Today's Must-Read: Snowflake Edition

Digby has an interesting post on politicians being accosted in public places by -- well, the public -- and the reactions from, of all people, journalists:

This past weekend, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was yelled at in a Louisville restaurant while sitting with his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. A man approached their table and angrily told they should leave the country. When other patrons spoke up and told him to leave them alone he shouted, "They're coming for Social Security!" (This happens to be true. McConnell told CNBC just last week that the only solution for the massive deficit caused by his massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy is to cut "entitlements.")

There have been several similar incidents. Protesters and constituents have approached Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen in public places, giving them hell over policies and practices.

Of all the people in our public life to get angry about this, the last you'd expect would be members of the media, who are being demonized by the president and these very same politicians. But some of them are quite upset and have taken to social media to scold citizens for addressing their leaders in this way[.] . . .

These are all fine reporters but they are on the wrong track. The same First Amendment that protects them from the authoritarian impulses of a politician like Donald Trump also protects these citizens' free speech and right to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

I find it absolutely astonishing that reporters, the media, would come out defending politicians who support a president who, among other things, has praised a congressman for physically attacking a reporter. And hacks like McConnell, Cruz, and Sanders are themselves part of the rot that's infested our government -- they certainly don't deserve much in the way of deference.

I guess it's true, what they say about the Villagers -- they're not even sure anything exists outside of Washington cocktail parties. I have news for them: democracy is not always well-behaved.

Today in Shamless Liars

No, it's not Tony Perkins, although I think a Tony Perkins Award is in order:

Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday defended the White House's decision to ban CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins after she asked questions that upset President Donald Trump.

During a pool spray last week, Collins pressed Trump about whether he is disappointed that his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, had released an audio tape proving that the president knew about a hush payment for former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Collins was later told that her invitation to the president's next event had been revoked.

In an interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, Pence said he backed the White House's ban on Collins.

"Let me say, this administration believes in the freedom of the press," Pence told Bartiromo. "President Trump and our entire administration have provided extraordinary access to the media. The president answers so many questions. I can assure you we'll continue to do that."

He answers so many questions. The best answers. Lots of people say it.

This is the one that caused hysterical laughter:

We stand for the freedom of the press in this White House.

The horrible part is that Trump's base will have no trouble swallowing that, along with another helping of "enemy of the people."

Here's a little more on how much the Trump White House, and Trump himself, stand for freedom of the press:

In an absolutely unprecedented move, Donald Trump tried to personally black list certain reporters from attending and covering White House events. The Washington Post is reporting that Trump has sought to personally ban reporters he felt asked too many tough questions of him and his administration, you know, those people "doing real journalism." He even inquired about revoking their press credentials - a shocking accusation, if true.

As for Pence himself, a word of caution from Frank Bruni at NYT:

There are problems with impeaching Donald Trump. A big one is the holy terror waiting in the wings.

That would be Mike Pence, who mirrors the boss more than you realize. He’s also self-infatuated. Also a bigot. Also a liar. Also cruel.

To that brimming potpourri he adds two ingredients that Trump doesn’t genuinely possess: the conviction that he’s on a mission from God and a determination to mold the entire nation in the shape of his own faith, a regressive, repressive version of Christianity. Trade Trump for Pence and you go from kleptocracy to theocracy.

Remember, this is the man who signed Indiana's right to discriminate bill.

Via RawStory.

This Is a "Christian" Nation

We don't really need Mike Pence whispering in Trump's ear to establish "Christian" supremacy in the good ol' USA -- we have Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III to take care of that. From the DOJ:

The Department of Justice today announced the update of the United States Attorneys’ Manual (USAM) with a new section titled, “Associate Attorney General’s Approval and Notice Requirements for Issues Implicating Religious Liberty.”

On Oct. 6, 2017, the Attorney General issued a Memorandum for All Executive Departments and Agencies entitled Federal Law Protections for Religious Liberty. The memo directed components and United States Attorney’s Offices to use the guidance in litigation, advice to the Executive Branch, operations, grants, and all other aspects of the Department’s work.

