Pay your damn taxes

Posted on January 21, 2010 by Michael

As the upstanding citizen I am, I just finished getting through all my taxes. As it happens, I am getting money back, but I would have certainly paid up if that’s how the math worked out. Maybe I wouldn’t be doing that in January, but I would do it by April 15th. Paying taxes as they are due is just such a basic concept that one must be ignorant, stupid, or a crook to do otherwise. It turns out the Mormon Church is run by crooks.

The Mormon church worked to hide its involvement in the 2008 effort to ban gay marriage in California, telling the Proposition 8 campaign that it wanted “plausible deniability” in its connections with the movement, documents revealed in a California courtroom Wednesday show.

In the seventh day of testimony in the landmark gay-marriage trial in San Francisco, lawyers for the gay-rights side presented emails showing “close links between the Proposition 8 campaign and leaders of the Catholic and Mormon churches,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

Any reasonable person would have to conclude that this sort of political involvement demands the Mormon Church pay its taxes. Maine had this same problem with the Catholic Church recently. In both cases, no taxes will be rendered. It doesn’t make any sense. Ignoring for a moment that religious institutions generally should not be tax-exempt (except as they function as charities), if government is going to grant certain groups privileges, those groups should have to abide by the rules. They constantly and consistently do not do this. No one is saying “No! You can’t support cause X!”. Go ahead, support your bigotry or yearning for a theocracy. Just pay your damn taxes when you do it.

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Question 1 and Respect

Posted on November 26, 2009 by Michael

By Michael Hawkins

It is necessary to briefly address the ugliness of Question 1. The results were abysmal: 52% of Mainers are bigots.

It would be a mistake to forget the analogy consistently drawn by No on 1 supporters. That is, this is like the past denials of civil rights for racial minorities.

Yes on 1 supporters never bothered to show how same-sex marriage infringed upon anyone’s rights. From this reason it must be concluded that “bigot” is the most appropriate term for these people.

Yet there’s an unjustified apprehension surrounding this label. Those who fought for liberty would do well to remember that the aforementioned analogy was more than just words. It meant something.

Do away with the undue respect. A bigot is a bigot is a bigot. Declare it loudly.

Filed under: Same-sex marriage | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Does this make them proud?

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Michael

There was an election day recap article in the local paper for 11/5. One part of it was very striking.

“It just makes me very, very sad,” said Diane Sammer, 49, of Harpswell.

Her partner of 28 years died last year. For many years they wanted to be married in Maine, and their hopes had risen since same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts in 2004.

When Sammer’s partner died, Sammer was not allowed to claim the body, and she was excluded from the arrangement process at the funeral home.

“They didn’t want to deal with me. They just wanted her parents to come and sign documents,” Sammer said. “Because we weren’t married, they didn’t acknowledge me as a legal participant in her life.”

Twenty-eight years. Does anyone for a moment believe that Diane’s partner didn’t want her wife-in-everything-but-legalities to take care of her final arrangements? Who in his right mind believes it is okay to do this to people. What in the fuck did Diane Sammer and her partner ever do to anyone?

I wonder. When these on-par-with-racists bigots read things like this, are they proud? Do they dance and cheer? Do they really think they’ve done any family a service? Do they believe that gay couples all of a sudden have just gone away?

And just to cap off the inanity in this article, lead bigot Bob Emrich tells this lie.

“No on 1 (supporters) were much more organized,” he said. “They had that down to a science. They had a remarkable strategy of early identification of voters.”

Yes on 1 bigots had the ENTIRE FUCKING CATHOLIC CHURCH on its side. You don’t get more organized than that. Or ignorant.

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Solid Argument

Posted on November 4, 2008 by Michael

This is from a bigoted article by Gerald Christian Nordskog, with Dr. Ted Baehr and Dr. Tom Snyder. The bigotry isn’t particular important (or well constructed). The interesting piece is when these mooks try to venture beyond their expertise of hate-mongering.

Most homosexuals seem to have adopted an irrational, unscientific view of the now defunct evolutionary model. They fail to realize, however, that, if evolution were really true (which it isn’t), there actually wouldn’t be any human homosexuals in the world. Why? Because, according to evolutionary theory, nature would have “selected out” over time, by the so-called “natural selection” evolution process, any truly genetic homosexual tendency because homosexual people do not procreate, or create any descendents. Thus, their deviant tendencies would have been eliminated from the gene pool by the untenable methodology of evolution.

No biologist is going to claim there is a gene which determines sexual preference. That isn’t how genetics work. Although studies have been conducted which have found that the genetic marker Xq28 conveys a tendency toward homosexuality, there is nothing that says homosexuality is deterministic. In fact, that study is far from solid but if it were true, it still wouldn’t say homosexuality is deterministic. This is essentially the problem encountered (unwittingly) by these bigots.

I may have a gene which gives me a predisposition to strong muscles around my shoulders. That doesn’t mean I’m going to be a great pitcher for the 2013 Boston Red Sox. It doesn’t even mean I would necessarily even have a chance at making it into an Independent League. Most genes have some degree – often a high one – of interaction with environmental conditions. This is why there is no “gay” gene(s) – and just the same, this is why there is no “straight” gene(s).

But just to be antagonistic toward these bigots, one possible way a gene which gives a predispotion (though not determinism!) toward homosexuality can be maintained in a gene pool is through sexually antagonistic selection.

The results of this model show the interaction of male homosexuality with increased female fecundity within human populations, in a complex dynamic, resulting in the maintenance of male homosexuality at stable and relatively low frequencies, and highlighting the effects of heredity through the maternal line.

These findings provide new insights into male homosexuality in humans. In particular, they promote a focus shift in which homosexuality should not be viewed as a detrimental trait (due to the reduced male fecundity it entails), but, rather, should be considered within the wider evolutionary framework of a characteristic with gender-specific benefits, and which promotes female fecundity. This may well be the evolutionary origin of this genetic trait in human beings.

Bigotry never wins.

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