The Right Wing Racism of Pat Buchanan

No matter how many denials they make, racism is racism, and the right can't honestly deny it in their ranks.  You can see it in the old timers, like Pat Buchanan, and you can see it in some of the statements made by the crop of contestants for the GOP Presidential nomination for 2012.

Pat Buchanan, a lifelong conservative political figure, was let go from MSNBC as a political commenter for his recent book, and for appearing on right wing supremacist radio shows to promote it.  He is now complaining across the conservative media that he was treated unfairly, that he was the victim of a witch hunt.

I signed that petition to MSNBC that may have contributed to his being let go. 

I don't blame the petition or the organizers however for the result.  I blame Buchanan for the hateful views and where and to whom he promoted them for the termination, not the people who complained or objected or signed petitions.  Buchanan is failing to properly take responsibility for his own positions.  He is of course entitled to any hateful position he wishes.  But he should recognize that if it offends the way he has, it will have an effect on his employment as a political analyst.  This would seem to be so obvious, so axiomatic, that Buchanan's reaction is incomprehensible, and would appear to be a failure on his part to take responsibility for his views and actions having so deeply offended people.

Media Matters covered pretty thoroughly the racist views of the radio show in question, and the position of Buchanan in his book which asserts that the U.S. is 'disintegrating' because of the loss of status of white people.  He also ascribes to the idea that white Europeans are genetically superior to other brown and black races, and that we can never have racial equality through the efforts of education, effectively, because of that innate inferiority.  Buchanan believes that too many black and brown people will turn us into a third world nation.

According to the NY Daily News

Pat Buchanan will not be returning, the network announced Thursday. The decision comes just four months after MSNBC suspended the former Republican presidential candidate following the publication of his latest book.

"After 10 years, we have decided to part ways with Pat Buchanan," the network said in a statement. "We wish him well."

The book, "Suicide of a Superpower" contains chapters titled "The End of White America" and "The Death of Christian America" and was ripped by critics as racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic.

MSNBC President Phil Griffin said recently he didn't think Buchanan's book should be "part of the national dialogue, much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC."

Pat Buchanan is credited with being part of the writing of the Southern Strategy of the Nixon White House, the one that deliberately tried to use race and the civil rights legislation to turn formerly conservative Democrats into newly minted Republican voters.

Pat Buchanan was terminated for inappropriate, factually inaccurate, and highly offensive views, specifically those which are understood to promote white supremacy, anti-semitism, and racial hatred.  Buchanan has defended the actions of Nazis involved in forced labor slavery and defended Holocaust war criminals.  In 2010, Buchanan objected to the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Kagan because she was Jewish, and he felt that would create too Jewish an element on the Court. 

William F. Buckley, who I credit for his condemnation of the bigot group, the John Birch Society, also condemned Buchanan.  Again from wikipedia:

In 1991 William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote a 40,000-word National Review article discussing anti-Semitism amongst conservative commentators focused largely on Buchanan; the article and many responses to it were collected in the book In Search of Anti-Semitism (1992). He concluded: "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism."^[18][19] The Anti-Defamation League has called Buchanan an "unrepentant bigot" who "repeatedly demonizes Jews and minorities and openly affiliates with white supremacists."^[20] Neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer said about Buchanan that "There's no doubt he makes subliminal appeals to prejudice."^[21]

Buchanan coined the term 'silent majority', and takes pride in his assertion that he was part of the 'Southern Strategy', and that he thinks there is nothing wrong with 'prefering his own race.  He has long been a fan of racist writers and broadcasters.

He ran for the office of President in 1992, 1996, and 2000.
From wikipedia.org on the Southern Strategy:

In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to the Republican Party strategy of winning elections in Southern states by exploiting anti-African American racism and fears of lawlessness among Southern white voters and appealing to fears of growing federal power in social and economic matters (generally lumped under the concept of states' rights). Though the "Solid South" had been a longtime Democratic Party stronghold due to the Democratic Party's defense of slavery prior to the American Civil War and segregation for a century thereafter, many white Southern Democrats stopped supporting the party following the civil rights plank of the Democratic campaign in 1948 (triggering the Dixiecrats), the African-American Civil Rights Movement, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, and desegregation.

The strategy was first adopted under future Republican President Richard Nixon and Republican Senator Barry Goldwater[1] in the late 1960s.[2] The strategy was successful in some regards. It contributed to the electoral realignment of Southern states to the Republican Party, but at the expense of losing more than 90 percent of black voters to the Democratic Party. As the 20th century came to a close, the Republican Party began trying to appeal again to black voters, though with little success.[2] In 2005, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized for his party's use of the Southern Strategy in the previous century.[3]

It should be noted that Republican National Committee Chair Ken Mehlman also has apologized for the right wing making a wedge issue of gay rights, particularly poignant, given Mehlman is himself gay, and that he was part of demonizing other gays.

The Southern Strategy section in Wikipedia goes on to state:

Although the phrase "Southern strategy" is often attributed to Nixon's political strategist Kevin Phillips, he did not originate it,[4] but merely popularized it.[5] In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, he touched on its essence:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.[6]

and


Lee Atwater


Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, reported a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Alexander P. Lamis, in which Lee Atwater discussed politics in the South:

Lee AtwaterYou start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.[35]

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger".[7]

Herbert wrote in the same column, "The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.'s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks."[36]

Buchanan was also a part of the Reagan White House, which has not been free from the tar brush of intentional racist strategies.  Reagan's War on Drugs, launched at a time when actual drug use was declining anyway has been analyzed by some historians, legal academicians, and sociologists as an effort that was both a calculated political expedient, and a means to disproportionately target minority communities.  Typically those communities of color have voted primarily Democratic.  As a result of the War on Drugs, a disproportionate number of people who are non-violent criminals have had the same offenses which were previously misdemeanors raised to the level of felony convictions.  The number of people in our prisons is twenty times what it was in the 1920s, with by far the greatest increase occurring in the Reagan era of the 1980s, as a direct result of the War on Drugs.  It is more dramatic in the visual depiction than words can convey.
From Wikipedia's article on Incarceration:


Number of inmates. 1920 to 2006.^[1][2] (absolute numbers) General US population grew only 2.8 times in the same period, but the number of inmates increased more than 20 times.

 From the wikipedia article on Race and Crime:

As of 2001, the chances of going to prison in percentages for various demographic groups

From the section on Prison Data, correlating to the above graphic:

According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) non-Hispanic blacks accounted for 39.4% of the prison and jail population in 2009.[27] Hispanics (of all races) were 15.9% of those incarcerated in 2009.[27] Hispanics comprised 16.3% of the US population according to the 2010 US census.[28][29] According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2000 to 2008 the rate of prevalence of incarceration for blacks declined to 3,161 per 100,000 and the white rate slightly increase to 487 per 100,000[30]. In 2009 American Indians and Alaskan Natives were jailed, paroled, or on probation at 932 per 100,000, 25% higher than for non-Indians/Natives (747), up 5.6% that year and 12% higher than 2007.[31]. However, crime in general declined during this time down to near 1970 levels, an 18% decrease from the previous decade.[32]

Many people incorrectly believe that the War on Drugs was a response to the problems in the 80s from crack cocaine.  While that was a huge part of the crime increase in the 80's, the surge in crack cocaine did not occur until AFTER the War on Drugs was started.  While I cannot directly link a specific person, like Buchanan, to the War on Drugs policy, there is a significant viewpoint that it was not so much a response to a problem as it was an attempt to promote a law-and-order position for political expedience, and that at the very least secondary to that expediency was the shift in voting patterns that resulted, which favored Republicans.  Certainly the Reagan White House promoted terms commonly considered to be 'code' or 'dog whistles' such as 'Welfare Queen' and any number of nouns combined with the word 'Crack' to refer primarily to blacks.  An example of scholarship on the topic is University of Dayton's Kenneth Nunn's work, "The Drug War as Race War" from 2002, which makes the connection quite clear.

