Thanks to Jeff, who tipped me off to this story that those bastards at MSNBC and the New York Times refuse to cover:

FORMER DAVENPORT, IA—Immediately following the performance of a same-sex marriage ceremony Sunday afternoon at Holy Christ Almighty Lutheran Church on Lincoln Avenue, the city of Davenport, IA and all 99,685 of its residents were reportedly smitten into oblivion by the merciless wrath of God and flung into the deepest bowels of eternal hell.
…
“They tried to warn us and we didn’t listen—Lord, why did we not listen?” said Rev. Kenneth Hanson, the clergyman who performed the unholy marriage, moments before being dragged into a bottomless pit, flayed alive, and devoured by Satan, the Great Deceiver. “All I wanted to do was provide basic civil rights and legal recognition to Brian and Greg, two people who love each other and have been together for 15 years. But I was wrong. Oh, so wrong!”

On a related note, I’ve been so busy with work that I haven’t been able to get my head above water (Ouch! Sorry!) long enough to find out how many fundies are blaming Japan’s earthquake and tsunami on their being a mostly-Shinto country, or having a gay person, or eating shellfish, or giving us Pokemon, or something. You can mention that in the comments, if you know of any.

I was over at the Traditional Values Coalition website, where I saw a link that said “Do you want men dressed as women teaching your kids?” My reply was “Would you prefer they were undressed?”

Anyway, I clicked on the link, and it took me here:

Don’t you love how any time anybody wants to promote one political agenda or another, they always invoke the “do it for the children!” meme?

What I love about the above picture is the impending storm clouds. Uh oh! Can’t be good!

I also love how they were sure to make their cast multi-racial. Hey, fundies! Check that middle kid’s green card! He’s brown; he can’t be here legally!

Also note how they refer to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. I suppose they’re so busy plotting which “liberal” program to demolish next (I’m guessing the 40-hour work week) that they’ve forgotten to update their website. In fact, now that they’re in control of Congress, EDNA is pretty much a mid-term abortion.

The sad thing is, their followers are such Pavlovian salivators that this website probably still pulls in several donations per day.

Here is the rest of that page:

I love these phrases:

Cross-dressing teachers!
…
Your children will be trapped!
…
Classes taught by drag queens!
…
Indoctrinated!
…
Bizarre sexual fetishes!
…
Hogtied with two wetsuits and a dildo!

OK, I made up that last one. No fundie would ever be caught dead hogtied, wearing two wetsuits, with a dildo shoved up his ass.

I’m having a hard time envisioning a transgendered teacher, though. I’m not sure what that would look like.

I opened my email a couple of days ago to see an alert from Donald Wildmon of the American Fundie Association. The headlined screamed:

Dicks Respond to Christmas Boycott

Not exactly the type of headline I would have expected from Donny. He’s either referring to his followers in a less-than-flattering manner, or he’s telling us about some extra-special Christmas porn. Either way, he had my interest.

I looked at the email more intently, and was profoundly disappointed. I had misread the subject line! It was actually entitled:

Dick’s Responds to Christmas Boycott

He’s referring to the sporting goods store! What a dick!

He writes:

According to Vice-Chairman Bill Columbo, in a phone conference with AFA today, “We have made significant changes from past years, when ‘holiday’ was the dominant theme of our advertising.”

No! You need to stand up to the fundies! Form a stiff opposition!

Mr. Columbo said shoppers will soon see something new from Dick’s…

You know, when you read that out loud, you can’t hear the apostrophe.

…”Christmas” in the company’s television ads, newspaper inserts and on its website!
…
As a result of Dick’s response, AFA is cancelling the boycott.

In other words, Donald Wildmon likes getting a little action from Dick’s.

Unlike the woman in the above picture, the only pain in my ass is how many hours I’m working these days. It has been difficult to sit on the sidelines while Proposition 8 was declared unconstitutional. The fundies are throwing a fit! They’re having a conniption! I don’t think I’ve ever seen the fundies this worked up! Oh, happy day!

They’re upset for a lot of reasons. For one, they somehow think that their religion gets to make the laws of our land. The last time I checked the Constitution, that wasn’t how it’s done.

There are a lot of other reasons they’re upset. Most of them you’ve probably heard. I was thinking about this, and I may have come up with another.

The fundies object to gay marriage, because it legalizes anal sex.

In fundie-land, any form of sexual activity outside of marriage is forbidden. Certain activities (the ones they refer to as “unnatural acts”), though, are so heinous that you’re guaranteed a trip to hell just for contemplating them.

