“If there are good reasons for a tradition these reasons can stand on their own merits with no need to appeal to longevity. Using the past to veto the future is often the hallmark of those who just don’t have a better argument.”
Repost from: Friendly Atheist
Tony Perkins, the head Christian at the Family Research Council, made news this week when he appeared on Piers Morgan‘s show and said this incredibly stupid thing:
Morgan: You have five kids, right?
Perkins: Yes, I do.
Morgan: What would you do if one of them came home and said, dad, I’m gay?
Perkins: Well, we would have a conversation about it. I doubt that would happen with my children, as we are teaching them the right ways that they are to interact as human beings.
In other words, his kids wouldn’t turn out gay because he raised them “right.”
Chris Matthews invited Perkins on Hardball to elaborate on the comment… and, for some reason, Perkins accepted. Barney Frank was there, too, and both he and Matthews went off on Perkins for 15 glorious minutes:
Read more, and watch Barney Frank school Tony Perkins video here . . .
[…]
To add insult to injury, Lawrence O’Donnell took Perkins to task for suggesting there has only been one definition of marriage throughout mankind’s 5,000-year history (wait, what?):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQWxWk1wTAs&feature=player_embedded
“Our society has created a profession where you have near unlimited authority, and next to no responsibility for what you do with it. Of course that is going to attract people who are sociopathic, depraved, sadistic fucks!”
By Madison S. Hughes (05.05.2012)
It will happen!
The military and police forces attract a great number of Hawks. Many are actually Chickenhawks, but more on that presently. They come stock with an aggressive and militant mindset. They are predominately white-wing reactionaries who are very traditional and theistic. They see the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters as left-wing radicals who are very unconventional and secular. They believe the unemployed are so because they are lazy, and the have no work ethic. The OWS protesters see the downtrodden as victims of the system that, ironically, the Militarized Police Force are supporting against their own economic best interest. The contrast could not be greater.
Thus far the Militarized Police Force has demonstrated that they are, in fact, Chickenhawks. Their continual use of disproportional force against nonviolent, unarmed, passive protesters shows that they are just itching like a yeast infection to put a notch in their lipstick case.
It’s only a matter of time.
[May 3d] is an ugly anniversary in American history: 42 years ago, National Guardsman opened fire on anti-Vietnam protesters at Ohio’s Kent State University, killing four students. Ten days later, Mississippi police fired on civil rights protesters taking refuge in a women’s dormitory at Jackson State University and killed two more students.
Four decades later, as police across the country deploy paramilitary tactics developed for fighting foreign terrorists on Occupy and some May Day protests, and as campus police ratchet up responses to tuition hike protests, we must ask, is this where things inevitably are headed—toward deadly confrontations between overly armed police and angered protesters, or just as likely, innocent bystanders caught in a crossfire?
[…]
The Kent and Jackson State anniversaries underscore many questions. When and where will a fatal police overreaction take place? Who will be the victim? What will be the reaction, including from politicians who helped to unduly militarize the police?
This scenario is not an accident waiting to happen. Police use undue force all the time, where the consequence is the armed police shooter kills an unarmed victim. It has happened many times in 2012, according to statistics compiled by the government, just not yet at an Occupy or student protest.
Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein are no strangers to D.C. politics. The two of them have been in Washington for more than 40 years — and they’re renowned for their carefully nonpartisan positions.
But now, they say, Congress is more dysfunctional than it has been since the Civil War, and they aren’t hesitating to point a finger at who they think is to blame.
“One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition,” they write in their new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.
Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, join Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep to talk about the book, which [came out 05.01.2012].
The author offers one of her periodic assessments of America’s potential to go fascist. And the news is better than it’s been in years.
Political Research Associates estimates that, at any given time in our history, roughly 10-12 percent of the country’s population has been bred-in-the-bone right-wing authoritarians — the people who are hard-wired to think in terms of fascist control and order. Our latter-day Christian Dominionists, sexual fundamentalists and white nationalists are the descendants — sometimes, the literal blood descendants — of the same people who joined the KKK in the 1920s, followed Father Coughlin in the 1930s, backed Joe McCarthy in the early ’50s, joined the John Birch society in the ’60s, and signed up for the Moral Majority in the 1970s and the Christian Coalition in the 1990s.
[…]
The conservatives know that the demographic trends are not on their side, and that whatever limited advantages they enjoy now are receding with every election cycle that passes. Right-wing America is old, white, rural, and religious — a cohort that’s shrinking with every passing year, and is even now in the process of being swamped by a tide of voters who are younger, urban, ethnically diverse, and largely non-churchgoing.
Always Question Authority 