An example of an analysis of policies NOT as a response to crime, but rather as an aspect of racial fears and an effort to counter 1960s increase in black voters that resulted from the civil rights legislation are works like U of MN Sociologist Chair Chris Uggens', in Ballot Manipulation and the "Menace of Negro Domination": Racial Threat and Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States, 1850 - 2002.  Professor Uggen has been quoted here before for his other studies which indicate that felons - who are mostly black - have been disenfranchised to such a pronounced degree that it has altered the result of elections.  It is Republicans who have largely been responsible for the black and felon disenfranchisement, and who are fearful of minority votes for Democrats, including voting by former felons.  The correlation between restricting voting, drug policies, and race cannot be denied.  Nor can the argument that this is a long term pattern by conservatives, whether they are more recent conservative Republicans, or the formerly conservative Democrats who switched to the Republican party, in part through the efforts to play on their racism by people like Buchanan through a range of Republican and other right wing political campaigns from the mid 20th century to the present.

No War on Religion, Just Another Right Wing Conspiracy Hoax

If one army faced another army, and the generals of the opposing army came forward to parley, and all the soldiers ran away, the other army including their generals, and any neutral observers, might fairly doubt that the lone generals legitimately spoke for their military force.  In this case, for purposes of analogy, the one army is wearing blue, the one with the most people on that side, and the other side is wearing red.  Many of the people now streaming over to join the blue army have taken off their red uniforms, at least for this battle.

When you have 98% of the women in the Roman Catholic church who are sexually active - which is at some time in their lives most of them, overwhelmingly - then I think it is fair for the rest of us, including the Obama administration, to recognize that the hierarchy, the Bishops of the Roman Catholic church are not speaking for the body of their own church, any more than generals without soldiers could legitimately speak for an absent / dissenting army.

Obama is clearly not waging war on religion; and he is no more waging war on Roman Catholicism than generals and an army are waging war on dissenting soldiers for a conflict with a few in the hierarchy - and even the hierarchy is far from unified on this point. Some f the ranking officers, so to speak, dissent as well. The scope of the generals whose soldiers have left them in dissent is covered below, but for those of you who wish to read the LA Times article referenced in the video below for yourselves, it's here.

 

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And if you doubt the analogy I made above about contraception, also on the topic of the fabricated war on religion is this, from the Maddow blog author, Steve Benen which you can read here (the original has the actual poll links):

Ignoring a consensus on contraception

By Steve Benen - Wed Feb 15, 2012 10:09 AM EST.Critics of the White House's policy on contraception access have been pretty aggressive of late, with a coordinated attack both on the policy and President Obama's compromise, but the campaign has failed miserably to persuade the public.

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll included a straightforward question on this:

"Do you support or oppose a recent federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the full cost of birth control for their female patients?"

Support: 66%

Oppose: 26%

Don't Know: 8% 

And what about a requirement on religiously-affiliated employers to cover contraception in their health insurance plans? Support drops a little, but it's still 61%. I thought the inclusion of the phrase "federal requirement" might affect the results a bit, but apparently not.

By the reasoning of many congressional Republicans, nearly two-thirds of the country likes contraception access so much, they're willing to endorse an outrageous assault on religious liberty.

All kidding aside, these results are consistent with other recent polls, all of which point in the same direction: the American mainstream agrees with the administration on this issue.....

Update: Greg Sargent has some additional details, including the fact that self-identified Roman Catholics agree with Obama's line, 67% to 25%, and even a majority of self-identified Republicans feel the same way.

Don't look now Catholic Bishops, but your church is not really behind you for the most part.  Don't look now Republicans, but the rank and file of your political party isn't behind you EITHER. You might want to think about that a bit further before you start getting too free with the whole 'War' thing.  You are clearly on the losing sid of that battle.

Climate Change Denials Are Just Fossil Fuel Corporation Propaganda

When facts don't fit their ideology, their preference for delusion over reality, the right responds by simply lying.  It is a tragedy that the right is not more adept, more intent on fact checking and on insisting on operating from a foundation of fact, not their paid-for-by-big-oil and religious fictions.

We have long contended that the right wing position on fossil fuel was propaganda, not good science, and generally a load of crap.  It is sad that the right wing has been bought and paid for, and that the low information voters who subscribe to their ideology have been conned when they should know better.

Now that hoax has been further exposed by Media Matters with internal documents leaked to them from the Heartland Institute, a right wing conspiracy-theory generating front for corporate greed.  Among those notably associated with Heartland are the Koch Brothers,  others known for generous right wing PAC support and campaign donations to keep themselves rich by disproprortionately influencing public policy and legislation. And now apparently they are hoping to influence our schools, by teaching them crap science that is factually inaccurate and pathetically poor scientific theory. 

Ecological pollution is not bad enough; now they're working their way down the alphabet to Education pollution, all for greed.  When lies don' work, they go to thuggery, as was the case when the documentary film maker of the movie Gasland was arrested for trying to record a public hearing in Congress, at the insistence of Republican Representatives.  To hell with freedom and the First Amendment, when big oil feels threatened; and the Tea Partiers and extreme right can't be quick enough to appease their buyers.

It is not chance that our nation has slipped badly in comparison to other nations in reading, math and science.  The extremist ideology driven right wants to control, and to some extent destroy, any form of control over education so they can substitute religion for fact, and intrude ideology in history.  Just recently the Tennessee Tea party was trying to remove references in history books to quite a number of the founding fathers having been slave owners.  They in fact wanted to remove references to slavery, and to any negative or unpleasant treatment of native americans as well, because it might give students a negative opinion of their country if they knew the truth.  They prefer a filiopietistic (look it up) approach to history, instead of admitting flaws in our great historic figures.

Texas has long tried to alter text book content to be less than factual.  Slavery is not being revised out of the American Revolutionary era; right wing politicians and others have tried to remove any mention of slavery as well from the Civil War.  They don't like the facts, so instead of presenting the reality, they choose to lie. Subjects like economics, and science, notably as it relates to topics like the religion masquerading as false pseudo-science, in the guise of creationism and intelligent design are just a few other examples.

And then we have climate change, global warming, man-made causation, about which there really IS NO controversy except where big oil money has faked a controversy.   I have long contended that we will not bridge the divide in American partisan politics until we begin from a basis of facts; only from that basis can we hope to achieve a consensus, a meeting of the minds.

Except that the right has lost their collective minds, or more precisely sold their minds and consciences.

Here is the first story in a series from Media Matters; it should be noted for those who discount anything no matter how factual if they don't personally LIKE the reality, that the facts in the Media Matters series on Heartland have been independently verified by the AP:
INTERNAL DOCUMENTS: The Secret, Corporate-Funded Plan To Teach Children That Climate Change Is A Hoax

By Brad Johnson on Feb 14, 2012 at 3:10 pm

The first in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. Heartland has issued a press release claiming that some of these documents were sent to an outsider under false pretenses and that one document in the set is a fake.

Heartland Institute's secret plans for a K-12 climate-denier curriculum.

Internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers, Microsoft, and other top corporations, is planning to develop a “global warming curriculum” for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as “a major scientific controversy.” This effort, at a cost of $100,000 a year, will be developed by Dr. David E. Wojick, a coal-industry consultant.

“Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective,” Heartland’s confidential 2012 fundraising document bemoans. The group believes that Wojick’s project has “potential for great success,” because he has “contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting scientific curricula.” The document explains that Wojick will produce “modules” that promote the conspiratorial claim that climate change is “controversial”:

Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy“), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”).

Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact (“environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather“), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.

Wojick will receive $5,000 per module, with twenty modules produced a year. Wojick, who manages the Climate Change Debate listserv, is not a climate scientist. His doctorate is in epistomology.

The Heartland Institute also runs the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a conspiracy-theorist parody of the Nobel-prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Heartland’s NIPCC project “pays a team of scientists approximately $300,000 a year to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered.” Their climate-denial work is funded anonymously.

James M. Taylor, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, told ThinkProgress Green in an e-mail why the group is developing its denier curriculum:

We are concerned that schools are teaching climate change issues in a manner that is not consistent with sound science and that is designed to lead students to the erroneous belief that humans are causing a global warming crisis. We hope that our efforts will restore sound science to climate change education and discourage the political propaganda that too often passes as “education”.

Right-wing ideologues, fueled by the fossil fuel industry, have been increasing their efforts to pollute science education in elementary schools. These attempts to hijack children’s education piggyback on the religious right’s war on biology education and the science of evolution. The National Center for Science Education, which has long led the defense of evolution education in elementary schools, has begun a new program to fight global warming denial in textbooks and classrooms.

___________________
 
Any doubt that the right is in the pay and the pocket of big oil?
 
I have written about the Keystone XL pipeline debacle, which directly benefits not only the Koch Brothers, but also a number of right wing politicians both directly and indirectly.  If you remember the disaster, including loss of lives, from the BP Oil incident in the Gulf of Mexico not that long ago, the lack of transparency, the lack of honesty should sound famliar.  If you have doubts, I encourage you to fact check all the happy happy propaganda ads that BP is running, trying to cover their oily backsides for that incident, so they can keep drilling, more and deeper, despite a complete lack of preparedness that is any better than they had in that last disaster.
 
Also from ThinkProgress Green:
 
House Passes Section Of Transportation Bill Consisting Only Of Earmarks To Big Oil

By Public Lands Team on Feb 17, 2012 at 1:27 pm
By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Last night the House of Representatives passed part of the behemoth transportation bill it is considering over the next month on a 237-187 vote. This section consisted solely of earmarks to Big Oil including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, opening Florida coasts to offshore drilling, a plan to develop oil shale (which isn’t even commercially viable), and building the Keystone XL pipeline. A Congressional Budget Office analysis shows that the drilling proposals together generate only approximately $2 billion, far less than the $50 billion funding gap needed for transportation projects over the coming years.

Even if the drilling could pay for the costs, linking oil and gas development to long-term highway funding is just bad public policy, as Ryan Alexander of the nonpartisan group Taxpayers for Common Sense has explained:

Paying for a couple of years of transportation funding with expected revenues from an increase in oil and gas drilling that will likely take many years to get rolling is not a responsible budget approach… It’s like buying the Ferrari tomorrow because you are sure a raise is coming sometime in the future.”

Originally the transportation bill (H.R. 7, American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act of 2012) was one large bill that included transportation funding, drilling, and changes to federal pensions. However, Republicans realized that they would not have the votes for the bill, and so split it into three bills to be voted on separately that will then be spliced back together and sent to the Senate. This was an unusual procedural move designed to shield Republicans from having to take tough votes that won’t be popular with their constituents but also force the bill through.

What is most galling is that none of these bills alone or combined would be able to pay for the costs of transportation generated by this bill. Traditionally, improvements to roads, bridges, and public transportation are funded by the federal gasoline tax, but GOP leaders in the House are taking the unprecedented step to tie funding to an unnecessary and ineffective increase in fossil fuel production. Since it doesn’t even begin to fund our highways, the bill can be considered nothing more than a series of earmarks for Big Oil.

The proposal to fund oil shale from Congressman Doug Lamborn (R-CO) is a particularly nasty earmark. The Congressional Budget Office found the bill would generate no revenue over 10 years and in the short term would cost money to implement the leasing program. The Checks and Balance Project detailed this “boondoogle” in an online ad.

Last night’s vote saw some crossing of party lines, particularly 11 Florida Republicans angered by proposals to drill off of the state’s coasts who voted no on the bill’s passage.

Breitbart Is Anything But Bright - or Honest

Andrew Breitbart had to back away from his protege James O'Keefe when it became apparent that O'Keefe had altered and changed and misrepresented the coverage of ACORN.  He has become no more honest, no more factually accurate, and certainly no more civil or clever since then.

While I usually find the following source to be heavily biased, in this case it appears that Keith Olbermann has soundly and factually called out Breitbart for the lying ass that he is.  Sadly, the right is so enamored of being lied to so long a it is a lie they find palatable, that it doesn't care if Breitbart, or the rest of the right wing media and blogosphere is any more accurate. 

Breitbart is deplorable and he deserves condemnation for this. 

Sadly the right is NOT willing to be against rape, unless they think they can find a way to exploit it against a political opponent.  It is the right that is trying to redefine rape as only violent events, not as non-consensual sex.  That would rule out rape of a woman who was incapacitated by a date rape drug, it would rule out the inability of a child to fully consent in statutory rape cases, it would rule out so many instances where rape is the coercion of  non-consensual sex, that the Republicans and the other conservatives who support this should be ASHAMED.  They are the aiders and abetters of rape, not the Occupy movement.

And double-shame on them for doing their best to deny women an abortion for rape, incest or to save the life of the mother as well.

From Current TV:

and  and

The Nut Gingrich, on Facebook, Hypocrite AGAIN, STILL

I doubt that the Nut has a prayer, of any kind, at being the candidate.  But sadly, none of the other candidates are any better on the right.

But still, this was funny as a reality to check to conservatives:

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Jon Stewart NAILS IT!

I nearly always find Stewart hilarious, but also on a different level, very serious.  This was clearly from the heart as well as the head, and not only comedic, but also sincere.  I particularly share his sentiments that there is NO war on religion, not by the Obama administration or anyone else in this country.  And we appear to have triggered 'Godwin's Law' to come into effect as well, underlining the stupidity, and the deliberate manipulation of the situation for political traction, no matter how ludicrous.  Faux news triumphs again for being factually inaccurate while being at the same moment hideously and hilariously biased.

From the February 13, 2012 edition of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart (click on the link to play the episode on the Daily Show site, if you have trouble playing the video here):

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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and

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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A Reprise and Update of an Old Post, One of My Favorites

