The material was seized in a nuclear smuggling case in Georgia (the country), and the Russian Federation wanted to analyze the material to double-check where it may have come from. A law-enforcement matter, and it’s likely the US wanted to make a point to Russia that it’s serious. You don’t get more serious in law enforcement than the head of the FBI.
As far as I'm concerned, Julian Assange can spend the rest of his life in the Ecuadorian embassy in London -- maybe coming out once a year to see if he's developed a shadow yet.
I daresay you've read about The Hairpiece's latest wild fantasy -- that are just oodles of terror attacks around the world that the press hasn't reported on because reasons. Washington Post, via Joe.My.God.:
Speaking to the U.S. Central Command on Monday, President Trump went off his prepared remarks to make a truly stunning claim: The media was intentionally covering up reports of terrorist attacks.
“You’ve seen what happened in Paris, and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening,” he said to the assembled military leaders. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”
Of course, that got -- mmm, moderated:
In a press availability on Air Force One, Spicer tried to soften Trump’s comment. Terror attacks had been “under reported,” not “unreported.” He continued, according to the pool report:
“He felt members of the media don’t always cover some of those events to the extent that other events might get covered. Protests will get blown out of the water, and yet an attack or a foiled attack doesn’t necessarily get the same coverage. He’s doing what he can to protect this nation and protect our people. And that’s why I think sometimes the polls don’t reflect what you see on the media. You see a wide degree of support for the president’s policies to protect this country, to create jobs, to grow the economy. And yet a lot of those stories and success that he’s had – in a mere two and a half weeks in office – aren’t exactly covered to the degree to which they should be.”
And who gets to decide the degree to which they should be covered? Don't tell me -- let me guess!
As it happens, the White House has a list. A long list -- a yuuge list of terrorist attacks that were "not reported/underreported" by the media for probably nefarious reasons. And, funny thing about that list:
There’s a concept in interactions with the press called “working the refs.” The idea is that it’s worth paying attention to trying to shape the coverage you receive before you receive it by offering criticisms that hopefully push the media where you want. Trump’s point about the media not reporting on terror attacks wasn’t necessarily that he thought the media was burying stories — though it very well may have been. Spicer, at least, was smart enough to understand that this was an opportunity to get the media to run with a lengthy list of terror attacks that, he hoped, would reinforce Trump’s broader message that terror attacks were a constant threat that demanded a strong response. Spicer, in other words, hoped to work the refs. . . .
The list was rushed — “attacker” is misspelled repeatedly and there is incorrect information, such as the statement that multiple people were involved in the recent attack at Ohio State University. This wasn’t something that the White House was sitting on, waiting to raise as a legitimate critique of how the media approached an issue central to Trump’s presidency. It was, instead, an attempt to make lemonade.
(I have to admit to a certain amount of sympathy for Spicer: his job is to make an out of control idiot look good. That's gotta be stressful.)
The White House released on Monday a list of 78 terrorist attacks that the Trump administration claim were not sufficiently covered by the nation's press. The list, however, included some mass killings that were covered well enough to make their locales into symbols of anger and grief: Orlando and San Bernardino, Nice and Paris in France, and Brussels in Belgium.
And the list does not include the mass shooting at at African American church by Dylan Roof, or the Ottawa mosque shooting by Alexandre Bissonnette (a big fan of Donald Trump, as it happens).
You want the White House's real attitude toward a free and independent press? New York Times, via Joe.My.God.:
Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s chief White House strategist, laced into the American press during an interview on Wednesday evening, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by an election outcome few anticipated, and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration.
“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Mr. Bannon said during a telephone call. “I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”
Let me start off by noting that the press is supposed to be the opposition. If anyone doesn't understand this country, it's Trump and his advisors. Or, let me say it this way: it doesn't matter whether they understand it or not, because they have no respect and no sympathy for our basic principles and values.
And frankly, if the press were to really examine the way Trump became president, they'd have to admit their own complicity. Here's just one example:
I don't think we get to pretend anymore that there is a functioning media in this country. The nation's 'paper of record' is showing that they are fearful (not timid, damn it, but out-and-out cowardly) of publishing stories about our newly sworn-in president who entered office with a plethora of conflicts of interest and scandals, none of which the Times took all that seriously in their reporting prior to the election. But they will rationalize their inadequate reporting away as 'doing their job correctly' while democracy is being stolen from us by Putin.
This is interesting. It posits that in order to achieve Trump's foreign policy aims, the media and the intelligence community both have to be thoroughly discredited. I'm guess that would be Bannon.
Her "this" is a very interesting article from The Atlantic on why Trump is taking on the press and the intelligence community. Worth a read.
While foreign and new media outlets such as The Guardian, Buzzfeed, City Lab, Daily Beast, and Huffington Post have reported specifically on the arrests of journalists (as has traditional outlet US News) most major media outlets in the United States have remained surprisingly silent. The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and MSNBC have not reported on the arrests at all. Washington Post’s report on the episode was framed in a decidedly pro-police terms–complete with an apocalyptic burning limo (that, it should be noted, was set on fire after the arrests in question) and the ominous, conspiratorial headline: “Protesters who destroyed property on Inauguration Day were part of well-organized group”
Paul Ryan and the teabaggers want to repeal Obamacare and gut Medicare as quickly as possible, before there's time for opponents to get their act together. Lamar Alexander is the second Republican I've seen saying "chill a minute."
A senior U.S. Senate Republican warned his party on Thursday against simultaneously overhauling Medicare and the Obamacare health insurance program, saying this would be “biting off more than you can chew.”
The cautionary comments from Senator Lamar Alexander came after House Speaker Paul Ryan, long an advocate of privatize Medicare, said Republican lawmakers would be discussing reforms of the health insurance program for the elderly with President-elect Donald Trump’s administration.
Ryan's claims about Medicare are pretty much standard GOP alarmist bullshit:
Ryan earlier Thursday said that Medicare was on a path to going bankrupt around 2028, and needed reform, a repeat of his long-standing stance. He wants to convert the fee-for-service program into a system of subsidies for seniors, to buy coverage from private insurers or a scaled-back Medicare.
I'm inclined to take his warnings about insolvency with a grain of salt, at least, seeing as how he can't submit a budget proposal in which the numbers actually add up.
