I didn’t watch the Republican National Convention

Sorry. I just can’t bear it. My wife wanted to make the effort, and I grumbled and delayed and finally handed over control of the remote (I had a lecture to write anyway), but I was amused to see she turned it on during Santorum’s speech and only lasted about five minutes…she decided the weather news was far more interesting.

So I looked elsewhere for summaries. Salon caught Santorum’s dogwhistle speech.

Chris Christie got tapped to make the keynote attack on President Obama, but Rick Santorum was assigned to throw out some of the reddest meat at the GOP convention: about the way Obama supposedly gutted the work requirement for welfare (he didn’t).

And in case anyone was in danger of missing the racial subtext, Santorum linked Obama’s waiving the work requirement (he didn’t) to “his refusal to enforce the immigration law.” Welfare recipients and illegal immigrants, oh my! Santorum made sure to scare the white working class with the depredation of those non-white slackers and moochers. It’s 1972 all over again.

Yeah, Republicans are racist. They ought to just be open about it and call themselves the White People Party.

The best summary comes via physioproffe: Gin and Tacos’ “AN ASTONISHING PANAROMA OF THE ENDTIMES”. I get the impression they had to bring on Ann Romney because she’s the only person willing to make a speech about Mitt.

Todd Akin is not an extremist

The Republicans want you to think he is a fringe candidate, a wacky loner who just said something outrageous. But when you look at the voting record of Minnesota's Republicans, it becomes really clear: they all vote almost exactly as Todd Akin would on every abortion-related bill that comes up.

It’s really rather stunning: Democrats and Republicans are extraordinarily polarized on this issue. With only a few wobblers, Democrats vote for issues that give women reproductive choices, while Republicans vote against them. If you don’t think there is a bit of difference between the two parties, just look at that one issue.

By the way, about those wobblers…they aren’t, really. If you look at the detailed voting records, you find that there are a few Democrats who are actually stealth Republicans — they consistently vote more like a Republican on women’s rights issues. One of them is, unfortunately, my own state representative, Collin Peterson. I never vote for him, and I can never vote for his Republican challenger, either. Can we please get a real Democrat to run for that office and topple him?

Well, now that you raise the question, Mitt…

Rmoney is pandering to the birthers now at a campaign stop in Michigan.

No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised.

Wait…how do I know that? I haven’t seen Mitt’s birth certificate, but I’ve seen Obama’s. Why should I believe him?

Oh. Because he’s white and looks like everyone else at his rallies. White people look like they were born in America, while brown people all look like foreigners and their claims of being born here are all questionable. I forgot.

I’d like to see him repeat that claim at an open rally in inner city Detroit, though. He might be the funny-looking one there.

You minorities need to stop feeling so damned sorry for yourselves!

Whine, whine, whine. That’s all minorities ever do. Steve King (Racist, IA) would like you all to man up, act white, and join a church.

I went to the Iowa State website and […] I typed in “multicultural” and it came back to me, at the time, 59 different multicultural groups listed to operate on campus at Iowa State. It started with Asians and it ended with Zeitgeist, so from A to Z, and most of them were victims’ groups, victimology, people that feel sorry for themselves and they’re out there recruiting our young people to be part of the group that feels sorry for themselves. […]

And then, you’re brought into a group of people that are–have a grievance against society rather than understand there’s a tremendous blessing in this society.

Multiculturalism is a dirty word. There is but One True Culture, and you will shut up and be assimilated. There’s something wrong with you if you have any grievances against Steve King’s society.

Hey, Iowans, how do you keep electing this moron? And as long as you’re doing that anyway, can we send all of our Bachmann supporters south to live in his district?

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.