As the culture wars against women waged by the right accelerate in this election cycle, I think it is worthwhile to recycle an old post of mine from 2010 that I think pertains to our current events in 2012. The figure that 98% of women have used artificial contraception has been in the news. I wanted to know where that number came from; I also like fact checking. So I was pleasantly surprised to find a good challenge that substantially approved those numbers at politifact.com, along with the study itself that was mentioned - which saved me further checking on my own.
I personally have always found the Guttmacher Institute to be an excellent research organization in the past, and have read other studies as well as this one. I'm not the only one who finds the Guttmacher Institute to be reliable. The politifact.com article noted that the Catholic Medical Association has found the source credible in earlier studies of the same question, and found a pretty consistent percentage of use of contraception among Roman Catholics over time.
This is not a new development or trend. While the Roman Catholic bishops may oppose the Obama administration, not all of the Roman Catholic hierarchy does so. The Catholic Hospitals Association, the Catholic Health Association, and Catholic Charities all support the Obama accommodation, including a petition signed by 600 doctors and medical students doctors, including 70 doctors who specifically identify themselves as Roman Catholic, who support the Obama administration's position on contraception.
So as I watch the GOP presidential candidates trying to exploit for their own political advantage the very real health and family planning concerns of Catholic Hospitals, Catholic health care providers, and the overwhelming rank and file of those who are the Roman Catholic church in this country as congregants, I am appalled that a few bishops and some prudish antiquated out-of-step politicians are trying to make this an issue about religious freedom.
It is entirely about religious conscience, including following one's conscience to differ with their church hierarchy's dictates, as clearly a huge number of Catholics actually do. I would argue that the right to religious freedom is a right of the individual, not institutions. Institutions, including religious hierarchies, are not people any more than corporations or other organizations are people.
I would argue that Obama should not have caved in to the minority position of the Bishops at all, but that he did so in a way that embraces tolerance for a spectrum of religious belief and practice, including the ACTUAL spectrum of belief and practice among Roman Catholics. The representations made by the right are false, misleading, and their usual bullshit misrepresentation, not an honest engagement over the role of religion in our society or government. Shame on them, and shame on the Bishops, and for that matter, shame on the Roman Catholic church which is promoting a policy that is not founded in either the Bible, or any real traditional teaching. For example, the Roman Catholic church didn't make masturbation - relating to the issue sex must be for reproduction - a sin until the 6th century. The legitimate argument that the Roman Catholic church is interested not in the status of their follower's souls as much as in maintaining their numbers regardless of the personal harm to their coreligionists in contending with hardships due to an inability to exercise effective control over their reproductive choices. I find that the right, particularly the religious right, as personified especially in this election cycle by Rick Santorum, are waging a war not only against women, but apparently against people enjoying sex, except on their narrow small-minded and intolerant terms. I don't mind a Roman Catholic in the White House; I have no fear of this country having policy dictated by the Pope. The Pope isn't successful at dictating the sex life of his own church members. But I have no patience or tolerance for anyone, of any religion or no religion, who would so deeply restrict the freedom of Americans to follow their own conscience. I personally am strongly opposed to the imposition of the views on sex of hypocrites like Gingrich or apparent prudes and sexually uneducated asses like Santorum trying to dictate to men and women that they must conform to religious views of when and how and with whom to engage in sex. Rather I would argue that my sex life is my own, and so long as no one who is vulnerable or unable properly and fully to give consent is involved, everyone else but particularly the right and the religious right should BUTT OUT of sexual matters and reproductive matters. Get the hell out of my body and out of my bedroom and quit violating my right to follow my conscience in these matters. The right is all about dictating to others a conformity to their ideas and conscience, denying those who differ with them the right to their own choices. So, without further ado - here is Sex and Windex:

Sex and Windex

"Cleanliness is next to Godliness." 2nd century Hebrew proverb Rabbi Phineas ben-Yair (per Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 14th ed.) "Honni soit qui mal y pense." Motto, English chivalric Order of the Garter, founded 1344 King Edward III of England

I have been following the Simon-Simpleminded-Simon-purity statements that are enjoying a new resurgence in the right-wing culture wars of the current season of political campaigns with alternating amusement and distaste. While I bless and thank my parents often in my heart for having insisted that an attention span and ability to concentrate is like a muscle which must be exercised to remain strong, a premise I bring to many tasks..........there are certain activities which produce for me a tedium which is almost physically painful to endure. It is just one of the reasons, I - along with many people - dislike the necessary task of washing windows. Unlike other domestic tasks, there is no 'domestic godess' gratification in it; it is an annoying necessity to be reluctantly endured and gotten over with as quickly as possible. Until recently, I just cringed when thinking of the smirking, leering pseudo-purity promoted by professional right wing political parasites like Christine O'Donnell who make a living off of saying any dreck the right wants to hear. Instead, in response to a news item about her anti-masturbation crusade on the news in the background, I played an old CD while washing windows, selecting the most lust-inducing music available in my collection. In this case it was from 1991, a local group, Mick Sterling and the Stud Brothers. My friend Sara introduced me to their music a few years ago (thank you Sara!) simply describing Sterling's vocal quality as 'beefy', but said with an edginess in her expression which implied much more. I would describe the mixture of rough and smooth in his delivery as the auditory equivalent of a caress followed by the feel of a lover's fingernails lightly but firmly dragged across one's skin, making it tingle. The mixture of Sterling and the instrumental accompaniment of 'Squib Cakes' built nicely through 'Turn Me Loose'; but it was the lyrics and energy of of 'Bump and Grind' which carried me through cleaning the big living room window. It was "I want to bump and grind and get on down, hold your body next to mine" that generated the knot of energy just forward of the small of my back, taking me into the moment and away from my usual attempts to distract myself from boredom. I conjugate irregular french verbs while standing in grocery store check out lines waiting for overflowing carts of necessities to be processed through, in order to block out screaming toddlers having temper tantrums, for example. But that doesn't do much to get the blood pounding or the libido blazing. It doesn't have that pounding, elemental power of human sexuality that centers you in the moment, in the wonderful feeling of moving your body it takes to carry you through washing windows. So, as I look up from the computer at the morning sun shining through the oh-so-clean windows, unmarred by even the tiniest streak, I can smile, and raise my cup of black coffee in a toast to Sterling and sexuality. Because the better lessons of sex is not that we are evil for having sexual urges, or that God will frown or punish us for them, but to exalt in the humanity of it, in the energy of it, the JOY of it, because we all share it, so long as we control and direct it positively, and do not lose that control of it. Sex, and even lust is not dirty, especially not if you use it with a little Windex. Because, in the wise words of a religious man from the second century, cleanliness is next to godliness, in mind and body. It is the attitude that sex and sexual impulses are evil except for the narrowest possible expression which makes it dirty and sin-foul. If I may be allowed a somewhat loose translation that conveys the meaning more than the precise equivalent word for word, the motto of the order of the garter is that the evil is in the mind of the person who seeks to find evil, in things, in actions; an example would be the pseudo-purity espoused by people like O'Donnell that equates auto-eroticism with adultery. I hope you enjoyed 'Sex and Windex'; other titles I considered were 'Lusting and Dusting', and ............well, I will leave it to readers to come up with their own, because my list is too long to share here, and in any case was probably deficient in masculine chores that were analogous. Have your own fun with it, and try to be aware of all the ways in which sexuality enriches our lives and mundane experience. Or, if you are having trouble putting down your beverage and walking away from the computer, if you are procrastinating your own tedious tasks, you might want to check out the youtube video of Mick Sterling, performing "You Don't Know What Dirty Is".

A Feminine Perspective on the Culture War on Women

Apparently we have returned to those glorious days of yesteryear, as old-timey radio used to say.

And we have George Carlin's riff on the War on Women, that right wing attempt to keep us barefoot, and pregnant, and in our place, the one that wants to weaken the description of rape, the one that wants to repeal equal pay for equal work laws, the one that wants to make it more difficult and costly to control our reproductive rights.

There is a great deal to be said for the push-back against right wing reactionary politics using humor.

We have the Virginia state senator, Janet Howell who tried to amend legislation that would force costly, non-medical procedures on a woman by linking a similar measure that would force men who wanted erectile dysfunction medication to get a rectal exam.  Actually, that makes sense, because of the typical age of men who actually need, rather than simply want for recreational purposes, that kind of medication and prostate cancer and other diseases.  Lets call out the hypocrisy of the pro-freedom from government intrusion crowd for what they are, liars and hypocrites for interfering with medical care and legal procedures to force their religious beliefs on the rest of us.

