Live Mocking the State of the Union Address

I’ll be tweeting the State of the Union address tonight. Please follow along on Twitter and help me mock President Obama’s attempts to win back the public trust by blaming Booooosh!!!!

Oh, and do yourself a favor: don’t play any of the State of the Union drinking games that require you to take a drink every time President AllAboutMe says “I” or “me.” Your liver will thank you.

January 27, 2010 · Filed Under Barack Obama, Liberal Absurdity

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Jon Stewart Doesn’t Need a Weatherman

He knows exactly which way the wind blows.

The result? Comedy gold as Jon Stewart rips Keith Olbermann to shreds over his bizarre rants against Scott Brown. Man, I love me some hot blue-on-blue action. Seriously, watch the whole thing.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Special Comment – Keith Olbermann’s Name-Calling
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		 Political Humor Health Care Crisis

h/t Lori Ziganto

January 22, 2010 · Filed Under Distractions, Liberal Absurdity

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Martha Coakley: Victim of the Patriarchy?

My piece at NewsReal today examines the inclination of some feminist writers to immediately blame sexism for Martha Coakley’s loss to Scott Brown.

There are facts, and then there are feminist facts.  Here’s an example:

Fact: Scott Brown is a white male who drives a pickup truck and won the Massachusetts special election.

Feminist fact: Scott Brown won the Massachusetts special election because he’s a white male who drives a pickup truck.

Can’t you picture the GMC warning labels? Caution: you’re driving a tool of the phallocracy.

You can read the rest at NewsReal.

Boiling the entire Coakley/Brown race down to gender bias is not only shallow, disingenuous political analysis, but it deprives women candidates of the ability to sink or swim on their own merits.  Of course, that hasn’t stopped others from piling on with variations on the sexism theme.

In addition to the examples cited in my NewsReal piece, a POLITICO article about the “impenetrable” glass ceiling in Massachusetts decried “how mind-bending the gender dynamics in this campaign were.”  And in The Daily Beast, James Carroll wrote that “Martha Coakley was croaked by an electorate that could not get past her gender” in “Misogynist Massachusetts.”

When gender disparity is your bread and butter, that’s what an election post-mortem looks like.  So I was pleasantly surprised to see a smarter, saner analysis of Coakley’s loss at Salon’s Broadsheet:

But, as a lefty feminist, I’m calling B.S.  It isn’t so simple, and suggesting otherwise is dangerous.

It takes willful blindness to argue that Coakley’s loss was chiefly the result of anything other than a crappy campaign.

Clearly Coakley didn’t lose because she was the female candidate.  But her crappy campaign wasn’t the biggest factor either.  She lost because she represented everything the majority of Massachusetts residents detest about the Democrats’ agenda. And she lost because immoral, politically motivated decisions she made as a prosecutor came back to haunt her.

So does Massachusetts have a problem electing women to office?

The Commonwealth ranks 18th in electing women to positions in the state legislature. That leaves room for improvement, but it hardly merits the “Misogynist Massachusetts” slur.  And crying sexism because the better man wasn’t a woman is simply counterproductive.

January 21, 2010 · Filed Under Conservatism, Feminism, Liberal Absurdity, Women

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Dr. King’s Dream: Electing Martha Coakley?

Massachusetts Democrat Martha Coakley says she wants to achieve Martin Luther King, Jr.’s unrealized dream.  What will it take to get there?

“I’m running for the United States Senate because Dr. King’s work is unfinished; his dream is unrealized,” she said.

“Tomorrow we act on the dream and we make sure that we allow me to continue that work,” Coakley said. “We remember the dream tomorrow and we will act on the dream tomorrow.”

Got that? Tomorrow, Massachusetts voters have a chance to make history by sending another white Democrat to the United States Senate.  And a vote for Republican Scott Brown, why, that’s basically a vote against King’s dream of equality, freedom, and justice for all.

In a nutshell: elect Martha Coakley or you’re a RAAAAACIST!!!

A white candidate plays the race card against her white opponent on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. What better way to honor King’s legacy?

Hat tip: Michelle Malkin

January 18, 2010 · Filed Under Liberal Absurdity

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Ugandans, American Evangelicals, & the Soft Bigotry of Liberal Expectations

Homosexuality is a serious crime in Uganda, and has been for more than 100 years.  Gay Ugandans are subjected to unfathomable atrocities ranging from beatings to jail time to the horrifying practice of correctional rape. Public outings are a popular political weapon, leading not just to shame, but to violence, discrimination, and imprisonment.

And now, members of the Ugandan parliament are considering a draconian piece of legislation known as the Anti Homosexuality Bill of 2009 (PDF). Written by freshman MP David Bahati, the proposed law could institute the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality,” including acts that involve HIV-positive individuals and repeat offenders.  The penalty for other homosexual acts would increase from 14 years to life in prison.  In addition, friends, neighbors, and even clergy would be deputized as informants, and imprisoned for “aiding and abetting” homosexuality.

Who is to blame for this inhumane proposal?  Surely not the Ugandan people, all of whom are pure in thought, word, and deed.  And certainly not the beneficent legislators, eager to do what’s best for the people.  So who bears the blood of Ugandan gays on their hands?