In order to ensure compliance with the Attorney General’s memo, the USAM will be updated with language that directs relevant Department of Justice components to:

• Immediately inform the Office of the Associate Attorney General upon receiving service of a suit filed against the United States raising any significant question concerning religious liberty;
• Coordinate decisions about merits arguments and significant litigation strategy questions in religious liberty cases with the Office of the Associate Attorney General; and
• Obtain the approval of the Office of the Associate Attorney General with respect to any affirmative civil suit that impinges on rights under the Free Exercise Clause, Establishment Clause, or Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The updated USAM will also instruct relevant Justice Department components to consult the 20 religious liberty principles laid out in the AttoOcrney General’s October 6 memo when considering whether the notice or approval requirements are initiated.

The October guidance seems quite reasonable, for the most part, until you remember who issued it and what court decisions he's using as authority. (Hobby Lobby? Because according to Citizens United, corporations are people.)

I sincerely hope that no one thinks this guidance is going to apply to Muslims, or Buddhists, or Hindus, or Pagans. Given the rate at which Trump and McConnell are stacking the courts with incompetent theocrats, that's certainly a pipe dream.

The reaction is, so far, fairly mild:

The head of Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law weighed in, calling today's move "astonishing."

This is astonishing. Most US Attorneys' Offices don't even have a civil rights point of contact. This newly created "religious liberty" position is wholesale politicization of DOJ's work. https://t.co/XBw1J723pB

— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) January 31, 2018

I'm reminded that both Mussolini and Hitler had the churches on board. Come to think of it, so does Putin.

Wait until the Satanic Temple sues.

Next Target

This should come as no surprise:

President Trump skewered the free press Wednesday, telling reporters that "it is frankly disgusting that the press is able to write whatever it wants to write."

The comments followed Trump's tweets Wednesday morning, which reacted to an NBC News story that claimed the president had called for the nuclear arsenal to be increased "tenfold." "With all of the fake news coming out of NBC and the networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their license?" Trump asked.

Via Joe.My.God., which has some of the Twitter reactions.

Trump vs. the NFL

And also the NBA. There are stories on this all over the place, so I don't need to link to them, but Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof has nailed it, I think:

I suppose if a dictator was threatening to blow up the West Coast, Congress was about to humiliate your plans to stomp on the legacy of your hated predecessor once again, three hurricanes in a row had devastated whole cities and wiped out the infrastructure and crops of a territory, and a special counsel was about to issue indictments for a former White House official, you’d be desperately looking for something to distract the attention of the media and start a Twitter storm.

He also links to a couple of articles that pretty much summarize the whys and wherefors, such as this report from NYT:

On three teams, nearly all the football players skipped the national anthem altogether. Dozens of others, from London to Los Angeles, knelt or locked arms on the sidelines, joined by several team owners in a league normally friendly to President Trump. Some of the sport’s biggest stars joined the kind of demonstration they have steadfastly avoided.

It was an unusual, sweeping wave of protest and defiance on the sidelines of the country’s most popular game, generated by Mr. Trump’s stream of calls to fire players who have declined to stand for the national anthem in order to raise awareness of police brutality and racial injustice.

What had been a modest round of anthem demonstrations this season led by a handful of African-American players mushroomed and morphed into a nationwide, diverse rebuke to Mr. Trump, with even some of his staunchest supporters in the N.F.L., including several owners, joining in or condemning Mr. Trump for divisiveness.

Julius Thomas, a Miami Dolphins tight end who had previously stood for the anthem, knelt for it on Sunday with several players.

“To have the president trying to intimidate people — I wanted to send a message that I don’t condone that,” Thomas said, echoing the opinion of most N.F.L. players. “I’m not O.K. with somebody trying to prevent someone from standing up for what they think is important.”

Of course, it's not about race -- says the White House:

The White House legislative affairs director has insisted President Donald Trump does not see the issue of NFL players kneeling to protest police brutality towards African Americans “through a racial lens.”