Now we have another female state senator who has beautifully used humor again in a similar way.  Constance Johnson, a state senator in the Oklahoma legislature, addressed the insanity of trying to give equal personhood to zygotes at the instant of conception.  As a point against the legislative attempt by the right to wrongly redefine personhood, I would point out that we don't and cannot ever determine the moment of conception.  I could write here at some length about the process known as spermatozoon activation or the acrosomal reaction, because I actually read about things like this extensively in pursuing my interest in theriogenology.  But this blog is about politics and current events (and anything else we feel like writing about) so I will save my other hobbies for a different niche.  The point is -we don't know, and with the exception of some very specific kinds of artificial insemination, NEVER know in the natural course of things, when the moment of conception occurs.  It takes us a while to be able to tell THAT it occurs, and that requires separate processes, including uterine implantation.  So on the face of it, the very premise of this legislation is poor.  But Howell does tie in to the obvious attempt to force on the rest of us, in a violation of church and state, one of the premises of the catholic church, that masturbation is a mortal sin.

I agree with my high school biology teacher, who gave us the most comprehensive sex ed classes imaginable; 95% of men admit to masturbation, and the other 5% are liars.  I would posit that the numbers for women are similar.

Good for Senators Howell and Johnson, we need more humor, we need more reason, and we certainly seem to need more women in our legislative government at all levels.

In search of facts

Last night I went out with a couple of friends, one liberal, the other conservative.


A point came up about wolves, I commented that "there hasn't been a case of purposeful wolf attacks on humans since 1647." It was a fact I remembered, something I had read not so very long ago, about a wolf pack attacking villagers in France.



The fact I should have said was that there hadn't been a recorded case of wolves purposefully preying, as a pack, on humans, in Europe or the US, since 1647. This is in part true for a couple of reasons, first, those wolves which might have once preyed on humans were killed, Darwinian selection saved those which were shy. The wolves in the US are EXTREMELY so, you don't see them in the wild, or not very darned often.


Second, the wolves in Europe.. well they're basically extinct.



My liberal friend pulled out his computer and brought up his Internet connection and checked my comment and essentially got in my face about the fact that my "fact" was wrong. My intended point was lost. He essentially ignored the idea or "truth" about wolves not preying on humans, he ignored the idea that humans aren't the prey of wolves. I agreed with him that what I said and what I meant weren't precisely the same, but I said if we take his numbers, e.g. Wikipedia's numbers at face value, humans probably haven't been prey for at least hundreds of years if ever. He repeated his point that wolves "attack" humans by pointing out that according to Wikipedia there were wolf killings of humans as late as the 1800's in Russia. In looking at it, I commented that usning that number of roughly 1100 killings in 250 years it amounted to an average of FOUR per year among tens to hundreds of millions of people and millions of wolves. Humans are damned easy prey, we're slow, have poor senses other than sight and if wolves were preying on us, the numbers would have been astronomically higher. Bears kill far more people, so do dogs - yet we grasp that neither bears nor dogs prey on people. In my recent visit to Yellowstone, where there are dozens of wolves and bears and obviously millions of people visiting the park, the Park Service spends zero time educating visitors about wolves, and hundreds of hours and many thousands of dollars educating those same visitors about how to avoid and react to encounters with bears. The evidence is rather revealing to the point that wolves aren't an overt threat to humans. My experience, and that of my father's as an adjunct professor on the subject, is that experts in the field feel that wolf attacks on humans are cases of mistaken identity or otherwise lone, sick animals - and even those situations are so infrequent that the Park Service sees no reason to offer classes educating the public on how to avoid the potentiality.


Still my friend persisted because, "You said it so matter of factly, like you KNOW everything, and I think you're just sensitive to being wrong." I commented I have no issue with being wrong, admitted I was and was happy to admit I stated things too broadly, but I had to wonder why it was so important to him to prove me wrong. What caused him to be so over-focused on proving my statement, rather than even the intent, was flawed?


In contrast, my conservative friend commented that just because there wasn't proof of attacks, doesn't mean it's not happening. He didn't care or even question the facts, he said, by contrast, the overarching point was wrong. He "felt" humans are preyed upon by wolves. I said to him that it's idiocy to attempt to disprove negatives. First and foremost, if such attacks were occurring, they'd be reported. It wouldn't be a mystery, but what's far more important, is we are a society of proof, lacking it means you don't claim it's true. It means you say it's a feeling at best - it means you need to question yourself, your facts, it means you don't make policy about this thing you can't prove. In my case it means you don't agree to kill wolves simply because people fear them.

In DogGone's case below, it means you don't strip people of their rights without proof of fraud. In a nation of due process, and one where conservatives claim a steadfast support of individual liberty and the sanctity of self-determination, we don't take away rights without proof.


But my conservative friend, he didn't change - if you lack evidence, but have a feeling, that's enough, and asking people to prove you wrong is what you do, despite your lack of evidence and their comparative knowledge. You dismiss their facts, ignore them if they are inconvenient and don't jibe with your world view. Next time I think I'll mention that just because we don't have evidence there aren't green men on Mars, doesn't mean there aren't, it just means we haven't found them yet, I have a gut feeling.


It also showed me a couple of other things - first that both sides of the spectrum were flawed. My conservative friend used extraordinarily poor reasoning skills, insisting on proving (as if you somehow could) that it wasn't a case of "not finding the right kind of evidence" rather than recognizing that the burden of proof is always on the side alleging there is a problem. My liberal friend was too myopic, too bound up in the words, in proving his superiority with facts to see the underlying truth. To his credit, after a time he admitted the overarching point was true, namely that wolves don't prey on humans. The "conflict" with him also showed me again I should go from actual facts and be more precise with my recitation of them, or it undermines my point. The second point derives from the first, these flaws mean that neither liberals nor conservatives have a monopoly understanding the meaning of facts and both have something to teach the other. Liberals often check and qeustion facts, Conservatives often have good basic insticts. Yet each is unwilling to listen to the other or learn from the other important points which would otherwise lead to a better cognitive understanding of the basic truths the facts and their gut implies. Rather than stridently arguing pedantic points or dismissing facts which don't agree with your desires, I surely do wish my friends and the larger world would take a moment to seek the truth rather than simply the facts they prefer.

Last Night I Went to the Caucus......the REPUBLICAN Caucus

I grew up in a household that was very conservative and Republican, very Lutheran, in the ultra-conservative Wisconsin and Missouri Synod version of being Lutheran to which Michele Bachmann used to belong kind of family, not people like those far more numerous liberal Lutherans portrayed on A Prairie Home Companion.  My parents were sufficiently politically active, mostly by donations, to hob nob with Republican governors and Congressmen and Senators occasionally, if not regularly.  They were more a recognized name, known, not influential the way really big money is influential.

But the one significant way in which the Republicans of my childhood and early adult experience significantly differed from our current conservatives was that those Republicans were more fact-based, more reality based, and most importantly, for those Republicans being called a moderate, BEING moderate, was not a dirty word.  Supporting organizations and agendas like those of the John Birch Society was considered extremist and even dangerous.  For someone to be an extremist was a very bad thing.

A few years ago, on behalf of an organization for adoption rights in Minnesota, I agreed to go to our local caucus.  The organization was sending people to ask for their support in the legislature to BOTH the Democratic and Republican caucuses.  I was supposed to go to the Democratic caucus while another neighbor was going to the Republican caucus with her husband.  But at the last minute, her husband couldn't go with her, so someone else went to the Democratic caucus, and we both went to the Republican one in our area.  I agreed to speak for our cause, because my friend was very shy about public speaking.

I am not shy about speaking up, not in public, and obviously for those of you who read what I write here, I'm not shy about expressing myself with the written word either.

To my surprise, because of a lack of volunteers for the job preventing the caucus business from moving forward, in that earlier Republican Caucus, I ended up as Caucus Secretary, despite the fact that I considered myself an Independent, not a Republican any longer. 