You’re also guaranteed a trip to prison. Most states, in fact, used to have laws against sodomy (some states still do). They’ll throw your ass in the slammer if they catch you, which, ironically, just guarantees you’ll be having a lot more anal sex.

But once you’re married, all of the taboos are lifted. You’re supposed to have sex. It’s your moral obligation. God is watching you have sex, and if he doesn’t see enough of it, you’re in trouble!

You can see what the problem is. Legalizing gay marriage legalizes gay sex. That probably bothers many fundies more than the idea of two men playing house together.

Surely you must be gay by now. After all, the homosexuals have been promoting their agenda and shoving their lifestyle down your throat for several decades now. If the conversion hasn’t stuck yet, well then, I guess it never will!

I was reminded of this agenda by seeing an article on Yahoo that Constance McMillen just won her court case and turned the whole country gay.

The article states:

[T]he American Civil Liberties Union won their case against the Itawamba County School District on behalf of 18-year-old Constance McMillen!

To recap, McMillen wanted to bring her girlfriend to her senior prom but was denied this right by her Mississippi high school. School staff and students then put on a decoy prom for McMillen and other “less desirable” pupils while the majority of the student body partied 30 miles away at the real prom.

Today’s ruling means that school officials are required to implement a policy banning discrimination and harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and they’re paying McMillen $35,000 in damages as well as her attorneys’ fees.

Maybe $35,000 doesn’t sound like much, but you have to read between the lines. You know, like the geniuses who left comments on that article. Here are just a few:

Jesse wrote:

Thats sweet let gays go to prom. U kno wat lets let daughters be sexually active wit their fathers and bring them to prom. If i started datin someone in jail for murder robbery or watever could they let them so i could bring them to prom. They better of il get a sh*t load of money out of it. Wat if im eighteen and im attracted to 8 year olds could i bring them to prom. U cant judge me i have my rights huh. This is sick and a bad move from this selfish D*ke. Peace i hope u sleep good knowin your rewarded for having no values.

MStoneManiac said:

Another example of the Gay Agenda and how its forcing the hetero majority to accept and affirm a lifestyle that is abberant by social standards, perverse by moral standards, an abomination by religious standards and a mutation that is essentially genocide by biological standards. Thanks gay people for shoving it down our throats!

Patriot1 wrote (and you know anybody calling himself “Patriot1” is going to be a model of intelligence and tolerance):

So yet another gay/lesbian trying to force their lifestyle on everyone else, and say “accept it and okay it, or I will find a way to force you to, because I don’t like that you don’t care for my lifestyle choice.” And yet then they have the gall to call US intolerant.

I’m sorry. I’m a little confused right now. Which millennium are we in?

Wow. You guys missed the most amazing talk. Greta Christina spoke tonight at the San Francisco Atheists meeting. Her subject was “What can the atheist movement learn from the gay movement?”

I wish I had taken notes. I did write down one thing she said, because it touched upon a matter that I occasionally struggle with:

Let firebrands be firebrands and diplomats be diplomats.… Both methods together [are] more effective than either alone.… The good-cop/bad-cop dynamic should not be underestimated.

The funny thing is, in real life, I’m very much the diplomat. My carbon-based incarnation is not nearly as dickish as my silicon-based alter-ego. In the past, I have struggled with just what my online role should be. For the moment, the matter is settled.

But Greta is right. The atheist movement can learn a lot from what the gay-rights movement did right and where it stumbled.

So go out there, find yourself a gay friend, and probe him.

For ideas.

The great thing about fundies is they can’t maintain the appearance of normalcy for very long. Sooner or later (usually sooner!) one of them says or does something stupid.

It’s been barely more than two weeks since I lamented that the fundies weren’t doing anything to amuse me. Then lo and behold — George Rekers!

On April 13th (but apparently just making the news this week), George Rekers returned from a vacation.

OK. People are entitled to vacations. I don’t begrudge the man a little time off. But let’s take a fast look at who this guy is. According to Wikipedia:

George Alan Rekers is a professor of Neuropsychiatry & Behavioral Science Emeritus at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine.

He’s also a Baptist minister. I thought I’d throw that in there just so you have a little context. Rekers also thinks it is possible to “cure” homosexuality. That’s some really delicious context you’ll be needing for the rest of this story.

Oh, I may have given you the wrong impression when I mentioned that he’s a Baptist minister. It turns out he’s not just any Baptist minister:

In 1983 Rekers was on the founding board of the Family Research Council, a non-profit Christian lobbying organization, along with James Dobson and Armand Nicholi Jr.

