At least James Dobson will approve

Focus on the Patriarchy has always favored punishing children to teach them right from wrong, so I can’t imagine them being too upset at this news: a fellow’s 4-year-old daughter was having trouble memorizing her ABC’s, suggesting that she needed some extra incentives to excel. So Dad waterboarded her. How sweet that Daddy cared so much about the importance of her education.

I’m going back to teaching in the fall. Will this be considered a reasonable educational technique? I’m thinking of putting a rack in the lecture hall and carrying around some thumbscrews just to help my students learn better.

I detest these people

Why do so many of our political leaders support creationism? Here’s a disturbing glimpse of the way the neo-conservative elite thinks, discussing specifically Irving Kristol:

Kristol has acknowledged his intellectual debt to Strauss in a recent autobiographical essay. “What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that ‘the truth will make men free.'” Kristol adds that “Strauss was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some [emphasis Kristol’s] minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion with utterly unpredictable, but mostly negative, consequences.”

Kristol agrees with this view. “There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people,” he says in an interview. “There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”

The masses must be kept ignorant and pacified. The ruling elite will keep the truth locked up, and dole out “truthiness” to the mob.

I think whenever you start talking about different “truths” for different people, you’re using the word incorrectly. There is a truth about the world, and what Kristol is actually suggesting is that there are lies, not truths, to be given to children, students, and those adults he does not fancy having in his privileged club of power.

I’ll also note that their cynical strategy does not work. Cultivating ignorance in the people in the belief that a cunning elite will be better able to manage them leads to situations like we’re facing now: where the ignorant and stupid are encouraged to thrive and take power, and where the Bushes and Becks and Palins rise to the demagogic top and find the mob malleable and easy to push into extremism and insanity. I suspect that an “intellectual aristocrat” would be appalled at the unintended consequences of his wretched plan…

American pious irrationality expands worldwide

I tend to think that most religious people are not interested in flying planes into buildings or making themselves a belt out of dynamite, but that doesn’t excuse them: they still make irrational decisions with evil consequences, they are simply a bit more remote and indirect. The same people who would be horrified at the idea of personally lynching someone for blasphemy have no problem with praying that someone else will do the job for them, as we all saw in the reaction to that little cracker incident last year. One of the most revolting examples of this principle at work is the recent attempts to create a legal justification for imprisoning and killing homosexuals in Uganda, a situation which, as it turns out, was fomented by American evangelical homophobes. This is not to excuse Ugandans, who were apparently primed to commit violence against gays already, but it was our preachers who sparked the flame.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

That’s pretty much standard anti-gay rhetoric here in the US; we’re inured to it, and unless you’re a victim of it, it’s fairly easy to ignore it — which is why the evangelical haters are still allowed to babble on the news. These wretched liars for Jesus have their audience that loves to hear their nonsense about gays as predators on young boys, being evil and hating heterosexual marriage, and all that other dishonest crap, including their bizarre touting of ‘cures’, but at least we in the US also have vocal proponents of equality and civil liberties. We just need more of them.

In Uganda, though, that rhetoric and false assumption of authority led to horrid abuses of civil rights, like the anti-homosexuality bill. At least now, though, we can get specific and name names for the people responsible for inciting hatred of gays in Africa.

The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.

I’m sure they are trying to get away from the guilt…but the thing is, if you read the anti-gay literature here, that’s the direction they want to go in: the criminalization of sexual acts that they find repugnant, the encouragement of loathing of people who don’t love the people they approve. They want homosexuals to be despised, second-class citizens who don’t have all the rights of good Christian heterosexuals. The only reason they are running from it now is that it happened far faster in Uganda than they expected, and they’re suddenly standing their with a smoking gun and blood on their hands, rather than at a safe remove with the apparatus of the state peeling away the rights from people, one by one.

And look who else is involved, President Obama’s friend:

Uganda has also become a magnet for American evangelical groups. Some of the best known Christian personalities have recently passed through here, often bringing with them anti-homosexuality messages, including the Rev. Rick Warren, who visited in 2008 and has compared homosexuality to pedophilia. (Mr. Warren recently condemned the anti-homosexuality bill, seeking to correct what he called “lies and errors and false reports” that he played a role in it.)