I did a good job, fulfilling my secretarial duties; I've done meeting minutes many times before for other organizations.  This was not an unfamiliar task, and it seemed to me that for taking up the time of the caucus with a piece of business that was not Republican specific, and to engage the good will of the other attendees, this was a useful, positive contribution.

During the week before the Caucuses, in a conversation with my co-blogger Pen, he mentioned that one of his colleagues had made the statement recently that he hadn't left the Republican Party, that rather the Republican Party had LEFT HIM.  I came to feel the same way, back in the 90's, the first time around for the Nut Gingrich in Congress and the so-called Moral Majority, who were neither particularly more moral than anyone else, or a majority.  I disliked then what I saw as a drift into more far right extremism, and particularly I objected to the injecting of religion, specifically Christianity, into what ought to be a secular government.  I became an independent, and as I have become increasingly dissatisfied with the reasoning and positions and policies -ESPECIALLY the disastrous economic and de-regulatory policies of the right, I have become increasingly a supporter of at least some more liberal positions in politics.  But my roots are still my roots.

As part of a very minor protestant denomination, I had been brought up to believe that any intrusion into religious matters by government, like the so-called faith based initiative, and like that engaged in by the religious right, could as easily end up in the tyranny of religious groups could easily work against smaller groups of churches.  A hypothetical example, which I now deeply regret plays into right wing Islamophobia, was that a religion like Islam, if it grew faster than Christianity - and it is growing faster, world wide - could then force THEIR religious preferences into law, into government, into our lives in ways which would make religious beliefs less autonomous.  Coming as I did from an extended family that had produced over the generations a lot of Lutheran ministers, and church founders and elders,  I was brought up to believe in a strong wall between church and state - a wall buttressed from the church side.

A commenter a few years ago on a conservative blog belonging to a friend of mine and my co-blogger accused me of being a traitor to my upbringing and to my conscience for no longer supporting or being active in the GOP or joining the Tea Party.  I consider the Tea Party to be just another fractious faction of ill-informed and authoritarian conservatives, not a legitimate group that will improve politics.  Too often they personify the worst of the conservatives, not moderates, and not sanity or fact-based views.

So, motivated by nostalgia, by a deep anger at the term 'moderate' having become a dirty word on the right, motivated by a desire to confront the factually inaccurate assertions made over and over by far too many Republicans, especially from those in elected government like my Congressman Chip (or Crash) Cravaack, and with the phrase "the Republican Party LEFT ME" firmly in mind, I decided to attend the local Republican Caucus rather than the Democratic Party or the Independence Party or the Green Party Caucus.

The chair thanked all the conservatives who turned out last night.  Apparently unless you are deeply and far right conservative, you aren't thanked or welcomed.

There were only a total of 23 people for my community, and most of the meeting it was closer to 19.  There were exactly two people in the room of that number younger than I am, and nearly everyone else was distinctly older than I am.  I was demographically in the middle.  It was a notably very white, and apparently from the comments entirely Christian, mostly protestant group of people.  But then that is to be expected somewhat given the part of exurbia / rural Minnesota where I live.  However, from my limited involvement in the 2010 election recount for the governor's race in the same area, I can vouch for the fact that the participants in the Democratic party spanned a greater range of ages, ethnicities and religious spectrum, and there were a lot more of them.  In the recount, that figure was approximately 4 Democratic volunteers to every Republican volunteer.

We began with letters from the candidates being read, a straw poll vote (non-binding), which had an interesting break down - 2 votes for Gingrich, 5 for Ron Paul, 2 for Romney, and 11 for Santorum.  I would not be surprised if this was similar across the state.  But I think holding such a straw poll is meaningless, and a waste of time for both parties.  In the previous event I attended where I volunteered as secretary, we also discussed the platform and individual planks, and voted on them, which we did not do at this caucus.

I had been hoping for a chance to discuss the party positions, and came armed with printout of fact checking I had done in preparation for challenging some of those positions and assumptions.

The ONLY opportunity I had to do anything other than a yay or nay vote came when the request for volunteers to be election judges came up on the agenda.  The person who was our caucus chair - who was presumably elected before I arrived, the room having been moved from where I had originally been directed - asserted at moderate length that it was very important to have Republican election judges at every polling place because elections had been STOLEN so often in the past by illegal and improper 'shenanigans'.  After a few minutes of this kind of factually inaccurate nonsense about our voting procedures, I raised my hand with a question.

I respectfully but firmly challenged the chair to provide the facts for his claim.

When pushed on the subject, he admitted there were none, that it was just his 'gut feeling'.

I objected, again firmly but quite pointedly, to his opinion being presented as if it were fact, rather than being identified as his opinion.  He still insisted that this was true, but that he had no facts to support it, so he would assert it with the addition of the words 'in his opinion' at the end.

I pointed out that no investigation had proven any such case, and there had been ample and expensive investigations, over and over.  I pointed out that Minnesota was widely held to be exemplary in how we held our elections, and that we had one of the acknowledged experts in the world, Chris Uggens, as chair of the University Department of Sociology who had made extensive studies of the subject.  And I concluded with my own experience as a volunteer in the Dayton Emmer recount where I personally witnessed the meticulous, fair and accurate conduct of that election result.

The chair then asserted that well, maybe the Dayton Emmer election was okay, but the Franken Coleman race wasn't.  I countered with the fact that after six months of investigation and challenge, there was effectively no significant problem with voter fraud, that the Franken Coleman race was evidence that there WASN'T that kind of voter fraud despite his suspicions.  I insisted that such claims be based on actual evidence, not vague gut feelings, and then I pointed out that just last week the REPUBLICAN Secretary of State for Indiana had been convicted of multiple counts of voter fraud, perjury, and theft; so that if the Republicans were going to be accusing their political opposition of voter fraud, the Republicans better have proof first that it wasn't the Republicans who were trying to steal elections.

On every topic that came up in passing for vote, or comment, it was very clear to me that the other people in the room were what I consider to be low-information voters.  They were not particularly aware of current events, and their only knowledge of issues appeared to be from highly ideological sources, not the fact checkers.  Not one of my fellow Republican caucus attendees appeared to recognize the importance of fact checking what they were told, and not one of them at any time challenged the content of the caucus or what they were told there.  No one else there came prepared with anything other than a pen or pencil.

There is no doubt in my mind that at least at the caucus where the primary activity was to elect delegates to the county convention and to participate in a straw poll,  moderates in the Republican party were NOT represented.  Moderate sadly, IS a dirty word among conservatives, and I believe that position will alienate their fellow or former Republicans like myself, like the others who I have heard express the sentiment that they were abandoned by their own party.  So long as the conservatives operate on belief rather than fact, on ideology rather than objective reality, so long as they perpetuate the myths that push the buttons of their voters without regard to what is true, then the Republicans will hurt themselves, and they will hurt the rest of us.

The message conveyed at the Republican caucus was that Governor Dayton was thwarting the Republicans, and that he was therefore somehow stealing what they had accomplished.  The message conveyed was that the right needed to take the Senate, and the White House.  I personally doubt that so long as they are living in the world of right wing crazy land, they will probably lose the house of Representative, lose their state majority, and NOT take either the White House or the Senate.  And that is as it should be, so long as they are fact averse, and promulgate policies which have been demonstrated over and over to result in national crises.  Without moderates, without people who challenge them from within on the facts, what is left are a bunch of very nice, mostly old, fearful, religious white reactionaries who believe what they are told by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and who want to return to life in a fantasy world circa 1950 that never existed.

I could easily have been elected a delegate, or been an alternate.  The caucus barely could produce the six delegates they were allotted, and only two alternates, instead of the required six.  I did not feel that in good conscience I could represent the views of the people in that room, or that they would have been pleased to have a delegate armed with photocopies of fact checking who challenged their policies and positions and most of all, their assumptions and world view.