On the other hand:

Every day, and in countless and unexpected ways, Donald Trump, the President of the United States, finds new ways to divide and demoralize his country and undermine the national interest. On Tuesday, he ranted from the lectern of the U.N. General Assembly about “Rocket Man” and the possibility of levelling North Korea. Now he has followed with an equally unhinged domestic performance at a rally, on Friday evening, in Huntsville, Alabama, where he set out to make African-American athletes the focus of national contempt.

In the midst of an eighty-minute speech intended to heighten the reëlection prospects of Senator Luther Johnson Strange III, Trump turned his attention to N.F.L. players, including the former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and asked a mainly white crowd if “people like yourselves” agreed with his anger at “those people,” players who take a knee during the national anthem to protest racism. . . .

“People like yourselves.” “Those people.” “Son of a bitch.” This was the same sort of racial signalling that followed the Fascist and white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. It is no longer a matter of “dog whistling.” This is a form of racial demagoguery broadcast at the volume of a klaxon. There is no need for Steve Bannon’s behind-the-scenes scriptwriting. Trump, who is desperate to distract his base from his myriad failures of policy, from health care to immigration, is perfectly capable of devising his racist rhetoric all on his own.

(Via BarkBarkWoofWoof.)

He's right -- it's way beyond dog whistles.

By the way -- it looks like he really has taken on the entire NFL (via Joe.My.God.):

All but two of the NFL’s 32 team owners and CEOs issued statements Saturday night and through Sunday in response to Trump’s crusade against protesting NFL players, which began in earnest during a rally Friday night in Alabama. After making a thinly veiled allusion to former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who sparked a national debate by taking a knee before August 2016 preseason games to protest police violence against minorities, Trump called on NFL coaches to get the “son of a bitch” players off the field if they continued to kneel. The president repeated his call with no less intensity on Twitter on Saturday and Sunday morning.

And just in case you've forgotten what a caring, compassionate sort of guy Trump is:

Speaking to supporters in Alabama on Friday night, he decried Kaepernick and later assailed rules meant to improve player safety, saying they hurt the game’s entertainment value and pointing to declining television ratings for NFL games.

What's a little brain damage if people are entertained, right?

Today's Must-Read: "Onward Christians Soldiers" Edition

The influence of evangelical/fundamentalist "Christians" on the U.S. military has been a problem for a long time. Remember the problems with overt proselytizing a number of years back at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs? (Also home to a major anti-gay hate group, the American Family Association.) Since the election of The Hairpiece, it's apparently reached epidemic proportions:

Donald Trump’s election has led to such a steep rise in fundamentalist Christian evangelizing and religious bigotry in the U.S. armed forces that the matter is reaching the level of a “national security threat,” according to information shared exclusively with Newsweek by an organization that represents and advocates for secular and minority religious views in the military.

The number of complaints from servicemen and -women in the Army, Air Force, Marines and other service branches to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has doubled in number since November 2016, according to lawyer Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, a former Air Force officer who founded the organization.

Many of the recent charges are coming from members of minority religions, including Roman Catholics, Jews and Muslims, and from atheists. Among the complaints: military family and marital therapy programs are being infused with Protestant Christianity, which would go against the U.S. Constitution; open anti-Semitism; anti-LGBT statements, posters, symbols and bullying; openly anti-Muslim teachers and Islamophobic attacks; a rise in on-base evangelizing; and increased pressure on recruits or lower-level personnel and service members to convert to fundamentalist Christianity.

We're talking about the likes of Gordon Klingenschmitt being in the ascendant. Why they're picking Trump as their messiah is anyone's guess:

The Christian right’s willingness to see Trump as a savior for their cause—if not a messianic figure, despite his living as an urban libertine who has had three wives and a history of lewd acts and statements—continues to grow. His selection of an evangelical as vice president, plus the appointment of at least nine evangelicals to his Cabinet, have apparently soothed any concerns the religious right had with his personal life.