First you associate them with evil, then you disenfranchise them, and only when they’re sufficiently dehumanized do you get to kill them. America’s Christian evangelists are on step one, and working hard on step two; Uganda’s problem is that they moved on to step three a little prematurely.

Danish cartoonists proven wrong!

Oh, yeah, but they screwed up. Probably the best known of the inflammatory anti-Islam Danish cartoons was the work of Kurt Westergaard, who drew the prophet Mohammed with a bomb for a turban. It was a very misleading portrayal of a Muslim, which was demonstrated lately when a Somali fanatic tried to break into his home and kill him while yelling “revenge!” and “blood!” …with a knife and an axe, not a bomb!

I’m sure Westergaard will be publishing an apology and retraction now. Or maybe he’ll just have to admit his error and redraw Mohammed with more personal nasty weapons of death and destruction bristling from his turban.

The poor oppressed Muslim man was shot and received some minor wounds, and has been arrested. Westergaard is fine; for some mysterious reason, he had security alarms all over his house and a safe room where he and his 5 year old granddaughter, who has probably learned something from this encounter, could hide. All signs of a guilty conscience, no doubt.

(Danish source, and horrible google translation, if you’re interested.)

There ought to be a qualifying exam for parenthood

It’s another of those cases where people unfit to be parents abuse their children. Samuel McGehee is accused of murdering his youngest son, suffocating him to death because he wouldn’t take a nap. That’s horrible, but the next question I have to ask is why this guy was allowed in the same room with small children after what he did last year.

A detective testified that in March 2008, McGehee, concerned about the family’s financial state, decided to circumcise his other son at home, using a filet knife.

“There was severe damage to the shaft of the penis,” Detective Shawn Jenkins said. “There was a lot of skin removed.”

The 3-month-old’s scrotum was also lacerated during the procedure, Jenkins said. The child has subsequently endured extensive reconstructive surgeries, and more are expected.

What is it with these religious kooks and their children’s penises? I’m the father of two boys, and aside from assistance with basic hygiene when they were very small, I pretty much left their business alone…and the idea of taking a knife to them was unthinkable. I really wonder what crazy fundagelical church this man went to that made circumcision such a priority.

If the law had taken this lunatic aside when he’d committed such a stupid crime and told him that his parenting rights were immediately suspended, there’s another little boy who might still be alive today.

How not to end the scourge of HIV

Uganda’s solution is rather shocking: throw any gay people into prison for life, and execute any who are HIV-positive.

Don’t blame it on those ‘primitive’ Africans, though: I can think of a few loud Americans who would find that a reasonable way to address the problem.

I am deeply ashamed to discover that this bill isn’t just hypothetically the kind of thing a few Americans would sponsor — it is literally a product of that wretched American ‘brain’ trust, The Family.

Doug Wilson is a nasty piece of work

As I mentioned yesterday, Christopher Hitchens is touring the country with a pastor, Doug Wilson, doing public debates. A reader wrote in to inform me of who Wilson is, and I was appalled. He has a ministry in Idaho which has ties to the white supremacy movement! Doug Wilson has an entry at the Southern Poverty Law Center that explains that he coauthored a book, Southern Slavery As It Was, with Steven Wilkins, a neo-Confederate, that was essentially a mangling of history and theology to assert that slavery in the South wasn’t so bad after all. He runs a private school in Idaho that celebrates Robert E. Lee’s birthday; he wants a “cultural reformation” in America, and his model, his ideal, is the antebellum Confederacy. He’s a regular speaker at Christian Reconstructionist conferences sponsored by the League of the South. His ideological heroes are Robert Lewis Dabney and Rousas John Rushdoony. Here’s a collection of links that point to the vileness of this sleazebag.

He doesn’t confine his bigotry to other races, either. He’s a wanna-be theocrat who wants to return to biblical barbarities.

Wilson used the Bible’s view on homosexuals as another example.

