Texas is about to get worse

I usually avoid Texas political news because it makes me ill, so I’m a little late to this…but would you believe the Texas legislature took a turn to the right in the last election? The Tea Party led a wave of new lunatics right into the halls of power in that state…and what they want to do as a top priority is follow the Louisiana path of demolishing public education and vouchers, vouchers, vouchers.

State Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, the outspoken voice of the far right in the Senate, said he will be pushing vouchers that parents of school-age children could use for charter schools, online offerings or additional alternatives to the public schools.

"To me, school choice is the photo ID bill of this session," the Houston lawmaker said. "Our base has wanted us to pass photo voter ID for years, and we did it. They’ve been wanting us to pass school choice for years. This is the year to do it, in my view. That issue will do more to impact the future of Texas and the quality of education than anything else we could do."

If you haven’t heard about this photo ID bill, it’s a racist law passed to suppress minority voters by requiring photo ID at the polls. They say it’s to prevent voter fraud, but since that’s a nonexistent problem, you know what it’s about: preventing poor brown people from voting. It’s one strategy the Republicans have to stay in office, and that’s by suppressing voter turnout while making it easy for well-off white folks to make their preferences known.

So it’s telling that this dingleberry and his base so value fucking racism, and that now their next priority is to screw over education. That’s the second prong of the Republican strategy: keeping people stupid. They know that anyone with a brain will turn away in revulsion from the Tea Party policies, so they have to make sure no one in the electorate develops one.

I am not a presidential candidate, but…

Some rag called Cathedral Age interviewed Obama and Romney about faith. The two responded by ladling out dollops of pious porridge, all of which was nonsensical and fact-free, but did occasionally serve up scraps of information that were mainly horrifying (did you know Obama has a “faith advisor” who sends him bible quotes and CS Lewis quotes and that sort of thing? That’s not the daily briefing I imagined). Read it if you really want to be bored or aggravated.

It did make me wonder, though — if a bunch of Episcopalians can get the attention of the presidential candidates during the election season, could atheists do likewise? Get on it, Dave Silverman: send the two a set of questions that actually drill down to some secular substance. I suspect they’d both ignore them, unfortunately.

And then I thought, well, what if I were asked these same questions in an interview? How would an atheist answer them? Especially, an atheist who wasn’t trying to pander his way into political office? So I took a vicious, bloody-minded stab at it. These are the same questions Cathedral Age aimed at our two candidates, and I’ll just pretend I’m the nominee of the Atheist Party.

How does faith play a role in your life?

It doesn’t. Faith is a poison, a shortcut to answers that avoids reason and evidence and cultivates an undisciplined and lazy mind. I abjure it and think all political candidates should do likewise.

Do you have favorite scriptural passages, prayers, or other words of wisdom to which you often turn?

No.

Scripture is a morass of inconsistency and lies. Even where it is gifted with poetry (which isn’t often), it is simply an accreted mass of dogma. I never consult the Bible, the Koran, or any other holy book for advice, since they are never applicable, and are usually informed by a barbaric morality.

I don’t do prayers. Entreaties to a nonexistent superman seem singularly pointless.

“Words of wisdom” is a stock phrase that usually means “reassuring cliches”. Nope, I avoid those as well.

How do you view the role of faith in public life?

Faith is the great leveler, the delusion that allows any ignorant asshole prancing in self-serving fantasies of being the center of the universe to claim divine, cosmic authority behind his words. It has corrupted American discourse, because it privileges medieval nonsense about how the world actually works and allows antique bigotry to persist, allows people to make claims without concern for evidence, and gives every idiot with a dog-collar a pedestal to stand on.

Faith ought to be mocked and derided. That we give it special authority in public discourse is a disaster.

As a country of great religious diversity and divisiveness, how can faith play a role in unifying america?

It can’t. Faith is unmoored from reality — it gives every blithering child of god a special place free of responsibility, where their beliefs are stamped with divine approval by the voices in their head. Every one of those religions touts itself as the one great truth about the universe, and they can’t all be right, and most likely none of them are right. We’re looking out on a circus arena populated with clowns, and you’re trying to ask me which one’s shoulders I should stand on to bring order out of chaos. And I say none of them.