I AM going to volunteer to be an election judge.  Not for the democrats, but as an independent.

There are few enough of us who are critical fact checkers; I think that would be the designation, since one is preferred if not required, that would best fit my mind set and totality of political experience.  But the next time there is a Caucus night........I might go back to the Republican caucus, armed again with my printout of many pages of fact checks.  It might help, and I don't think it can hurt, and maybe next time I won't be the only one.

Marriage Equality in California - About Damned Time Culture War of Intolerance by the Right Is Defeated!

I was so pleased to see that there has been a consistent view on overturning the terrible Proposition 8 in the courts at every level.  This represents one more appeal that has ruled in favor of dumping 'Prop 8' as it is referred to colloquially in favor of respecting the long term committed and family relationships of same sex couples.

It is worth noting that the passge of Prop 8 in the first place was funded in large part by contribution of the Mormon Church, and represents the far right wing politics in this country, notably the religious right that has attempted to force their religious beliefs on others, all while giving loud but empty lip service to the word freedom.  I for one am sick of haivng bigoted right wing intolerance be the standard for normal or acceptable, and I am heartily sick of their attempts to force conformity to their world view on the rest of us.  Certainly not all right wingers condemn same sex orientation, as is the case with Log Cabin Republicans.  But it is true of enough of them, and particularly some of the less legitimate fundie religious righties who engage in a hate campaign against same sex relations.  We have had some of our own notable shameful sin-preachers here in Minnesota who promote ignorance and bigotry on the right, who for example make a false assertion about same sex oriented individuals being pedophiles which is factually a LIE.

They have a right to their opinions, however ill-founded and badly grounded, although they like to represent it as fact too much of the time when it is fact-averse.  We have the right not only to reject it, but to prevent it from becoming the intolerant law of bigotry here in MN, should it appear on the 2012 ballot as an amendment.  The right has despaired of successfully forcing their narrow and unpopular views on the majority through legislative attempts; now they hope to find an end run around their legislative failures by using the ballot initiative for a constitutional amendment.  Presumably they are hoping for a large enough voter turn out.  Even if there was passage of such a state constitutional amendment, it is far less likely now that it would survive a legal challenge, given this from the Prop 8 decision:

"Although the Constitution permits communities to enact most laws they believe to be desirable, it requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different classes of people differently. There was no such reason that Proposition 8 could have been enacted," the ruling states.

It was perhaps most telling in the earlier lower court hearings that the lawyers on behalf of Prop 8 couldn't come up with any plausible explanation of why it was or how it would be that a gay marriage harmed a hetersexual marriage.  That is because there is no way in which it is a threat to 'traditional marriage'. While it is possible that the SCOTUS would take up this case, I think it is more likely they will not - just a gut feeling from following their cases.  I will be surprised if the Appellate Court agrees to hear this case en banc either; it seems such a meticulously argued case by the winning side, and the rulings seem so careful in their wording and scope that I can't see it being worthy of their time and expense, given competing case loads on their dockets.

Gay rights used to be one of the right wing wedge issues.  Maybe they haven't noticed, that despite the support of religious conservatives, like the Mormons, it isn't a successful wedge issue any more - a wedge issue tends to be one that turns out the base to vote in elections.  In fact the turnout for the 2012 Republican Presidential candidates which typically is dominated by the more extremist factions has had a lower turnout this year, consistently in every state so far, including last weekend in Nevada, than the 2008 and 2010 election cycles.  Given the poor turnout for the Republican candidates, who don't tend to have strong support anyway, given their respective approval and disapproval ratings, I don't see the strategy for a strong supportive vote against Marriage Equality in 2012 for Minnesota Constitutional Amendment like Prop 8.  But one of the things I've noticed about the conservative movement here in Minnesota is that they sincerely believe that most people agree with them, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary - here, next door in WI which tends to be so very similar to us in Minnesota, and across the rest of the nation. Sadly, the conservatives have, as so many people I know put it, abandoned their party members, not the other way round.  The GOP and it's subordinate Tea Party has become reactionary, intollerant, rigid, and reactionary.  They no longer seem as rooted in objective reality as they were in the past - say back around the time of Eisenhower.  Moderate conservative has not always been a derogatory term.  Fiscal responsibility did not alwasy equate to stupid about the economy either, or bought and paid for by the wealthy individuals and corporations to the extent that it does now.

There is by no stretch of the imagination complete consensus on the matter of gay equality or marriage equality, but the trend has been consistently in the direction of a fair recognition of the rights of people to the dignity of respect, including legal respect, for their relationships.  This article from the Center for American Progress last summer covered some of the polling which has shown a strong and steady trend towards support and respect for the relationships and the individual dignity and rights of same-sex oriented Americans.  Just this past month the state of Washington had begun the legislative process to become the next state that legalizes same sex marriages. 

From NBC.com and the wire services, by way of MSNBC.com:

Court: Calif. ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional
Ruling paves way for a likely Supreme Court showdown on voter-approved Prop 8
NBC News and news services
updated 2 hours 15 minutes ago 2012-02-07T18:24:17
SAN FRANCISCO — A federal appeals court has declared California's Proposition 8 unconstitutional, paving the way for a likely U.S. Supreme Court showdown on the voter-approved law, NBC News reported.


A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that a lower court judge correctly interpreted the U.S. Constitution when he declared in 2010 that Proposition 8 was a violation of the civil rights of gays and lesbians.


The passage of the ban followed the most expensive campaign on a social issue in U.S. history.


It was unclear when gay marriages might resume in California.


Lawyers for Proposition 8 sponsors and for the two couples who successfully sued to overturn the ban have said they would consider appealing to a larger panel of the court and then the U.S. Supreme Court if they did not receive a favorable ruling.


"Although the Constitution permits communities to enact most laws they believe to be desirable, it requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different classes of people differently. There was no such reason that Proposition 8 could have been enacted," the ruling states.


The panel also said there was no evidence that former Chief U.S. Judge Vaughn Walker was biased and should have disclosed before he issued his lower-court decision that he was gay and in a long-term relationship with another man. Walker publicly revealed he was gay after he retired.


Proposition 8 backers had asked the 9th Circuit to set aside Walker's ruling on constitutional grounds and because of the judge's personal life. It was the first instance of an American jurist's sexual orientation being cited as grounds for overturning a court decision.


Walker's successor as the chief federal judge in Northern California, James Ware, rejected the claims about Walker's personal life.


California voters passed Proposition 8 with 52 percent of the vote in November 2008, five months after the state Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage by striking down a pair of laws that had limited marriage to a man and a woman.

The ballot measure inserted the one man-one woman provision into the California Constitution, thereby overruling the court's decision. It was the first such ban to take away marriage rights from same-sex couples after they had already secured them.


The Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and the Law, a think tank based at the University of California, Los Angeles, has estimated that 18,000 couples married during the four-month window before Proposition 8 took effect. The California Supreme Court upheld those marriages but ruled that voters had properly enacted the law.


With same-sex marriages unlikely to resume in California any time soon, Love Honor Cherish, a gay rights group based in Los Angeles, plans to start gathering signatures for a November ballot initiative asking voters to repeal Proposition 8.
Check back for more details on this breaking news story.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Hooray for REAL freedom, real equality, real rights for everyone fairly and without unreasonable prejudice, not the right wing bastardization of narrow ideas that lie about facts, and rigid reactionary conformity to their religious interpretations.  The right's idea of freedom isn't free, not for them, not for the rest of us.  They abuse the word in the way they use it.

Cross Posted from the Brain Police

I think Microdot is a fantastic blogger, a lot of fun.  There is a link to his blog the Brain Police on the left side here, on our blog roll.

