet in a self-contained corner of the entertainment landscape. It’s one of the most inclusive forms of media, dating back to the original X-Men being one big allegory for minorities of all kinds, looked down upon by society and forced to live as second class citizens.

Now, living in the most socially progressive age to date, comic books have flourished, their ever-present trend of inclusion benefiting from the change in global tone regarding the LGBT community, people of color, and other historically underappreciated groups.

In Alters, the first-ever superhero book with a central transgender protagonist by a mainstream writer (Paul Jenkins), a young woman, while transitioning from male to female, discovers she has great power. Now, faced with the discrimination transgender people face on top of that those with mutant-like powers face, life becomes doubly complicated.

The diversity in Alters is also found off the pages, in the team behind creating its main character, Chalice. “It means a lot to me to see trans people represented, especially so prominently,” said Tamra Bonnvillain, a trans colorist for Alters. “So many times in the past we’ve been represented as throwaway characters, and even a lot of more recent positive trans characters are in minor roles.”

Alters #1 goes on sale September 7.

Via Out.