Just as a reminder, anyone remember the backlash when Bush the Lesser tried to privatize Social Security? Not pretty.
There's a new "study" out that purports to debunk the "liberal" narratives on sexual orientation and gender identity. David Hart, at the Slowly Boiled Frog, points out some of the problems:
Ryan T. Anderson writes at Heritage Foundation's blog:
Co-authored by two of the nation’s leading scholars on mental health and sexuality, the 143-page report discusses over 200 peer-reviewed studies in the biological, psychological, and social sciences, painstakingly documenting what scientific research shows and does not show about sexuality and gender.
Back the fuck up.
There is nothing new about this and it is not a major report. Major reports are published to peer reviewed scholarly journals. The New Atlantis is not peer reviewed and it is a project of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. EPPC is a conservative Catholic organization headed by Ed Whelan with an assist from George Weigel. The authors did not engage in an independent investigation of anything. Rather, this is a cherry picking of existing research to suit a predetermined ideological conclusion.
Those two “leading scholars” are Lawrence S. Mayer (who is out of his depth on sexuality — he is a biostatistician-epidemiologist) and Paul R. McHugh. McHugh insists that transgender people do not exist. Everyone involved in this, … paper is a Defender of the Faith™, as is Ryan Anderson.
Hart's points, although rather vehemently stated, are valid: The New Atlantis is not a scholarly journal -- it doesn't seem to publish origina research, it is not peer reviewed, there seems to be no mechanism for vetting submissions other than ideology: It is an organ of the Catholic Church, ultimately, through several layers. Just skimming through on my own, it appears that the authors have followed the path so beloved of anti-gay "Christian" voices -- cherry-picking data and using it to support their predetermined conclusions, while ignoring any data that doesn't. I call it "Faith-Based Science." It's the sort of thing that got Paul Cameron (remember him? He's the guy whose work is still being cited by the likes of Tony Perkins, although they no longer mention him by name -- he's that radioactive) kicked out of every professional organization he belonged to.
In the end, we must ask why McHugh and Mayer went to such lengths to produce such a long and deeply flawed paper for a journal that isn’t even peer reviewed. First and foremost, it provides a scientific veneer for the public policy goals of their church. Ultimately this paper is about using cherry-picked science to justify religious views rather than an actual review of what the research suggests should be best practice. This public policy work was put in to practice when much of this same paper was used in a deposition in support of HB2. They have somehow contorted themselves to twist the commonly accepted answer of , “it’s complex” into “there’s no evidence.”
In this they have gone against all current medical wisdom, standards of care, and practice. There does not appear to be any awareness or concern that such a contrarian position which could cause so much harm to so many people requires an extraordinary level of proof.
This paper does not suffice as such when it cuts so many corners, resorts to logical fallacies, and claims without either evidence or citation. A solution of “more reparative therapy” is far less supportable than their claims about the biological origins of gender identity. In the end, they have forgotten their vow to “do no harm,” while advocating against both civil and human rights for highly vulnerable minorities.
I have to confess, I simply don't understand the motivations of people who do things like this. I really can't find a point of entry on that. I can understand it better on the part of the Church: it's a matter of power and influence, and the Church has been losing ground steadily over the past few decades, as more and more people come to see that reality and Church doctrine have very little to do with each other. And the Church's behavior during the sexual abuse scandals did nothing to help: it's hard to take seriously as a moral arbiter an institution that is so obviously morally bankrupt.
I am, as it happens, deeply offended by anyone calling this sort of garbage "science." I big portion of my education has been in science, specifically psychology, and this kind of thing is one of the worst perversions there can be, in my book. Not to mention the complete lack of ethics involved.
At any rate, this "study" is now being touted everywhere by the right wing, and as Hilt notes, has already been used in an amicus brief. One only hopes that the opposing counsel can lay hands on someone who knows what they're talking about to rebut it.
It was made clear to me some while ago that the economy does better under Democratic administrations. There are a number of reasons for this, the major one in my mind being that Democrats understand how our economy works, while Republicans understand how they think it should work. (That seems to be the prevailing right-wing mindset -- see "natural law" as an example.) There's an interesting post at Mahablog about a fairly recent study that lays out very clearly the Democratic vs. Republican record on the economy since World War II:
Last year some Princeton economists came out with a study that showed a rather startling gap between Dem and GOP administrations in how the economy performed, going back to World War II.
“The U.S. economy not only grows faster, according to real GDP and other measures, during Democratic versus Republican presidencies, it also produces more jobs, lowers the unemployment rate, generates higher corporate profits and investment, and turns in higher stock market returns. Indeed, it outperforms under almost all standard macroeconomic metrics.”
Strangely enough (hah!) the story somehow got mostly ignored in the "liberal" press. Not completely, but the spin from those who did note it is breathtaking:
But the two articles I found about this, one by Chris Matthews (the one linked above) and the other by Robert Samuelson, both go to great lengths to not give Dems credit for being better on the economy. Samuelson is particularly brilliant —
If Republican presidents were saddled with most recessions, their growth and job creation records would naturally be worse. And that’s what the Blinder-Watson study shows. Since the late 1940s, the economy has spent about 12 years in recession. But 10 of those 12 years occurred under Republican presidents; only two occurred under Democrats. On average, the economy spent slightly more than a year in recession for each Republican term and only three months for each Democratic term.
If only Republicans hadn’t been saddled with those damn recessions!
A controversial bill signed into law this afternoon by Gov. Chris Christie would allow for fast-tracking the privatization of many public water systems in New Jersey.
The Water Infrastructure Protection Act removes the public vote requirement to sell water systems throughout the state under emergency conditions that many systems currently meet.
Hmm -- "removes the public vote requirement." How very democratic of them -- will of the people, and all that.
… For over a decade now, Chicago has been the epicenter of the fashionable trend of “privatization”—the transfer of the ownership or operation of resources that belong to all of us, like schools, roads and government services, to companies that use them to turn a profit. Chicago’s privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm’s investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much.