Some people have questioned the sincerity of your faith and your christianity. how do you respond to those questions?

Well, that’s kind of inappropriate question for me, since I’m not pretending to be a Christian. I’m not and never will be.

What does a political leader’s faith tell you about him/her as a person?

Oh, it hints at many things.

They could be a gullible fool. It could tell me that they don’t think very deeply at all, and have never put much thought into these bizarre claims that they may say are important forces in their lives.

They could be a dishonest opportunist. The media is always touting faith as a marker for morality, despite the fact that it is actually a very cheap signal — anyone can mouth pieties, and even the most corrupt child-raping priest can say they believe in a god — and in the US, it’s virtually impossible to get elected as an atheist because of the raging bigotry against rational intellectuals.

They could be a brilliant rationalizer, who has built up an elaborate set of excuses for their ridiculous beliefs. I would worry that they’d do likewise for any conclusion they wanted to reach in office.

At the very best, they could be a person who’s never put much thought into their inherited religious tradition; maybe it’s because they’ve put more effort into studying economics or political science or sociology, I don’t know. In this case it would be a misleading indicator.

A leader’s faith basically tells me nothing good about them at all.

How can our government and faith communities work together as a positive force for the nation while also respecting the boundaries between the two?

They can’t. Read the Constitution. This country was founded partially on an understanding that bringing god and state together corrupts both. Some thought that because they wanted a secular government free of superstitious influence; others loved their peculiar religions and did not want the state to endorse some other faith. Either way, they were in agreement: government and faith should not work together. So why, Cathedral Age, are you trying to blur the boundaries? Do you think that having a big expensive elaborate building in Washington DC means that when the government decrees a state religion, it will be Christianity or Episcopalianism?

Washington National Cathedral is called to be the spiritual home for the nation. from your perspective, how can the cathedral live out that mission?

This is a secular nation, or it should be. We are not going to have a spiritual home, and we shouldn’t want one.

The best way that the National Cathedral can serve the country is by ending this pretext that it represents faith in America. Gut it completely of its superstitious trappings, fire the god-soaked leadership, and turn it into something secular and useful. Turning it into a bowling alley or a movie theater would be an improvement, but you could also aim higher and make it into a library or a secular meeting hall. Find something better to do with your time and money.

I think you should be embarrassed that you’re maintaining this expensive, opulent building to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year, all for the purpose of babbling at a nonexistent space ghost.

Well, what do you think? Would those answers help me get elected to high political office?

Everyone should have a daily dose of angry Irishman

I put this clip of Michael D. Higgins, president of Ireland, on my speakers this morning to have it blaring out while I puttered about in the kitchen fixing a bit of tea and yogurt for breakfast. He’s chewing out some Tea Party sympathizer in that way only the Irish can, and I swear, it was better than a big cup of coffee for waking me up. He’s a little too generous to those salt-of-the-earth American midwesterners, who certainly will treat you with kindness and hospitality personally before going off to vote for torture, bombing, God, more tax cuts for the rich, and against gays, atheists, and non-white people, but otherwise…bracingly good.

What is it with Republicans, sex, and science?

They just can’t get it right. The latest eructation of idiotic error comes from Tennessee, where Stacey Campfield makes shit up about STDs.

Tennessee state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) falsely claimed on Thursday that it was nearly impossible for someone to contract AIDS through heterosexual contact.

“Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community,” he told Michelangelo Signorile, who hosts a radio program on SiriusXM OutQ. “It was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall.”

Do they have to take a Stupid Test to be admitted to the party? And score somewhere in the range of a flatworm?

The czar and the patriarch

Forgive me, I haven’t been keeping up with the Pussy Riot story — this is just the worst possible time of the year for me, with classes starting tomorrow. But I strongly recommend Eric Macdonald’s summary: this is a collusion between an old school tyrant, Putin, and the Russian Orthodox church to silence criticism, and to promote an unthinking, dogmatic nationalism. It’s not just Russia, either, but similar forces are at work in the United States, where God and Country are deeply entangled, and it’s a recipe for world-wide catastrophe.

