Invisible Bigotry

It has been a month since I last posted on my blog unfortunately, but this really prompted me to speak out. In the wake of the KONY 2012 campaign, a friend of mine posted a link to another blog on facebook. The title of the post was "Invisible Children Funded By Antigay, Creationist Christian Right" which caught my attention. I had been somewhat critical of the movement for other reasons, such as the tacit, or sometimes explicit support for foreign military occupation in the region.

I'll just take a quote from this post, which you should really read for yourself.

But Invisible Children’s first yearly report, from 2006, gives “special thanks” to the “Caster Family Foundation” and IC’s 2007 report is more specific, thanking Terry and Barbara Caster. In the lead up to the 2008 election, the California-based Caster family was identified as one of the biggest financial backers of the push for California’s anti-same sex marriage Proposition 8.

 Always be skeptical of popular movements, and if they pass the test, give them your support, but don't blindly support causes, ever.

Good Old-Fashioned Christian Hate

I can't remember how, but I managed to stumble upon a video on YouTube posted by drcraigvideos. The video contained a clip from a radio show/podcast by the Christian apologist Frank Turek talking about 'angry atheists' leaving hateful comments on William Lane Craig debate videos. He said something that made me want to leave a comment. He said that he looked at the comments "to see what names were called, or were attributed to Craig and what names were attributed to Hitchens, in other words ad hominen [sic (Yes, he pronounced it hominen)] attacks, insults if you will." I left a comment pointing out that insults and ad hominem attacks were not the same thing. See for yourself what I got in response from drcraigvideos.

I actually thought he was using it as an example, I should have realised from the "3rd option" that he was actually just straight up insulting me. So it seems that this evangelical Christian is just as bad as the trolls who post inflammatory comments on his channel. In fact it's rather ironic that this video was about inflammatory comments, I left a serious comment, was insulted in return, and when I explained my initial comment further, I was insulted again. In fact I think drcraigvideos is even worse than the trolls, because he's a filthy hypocrite.

Just to clarify, the comment I left that is pending approval in the picture was intended to be sarcastic.

EDIT: It seems I'm not alone in my experience with this deplorable character. See here and here for more details.

EDIT 2: I have now been blocked by drcraigvideos. He must be scared of legitimate, civil criticism. What a disingenuous tool.

Fear-Mongering, Propaganda and Poor Journalism in the New Zealand Herald

An article in the New Zealand Herald today was brought to my attention via Facebook, and to say the least I was quite shocked. The title of the article was "Sex at 14 - I learned all about it in class" by Elizabeth Binning. It (kind of) tells the story of a teenager from the Hibiscus Coast (North of Auckland) who is pregnant at the age of 17. 'Big deal' so far right? My gripes with the piece started right from the title, and continued through just about every single sentence all the way to the end.

The "Journalist" Elizabeth Binning is pushing for an anti-Sex-Ed angle throughout the whole story, which already shows her colours. Comprehensive sex education is demonstrably the best way of reducing teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Abstinence-only education has proven to be a complete failure in the United States (Guardian) and has been ineffective in general (Wikipedia). People who push propaganda against teaching teenagers sexual and reproductive health are not only counter-productive but they are chewing away at the progress that has been made in many places.

Beyond the anti-sex-ed angle of the piece, it is very poorly written, and seems to indicate at one point in the article that the girl in question was raped. "I didn't wind up pregnant because I didn't attend a class. I know all about contraceptives and safe sex. It was purely the fact that I was drunk, it was New Year's, and some older male thought it would be fabulous to take advantage of me." But after emailing the editor expressing concern that the journalist didn't seem to care about the rape, an acquaintance of mine through my University feminist group received a reply that the girl was not raped, but rather that she was drunk and was deceived by the older male that 'pulling out' was an effective contraceptive method. Either way, it doesn't paint a very good picture of the man in question, and it would in my opinion have been much better to focus on that aspect of her story. I have heard it said that the general attitude towards rape in New Zealand is rather blasé, which I find extremely appalling. I believe our rape laws are in dire need of revision, but that is a discussion for another day.

Binning also quotes from this ignorant child as if she was an authority on the matter. No references to studies to back up what the girl is saying? No checking her story to see whether the health teacher at the school was actually getting kids to taste flavoured condoms? I don't know about you, but I'm simply not going to take the word of a 17 year old who got pregnant because she was lead to believed that 'pulling out' was an effective contraceptive method, when "She said teaching young teenagers about contraception won't help reduce New Zealand's high rate of teenage pregnancy rates." I'm sorry, but all the data goes the other way.

Here are some quotes from the article

"A pregnant teenager says sex education in schools does not prevent young people from having sex - if anything, it encourages it."

Really? Data please?

"Amber-Leigh has spoken out in the hope it may help other young teenagers to learn about the importance of having protected sex - or preferably waiting until they are older."

So how about educating them about contraception? I distinctly remember being told when I was 14 years old that "just pulling out doesn't work". Either she wasn't paying attention or her teacher was crap.