OH!! He’s a major fundie! And he’s friends with rabid homophobe and animal abuser James Dobson.

Rekers is also involved with several other organizations, most of them about teen sex. Much of that work seems to be involved in writing about how sinful homosexuality is.

By the nature of his work, he must spend a lot of time thinking about this issue. If he’s like most fundies, he’s fixated on the mechanics. That would require a lot of visualization on his part.

Therefore, George Rekers spends a lot of time daydreaming about gay teen sex.

Or so it appears.

Let’s get back to the matter of Rekers’ recent vacation.

The vacation he took to Europe.

For ten days.

With a male prostitute.

Said prostitute peddles his services through a website called… wait for it…

“RentBoy.com”!

The Miami New Times has a good article on this most amusing development. According to the article, their reporter photographed Rekers coming out of customs with his “rent boy”.

If you parade around in public with your gay hooker long enough, somebody is eventually going to notice.

We all know that we live in a media-saturated world. The TV and print media that pass for news these days aren’t news at all. They’re just glorified versions of TMZ. Ninety percent of what they cover is just gossip. As a result, we’ve all seen good and bad examples of how to handle an embarrassing revelation. The best thing to do is to confront the story immediately and confess. That disarms the media. The worst thing to do is deny it. No, actually the worst thing to do is to come up with a ludicrous cover story. No, strike that. The actual worst thing to do is to come up with a ludicrous cover story and keep changing it!

What do you think old Rekers did? Do you think he just came right out and admitted that he spelunks the brown cave? That would have killed the story in one 24-hour news cycle. That wouldn’t provide the rest of us any schadenfreude at all. We all know you can’t spell “fundie” without “fun”. That means Rekers did exactly the wrong thing! Hooray! It’s Opposite Day in Fundie Town! Yes, Rekers lied:

Reached by New Times before a trip to Bermuda, Rekers said he learned Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation. “I had surgery,” Rekers said, “and I can’t lift luggage. That’s why I hired him.”

But according to the article and photograph in New Times, Rekers was the one handling the luggage at the airport. The article continues:

Yet Rekers wouldn’t deny he met his slender, blond escort at Rentboy.com

If you’re not at work or otherwise easily embarrassed (or aroused, depending on your preferences), click on that link. Check out a few pages. Then tell me whether that’s where you would go if you were looking to hire a porter.

The story gets better, of course. Seeing that the first lie didn’t stick, Rekers is trying a different one. In a newer article, the Miami New Times reports:

Yesterday, Rekers switched his PR tack and told a blogger that his strapping travel assistant doubled as a male Mary Magdalene. He took the boy to Europe, Rekers said, to show him Jesus — with whom Rekers compared himself. The Christ wined and dined prostitutes, so why shouldn’t Rekers?

Oddly, he didn’t mention ministering to the boy when he spoke to us before the news broke.

Must have been an oversight. You know: Bellhop or gay male prostitute. It’s a subtle distinction that’s easy to overlook. (This makes me wonder if there are ever any surprised bellhops at the hotels Rekers visits.)

Since Rekers is one of the founders of the Fundie Research Council, surely they must have a statement on this whole affair. Why yes they do! It arrived in today’s email. Tony Perkins writes:

Yesterday evening, we began to see online “news” accounts of Dr. George Rekers, a reparative therapist for homosexuals, actually being involved with a male prostitute.

“And we have to put ‘news’ in quotation marks, because this story obviously has to be false. Otherwise, that would suggest that ‘curing’ gays doesn’t work.”

Some of the stories identified Rekers as being a founding board member of Family Research Council. I had never heard of Dr. Rekers, so I asked our corporate attorney to review past documents. We did verify that Dr. Rekers was a member of the original Family Research Council Board prior to its merger with Focus on the Family in 1987. FRC has had no contact with Dr. Rekers or knowledge of his activities in over a decade… [emphasis added]

“Well, what do you know? It turns out that this Rekers fellow actually exists, and he even had a teeny tiny involvement in our hate group in the very very early years. Of course nobody here now knows him, and none of us does any of those revolting actions that we here at FRC spend most of our days thinking about.”

I see. Tony is pulling the old Mission Impossible “disavow any knowledge” trick. In fact, if you go to the FRC About page, you’ll see no mention of George Rekers at all. Must be true!

