I have to wonder if Navy Lt. Cmdr. John Thomas Matthew Lee, Chaplain, was considered a man of good character—he just received a two year prison sentence after using his office for years as a base for preying on young Navy men…and he was also HIV-positive. He had his sentence reduced for his willingness to give up all of the names of his sexual partners, for their own good, I presume.

I also wonder if the Navy would be so fierce in their denunciations if he’d been using his rank and reputation to molest young women. There’s also a troubling suggestion that their pursuit of the victim’s names wasn’t entirely virtuous.

By trying to control the story and dampen the coverage, Marine officials delayed informing the public about the case — and Lee’s partners and victims about potential health risks. The officials knew that aim was important: They were willing to reduce the fairness of the sentence to achieve it.

Had the Corps released this public information to the media, it would have bought Lee’s victims more than a month to seek treatment, since the charges relating to his HIV status were preferred Nov. 1. It might not sound like much, but ask the victims whether they would like that time back. More important, ask anyone who’s had sex with the victims since then.

Remember that bizarre video from Pat Robertson that claimed I-35 was a holy highway? One element featured there was a cheerful (ex-?)gay man who claimed to have been “cured” in one of the Purity Sieges the Christians put on.

It turns out that the story wasn’t quite as beautiful as it was portrayed. The fellow was bipolar, was deprived of his medicine, put through a hellish harrowing instead of treatment, and was eventually kicked out of the “gay cure” program as a failure. The poor guy was simply manipulated for propaganda purposes by these Christianist fanatics.

And the outcome is pretty ugly for Christianity. The lesson from this story is that when people set aside their religious beliefs, they can be decent to one another; when they use them to provoke violence, well, they look rather stupid.

Daughters (and sons) have a special property: normal people simply can’t kill them. They drive us crazy, they can break our hearts, but we just can’t do them harm ourselves.

So I really don’t understand how a father can kill his daughter over her clothing choices. I can yell, and I could ground her, and I could deprive her of privileges…but physically hurt her? Impossible.

Oh. It was over religious apparel. That explains everything. Religion is very good at subverting and destroying normal, healthy family values.

Would you care to attend Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church for a morning? Philip Bloom has a short documentary in which he used a hidden camera in the Phelps compound. It’s as you might expect: raging howls of a sermon, condemnations and hatred, people hoping that millions of others die and go to hell. Phelps has 13 children (11 of whom are lawyers!) and 54 grandchildren, and looking around the pews there can’t be many more attendees than that.

The end is particularly disturbing when two of Phelps’ teenaged granddaughters come up to regurgitate the very same hate speech at the reporter. It’s also kind of creepy because they look so alike, and like Shirley Phelps Roper, and Fred Phelps … just how inbred are these people?

I’m afraid, though, that there’s a little interlude in the middle with a liberal minister in Topeka, and she’s saying with such certainty the usual platitudes about how god is love and he wouldn’t countenance Phelps’ activities, etc., and I found that just as offensive as Phelps’ screeching about god’s nature and desires. They’re both ignorant, and they’re both saying what they think their congregation wants to hear.

Remember that awful, nonsensical “Letter from Hell” on GodTube? It was a particularly contemptible example of the evangelical impulse — the message was that not only will you suffer horribly in hell if you are naughty, but all your friends will, too…and it’ll be all your fault.

Would you believe a schoolteacher showed that video in a public school?

It’s a patently evangelical video for an especially disgusting version of the Christian cult, it plainly says that its purpose is to “help teens share Christ with their friends,” it was downloaded from Godtube, and it was shown in a class with a Jewish student (the only Jewish family in all of North Dakota^*).

The teacher’s excuse? It was intended to show the dangers of drunk driving.

Yeah, right. The reason you shouldn’t drink and drive is that you might end up practicing your penmanship in hell. Isn’t it enough to say that you might end up dead or injured, or you might kill or injure someone else?

Besides, isn’t threatening kids in North Dakota with hell kind of like promising them an upgrade?^**

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^*I probably exaggerate.

^**I kid, I kid.

I swear, they’re trying to see how stupid they can get before my head explodes. Read Isaiah 35:8:

And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.

Obviously, to any brain-dead literal-minded pismire of an evangelical Christian, that is a reference to I-35, the interstate that cuts through Minnesota and Texas. Obviously. Never mind that unclean PZ Myers has driven on it quite often, or that this is the road with the bridge that collapse, or heck, that it is just a long piece of concrete with trucks blatting out nasty hot gasses all day long.

Good god.

Don’t watch this video unless you’ve got an awesome tolerance for high-density super-concentrated stupid and dancing howling raving demented fuckwits. This is America, land of prophecies, dreams, and visions taken as insight, where imaginary demons and angels are supposedly fighting over a strip of pavement.

Must rest. Intracranial pressure rising…rising…rising…

(via Minnesota Monitor)