He goes on about the supposed benefits:
That is the promise of privatization in a nutshell: that the profit motive can serve not just those making the profits, but society as a whole, by bypassing inefficient government bureaucracies that thrive whether they deliver services effectively or not, and empower grubby, corrupt politicians and their pals to dip their hands in the pie of guaranteed government money…
What no one seems to want to talk about -- at least, no one who is touting privatization as the remedy for our tottering infrastructure, not to mention the perennial manufactured "crises" in Social Security and Medicare -- is that you're inserted another layer of potential abuse into the system: suddenly, someone has to make a profit off of something that has been functioning without having to make a profit.
However, the rush to outsource responsibility for housing the poor became a textbook example of one peril of privatization: Companies frequently get paid whether they deliver the goods or not (one of the reasons investors like privatization deals). For example, in 2004, city inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations at Lawndale Restoration, the largest privately owned, publicly subsidized apartment project in Chicago. Guaranteed a steady revenue stream whether they did right by the tenants or not—from 1997 to 2003, the project generated $4.4 million in management fees and $14.6 million in salaries and wages—the developers were apparently satisfied to just let the place rot…
The head-scratcher here is that the taxpayer is going to have to pay for this, ultimately, by reimbursing the new owners for the purchase price (often inflated) and by paying for any maintenance the owners care to do. Higher rates for everyone, coupled with a decrease in service. Something else that no one wants to talk about.
I'm not going to point fingers at Republicans or Democrats on this one -- it's a bipartisan effort.
And from the standpoint of value for the dollar, it's really, really stupid.
Some things really should not be subject to the profit motive. Like just about anything that we, as taxpayers, are footing the bill for.
Bryan Fischer is, among his other accomplishments, an expert epidemiologist, who knows all about transmission vectors and incubation periods.
Of course, in real life Fischer is a raving rabble-rouser who will say anything that will get him some attention, as well as being an everything denialist. (Denial seems to be as much a part of the Christianist toolbox as projection.)
It's people like him that make me sometimes regret that we have free speech in this country -- but then, unlike Fischer and his ilk, I have no intention of setting myself up as the arbiter of who gets to say what.
I wonder if he realizes how ridiculous he is to sane people.
I'm finally ready to dive into the swamp muck that came out of various and sundry Catholic bishops last week. It's pretty stinky.
Let's start off with my own home-town atrocity, Cardinal Francis George. He's been relatively quiet lately, compared to someone like Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, but he couldn't resist using a celebratory mass honoring couples who have been married fifty years to slam gay couples:
Without mentioning gay marriage specifically, George also spoke briefly about the Catholic Church’s opposition to legalizing same-sex marriage, saying the institution of marriage is something that “comes to us from God,” not from the church or from the government. . . .
George said, “There must surely be ways in our civil society, where we can honor friendships, where we can respect other people, without destroying the nature of marriage. It is very important, for your whole lives, give witness to what marriage truly means. And while civil laws might change – if they do – then society will be the worse for it.”
OK, first point: I require some evidence that "marriage comes to us from God," and I'm afraid that quoting from the Bible won't do it. What the evidence says is that marriage is and always has been a human institution, created by societies as a means of recognizing families, or, to put it in more basic terms, the establishment of new households. Coming from a church that didn't even recognize marriage as a sacrament until the thirteenth century, claiming ownership of the institution is a bit much.
Second, the utter contempt in which George holds gay people and our relationships is evident in his reference to "friendships."
If I thought the man understood the nature of marriage at all, I might be inclined to listen, but he obviously doesn't have a clue, any more than the Church seems to have a clue as to the true nature of morality. Remember, this is the man who said that Chicago's Gay Pride parade could "morph into" a KKK gathering. Classy, that one.
And I'm sure the 400 couples celebrating their fifty years of marriage were more than delighted to have their celebration hijacked for some not-so-subtle politicking.
And how about the Bishop of Springfield, Thomas John Paprocki, as long as we're talking about politicking?
Again, I am not telling you which party or which candidates to vote for or against, but I am saying that you need to think and pray very carefully about your vote, because a vote for a candidate who promotes actions or behaviors that are intrinsically evil and gravely sinful makes you morally complicit and places the eternal salvation of your own soul in serious jeopardy.
This is just to blatantly cynical that even I'm aghast. Of course he's telling people how to vote, but I'm sure he's got a fleet of lawyers who told him exactly how to phrase it so he can keep his 501(c)(3).
(Footnote: I notice the Catholic hierarchy is really big on "intrinsic" this and that -- as in, abortion is intrinsically evil, gay people are intrinsically disordered, and on down the line. As someone whose religion stresses that one is individually responsible for making moral choices, and who knows that those moral choices are made in a fluid milieu, this "intrinsic" bullshit is just that. Althoughj I might note that raping children is intrinsically sick.)
Mistermix at Balloon Juice has an on-point summation of Bishop Paprocki's little homily.
Moving farther afield, the Archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, came out with a "pastoral letter" that turns out to be little more than sixteen pages of gay bashing. This is just a sample:
If our society enshrines in law a “civil” right to “marry” someone of one’s own sex, then any persons or groups that believe otherwise will be seriously disadvantaged in law and in fact. Already we hear public officials and news organizations refer to those of us who hold the conjugal view of marriage as “bigots.” States such as Illinois and Massachusetts have made it impossible for Catholic Charities to provide adoption services. Hotel managers, photographers, owners of reception halls, etc. who hold to the view of marriage as a conjugal partnership have had legal or civil actions taken against them. How long would the state permit churches, schools or parents to teach their children that homosexual activity is contrary to the natural law if homosexual marriage were a civil right? Already in Canada and other democratic nations “hate speech” laws have been used to harass or even arrest clerics who preach the Biblical message about marriage.
It's just one distortion and fabrication after another. Let's just take a quick run-through: 1) recognizing the right to marriage for same-sex couple disadvantages no one. People call you a bigot for expressing your desire to continue discriminating? That's called "the free marketplace of ideas," and your ideas aren't selling so well. Catholic Charities in Illinois and Massachusetts chose to close their adoption services rather than comply with long-standing anti-discrimination laws. Same holds true of hotel managers, photograpers, et al.: they are providing services to the public and fall under anti-discrimination laws as well. As for teaching children that homosexual behavior is contrary to natural law, it's not. At least, not any real natural laws, as opposed to the fantasy "natural law" promulgated by the Church. And the hate speech laws of foreign countries have no relevance here -- we don't have them, and we have fairly robust protections for free speech in this country.