Poor Tony. Doesn’t he know that you can’t hide from the internet? Here is an archived copy of that exact same FRC About page, written before this embarrassing scandal broke. It says:

In 1983, the Family Research Council incorporated as a nonprofit educational institution in the District of Columbia; its founding board included Dobson and two noted psychiatrists, Armand Nicholoi Jr. of Harvard University and George Rekers of the University of South Carolina. [emphasis added]

It looks like Tony Perkins is trying to push George Rekers back into the FRC’s very large rainbow closet.

I actually swiped the title of today’s post from Tony Perkins of the Fundie Research Council. It may be the first thing he has ever written that I actually approve of. Just the title, that is. The article itself is nothing to clap about. He writes:

According to the most knowledgeable experts on the issue, the spread of STDs may be the biggest crisis that no one knows about.

Really, Tony? Nobody talks about STDs?

Actually, it was the fundies’ influence on Ronald Reagan and other conservative politicians that prevented the federal government from tackling AIDS head-on when it became evident in the early 1980s that a serious epidemic was unfolding. The fundies contributed to the rapid expansion of that epidemic. Their backward “morality” is partially responsible for the deaths of millions.

There are other STDs, of course. Tony doesn’t mention AIDS at all in his latest diatribe. He apparently isn’t interested in those victims.

Cheryl Wetzstein of the Washington Times tackled the issue today in a must-read article about these silent killers. She quotes William Smith, head of the National Coalition of STD Directors, at length about a monster strain of gonorrhea and how it could affect every corner of the country.

I wonder if Tony talks about gonorrhea but not AIDS, because most of his followers know they run the risk of catching it. Despite their pretense of morality, fundies contract STDs at a higher rate than non-fundies (7 of the 10 states with the highest rates of gonorrhea are in the Bible Belt.).

Another STD that’s worming its way through the States is syphilis, which seems to be claiming the lives of young babies who are victims of mother-to-child transmission. In the most developed country in the world, newborns accounted for 431 of the 13,500 cases of syphilis in 2008.… Despite first-rate health care, Americans are dealing with third-world infection rates.

Why would that be, Tony? Perhaps it’s because that “first-rate health care” isn’t available to everyone? Could it be that a large segment of the population has “third-world infection rates” because they have no health insurance? Kind of like in many (but not all!) third-world countries. Health coverage that Tony Perkins opposes.

The U.S. pours millions into STD treatments when, unlike cancer, it can be avoided with simple behavioral changes!

Yes, Tony. That’s called safe sex. We could bring STD rates down by teaching safe sex in the schools. Except we can’t. Tony is opposed to that.

As FRC’s Peter Sprigg pointed out, gonorrhea’s resistant strains tend to show up first in men who have sex with men.

Once again, a fundie manages to bring the conversation back around to gay sex! They pretend to be repulsed by it, but somehow can’t stop talking about it. I wonder how often Tony’s business travel “requires” him to change planes in Minneapolis, which of course requires a restroom break.

Was that a cheap shot? Probably. Was it justified? Probably. I can’t come up with any other explanation for why these fundies are so fixated on that one activity.

I’ve spent the last hour looking for a good fundie “news” article to rip apart. I’ve come up empty-handed. This is happening to me more and more often. Everything they’re writing these days is so derivative. It’s all the same old crap.

“Contraception is abortion!”

“America was founded by and populated exclusively by Christians!”

“The Anti-Christ is FDR Truman JFK LBJ Jimmy Carter Bill Clinton Obama!”

Don’t they have any originality? Must they be so predictable?

Come on, fundies! Say something especially stupid for a change! Make my job easy again! Every time I think I’m getting jaded, that I’m merely over-exposed to their idiocy, I think back to the glory days of the 1980s and 1990s when Jerry Falwell thought one of the Teletubbies was gay and Donald Wildmon thought Mighty Mouse was snorting cocaine.

The conservatives are right. America has lost its way. Its glory days are behind us. Even the fundies aren’t as good as they used to be.

I bet you guys thought I forgot about this! Way back in August, I posted this genuine bona-fide Astroboy comic book scene and asked if anybody could come up with some good captions. I was expecting to get back to it a couple of weeks later. What I didn’t count on was having to live in a hotel for nine weeks, and then getting hammered by other priorities.

But Astroboy has returned, and he has the best of your proposed captions to show for it!

If you think of any additional captions, go ahead and leave them in the comments. If I get any especially funny ones, I’ll make some more cartoons.