My guess is that they'll grab onto anything as a rationale for pushing their agenda: note that the "Christian" right has a history of blowing any little "victory" out of proportion, and claiming influence where they have none. (Just read any of Brian Brown's money begs, or Tony Perkins' press releases.)

And I think it's no surprise that this is happening along with the rise in hate crimes and the resurgence of the neo-Nazi and proto-fascist "alt right" groups: they share a mindset, and I'd bet that there's a lot of overlap in their membership.

Fasten your seatbelts -- it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Today's Must-Read: First Amendment? What First Amendment?

You may have gotten the idea, from way too many reports, that the right believes the only freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment is religious freedom -- their religious freedom, because any other belief is a political philosophy, not a real religion. They tend to ignore things like freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly.

And now a number of states are starting to put that idea into practice:

Thom Hartmann reminds readers that the war on drugs arose as a Nixonian tactic for suppressing the antiwar left and black people. Half a century later, Nixon's heirs are using Arizona's RICO statutes to suppress dissent in Donald Trump's America. Arizona's version of North Carolina's "economic terrorism" bill, Hartmann writes, "would hyper-criminalize any sort of organized political dissent if any person involved with that dissent (including, presumably, agent provocateurs) were to engage in even minor 'violence,' so long as that violence harms the 'property,' regardless of value, of any person (including a corporation)." Attend a street protest and you might go to jail and lose everything. Riot is helpfully redefined under the proposed Arizona law to include, "A person commits riot if, with two or more other persons acting together, such person recklessly uses force or violence or threatens to use force or violence, if such threat is accompanied by immediate power of execution, which EITHER disturbs the public peace OR RESULTS IN DAMAGE TO THE PROPERTY OF ANOTHER PERSON." (Caps in the original.)

Stifle dissent and protect money. These guys never do anything that's not at least a twofer.

Read the whole thing, but I'm warning you -- it's pretty sickening.

The VP's Night Out

No doubt you've heard this story, about Mike Pence being booed when he attended a performance of Hamilton. He also got a lecture from the cast:

At the conclusion of the show, cast members addressed Pence’s appearance — as a group locked in hand-to-hand — behind Brandon Victor Dixon who delivered the following message:

“Vice-president elect Mike Pence, we welcome you and truly thank you for joining us at Hamilton American Musical,” Dixon, who plays Aaron Burr, the nation’s third vice president, said. “We sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our alienable rights, sir. We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us,” Dixon added. “We truly thank you for sharing this show, this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men, women of different colors, creeds and orientation,” Dixon concluded to a roaring applause by those in attendance.

(Video at the link.)

Needless to say, Il Duce Junior was not pleased:

Donald J. Trump✔
@realDonaldTrump

The Theater must always be a safe and special place.The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!

7:56 AM - 19 Nov 2016

Donald J. Trump✔
@realDonaldTrump

Our wonderful future V.P. Mike Pence was harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton, cameras blazing.This should not happen!

7:48 AM - 19 Nov 2016

Apparently, some of the reporters at NYT thought this was beyond the pale:

Digby has the best response to that:

I'm afraid I have to agree. Booing is very rude. What you're supposed to do is chant "lock him up!" and scream "Trump that bitch!" It's also fine to call him "nasty" to his face. This booing, however, is disrespectful.

Of course, all the usual suspects are jumping on the bandwagon. But if you read through the tweets at the link, you'll notice how none of them address the substance of the situation: The man is a well-known bigot, viciously anti-gay, attending a performance that is all about the diversity that is America.

Oh, wait -- this is the segment of American politics that thinks Nazis are OK.

Faith and Governance

So the latest right-wing attack on Obama is that he's not a "Christian" (whatever that means, and if you look at some of the "experts" voicing this opinion, it's obviously an open question). Jon Green has a piece at AmericaBlog on why it shouldn't be an issue.

If you’re curious, or perhaps frustrated, as to why every Republican candidate is probably going to be asked about Obama’s faith this week, look no further than the people they have to pander to for the next year and a half: Republican primary voters and activists, who run the gamut from uncertain about Obama’s Christianity to absolutely convinced that it doesn’t exist[.]