The problem with Pussy Riot is that they see this clearly, and their music opposes both czar and patriarch. Look at their latest video and you can see their contempt for both.

(You don’t like their music? Tough. I thought it was wonderfully loud and angry and political, and if you don’t care for it, I’m pretty sure Lawrence Welk is still available in reruns on cable. Also, you don’t have to like it to respect the freedom of artists to express themselves.)

There’s also a third cause they’re clearly opposing: the historical confinement of women to very specific gender roles. I don’t know exactly what is going on in Russia, but it seems to be the women who are leading the charge against tyranny. Take a look at the Ukrainian FEMEN, too. Women are becoming the bravest of us all.

They aren’t just fighting against a tyrant and orthodoxy, but against the gender police. I’ve got to admire that.

I guess you shouldn’t always trust your doctor

Especially if that doctor is associated with Physicians For Life, an organization of ideologically warped doctors who abuse science to justify anti-abortion screeds. In one article, they carry out a set of weird calculations to trivialize pregnancies from rape. They go through a series of calculations to throw out most rapes (the woman is too old or too young to get pregnant, for instance…which should set off your alarms right there. Child rape is less of a problem simply because they won’t get pregnant?), and then comes to this weird excuse:

Finally, factor in what is certainly one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that’s psychic trauma. Every woman is aware that stress and emotional factors can alter her menstrual cycle. To get and stay pregnant a woman’s body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain that is easily influenced by emotions. There’s no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape. This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, and implantation.

Does that sound familiar? Missouri congressvermin Todd Akin recently echoed that sentiment, claiming that ‘legitimate rape’ rarely causes pregnancy (and it’s not just Akin — right-wingers everywhere parrot that claim).

Dr Jen Gunter speculates that Akin got his misinformation from Physicians for Life, and also takes apart their claim.

The Physicians for Life site quotes 3 sources, only one is original research. The one article was authored by Goth and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 1977 (yes, 1977) and in NO WAY SUPPORTS THE NOTION THAT RAPES ARE RARE OR THAT THE STRESS RESPONSE LOWERS THE PREGNANCY RATE. It is an article about sexual dysfunction among rapists. Put another way, the Physicians for Life have not provided a single published article to support their claims. Interestingly, Physicians for Life also promote the long disproven claim that abortion causes breast cancer.

It’s based on nothing but air and lies, in other words.

Woe is us academics

Have you been following Doonesbury for the past few weeks? It’s been all about the progressive destruction of the American university, as the old model is replaced by the for-profit university, a hideous scheme in which state and federal support for higher education gets siphoned off to support lousy schools that grind through massive numbers of students, offering low tuition, flexible hours, and a fast-track to a degree…and with abysmal retention rates, low success, marginally qualified ‘faculty’, and an education that is worth less than you paid for it. These are the colleges you see advertised on cheesy commercials on television, in which some guy proudly testifies about getting his fancy diploma working only a few hours a week at night over two years, and never having to step away from his computer to do it.

The assault is occurring at multiple levels, not just with dumbass MBAs and lawyers in congress shunting off cash towards their Libertarian ideal of a university. Anyone involved in academia has been watching the slow erosion over the last few decades…a period during which university faculty have been blamed and cheapened and discarded, replacing institutions of learning with factories churning out quotas of tuition-paying customers. You want to know How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps? Here’s one of them.

V.P. Joe Biden, a few months back, said that the reason tuitions are out of control is because of the high price of college faculty. He has NO IDEA what he is talking about. At latest count, we have 1.5 million university professors in this country, 1 million of whom are adjuncts. One million professors in America are hired on short-term contracts, most often for one semester at a time, with no job security whatsoever – which means that they have no idea how much work they will have in any given semester, and that they are often completely unemployed over summer months when work is nearly impossible to find (and many of the unemployed adjuncts do not qualify for unemployment payments). So, one million American university professors are earning, on average, $20K a year gross, with no benefits or healthcare, no unemployment insurance when they are out of work. Keep in mind, too, that many of the more recent Ph.Ds have entered this field often with the burden of six figure student loan debt on their backs.