Bottom line: total bullshit.
There was another story that I ran across, but my link was to the post at AmeericaBlog Gay, which is undergoing server transfer, and I can't retrieve the story. Fear not, though -- it's just as disgusting as those above.
Granted, it's an "opinion" piece, but once upon a time even opinion pieces had to have some grounding in reality. This piece by Dennis Byrne for the Chicago Tribune is notable not only for its blatant one-sidedness, but for the inflammatory language Byrne uses.
First, a gross exaggeration of the study's substance:
This is a debate-changing study, especially because it challenges more recent court findings in which judges cite the "no difference evidence" as a reason for overturning laws that define marriage as between a man and a woman.
No, it's not that at all. One key factor that Byrne conveniently forgets to mention is that the internal audit by Social Science Research, the journal that published the study, found that the peer-review process was badly flawed, marked by numerous conflicts of interest, and that the study itself is so bereft of scientific integrity that it never should have been published.
[Daniel E.] Sherkat was given access to all the reviews and correspondence connected with the paper, and was told the identities of the reviewers. According to Sherkat, Regnerus’s paper should never have been published. His assessment of it, in an interview, was concise: “It’s bullshit,” he said.
I find it hard to believe that Byrne was unaware of this, since it's been widely publicized -- but judging from his post, he limits his reading to The Weekly Standard and NOM's blog.
As for the rest of his post, it's pretty bad -- playing the victim card on Regnerus' behalf, lambasting those who have quite legitimate concerns about the closed circle of funders, consultants, and advocates (one notable link is Prof. Robert E. George, a major opponent of marriage equality and a co-founder of NOM), not to mention Regnerus' own statements that his religious beliefs "inform" his research, and dismissing the challenges to Regenerus' methodology, which are quite germane.
Saw this report on a follow-up investigation to the Irish child abuse scandal involving the Catholic hierarchy and priesthood. This struck me:
It found that the Church placed its own reputation above the protection of children in its care.
It also said that state authorities facilitated the cover-up by allowing the Church to operate outside the law.
That's what "religious organizations" are demanding in the U.S. -- that they be allowed to operate outside the law in regard to statutes concerning discrimination.
Do you really want to trust them?
This is the second report, concentrating on Dublin. Note this:
Thursday's report comes six months after the publication of the Ryan report in May, which took submissions from 2,000 people who said they had suffered physical and sexual abuse while in the care of Catholic-run institutions.
The Ryan report, also known as the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, found church leaders knew that sexual abuse was "endemic" in boys' institutions.
This is the Church that says that gay couples are not fit to raise children.
One of the most fascinating discoveries in the Dublin Archdiocese report was that of the concept of “mental reservation” which allows clerics mislead people without believing they are lying. According to the Commission of Investigation report, “mental reservation is a concept developed and much discussed over the centuries, which permits a church man knowingly to convey a misleading impression to another person without being guilty of lying”.
Read her article -- it's a real eye-opener about one of the ways the Church hierarchy protect themselves without -- in their own minds -- actually sinning.
And don't forget that this is coming after a decade or more of revelations about similar scandals in the U.S., Australia, and other countries in which the Church occupies a privileged position.
These are the people who have the nerve to call me and those like me "intrinsically disordered" and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars funding campaigns to take away our basic rights. Frankly, they should all be jailed, not only the pedophiles themselves, but their enablers, up to and including the current pope.
As promised, but before I look at Rod Dreher's latest attack on same-sex marriage, I'd like to make one very important point that seems to be misleading both the anti-gay and pro-gay contingents: notwithstanding that the question on the ballot in Maine was whether or not to repeal the same-sex marriage law, the issue that formed the basis of the campaign by NOM and the Catholic Church was "save the children." Schubert-Flint were quite clear that they had no campaign on the actual merits of the law itself, and used the scare tactic that worked for them in California. Consequently, to say that voters rejected same-sex marriage per se is putting quite a bit of spin on it.
With that in mind, let's look at what Dreher has to say.
That's a big part of the gay marriage side's problem: They cannot imagine why, aside from bigotry, anyone would disagree with them. To be sure, anyone on the traditional marriage side who doesn't understand that denying marriage to same-sex couples imposes a serious burden on them is either willfully ignorant or hard-hearted. The thing is, empathy should go both ways.
OK, Dreher, why, aside from bigotry, would anyone disagree that fundamental rights should be extended to all citizens barring a rational reason not to? The basis of the anti-gay campaign in this country is religious bias, pure and simple. Once you prune away all the high-sounding rhetoric about tradition and fundamental institutions, what you're left with is that someone's religion doesn't think it's right. Religious bias is not considered a "rational" reason for anything in this country.
As for empathy going both ways, yes, I can subscribe to that. But a little reality check: we, meaning gay and lesbian Americans, have been attacked as part of a culture war proclaimed by religious extremists. We've tried to talk to them, tried reason, tried understanding, and been met with narrow, mean-spirited reactions based on dogma. So let's try some empathy going both ways, OK?
Leaving aside that there is undoubtedly a significant number of people who vote against gay marriage because they flat-out don't like gay people, there are serious and important reasons to vote against same-sex marriage – and these deserve to be taken seriously.
"Serious and important reasons" -- barring religious prejudice, I've never seen one. I've looked -- boy, have I looked! -- and no one has presented a single serious and important reason that isn't based on their own bias. And Dreher doesn't seem to have any in his arsenal, either.
For starters, gay marriage represents a cultural revolution, a fundamental redefinition of what marriage means. Until the past 10 or 20 years, no society had ever sanctioned marriage between same-sex partners. It was unthinkable outside of a small radical fringe. Now, in the twinkling of an eye, it's coming to pass in a few countries, though the vast majority of humankind still finds it unthinkable.
Flat out not true. It's the old "everywhere and always" argument that has been debunked so many times that, were it anyone but Dreher, I'd be amazed that it was being trotted out again. And as far as "the vast majority of humankind," sorry, but it's well known that we don't accept arguments by assertion here.