And why is this important to the base? Well, there's this:

A majority of Republicans nationally support establishing Christianity as the national religion, according to a new Public Policy Polling survey released Tuesday.

The poll by the Democratic-leaning firm found that 57 percent of Republicans "support establishing Christianity as the national religion" while 30 percent are opposed. Another 13 percent said they were not sure.

This is the party that loves the Constitution. Also the party that carries on endlessly about "religious freedom."

Do you wonder why I've gotten to the point where I can't make myself vote for a Republican, even an Illinois Republican?

Footnote: That's also why evolution is such a big issue.

And This Is a Surprise?

Gee -- the Republicans in the Senate are blocking a vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United:

Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and other Supreme Court rulings dating back to 1976 that invalidated restrictions on money in politics.

The party line vote was 54 in favor, 42 against, falling short of the 60 votes needed to defeat a filibuster and proceed to a final vote.

I'm actually surprised that there were no Democrats joining the Republicans on this one, but they probably figured they were safe. Oh, and Ted "Obama Will Censor SNL" Cruz didn't bother to show up for the vote.

And the Through the Looking Glass Award goes to Mitch McConnell:

"I have to say it’s a little disconcerting to see the Democrat-led Senate focusing on things like reducing free speech protections for the American people," he said before the vote. "This is what they chose to make their top legislative priority this week. Taking an eraser to the First Amendment."

There you have it: in the Republican lexicon, corporations are "the American people." What does that make the rest of us?

"Jesus Christ Superstore"

John Stewart on the Hobby Lobby case:

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

It's not his most incisive commentary, but then, the mere fact that this case made it to the Supreme Court is a satire on the American judicial system.

It's another attempt to establish "Christian" supremacy as the law of the land.

And While We're All Outraged About That Russian Dictator (Updated)

Look what's happening at home:

In December 2011, approximately five million e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, an intelligence contractor, were hacked by Anonymous and posted on WikiLeaks. The files contained revelations about close and perhaps inappropriate ties between government security agencies and private contractors. In a chat room for Project PM, Mr. Brown posted a link to it.

Among the millions of Stratfor files were data containing credit cards and security codes, part of the vast trove of internal company documents. The credit card data was of no interest or use to Mr. Brown, but it was of great interest to the government. In December 2012 he was charged with 12 counts related to identity theft. Over all he faces 17 charges — including three related to the purported threat of the F.B.I. officer and two obstruction of justice counts — that carry a possible sentence of 105 years, and he awaits trial in a jail in Mansfield, Tex.

According to one of the indictments, by linking to the files, Mr. Brown “provided access to data stolen from company Stratfor Global Intelligence to include in excess of 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’ identification information, and the authentication features for the credit cards.”

Because Mr. Brown has been closely aligned with Anonymous and various other online groups, some of whom view sowing mayhem as very much a part of their work, his version of journalism is tougher to pin down and, sometimes, tougher to defend.

But keep in mind that no one has accused Mr. Brown of playing a role in the actual stealing of the data, only of posting a link to the trove of documents.

(Emphasis added.)

Via Digby, who also inks to this article:

A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university's servers, focused on his area of expertise, which is cryptography. The post was highly critical of the government, specifically the National Security Agency, whose reckless behavior in attacking online security astonished him.

Professor Matthew Green wrote on 5 September:

I was totally unprepared for today's bombshell revelations describing the NSA's efforts to defeat encryption. Not only does the worst possible hypothetical I discussed appear to be true, but it's true on a scale I couldn't even imagine.

The post was widely circulated online because it is about the sense of betrayal within a community of technical people who had often collaborated with the government. (I linked to it myself.)

On Monday, he gets a note from the acting dean of the engineering school asking him to take the post down and stop using the NSA logo as clip art in his posts. The email also informs him that if he resists he will need a lawyer. The professor runs two versions of the same site: one hosted on the university's servers, one on Google's blogger.com service. He tells the dean that he will take down the site mirrored on the university's system but not the one on blogger.com. He also removes the NSA logo from the post. Then, he takes to Twitter.