The Bible indicates the punishment for homosexuality is death. The Bible also indicates the punishment for homosexuality is exile.

“So death is not the minimal punishment for a homosexual,” Wilson said. “There are other alternatives.”

I don’t understand at all why Hitchens would want to be associated with such a creature, unless he was specifically seeking out the very worst that American Christianity brings to the table. Unfortunately, he’s contributing to the reputation of a monstrous blight on the Palouse, a racist, theocratic ideologue whom people of that region deplore.

Aaaah! Horrible wretched wicked story of faith and foreskins!

I happen to be male. I found myself unable to read the following story without feeling an urge to double over and cup my crotch, which was really awkward when sitting in a public coffee shop. So stop here if you are prone to sympathetic pains.

A man in British Columbia decided that he and his four year old son needed to be circumcised.

Already, half my readership has decided to flee to less cringe-inducing websites. That’s OK, just leave quietly, and close the door behind you.

[Read more…]

Fear and greed fuel the growth of African churches

It’s a modern-day version of a long-running evil: children in Africa are being murdered in the name of God.

The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.

His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him — Mount Zion Lighthouse.

A month later, he died.

Inciting violence against “witches” is only part of the recipe for religious success — that’s the fear part — with the rest of it coming from greed.

Church signs sprout around every twist of the road snaking through the jungle between Uyo, the capital of the southern Akwa Ibom state where Nwanaokwo lay, and Eket, home to many more rejected “witch children.” Churches outnumber schools, clinics and banks put together. Many promise to solve parishioner’s material worries as well as spiritual ones — eight out of ten Nigerians struggle by on less than $2 a day.

“Poverty must catch fire,” insists the Born 2 Rule Crusade on one of Uyo’s main streets.

“Where little shots become big shots in a short time,” promises the Winner’s Chapel down the road.

“Pray your way to riches,” advises Embassy of Christ a few blocks away.

It’s hard for churches to carve out a congregation with so much competition. So some pastors establish their credentials by accusing children of witchcraft.

So here we have a desperately poor region where the people need help…and instead, they get parasites who make promises of prosperity and blame failure on witches. Religion is the obstacle here, it doesn’t help.

We can’t be too smug here in comfortable America, though. Look inside Sarah Palin’s church, and you see exactly the same formula of fear and greed at work. Her church even supported the work of a Kenyan witch-hunter!

Texas has state-sanctioned murder

The story of Cameron Todd Willingham (via Digby) ought to be read by everyone. Willingham seems to have been a kind of Texan dumbass, an uneducated, wife-beating piece of work, but he was also the father of three children, who he, by all accounts, loved. Those kids died in a house fire. Forensic ‘experts’ declared the fire an arson, Willingham was arrested, tried, and convicted of murder, and was executed.

Only problem: he didn’t do it. The fire experts were good ol’ boys who were operating on folklore and fairy tales about how fires propagated; real experts have looked at the scene and since declared that it was an accidental fire. Nobody killed those little girls, but their father was killed for their deaths.

That’s not the most disturbing part of the story to me. You have to watch these videos of Judge John Jackson (he was prosecutor in the case, and is now a judge). He openly admits that the evidence for arson was weak, and that he looked at the circumstances to determine Willingham’s guilt. Those circumstances? Willingham was a low-class ruffian with tattoos of skulls who like heavy metal music. Therefore, he was probably a satanist. Therefore, he probably killed his children.

I’m not joking. That was the basis for this smug cracker’s determination of guilt, that led directly to his execution. Why not just criminalize tattoos and Metallica? It would make it easy to round up the riff-raff and exterminate them.

The state of Texas murdered an innocent man, and we can see the whole chain of incompetence, bigotry, and cowardice that led to the tragedy, from this ass of a prosecutor to Governor Perry, who refused to heed the evidence of malfeasance. Why aren’t all of them being impeached or fired, and facing criminal charges in a court of law? Is it because they don’t have any tattoos and listen to patriotic tripe from Lee Greenwood, Brooks & Dunn, and Tim McGraw?

End the death penalty everywhere. Drum the red-necked blundering boobs out of office, at the very least.