I went by Conservapedia the other day to see what their most popular articles are. A year or so back, almost everything on that list had to do with homosexuality. I’d say they were a bit fixated over there. I was rather surprised to see a much more balanced list this time:

There are only two anti-gay articles on the whole list! Our little conservative buddies are growing up! They’ve moved out of their anal fixation. Where are they now? According to Freud, after the anal phase comes the phallic phase. I doubt they’ll be moving beyond that. Something tells me they’ll be dicks forever.

31 Flavors of Creationism

The Discovery Institute invented Intelligent Design Creationism as an attempt to get past the ban on teaching creationism (i.e., religion) in the schools. To this end, they go out of their way to try to tell everyone that ID is nothing like creationism.

That’s why they hate it when bloggers like me append “creationism” to their term “Intelligent Design” whenever we write about it. It’s wholly appropriate that we do so. “Intelligent Design” is just a modifier. Modifiers need to have the noun they modify attached. You can say “cactus” or you can say “tall cactus” if you want to be more specific. You can’t just say “tall” when you’re talking about tall cactuses!

Likewise, “creationism” is way too vague these days. There are so many flavors, that it is usually best to specify which flavor we’re talking about. It’s awfully good of the Discovery Institute to let everyone know which flavor they support. They’re just being sloppy linguists (is that like cunning linguists?) by leaving off the noun.

That’s why this placement on the Conservapedia list is kind of funny:

All they need to do is get rid of that extraneous second bullet character.

An Article Written by the Authority

Many articles on that list would be fun to read, but I can’t fisk them all. Since I have to choose, I’ll choose the one that stands out the most: Deceit.

Conservapedia is the master of deceit. Nobody lies better than them. Their article on Deceit, therefore, must be superb! Let’s have a look.

They start off with a definition:

Deceit is the deliberate distortion or denial of the truth with an intent to trick or fool another.

That’s a pretty good definition. I told you this would be a great article!

Christianity and Judaism teach that deceit is morally wrong, but public schools do not.

That’s a really broad statement, considering how many public schools there are. None of them teach that lying is wrong? How does Conservapedia know this? By divine inspiration? Hey, there’s a footnote attached to that statement. That must give us the reference. It says:

For example, the Old Testament says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

Those morons! That doesn’t support their wild claim about the schools! I guess they do get their information by divine inspiration.

Deceit helps promote various belief systems with the public…. Nearly all of these examples consist of deceit that was embraced by many people in order to advance an ideological goal.
…
Embraced deceit is deceit that is knowingly allowed, defended or even promoted for ideological purposes. Not only did the perpetrators of the deceit promote it, but their allies were complicit also. Embraced deceit is common.

That’s a really interesting definition, especially in light of the Darwin Was Wrong conference. The creationists are embracing deceit so strongly that it’s looking a little kinky.

The rest of the article consists of 20 “examples of deceit”. Here’s what they say about these examples:

Most prominent modern examples are of liberals hoping to mislead the public through propaganda.

This implies that deceit isn’t even in the conservative repertoire. All you have to do is turn on Fox News or most talk radio to disprove that claim.

Furthermore, some of the examples that Conservapedia gives are incredibly flimsy. For example:

There are claims that president Barack Obama is a Muslim. If true, this would be a massive deception of the American public.

There is no credible evidence that this is true, so how is this an example of “liberals hoping to mislead the public through propaganda”? It’s definitely an example of deceit, but one of conservatives trying to mislead the public about Obama’s religion.

Some examples are accurate in principle, but contain fraudulent side claims:

Extremist, hyper-liberal regimes such as the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, Communist China, and North Korea elevate deceit into an instrument of political statecraft. Systematic liberal lies are the basic currency of daily governance, and propaganda delivered through state organs is as essential to these regimes as a free press to the United States.

While it is true that totalitarian regimes keep themselves in power through constant lies and deception, the claim that these countries are “hyper-liberal” is unfounded. First of all, “hyper-liberal” is an undefined term. Secondly, liberal values are (among others) freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. None of those countries embraces those values, and therefore are not liberal by definition.

Some of the examples, though, are just based on incomplete information. The best example they give is Julius Rosenberg:

For over 50 years many liberals denied that Julius Rosenberg had spied for the communist Soviet Union. Then, in September 2008, a co-conspirator finally admitted the truth in “Figure in Rosenberg Case Admits to Soviet Spying.”

What the liberals were upset about was the scanty evidence and miscarriage of the justice system that occurred in that case. There was reasonable doubt about Rosenberg’s guilt. By our standards of justice, he should not have been executed. How does finally getting the facts 50 years later prove deceit?

Alas, Conservapedia will never get the facts. Not now. Not in 50 years. Not ever.