Do you see where this is going?

Now add this little tidbit:

The National Security Agency violated privacy protections between 2006 and 2009 when it collected phone records from millions of Americans by failing to meet court-ordered standards, U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal Tuesday[.]

Want to bet all those phone records are classified? Along with any information relating to how they were acquired?

Hah! Just found this article:

Walton’s dissatisfaction with the Obama administration’s handling of the surveillance program are contained in hundreds of pages of previously classified documents federal officials released Tuesday as part of a lawsuit by a civil liberties group.

The Obama administration has been facing mounting pressure to reveal more details about the government’s domestic surveillance program since a former intelligence contractor released documents showing massive National Security Agency trawling of domestic data.

The information included domestic telephone numbers, calling patterns and the agency’s collection of Americans’ Internet user names, IP addresses and other metadata swept up in surveillance of foreign terror suspects.

The documents released Tuesday came in response to a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They relate to a time in 2009 when U.S. spies went too far in collecting domestic phone data and then mislead the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about their activities.

(Emphasis added.)

Can I call 'em?

Update: It gets worse. Read the whole article -- it's fairly short.

First Amendment? What First Amendment?

I guess you don't need to pay any attention to the Constitution if everyone agrees.

"Operation ROC resulted from meetings with church leaders," Bay Minette Police Chief Mike Rowland said. "It was agreed by all the pastors that at the core of the crime problem was the erosion of family values and morals. We have children raising children and parents not instilling values in young people."

Rowland said the idea was simple: get people who are not yet hardened criminals to become involved in positive programs — hundreds of free resources offered by some 104 churches in the region with 56 agreeing to help monitor first-time, nonviolent offenders. Under the program, pastors would report weekly to the chief and offenders in the program would bring a signed sheet to prove they attended church.

They would also have to answer some questions about the services, Rowland said. And the offenders who voluntarily choose church over jail get to pick the churches they attend. If they complete a year’s attendance, Rowland said, their criminal case would be dismissed.

There's a little problem here -- it's called the First Amendment, specifically the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise clause. They're apparently holding out "community service" as a non-church option -- but all the community service programs seem to be administered by churches. I don't think even Antonin Scalia's going to buy this one.

Walking a Fine and Blurry Line

I've run across this story a couple of places.

"It seems to me that what we are doing is producing a tyrannous new morality that is every bit as oppressive as the old. The way to [handle this] is not to ban them, not to fine them. It is for them simply to put up what seems to me to be a quite proper notice in a small privately run hotel which says we are Christians and this is what we believe. Otherwise, we are as I said, we are producing a new tyranny."

This is from David Starkey, a gay historian who also happens to be an atheist. The impetus is from in incident in England in which a gay couple was refused a room at a hotel because two men sharing a bed violated the owners' religious beliefs. (I can't find the original story, but here's a sort of follow-up from Pink News.)

I think Starkey has it almost right -- and keep in mind that the U.K., and Europe in general, have gone a lot farther with anti-discrimination laws than we have in the States. However, we have a principle in our laws that I think addresses this kind of issue very well: public accommodation. If you are a business offering goods or services to the public, you offer those goods or services to everyone. You leave your personal beliefs at the door.

We've made huge, and I think disproportionate, accommodations to "religious institutions" in this country, and I think it has set the idea of nondiscrimination back, sometimes substantially. And I've noticed one thing that I think is indicative of the essential dishonesty of many of those "religious institutions": up until a few years ago, organizations such as Catholic Charities were run as separate entities from the Church so that they could collect public money for their work. This was an arrangement that worked very well -- they were, in effect, offering a public service and could be publicly supported as long as their work did not involve forcing the Church's doctrine on those who received those services. Now, almost overnight, it seems that Catholic Charities and like organizations are "religious institutions" and feel free to discriminate on the basis of their religious beliefs -- but they still want the public money. They've tried to use that as a club -- remember that the Diocese of Washington, D.C., threatened to cancel their adoption agencies and other public services if D.C. passed a marriage equality law. D.C. said fine -- there are other organizations offering the same services, and in fact several of them offered to fill the vacuum. The Diocese folded -- I guess the money was too attractive.