That's not an argument against gay marriage, but it is an explanation for why gay marriage remains unpopular in this country. Culture precedes politics. If you cannot change culture, you're reduced to arguing, as same-sex marriage supporter Linda Hirshman did in the wake of the Maine defeat, that people shouldn't have the right to vote on the definition of marriage.
Along those lines, gay marriage backers often say that civil rights shouldn't be submitted to a popular vote. If blacks in the Jim Crow South had depended on a majority vote to gain their civil rights, justice would have been a long time coming. That makes sense to people who see no moral or philosophical difference between race and homosexuality. But it is by no means clear that the two categories are interchangeable. For traditionalists, it's a category mistake to say that they are.
First, "gay marriage" is not remaining unpopular in this country. Most people don't care one way or the other. And people did not vote on the definition of marriage. (So far as I can see, "one man, one woman" is not a definition of anything, merely the foundation for a 50% divorce rate.) If you want a nice succinct discourse on the "definition" of marriage, I give you once again Dan Savage:
In light of Savage's comments, can anyone take this next paragraph seriously?
Which brings us to another reason majorities oppose gay marriage: the belief that its supporters are all too willing to force their own particular view of marriage and its meaning on an unwilling society. It's simply not true that their viewpoint is neutral. To believe that same-sex marriage is the equivalent of heterosexual marriage is to accept that the essence of marriage is fundamentally different from what it has always been.
You'll note, by the way, that Dreher never tells us what the "essence of marriage" always has been. He's gone off into Wonderland here -- the remainder of his piece seems to be based on the idea that :"words mean what I say they mean" and never really touches ground again -- not that it had much contact to begin with. It also slides past the issue I opened with: how many of these majorities actually voted on same-sex civil marriage and not on the scare campaigns waged by opponents? Let's get back to that empathy thing: Dreher seems to think that I should try to empathize with people who lie about me, denigrate me at every opportunity, portray me as less than human, as a pervert, as a child-molester, and as essentially un-American. No thank you -- I do not want to get into their heads at all.
Oh, and now the "free speech, religious freedom" argument:
And thoughtful traditionalists understand that legalizing same-sex marriage almost certainly would bring about serious restrictions on freedom of speech and association, particularly for churches and religious organizations. Nobody is going to force pastors to marry same-sex couples, but legal scholars, including prominent gay-rights advocate and law professor Chai Feldblum, have plainly said that there is an irresolvable conflict between religious freedom and gay civil rights – and only one side can prevail.
I'd like to see some citations here. I'm not about to take Dreher as a reliable source, given his record. The opinions I've seen point out that freedom of speech and association, particularly for churches, are very strongly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and over 200 years of judicial history, and that those guarantees are going to outweigh anything that might happen as a result of legalizing same-sex marriage. (How many Catholic bishops have been sued in Massachusetts, by the way? Anyone have a recent count? I thought so.)
I'd like to know more about that "irresolvable conflict," as well. We have a pathological attitude toward religion in this country, which the Christianist right has made full use of in its campaigns to roll back civil rights for people it doesn't value, which is just about everyone. I have news for Dreher: there are limits on rights. There always have been. If we expect to maintain any sort of workable society, there always will be, on the order of "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." And in the realm of civil law, I think it's religious doctrine that's going to have to give way. It has no place in civil law. The overwhelming attitude among gay activists and commentators is that religious figures are free to believe what they want to believe, they can say what they want from their pulpits and no one is going to try to stop them. But if a preacher gets up and says "Go out and kill faggots" and one of his congregation goes out and kills a faggot, guess what -- that's incitement, and it makes him an accessory to murder. That's an old, established limit on free speech.
What Dreher and those who adhere to this nonsense about restrictions want us to believe is that religious doctrine trumps everyone else's rights under civil law. Sorry -- no go.
This is pure garbage:
You can't expect gay folks to privilege religious liberties over their own interests, but likewise, why is it bigoted for religious traditionalists to stand up for what they believe to be bedrock rights – rights that will be curtailed by same-sex marriage?
If they believe that their bedrock rights include the right to dictate everyone else's life, they'd better get used to the real world. Since Dreher and the Christianist right have yet to demonstrate that any real rights are under assault -- except ours -- this is nonsense.
Gay marriage opponents are not crazy to fear what may be done to them should same-sex marriage become the law of the land. In California, supporters of Proposition 8, which repealed same-sex marriage, have suffered vandalism, job and business loss, intimidation and harassment by activists. One would have to be deeply naïve, indeed foolish, to trust that traditionalist dissent will be tolerated once these groups gain the legal upper hand.
OK -- this is, to say the least, grossly overstated, and I think deliberately so. It's time to play the victim card (although now that I think about it, the whole essay is a set up for the victimhood). I'm not going to play the relative-hate game, except to note that when anti-marriage activists are dragged to death behind trucks, beaten to death by gangs of teenagers, or simply knifed thirty or forty times, then I might be willing to listen. Vandalism I'm not going to condone, even the one or two minor incidents that really happened in the wake of Prop 8. If you lose business because people don't like your politics -- well, that's called social disapproval and is the normal result when someone in a community holds views that are out of step with the rest of the group. The "intimidation and harassment" are also grossly overstated, which is a habit of the right -- any criticism is harassment, according to them.
And the grand finale:
None of this is a case per se against gay marriage (Damn! Coulda fooled me -- ed.), for which a strong moral argument certainly can be made. It is rather to say that with gay marriage proponents racking up loss after loss in state balloting, they would do well to quit falling back on the self-serving "bigotry" excuse and do what they (quite justifiably) ask of their opponents: imagine what this issue looks like through the eyes of people not like themselves.
Note that he's harping again on the losses from campaigns based on lies and scare tactics rather than issues, and trying to make us believe that this accurately reflects the country's attitudes toward same-sex marriage. (You'll also note that there's no mention of how the margins of "victory" for the bigots -- and I use that term advisedly -- have shrunk dramatically in just four or five years.) That's the big flaw in putting questions like this to popular vote, and is one reason we have a Bill of Rights and federal courts to adjudicate those questions: the people are subject to fits of majoritarian tyranny, particularly when they're fed a pack of lies. As for "bigotry," I have my perennial comment: Fine, so your religion says it's OK to be a bigot. You know what -- you're still a bigot, even if you have permission.