…

I’d like to mention here, too, that universities often defend their use of adjuncts – which are now 75% of all professors in the country — claiming that they have no choice but to hire adjuncts, as a “cost saving measure” in an increasingly defunded university. What they don’t say, and without demand of transparency will NEVER say, is that they have not saved money by hiring adjuncts — they have reduced faculty salaries, security and power. The money wasn’t saved, because it was simply re-allocated to administrative salaries, coach salaries and outrageous university president salaries. There has been a redistribution of funds away from those who actually teach, the scholars – and therefore away from the students’ education itself — and into these administrative and executive salaries, sports costs — and the expanded use of “consultants”, PR and marketing firms, law firms. We have to add here, too, that president salaries went from being, in the 1970s, around $25K to 30K, to being in the hundreds of thousands to MILLIONS of dollars – salary, delayed compensation, discretionary funds, free homes, or generous housing allowances, cars and drivers, memberships to expensive country clubs.

Yeah, that’s the reward for earning a Ph.D. Most of you won’t get employed in academia, and most of you who do will get the terrifyingly fragile job of adjunct. And if you do manage to get a real tenure-track position, after 4-6 years of graduate school and a post-doc or two, you’ll get paid $40-50K/year, and be damned grateful for it.

I, for one, welcome our new holy corporate overlords

You already knew that the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have First Amendment rights. Now the courts are working on giving them religion, too.

"Can a corporation exercise religion?" federal district court judge John L. Kane recently asked. He answered his own question with a provisional yes. In Newland v Sebelius, the court granted a commercial enterprise a temporary injunction exempting it, for now, from providing female employees with coverage for contraception and sterilization required by the Affordable Care Act.

The churches are already full of abstract entities with no material existence celebrated at the altar, so hey, let’s start packing the pews with them, too. In these years of declining attendance, the churches will probably welcome well-heeled worshippers, especially since letting them in also grants the churches lots of privileges.

But look where this is leading the rest of us.

Now, according to Judge Kane’s decision in Newland, secular businesses may enjoy similar status and similar immunity under federal statutes, at least, if not the Constitution. His ruling is an initial salvo in what may well be prolonged litigation, but it represents an ominous legal trend: Religious freedom is morphing into religious power. If the rights of diverse employees in a secular enterprise are subject to the beliefs of their employers, then religious people will not simply be laws unto themselves; they’ll determine, in part, laws governing the rest of us.

Religious employers are the worst employers. Now the American courts want to give them even more power to meddle in their employee’s lives…a power completely contrary to any of the principles of liberty on which this country was supposedly founded.

Wanna see something funny?

It’s a Romney campaign ad. The thesis? Obama has declared war on religion, while Romney will defend it, with shots of the Pope (not the shadowy-eyed inquisitorial current pope, but the old fatherly one, John Paul II).

There are a couple of things wrong with that. Obama is no friend of atheism; he’s expanded faith-based charity programs, continues to support the right-wing Prayer Breakfast nonsense, and has openly expressed his Christianity. I’m certainly not enthused about voting for him (athough, to be sure, his continuation of policies of tyranny and violence abroad is a bigger issue for me than his faith).

For another, why doesn’t he show the Elders of the Mormon Church rather than Pope John Paul II? I can guess: because if there’s anything creepier than one geriatric manipulator of your sex life, it’s a whole assembly of creepy geriatric genital diddlers. I haven’t looked lately, but when I was living in Salt Lake I saw those Mormon leaders in the paper all the time, and seriously, the head guy looked like the Crypt Keeper.

And finally, have you ever heard about the Mormon perspective on Catholicism? It is the “great and abominable Church”! I really wonder if this ad will be played in Morridor…I don’t think having Romney suck up to the Catholic church would play well in the Mormon homeland.