American evangelical Christians, of course!

You see, not one, not two, but three American evangelicals visited Uganda last March to speak at a conference about “the gay agenda – that whole hidden and dark agenda.”  When these evangelical serpents arrived in Uganda, the noble savages fell from gay-loving grace upon tasting the forbidden fruit of homophobia and hatred.  And as the sweet, sweet juices of Western exported Christian fundamentalism ran down their chins, the epiphany set in:  death to Sodomites!

At least, that’s the implication of the meme that’s been sliming its way through the liberal smear machine, culminating last week with the publication of “Americans’ Role Seen in Uganda Anti-Gay Push” in the New York Times:

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings,thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.

NYT writer Jeffrey Gettleman eventually gets around to a grudging admission that anti-homosexual bigotry existed in Uganda before three American nobodies showed up to enrapture thousands. But the intended takeaway is clear: it is not Ugandans, but American evangelicals who are to blame for the Anti Homosexuality Bill.  And untainted by the nefarious influence of three Americans you’ve probably never heard of – Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge, and Don Schmierer -  the good people of Uganda would have maintained their anti-gay status quo.

Western homophobia: it’s magically delicious!

Without a doubt, the trio of American anti-gay activists are among the rankest of human garbage, and the Ugandan event was permeated by the unmistakable stench of hatred and bigotry.  There is even video evidence of Scott Lively at the Ugandan conference describing gays as serial killers, child molesters, and sociopaths.

These are the same falsehoods spread by anti-gay groups in the United States. Are we to believe the average Ugandan is far more susceptible to hateful rhetoric than the average American?

Sounds like the soft bigotry of low expectations to me.

And it’s precisely those low expectations of the poor, unwitting Africans that we hear echoing throughout the liberal mediasphere.

The Seattle Times editorial board makes it clear the Ugandans aren’t to blame for the anti-gay extremism in their government:

Gays and lesbians are a frequent target for those who preach a theology of exclusion and holier-than-thou dividing lines. Familiar language at home, but now it is a vile export.

Homosexuals in Uganda are literally in fear for their lives after three American evangelists traveled to Africa to find far-flung converts for the rhetoric of the U.S. culture wars.

Shakesville blogger Melissa McEwan theorizes (conspiracy-style) that “the extreme anti-gay legislation under consideration in Uganda was underwritten by the secretive American evangelical organization known as ‘The Family.'”  In her defense, McEwan didn’t expel this steaming pile of crazy on her own – she picked it up on MSNBC.

Professional moby turned liberal lapdog Charles Johnson writes:

What a shock — preaching hatred leads to hatred. Who could ever have guessed?

Just appalling. This is where the rhetoric of the religious right leads, and don’t fool yourself — there are many people on the right who support Uganda’s persecution of gays, and would like to see the US do the same thing.

True to sycophantic smear formula, Johnson then attempts to tar the entire right based on anonymous comments of unknown origin at Free Republic.

PZ Myers calls the three evangelicals who attended the Ugandan conference “the people responsible for inciting hatred of gays in Africa.”  He continues, “The only reason they are running from it now is that it happened far faster in Uganda than they expected, and they’re suddenly standing their with a smoking gun and blood on their hands, rather than at a safe remove with the apparatus of the state peeling away the rights from people, one by one.”

And Jill at Feministe relieves the Ugandans of culpability like this: “This is a tried-and-true pattern among religious radicals. They set a fire, fan the flames and then feign shock when something burns down.”

Sure thing. In a matter of hours, an entire country of Africans was radicalized by a trio of inconsequential Westerners.  These evangelicals must be to Uganda what David Hasselhoff is to Germany!

The thing is, anti-gay sentiment is rampant in Africa, much more so than in the United States.  While American gays are fighting for the right to marry, many of their African counterparts are fighting against imminent execution.  Are we to assume that the same three idiots from America been running amok in Africa, filling innocent, impressionable minds with Christianist hatred and bigotry?

And here’s a question: if even “Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, has linked gay practices to Western influences,” why would the country’s leaders turn to the imperialist West to pile on with more advice?  Couldn’t it be that the Ugandan conference organizers were using Lively and company as pawns to promote their anti-gay agenda?

“When you demonize lgbts as predators, just what do you think would happen?” asks a blogger at Pam’s House Blend.

What do I think? I think the Ugandan people aren’t unruly teens succumbing to peer pressure at a kegger. And they aren’t smooth wax tablets awaiting the stylus of their Christianist overlords.  Ugandans are just as capable as Americans of shrugging off outrageously bigoted rhetoric, but the fact is, the bigotry was already there.

So let’s put an end to fetishizing the Ugandan people as noble savages sullied by the West. And let’s stop infantilizing Africans by relieving them of their moral responsibility and capacity for self-determination.  If Fred Phelps and the Westboro bigots haven’t managed to Pied Piper the vast majority of Americans into the river of hate, three self-important American evangelicals aren’t responsible for pervasive bigotry in Uganda.