Well, that woke me up this morning. I have to say, though, I'm getting tired of rebutting the same tired nonsense, even when it's wearing a spiffy new suit. And this one's not so spiffy.
Update and Coda: Just ran across this comment at Andrew Sullivan, which offers a good contrast, in its clarity and humanity, to the whining mess that Dreher manufactured to justify his own bigotry:
A few of my early salon colleagues became very close friends to my then-fiancee and me. In time I asked three of my closest friends, those whom I thought best understood what marriage represented, to be my groomsmen, regardless of the fact that two of them were gay. That those fellows immediately and graciously accepted didn't strike me as exceptional at the time. But as I look at my wedding pictures today and see these guys standing next to me (babyfaced, just a month after my 18th birthday), their hands on my shoulders and beaming smiles, it is bittersweet. I will never accept that these men could participate in my wedding, but that I might never have the honor and privilege of participating in theirs. Particularly since these men were the ones who so clearly illustrated for me the value of monogamous, supportive and positive relationships. My own parents divorced before I was one year old.
To me this debate is about how comfortable America can pretend to be while marginalizing a group of its citizens on the basis of bigotry. Arguments made in defense of traditional marriage are a type of sophistry designed to legitimize a repugnant view that we have otherwise worked so hard to shed.
As a man who has cherished his so-called traditional marriage for more than half his life, let me state clearly that shutting out gays from this essential cultural institution is out-and-out wrong. I don't just know it; I live it.
Catching up a bit, and ran across this coda to the story about Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and his remarks about "wasteful" spending -- like monitoring volcanoes. From Joe Connelley in SeattlePI:
Thanks to "something called volcano monitoring," to use the denigrating language of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, passenger jets did not fly into ash clouds when Alaska's Mount Redoubt erupted earlier this week.
Volcanic ash creates conditions akin to flying into a sand blaster. A KLM flight lost power in all four engines after it flew into the cloud created by a 1989 eruption of Redoubt.
The plane dropped by more than two vertical miles before its crew could restart the engines and land in Anchorage. No wonder Alaska Airlines canceled 19 in-state flights on Monday week after Redoubt sent an ash plume 60,000 feet into the sky.
The eruptions of Redoubt carry a lesson that Jindal did not learn back when he was a Rhodes Scholar: Don't sneer at science. . . .
Jindal's remarks give pause, not only about this would-be president but the Republican Party to which he tossed red meat in response to President Obama's address to Congress. "Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.," said the governor.
The official Republican hostility toward science is a direct function of the religious fundamentalist takeover of the party, that much should be obvious: it is overwhelmingly Republicans who oppose stem-cell research, teaching evolution in science classes, HIV research and education (and sex education in general), and who have come up with their own brand of pseudo-psychology in the "ex-gay" farce.
There is also the marked element of crass political opportunism -- Jindal's remarks, like those of Sarah Palin scoffing at funding for research using fruit flies -- are indicative of nothing so much as an appeal to the most ignorant and reactionary parts of the Republican party. Like the Dobson Gang, congressional Republican leaders (and let's not forget that stellar performance by the Republican budget team), Palin and Jindal are deliberately tailoring their appeal to the idiots in the base.
And we can easily see where common sense -- not to mention public safety -- reside on this one.
Jindal for president? Please -- do it. Maybe with Sarah "No Money for Fruit Flies" Palin as his VP choice?
Governor Douglas has said that he opposes the bill, and this afternoon he announced he plans to veto it. He said he made the announcement to stop speculation and to focus attention on economy."
The legislature has already taken up the marriage issue, debated it, resolved it, and voted. If he were to sign the bill, there would be nothing else to distract the legislature from its economic responsibilities. By vetoing it, he's guaranteeing that legislators will go through another round of debate and voting.
Douglas is pretty transparent here -- this is politics as usual, GOP style: feed the base.
Update: It occurs to me that Gov. Douglas is really between a rock and a hard place here, which probably goes to explain his reticence on this bill before now: ideologically, and since he does have to deal with the wingnut branch of the party to a greater or lesser extent, he has to oppose equal marriage rights for gays. However, not that I expect this to register with a lot of people, he is thwarting the will of the people as expressed by their elected representatives (and, might I point out, that expression is exactly in line with the position of the "don't rock the boat" contingent of gay commentators as well as the right wingnuts who insist that such social issues be left up to "the people" to decide) because of his personal beliefs. (Need I say once again that the will of the people is only supreme when it suits the theocrats?)
As for urging the legislature to focus on the economic crisis, that is, first of all, pretty much a gimme: nothing more than a ploy. And, as any number of commentators have pointed out, he has made that impossible by pledging to veto the bill. He's left the legislature no choice but to take up the question again. I mean, does anyone expect them to just drop it at this point? There's not only the fact that it has momentum and wide-spread support, but there's the fact that this is, indeed, the will of the people of Vermont and Douglas has not advanced a rational reason for opposing it.
(And on that score, I'll try to come back to yesterday's post in more depth for FGB, probably on Saturday.)
I love freedom of speech. It allows the Dennis Pragers of the world to make total fools of themselves. I'm not really surprised that there are people like Prager running around -- there are always people who will do and say anything for a buck or some notoriety. What amazes me is that there are people who will believe what the Pragers say.
What's really repulsive about this is the applause. What are these people thinking? (Update: I just discovered that Prager was a a Michelle Bachmann rally -- so we know they weren't thinking.
And the refutation of Prager's remarks is so easy -- check out Frick's post for the first two examples that come to mind. I'm sure you can think of more.
It's tempting to say Prager has made dishonesty into an art, but there are so many who are so much better at it that I can't even credit him with any competence.
But then, competence isn't a conservative value, from what we've seen recently.
(Note: It took some linking to get back to the video; this one came to me via The Washington Monthly, to them via Oliver Willis, and from thence to Think Progress, which is the link above. One comment relative to the comments at Willis' post: if Prager was talking about economic equality, he should have said so. He's no more an economist than he is political philosopher -- he's just a rabble-rousing blowhard -- so that context is just wishful thinking.)
Ran across this post by Joe Sudbay at AmericaBlog this morning. I'd seen mention of this story yesterday, and frankly, Obama's remarks seem quite reasonable -- and completely inoffensive -- to me. Sudbay notes Al Giordano going after the Clinton camp for their attack, and GottaLaff at Cliff Schechter going after McCain.