But I digress.

This is a principle that has bearing on any public accommodation. It's even more pertinent in cases such as pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control. We've catered to them, when I think their licenses should have been pulled. If you're licensed by the state, you obey the law and conform to the requirements the state imposes as part of your license. If you can't deal with it, find another line of work.

I suppose, in cases such as the hotel that Starkey's referring to, we could make allowances on the order he suggests, but I think rather than a sign on the premises, you make sure all your advertising and listings note that you discriminate on the basis of your religious beliefs.

We'll see what that does for your business.

A Must-Read and Maybe a Few Comments (Updated)

From Mahablog, this excellent commentary on the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy. O'Brien demonstrates one thing conclusively: so-called "conservatives" hate the idea of the Bill of Rights, and have no compunctions about lying their faces off to subvert it.

Update:  If Joe Lieberman is against it, ;you know it's the right thing to do.

"I'd say I'm troubled by it, but I don't know enough to say that it ought to be prohibited," Lieberman said on "Imus in the Morning" on the Fox Business Network. "But frankly I've heard enough about it and read enough about it that I wish somebody in New York would just put the brakes on for a while and take a look at this."

The key thing here is that he doesn't know enough to say anything, really.  But being the total tool he is, he's got to weigh in in the side of "wait and see."

This is even worse -- now he wants a religious litmus test for being able to put up a building:

The Connecticut senator, who's often been hawkish on national-security issues, has said the project should be put on hold until the developers of the project can be more fully vetted.

"I've also read some things about some of the people involved that make me wonder about their motivations. So I don't know enough to reach a conclusion, but I know enough to say that this thing is only going to create more division in our society, and somebody ought to put the brakes on it," he said. "Give these people a chance to come out and explain who they are, where their money's coming from."

Leaving aside the tinfoil hat element here, this is a pretty disgusting thing to say.  (Think about it -- he wonders about the "motivations" for putting up a community center.)

The issue seems fairly clear-cut to me:  a moderate Islamic group wants to build a community center on land it owns a few blocks from the site of the Twin Towers.  The community center will contain a place for worship, which is being labeled a "mosque," which, strictly speaking, it's not.  The right wing of the right wing is up in arms at the idea that a group that Osama bin Laden would like to wipe off the face of the earth might want to put a Muslim place of worship a couple blocks from "sacred ground" as an insult to the memory of those who died on September 11, 2001 -- some of whom, by all reports, were Muslim.

We were also told by the former hero of this wing of of the wingnuts, George W. Bush (who now, apparently, cannot be counted as a "true conservative"), that Osama bin Laden hates us because of our freedoms.  So the solution to this is to launch our own attack on those freedoms so he doesn't have to?  Excuse me?

Another Update

Read these remarks by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- the only politician I've seen who has confronted the issue squarely.

And of course, the "conservatives" have no sense of proportion, nor even the instinct for self-preservation that would save them from things like this:



Yeah, there is a constitutional tie-in here, although it's as thin as most of the Prop 8 proponents' arguments in Perry -- God (that's their god, not yours) forbid that Teh Gays should actually be allowed to travel across the country -- by train, yet -- being . . . um, gay. (Actually, that's just a thin excuse to repost this video, which is a stitch.)

This bit, via Bil Browning at Bilerico, is almost as good.

 It occurs to me that no one -- and I mean no one -- refers to riding a horse without a saddle as "barebacking."  As far as I and my Anglophone peers know, that's always referred to as "bareback riding."

Oh, wait -- this is a Republican from Indiana.  'Nuff said.

Send a Coathanger, Revisited

In light of this post at AmericaBlog, I thought that the "Send a Coathanger" campaign that I mentioned in this post should be expanded further.

Send a coathanger to you local bishop.