Unless, of course, you don’t think Ugandans are capable of thinking for themselves.

January 11, 2010 · Filed Under Gay Issues, Liberal Absurdity, Racism, The Blogosphere

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GLSEN & the Normalization of Sexual Abuse

I’m generally skeptical regarding accounts of Big Gay nefariously imposing a radical homosexual agenda on Americans.  You don’t have to be Freud to analyze the hyperventilations of some conservatives about gay sex being “shoved down our throats.” It was with that in mind that I read Scott Baker’s shocking rundown of graphic and unhealthy sexual depictions in the youth reading materials recommended by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN).

GLSEN’s bibliography of “pre-screened” titles for kids was compiled to further the organization’s “mission to ensure safe schools for all students.”  Books selected for inclusion were ostensibly “reviewed by GLSEN staff for quality and appropriateness of content.” The list was developed under the leadership of Kevin Jennings, the founder and longtime executive director of GLSEN who now serves as President Obama’s safe schools czar.

The recommendations for schoolchildren are divided into two categories, one for grades K-6 and another for 7-12.  Breitbart.tv’s Scott Baker and his team looked at a random sample of books in the latter category and found passages that went far beyond the promotion of LGBT tolerance:

What we discovered shocked us. We were flabbergasted. Rendered speechless.

We were unprepared for what we encountered. Book after book after book contained stories and anecdotes that weren’t merely X-rated and pornographic, but which featured explicit descriptions of sex acts between pre-schoolers; stories that seemed to promote and recommend child-adult sexual relationships; stories of public masturbation, anal sex in restrooms, affairs between students and teachers, five-year-olds playing sex games, semen flying through the air.

Many conservative bloggers following this story have likened books on the GLSEN list to child pornography.  While I think that’s a stretch, there’s no question that the excerpts and scans available at Gateway Pundit are stunningly explicit and inappropriate for many teens. Some passages glamorize promiscuity, unprotected sex, and sex between teens and adults as part of normal and expected gay behavior.  The excerpts are available here and here.

After reading through dozens of passages, I’m left with the impression that exploitation, abuse, promiscuity, and risk are being promoted as normal, acceptable, and even expected experiences for gay youth.  Too many of these vignettes read like validations of the stereotypical hypersexual gay lifestyle.  Instead of reading about the challenges of coming out, gay teens (and their heterosexual peers) are being handed a degenerate’s blueprint for how to live a “gay life,” starting with being initiated by a pedophile and working up to unhealthy hate sex and anonymous restroom encounters.

I realize many gay people (and many straight people) have had formative sexual experiences with much older people. But regardless of any fond memories, sex between adults and adolescents is exploitation, not love, and I fail to see how graphic portrayals of sexual abuse contribute to tolerance and school safety.

The passages from the GLSEN-recommended books give unfortunate credence to the sexually obsessed, debaucherous caricatures that often dominate mainstream depictions of gays.  Incidentally, these are the very same caricatures that prevent broader support for gay marriage and adoption.  But being gay doesn’t mean you’re sentenced to a lifetime of loveless rest stop sex with strangers.  It doesn’t mean you can’t have a lifelong partner, intimacy, a family, and even a white picket fence. In my experience, too many gay kids don’t realize that, and these books certainly aren’t helping.

Dan Blatt observes that gay fiction frequently leaves the same impression as the titles on the GLSEN list:

They all seemed to define their sexuality by its sexual expression.  Only a handful (notably the eloquent Jim Grimsley) wrote convincingly about non-sexual longing and emotional intimacy.  Most included gratuitous and graphic descriptions of sexual activity.

The notion that homosexuality doesn’t put intimacy and true partnership out of reach is exactly what gay kids need to see.  Instead they’re getting the glamorization of pedophilia.  Healthy, mature same-sex relationships don’t begin with memoirs about sleep away camp circle jerks and wistful reminiscing about experiences with child predators.  They just don’t.

I’m left wondering if GLSEN staffers recommended these titles to somehow rationalize unhealthy experiences in their own lives.

The excerpts from these books attempt to mainstream experiences that have little to do with being gay. People may be born gay, but they’re not born with an inclination to sniff semen-drenched tissues left behind at gas station bathrooms.

How can any parent, any decent person, defend this stuff as instructive?

Predictably, conservatives criticizing the GLSEN recommendations are being attacked as homophobes by Media Matters.  Apparently social cons fail to get suitably worked up about explicit sexual situations in books like The Lord of the Flies. Newsflash: a flip book overview of the Western canon’s raunchiest high school hits wouldn’t come close to some of the violent and abusive sexual experiences depicted in the GLSEN books.

And comparing the GLSEN recommendations to the ALA’s list of banned books is contextually disingenuous.  The Lord of the Flies isn’t assigned because educators are trying to promote tolerance of the behavior described in William Golding’s novel.  The same can’t be said for the titles on the GSLEN list.  It’s all about context, and GLSEN is way off the mark.

Note to Media Matters: some things are indefensible, regardless of political ideology.

via Michelle Malkin

December 6, 2009 · Filed Under Education, Gay Issues, Liberal Absurdity

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