OBAMA: So, it depends on where you are, but I think it’s fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people are most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre…they’re misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to ‘white working-class don’t wanna work — don’t wanna vote for the black guy.’ That’s…there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind of implies that it’s sort of a race thing.
Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long. They feel so betrayed by government that when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama, then that adds another layer of skepticism.
But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What is the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is so we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — to close tax loopholes, uh you know uh roll back the tax cuts for the top 1%, Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to uh middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide healthcare for every American.
But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
I was, quite frankly, amazed at this post by Autumn Sandeen on the topic at Pam's House Blend. It's credulous to the point of slack-jawed stupidity:
The bottom line is that at best the way Sen. Obama initially described small town Pennsylvanians sounds unflattering, and there does seem to be some credence in describing the comments as elitist.
The bottom line is that Sandeen is not paying attention. I simply don't understand how anyone could come to that conclusion after reading the remarks or actually listening to the recording. I don't have a lot of respect for her as a commentator anyway, but this tends to prove that my instincts were right once again. Obama's comments have quite obviously been spun into unrecognizability by people with their own agendas, thank you very much, and she's simply bought it. Who does she think she is -- Camille Paglia? (I have no idea who Sandeen favors in this year's elections, but she seems to be gullible enough that I would not be surprised if it were either Clinton or McCain.) That's what I call criminal laziness.
Andrew Sullivan is not much better. "Not the most felicitously phrased"? Excuse me? And Sullivan is worried about Obama being called an elitist?
Jeff Fecke, over at Shakesville, has a reasonable take on the whole thing.
It always amuses me when upper-class people with power and privilege start screeching about “elitism.” Today all manner of political, media and blogging elites — people with advanced degrees who’ve never been to a tractor pull in their lives — are snorting about elitism because Barack Obama said something that anyone with a real redneck background knows to be true — working-class, small-town whites feel left behind, bitter and frustrated.
This remark allegedly is an insult to working-class, small-town whites in Pennsylvania. I have a different perspective. Granted, my background is southern Missouri small-town working-class white, rather than Pennsylvania small-town working-class white, and there are subtle cultural distinctions between the two. While I may have kinfolk in half the trailer parks in the Ozarks, I admit that doesn’t qualify me to speak for Pennsylvanians. But over the past forty or so years small-town, working-class white America has been living through the shared experience of diminishing opportunity combined with increasing financial instability.
In community after community, the old factory or mining jobs that sustained the local economy are gone. Forty years ago, young folks left high school, signed on to jobs that paid Union-obtained wages and benefits, and looked forward to all the trappings of American middle-class affluence — homes, new cars, trips to Disney World. Now the bright young people move away to cities, and those who remain in the small towns sustain themselves — barely — by flipping hamburgers or cashiering at Wal-Mart.
Read the whole post. It's right on target. And get this:
What’s rich about the current flap is that the biggest reason small-town, working-class whites have tended to vote “conservative” in recent decades is that the Right has stoked that bitterness, frustration and xenophobia, election after election, and turned it on the Left.
That's what they -- the Limbaughs, O'Reillys, Hannitys -- are trying to do with this flap: the usual tactic of taking something out of context, just as they did with Jeremiah Wright, spinning it like crazy, and turning it against the left.
Also known as the "Spin Until Your Wheels are Smoking" Department.
And reporters wonder why everyone thinks they're a joke. Maybe it's because of things like this.
U.S. SEN. Barack Obama's critics have called his presidential campaign a cult of personality.
His glassy-eyed supporters are enraptured. The media are docile. Hollywood stars make music videos about him.
"There is something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism," Joe Klein of Time magazine has observed.
But we ask you, does the campaign poster on this page remind you of a totalitarian cult?
Wait, don't answer that.
The Soviet-style heroic Obama, the use of a single word "Hope," do make the SEPTA bus shelter posters a bit reminiscent of George Orwell's "1984."
Its more direct antecedent is John Carpenter's 1988 paranoid totalitarian fantasy flick, "They Live." Replace the word "Hope" with "Obey" on that Obama poster and tell us what you think.
Anyone who starts off quoting Joe Klein on Obama is missing a few screws anyway. But by all means, let's buy into the "cult" mantra -- but don't mention the billboards in the South with Bush's picture and the caption "Our Leader."
And Gar Joseph, who wrote the column, obviously doesn't know squat about Soviet art.
Joe Klein seems to be laying out the game plan for the right-wing noise machine in the general election:
I noticed it during Obama's response to a young man who remembered how the country had come together after Sept. 11 and lamented "the dangerously low levels of patriotism and pride in our country, the loss of faith in our elected officials." Obama used this, understandably, to go after George W. Bush. "Cynicism has become the hot stock," he said, "the growth industry during the Bush Administration." He talked about the Administration's mendacity, its incompetence during Hurricane Katrina, its lack of transparency. But he never returned to the question of patriotism. He never said, "But hey, look, we're Americans. This is the greatest country on earth. We'll rise to the occasion."
Klein, he talked about the administration's mendacity and cynicism because you and your colleagues refuse to. You're refused to for eight years, merely parrotting Dubyah's reassurances that everything's fine. It's not until he lost his majority that you opened your damned eyes and actually looked aroundand what's been going on. And you still can't get it right. The country's going to hell in a handbasket and you're complaining because Obama's not talking about what's right with America.
Am I missing something?...I guess talking about "this country that I love" must be a pretty deeply veiled reference to his patriotism. Sigh. It seems like "lack of patriotism" is going to be the No. 1 knock on Obama, but of all the attack lines (how about aloofness, for example), I think this one is the weakest, even as Obama couldn't wear enough flag lapel pins to make the likes of Klein find something wanting.
Perhaps the most appealing thing about Obama's candidacy -- even if you're not a supporter -- is his notion that thought-free token patriotism, in the form of lapel pins and the like, can be replaced with love not for symbols but for true American ideals -- like opportunity for all, and basic human and Constitutonal rights, the ideas that caused those supporters to chant "U-S-A, U-S-A."