This article was not a one-off event either, recently Elizabeth Binning has written 4 "articles" with the same propaganda against sexual health education. Some of the others display even poorer journalistic integrity than the most recent one. Quoting from anonymous sources with no apparent fact-checking is indicative of at the very least an incompetent journalist, at worst someone pushing a dangerous agenda.
The titles of her other 3 articles are:

• Too much 'grubby stuff', so dad steps in - No sources mentioned, story is about a father whose 12 year old son was supposedly recommended to engage oral sex by his sex-ed teacher. I call absolute bull shit.
•  Sex ed shock for angry parents - "Children as young as 12 are being taught about oral sex and told it's acceptable to play with a girl's private parts as long as "she's okay with it"." I call Bull Shit!
• Readers up in arms over sex education - "children as young as 12 are being taught about anal and oral sex and ...Children as young as 11 are being taught how to put condoms on cucumbers, and in some schools 14-year-old girls are practising on black plastic penises.
In one, a female teacher went as far as to give her class of 15-year-olds a rendition of the noises she makes during orgasm." I call BULL SHIT!

No sources are attributed to any of those claims.

Friday Fundies

This quote I'm about to show you completely baffles me how ignorant and bigoted whoever wrote this is. I cannot comprehend their thought processes, and in a way I'm glad I can't.

Quote# 63609

Because a beast has four legs and one gender[, i]f you put two men together, they have four legs and two penises, still one gender, that’s a form of bestiality. If you put Eve and Eve together, two vaginas, that’s still one gender, that’s a form of bestiality.

[...]

Everybody should have human rights. But you have to be human. Human means you deal with the opposite sex... We as a city, D.C., we’ve got to realize that you’ve got to discriminate against something that’s inhuman.

 Source

Interview With Son of Fred Phelps from the WBC

The son of possibly the most homophobic man in all of western society, who left his fathers church decades ago has recently given an interview to a Canadian news magazine. If you're at all interested in a look into the twisted psyche of the Westboro Baptist Church, then I highly recommend that you watch the interview. It's 30 minutes long and Nate Phelps (Fred's son) talks about nearly everything about his life before abandoning his deranged family.

Link

Makes me sick

Earlier today I saw a video of a whole pack of 'Tea Party' Republicans mocking and scorning an apparently disabled man. I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing, such a blatant act of inhumanity. I guess that's what happens when people listen to douche-bags like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh day in and day out on Fox News. In fact this isn't the first time a parkinson's disease sufferer has been openly mocked by Republicans. Rush Limbaugh himself mocked Michael J. Fox on live television, saying that he was faking his shakes and so on.

Anyway, here is the video.

Pat Robertson is a Vile Creature

Pat Robertson, the same person who brought us the Demon-Possessed candy and hatred against pagans, has now made a comment on the recent Haiti earthquake. Pat Robertson claims that the reason hundreds of thousands of people have died is because the Haitians had made a pact with the devil. He also says that this pact is responsible for the decades of poverty in Haiti.

Pat Robertson is a despicable, callous, vile creature.

Bigotry

Now before I start getting into the topic of the post I would like to acknowledge that this doesn't apply to all Christians, and to those who embrace humanist values, I am letting you know we are on the same side.

When I was younger I was as guilty as any of this bigotry, not because anyone taught me to be, but because I read it in the Bible. I was probably still in primary school the first time I read the book of Romans in the new testament, and before I had even finished the first chapter this verse shows up. Romans 1:27 - "In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion." This is not taken out of context or from a strange translation of the Bible, it is exactly as you read it from the New International Version. Some other translations put it even more harshly than that. This is not an isolated incident in the Bible of this kind of bigotry, in fact it stems all the way back to the pentateuch, where homosexuality is called an abomination, and by mosaic law homosexuals must be stoned to death.

Were it not for this intolerant hatred contained in the Bible that I read as a child, I probably would have spent my teenage years with a rather different set of moral values. Perhaps I would have adopted a set of values closer to my current ones. Or perhaps I would have been more influenced by the teachings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, with things like 'Let him who goes without sin cast the first stone' and other things like that. I imagine that most of the people of the anti-gay movement would have a similar experience would it not have been for the bigotry taught to them by the Bible. I cannot for the life of me think of any other reason on earth why some people would be so intolerant towards another human being. There certainly aren't any logical, rational reasons for people to hate gays. We live in an overpopulated world, and the fact that two men, or two women cannot reproduce (without modern methods of fertilization) really doesn't matter.

That leads me to my next point, infertility. One of the many appalling arguments against gay marriage commonly used by conservatives is that they cannot reproduce. One must then ask the question about infertile straight people, If gay people aren't allowed to get married purely because they cannot reproduce then the same reasoning must be applied to infertile couples. As you can see this argument falls so short of its intended goal that I feel pity rather than disdain for its supporters.

Every human being has rights, whether Jew, muslim, black, white, gay, straight or anything else. One thing you do not have the right to do though, is to deny others their rights.

Milk

No I'm not talking about the liquid substance we put on our cereal.
I'm talking about the film Milk. Starring Sean Penn and James Franco.
The movie tells the story of the last 8 years of Harvey Milk's life. For those that don't know, Harvey Milk was a gay activist, and the first openly gay person to be elected to local government in California.
Anyway, this movie is really inspiring and I thoroughly recommend watching it.

It's quite possibly Sean Penn's best performance yet in any film, right up there with I am Sam.