This particularly post struck me because of a recent discussion here in MN with another blogger, Joan Peterson of Common Gunsense.  Joan's sister was killed by gun violence, leading to her becoming a blogger.

I have been struck in turn by several points.  Making something pink doesn't make it feminine, it makes it a stereotype, and it tends to make it appear to be a toy, just as making it orange, or yellow or green.  As a woman, the phrase 'Barbie Doll pink' refers to something particularly hideous that suggests an unfortunate mentality for an adult of around age 7, as well a deficiency in good taste.

Further, while I am heartily sick of reading of 'partnerships' that are one-sided, where only one so-called partner knows anything about such a project.  Anyone can make a donation.  Using such a donation to make sales, without the consent of the organization to which you are donating is NOT a partnership.  A gun company marketed a pink firearm promising to donate to the Komen Foundation, claiming a partnership.
Making a donation doesn't make you a partner; that is a relationship to which both sides have to consent and agree. I won't mention the gun company here, by name, because I don't want to give them the attention.

In the case of the Komen Foundation, they deny knowing about this gun company.  Shame on the gun company for misrepresenting the partnership if that is true.  But I also do not have full faith EITHER any longer in the Komen Foundation and their claims.  So far they had not as of this weekend appeared to have contacted the company to have them end that claim which has been going on now for awhile.  They claim to want to be out of the middle of the very real culture wars.  That doesn't appear to be sincere.  They don't LIKE the attention of having taken sides in the culture wars AGAINST women, but then they shouldn't have taken a side.  Not only does the Komen Foundation appear to have reverse engineered their excuse to defund Planned Parenthood, which is a claim supported by those who have resigned and by those who are still inside the foundation but afraid of retaliation, they have also tried to quietly defund valuable stem cell research that would save women's lives, and they have a strongly right wing board governing these decisions.

Take a position, be open about it, Komen,  I for one will no longer believe the press releases you make, until such time as you get rid of your new anti-Planned Parenthood Vice President, and also restore stem cell research funding.  Your protests about grant excellence is bogus.  Your insistence that there was anyone other than Planned Parenthood that was defunded for that kind of grant is also bogus.  It will take more than what you have done so far to regain the public trust.

As to the pink gun?  Komen, if you DON'T get out of the culture wars, you might want to rethink that partnership.  Because as Microdot points out below, guns aren't good for women's health, any more than breast cancer is.  So if you care, REALLY care, Komen Foundation, as a woman who has had both a mother and  other female members of my family and dear friends with breast cancer, I will support other organizations that fund breast cancer research, and be very critical of YOU until you decide what it is that really matters to you - right wing ideology and political conformity, or women's health.  Because there is a clear divide between the two.  The right has been waging war on women, with everything from trying to deny us affordable contraception, to trying to revoke equal pay regardless of gender, to trying to define rape as only forcible rape, to denying women an abortion to save their lives.

And no, I'm not just hoping that the Komen Foundation will find this small blog and read it.  I made a phone call to the Minnesota Chapter of the Komen Foundation, and plan to follow that up with a call to the national headquarters as well.

So, Komen Foundation - pick one side.  Because the right is anti-women at the moment, at least the more rabid tea partiers and extreme conservatives are, and that is who you've hired, that is who is setting your agenda.  As you've seen so far, a lot of us don't like that.  An estimated as many as one in three women have used Planned Parenthood for a variety of services OTHER than abortion.

From Microdot's 'The Brain Police' Blog (because I couldn't have said it better).

October was Breast Cancer Awareness month, and the group Breast Cancer Action seized on the opportunity to promote its Think Before you Pinkcampaign to raise awareness of how companies are increasingly exploiting breast cancer as a marketing device to sell products -- some of which are actually harmful to women's health. Pink ribbon campaigns are offering up some bizarre, albeit benign products like a breast cancer awareness toaster and a breast cancer awareness floating Beer Pong table. But the most bizarre item yet to have a pink ribbon slapped on it must be Smith & Wesson's Pink Breast Cancer Awareness 9 mm Pistol, promoted by a woman named Julie Goloski, Smith and Wesson's Consumer Program Manager and a sharpshooter herself. Goloski is promoting S&W's breast cancer awareness pistol on her Facebook page, saying "October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Breast Cancer Awareness M&P’s are shipping to dealers. I am thrilled to have my name associated with such a worthy cause and one of my favorite firearms." According to a 2008 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, firearms are the second most common cause of violent deaths of women, accounting for 29.2% of all violent deaths among females in the U.S. in 2008. The most important point here is the above board accountability of corporate charities. We all want to be able to donate to charities because we want to take action to contribute to the causes which touch us, but you owe it to yourself to find out how your good wishes are being spend or wasted and squandered. The controversy surrounding the Komen Foundation put this directly into the spotlight for millions of big hearted generous Americans this week. How much of your charitable donations actually make it to what you intended them for? How much are you paying to fund the perks and the salaries of CEOs? Give responsibly if you want to see results!

Family Values and Hypocrisy in Politics

I don't think that either party should be making the dubious claim of being more 'family value' oriented or more moral than the political parties supported by other people.  The reality is that all of us are a mix of good and bad, and that anyone who tries to assert they are superior to other people is likely to find themselves as a group to be embarrassed by their members.  Whether it is this guy, or the state legislator who cheated on her marriage, or the state chair who stiffed counties for the recount costs and left the party with a huge amount of debt (so much for fiscal responsiblity), it is possible to posit a political position without this smug holier than thou crap from the republicans and the tea partiers.

It's not like there aren't people across the political spectrum who let power go to their head; there are.  Elliot Spitzer is a prime example.  But he has shown far more remorse and subsequent humility than this lot of holier than thou hypocrites.

This seems particularly classic as we have the pious hypocrite the Nut Gingrich prancing about the national stage in his vindictive, imperious over reaching classic manner, a style which has not changed from the era when he was critical of the lesser misconduct of President Bill Clinton, while having an extended and more serious affair of his own.  I note that whatever Clinton did, and he should certainly not have had the relationships with women that he did, he remained married to Hilary, and certainly as regards Monica Lewinsky, his sexual misconduct did not go as far, as that of the Hypocrite Supreme, serial cheater, and dishonest, censured politician, Nut Gingrich.

I see nothing more moral in the right wing support for the Nut Gingrich than I see in them having had this creepy homosexual pedophile for a political committee boss. 

Via MSNBC.com

NJ school official quits amid charges he videotaped boys in shower

Somerset Co. Prosecutor's Office / AP
Patrick J. Lott, of Somerville, N.J., an assistant principal at a public middle school, allegedly secretly video recorded teenage boys in the shower at Immaculata High School in Somerville for nearly three years.



BENARDSVILLE, N.J. -- A middle school assistant principal has quit his job after being jailed on accusations of secretly video recording teenage boys at a Catholic high school where he volunteered as a coach, officials said Saturday.
Patrick Lott, 54, submitted his letter of resignation dated Jan. 27 from his job at Bernardsville Middle School, and the Somerset Hills Regional School District board accepted it Thursday, Superintendent Peter Miller told The Star-Ledger newspaper.
Lott allegedly recorded 22 boys showering, including nine under age 16, beginning in January 2008 at Immaculata High School in Somerville, where he was a basketball coach and a volunteer, the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office says.
Authorities have not commented on how Lott allegedly installed cameras at the high school.
Lott, also active in local and county politics, is the former chairman of the Somerville Republican Committee.He remains jailed on $500,000 bail in Somerset County jail.
Video recordings were recovered from his home before his Dec. 23 arrest, officials said.
The school district placed him on unpaid leave from his $120,000-a-year job on Jan. 9.