Oh, add dishonesty to the mix, courtesy ABC. That's Jake Tapper's mantra. Frankly, from a reality-based point of view (i.e., outside the Beltway), this is almost comic relief:
Last August, I ran into Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, outside the Senate chamber in the Capitol.
This was before the Obama surge, before he had omnipresent Secret Service agents, back when you might see him strolling solo.
We chatted for a second, mainly about the Pakistan speech he'd recently given and about how the media had covered it. He was in good spirits.
As any close friend or family member can attest, I have an unusually keen sense of smell and immediately I smelled cigarette smoke on Obama. Frankly, he reeked of cigarettes.
Obama ran off before I could ask him if he'd just snuck a smoke, so I called his campaign.
They denied it. He'd quit months before, in February, they insisted. He chewed nicorette. . . .
Except….last night on MSNBC's Hardball, Obama admitted that his attempt to wean himself from the vile tobacco weed had not been entirely successful.
“I fell off the wagon a couple times during the course of it, and then was able to get back on," he said. "But it is a struggle like everything else.”
Now I wonder about last August.
It's not a big deal in the scheme of things -- the war on Iraq, a major economic crisis -- indeed, it's miniscule. Hardly worth mentioning.
Except that I don't like feeling that I wasn't being dealt with honestly. And as much as citizens who are suspect of the media might scoff at such a notion, many of us consider ourselves to be your representatives to help make sure our leaders are telling us the truth, and leading the country down a path we're confident is the right one. (Corny, I know.)
My hero. He's going to make sure our leaders are telling us the truth. Right.
We are still unpacking the memos written by Bush’s henchman that paved the way for torture, and a member of our media has his panties in a knot because a candidate may have been less than candid to him about smoking a legal substance. Where was this fucking spidey sense the past eight years?
Y'know, Tapper looks really cute in his bio pic, but I'd say he should spend all his spare time at the gym, because he's not going very far on his brains.
One of the things that annoys me the most about Andrew Sullivan is his habit of doing posts like this one. Please note that Sullivan makes no comment -- by which most people would assume that he has no criticism, which translates in most people's minds as approval. I think he's just waiting to see the reaction before he takes a position.
This should be a no-brainer: Dobson is a reflexive liar, so we know, based on his comments, that Obama is not the most liberal senator, and will not be the most liberal president in history. If Dobson says the National Journal is non-partisan and highly respected, we know it's a radical right-wing propaganda organ. If he says that Focus Action will be attempting to uncover the real Obama, we know that they'll be pushing whatever made-up scandals they think will work.
And of course, it wouldn't be Dobson speaking without a defense of the family somewhere in there. It's almost at the point where he uses it like a "thank you and good night."
Now, why can't Sullivan point this out?
Footnote: It's relevant to a lot of what I post here, but this post by John Dolan at alternet sort of gives my philosophy of dealing with the radical right fringe in a nutshell: don't be afraid to call them on the bullshit. And ridicule them while you're doing it.
Update:
In case you don't believe me, read this post by Steve Benen at Carpetbagger:
As Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented, among the votes Obama took that purportedly earned him the Journal’s “most liberal senator” label were those to implement the 9-11 Commission’s homeland security recommendations, provide more children with health insurance, expand federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, and maintain a federal minimum wage.
Obama himself criticized the Journal’s methodology by noting that it considered “liberal” his vote for “an office of public integrity that stood outside of the Senate, and outside of Congress, to make sure that you’ve got an impartial eye on ethics problems inside of Congress.”
Media Matters has also previously noted that the Journal admitted to having used flawed methodology in the publication’s previous rating of then-Democratic presidential front-runner Sen. John Kerry (MA) as the “most liberal senator” in 2003.
This really isn’t complicated. National Journal argues that some senators weren’t given scores if they missed too many votes. Obama missed a full third of the 99 votes used for the ratings, but that wasn’t enough to disqualify him from the rankings. Why not? Why not? Because National Journal’s arbitrary standards, known only to the publication’s editors, say so.
This is another one of Dobson's "reliable, respected sources." Respected by who? Right-wing snake oil salesmen.
Hmm -- seems to go together, doesn't it. I've been casually following PZ Myers' comments on the film Expelled, a creationist propaganda piece for which he was interviewed under false pretenses. If you're familiar with Myers, you know he's a biologist and a vocal atheist. The shenanigans of the producers of the film have been quite entertaining, but ultimately seriously dangerous. Tristero points out some of the issues in the controversy at Hullabaloo. The post takes off from this piece by Matt Nisbet, which is thoroughly off-base, although well-meaning.
The simplistic and unscientific claim that more knowledge leads to less religion might be the particular delusion of Dawkins, Myers, and many others, but it is by no means the official position of science, though they often implicitly claim to speak for science. Nor does it stand up to mounds of empirical evidence about the complex relationship between science literacy and public perceptions.
Excuse me? First off, as tristero points out, the film doesn't give raw footage of Myers and Dawkins -- this has been edited. Second, neither man claims to speak for science, and what entity do we go to for the "official" position of science? I hadn't realized there was such a thing. Tristero:
First of all, Nisbet is not quite accurate here. If you actually watch the clip and suffer through the insufferably bad music, you will find fairly innocuous statements by Dawkins and PZ (the "fairy tales" stuff is a bit gratuitous, but hardly offensive compared to what McCain bff Pastor Hagee has said about Catholics). In fact, the Dawkins/Myers material is actually pretty thin and uncontroversial. Hence the unbearable, ominous music and more importantly, the addition of a third interviewee - not Dawkins or Myers - who declares religion "evil" and who serves as the button for the segment.
Secondly, NIsbet fails to realize that Dawkins and PZ didn't create the takeaway message. The producers of the film did, by deliberately misleading them about the nature of the film in the first place, asking questions that provoked certain hoped-for answers, and most critically, editing the film in such a way as to turbo-charge the message. When you're dealing with dishonest filmmakers - Matt, they lied about the nature of the film in order to snag face time with PZ and Dawkins - then no matter who they had "representing" science - including Nisbet himself - they would be slathered with bad music and edited to look like the Devil Incarnate.
It goes back to my recurring message, which tristero restates: dialogue is not possible with people who refuse to acknowledge that there is any legitimate opinion but their own and who do not include the word "compromise" in their vocabulary.
