New Hampshire plays catch up

Posted on June 3, 2009 by Michael

New Hampshire has caught up with most of New England by passing a bill to allow same-sex marriage.

New Hampshire became the sixth state to legalize gay marriage after the Senate and House passed key language on religious rights and Gov. John Lynch — who personally opposes gay marriage — signed the legislation Wednesday afternoon.

I’ve had discussions with people who claim Lynch is acting out of political pressure. I don’t see evidence for that. It’s certainly a possibility, but the man is hugely popular and won by landslides in his last two elections. At the very least, it seems just as likely that he was caving to political pressure when he initially said he was against same-sex marriage. In fact, why not more? He had more to gain then than he stands to lose now.

Lynch, a Democrat, had promised a veto if the law didn’t clearly spell out that churches and religious groups would not be forced to officiate at gay marriages or provide other services. Legislators made the changes.

…

The revised bill added a sentence specifying that all religious organizations, associations or societies have exclusive control over their religious doctrines, policies, teachings and beliefs on marriage.

I believe this is correct. Morally, it isn’t, of course. It’s bankrupt in that sense. However, in a legal sense – and this is a legal issue – religions are protected by the First Amendment in this regard. Time may very well conclude that they are not, but it would appear that they are afforded these protections right now. Of course, the KKK is afforded First Amendment protections.

It also clarified that church-related organizations that serve charitable or educational purposes are exempt from having to provide insurance and other benefits to same-sex spouses of employees.

This, however, is not constitutional. This moves from the realm of protecting religious beliefs to harming people. If a religious organization hires a married homosexual, it is not germane to their beliefs to deny insurance. We’re talking about secular legal and tax issues, not religion at this point. New Hampshire went to far here. They are allowing religion to trump individual rights.

On the up side, discrimination has been significantly lessened in New England over the past few months.

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All it takes to refute something…

Posted on June 3, 2009 by Michael

…is for some journalist to say you did. According to the headline on that article, James Perloff refuted evolution at some half-baked meeting.

Perloff tried to draw parallels throughout history, attempting to connect individuals such as Andrew Carnegie, Karl Marx, Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler with the teachings and rationales of Charles Darwin. He also told of his own life’s inner conflict, saying he was briefly turned into an atheist at a young age due to Darwin’s theory.

Perloff went on to say, “Survival of the fittest does not explain arrival of the fittest,” and that, “[the theory of] evolution is just speculation on the past and should not been seen as scientific fact.”

There you go. EVILution has been defeated. Good job, Perloff. Honestly. It should be clear to everyone. If someone can make bogus, tinsel thin connections between ideas and people Real America loathes, then the idea must be false. Just pretend that logical fallacies don’t exist and the argument is air-tight.

The event was held in front of a small gathering and was kicked off with a prayer along with the Pledge of Allegiance led by Harold Shurtleff of West Roxbury, regional field director for the John Birch Society.

I remember as a very young kid playing Street Fighter. When the levels got too hard or my older brother beat me a bunch of times in a row, I’d start up a game just by myself. I would have a Player 2 set up, but no one was controlling it. I’d just wail all my 32 bits on that character. It made me feel good. Does anyone get the feeling that conservatives have the same frustration? I mean, the exact same frustration – one born out of immaturity and a lack of rationale. These people are kicking and screaming their prayers and flag-based prayers all over the place because it makes them feel good. Of course, I was a child when I did it. What excuse do these people have? There are more examples.

Take Sean Hannity. He’s a huge idiot. (I heard him say in the middle of a broadcast, and I paraphrase, “…that isn’t an arrogant statement. America saved the world from Totalitarianism. It did this multiple times. The world has us to thank. That isn’t an arrogant statement.”) He refuses to refer to Obama as “President Obama” in virtually every instance. He insists on calling him “The Annointed One”, or “The One” for short. You can feel his anger and immature frustration. People very rarely identify whining correctly (they tend to conflate it with active disagreement). This is not one of those cases. Sean Hannity and the new breed of ultra-radical conservatives are big, fat whiners.

Conservapedia is another great example of a bunch of crybabies. Their page on evolution (which is just a page on creationism) has a section titled “Creation Scientists Tend to Win the Creation-Evolution Debates“. I kid you not. This is their version of 32-bit wailing. They absolutely cannot win. Rather than to accept reality, they set up these conversations in their own heads where they win every time. Sean Hannity does it. John McCain did it. Dubya definitely did it. This is the path of conservatives in America. Yell and whine and if that doesn’t work, beat the crap out of Blanka.

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The moral elite

Posted on June 3, 2009 by Michael

“Elite” is a term that generally gets bandied about when someone is stupid. Obama was elite and McCain and Palin were Real America. In other words, they were amazingly stupid and Obama was intelligent. This applies to many conservative-liberal dynamics. So in essence, this dynamic changes the definition of elite. Put bluntly, it makes faux connotations to a word which is a positive attribute or characteristic. Unfortuntely, I’m going to delve into this bastardization of the English language, too.

We have a moral elite in the world. They are the righteous religious, the men and women (but mostly men) who believe they are right because they have always been told by their dogma they are right. In truth, they are moral scum. In 2008 campaign rhetoric, they are the most elite of the elite.

We recently had the killing of the abortion doctor in Kansas. The irony should not be lost on anyone. A pro-life man killed someone. In reality, he was actually pro-some-life. He went about picking and choosing. Religion is the engine which allows this. It is the wrong model for morality. It allows – nay, often encourages – itself to be subverted for evil. If it isn’t actively advocating for evil acts (i.e., telling people to murder rape victims), then it’s propping itself up for people to be immoral. The abortion doctor was killed because a religious man believed he was defending life. Religion leads to this conclusion, unavoidably.

Locally, religion has been a motivator in my hometown. A few years back we had a lingerie shop with live models. Women stood in the window downtown and showed off some underwear. Small acts of vandalism against the owner eventually built up to the slashing of her tires. She soon moved to another part of the state out of fear bred by religion. Years later another business opened up with the same idea, though with a focus on latex. Given that reality has a huge liberal bias, people apparently recognized that window models harm no one. It turns out the religious motivations were wrong. Again.

Now we have this incident. A man opened up a topless coffee shop in the next town over. He had plans of opening a stripclub, but recently announced he planned on just having dancing waittresses (pending board approval), sans the alcohol and lap dances. Sure enough, we have an act of vandalism. I use that word very, very lightly. In truth, this was an act of arson. A person, ‘morally’ motivated, burned down a building because it housed harmless activity of which he or she did not approve. The culprit is still unknown, but is there any doubt religion has its filthy hand in this?

Oh, and just to make matters worse:

An ambulance crew from Belfast was driving by at around 1:00 a.m. and spotted the fire. They woke the building’s occupants, which included owner Donald Crabtree, four other adults and two four-month old babies. They all got out safely.

Religion makes people do inane, dangerous things for which there is no secular basis.

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