Passive Aggressive Bigotry

Now that the United States Supreme Court has ruled that barring same-sex couples from marrying the person they loved amounted to unequal treatment under the law, my social networks have exploded in a wash of rainbow colors speckled with dingy, gray flecks of hate. Even before the ruling, I had to endure daily flashes of undesired religious admonition. But now…

Hole—EEE—crap.

The parade of exhortation has become so repulsive and weighty, I am half a mind to hide certain friends for the foreseeable future to protect my sensitive eyes from the scrolling diatribe of Christian guilt.

So, imagine my (non)surprise when, the a day after Obergefell v. Hodges, one woman I know posted a meme showing a man and woman outlined in bathroom sign fashion with hands interlocked that said “straight pride.” Wow.

Of course, people – including me – called her out on it. Though she didn’t see fit to retain the comments that countered her view, she claimed she only posted the picture to show she was “proud to be straight,” and that she couldn’t see why anyone would be offended by her expressing her “straight pride.” The whole thing smacked of anti-gay sentiment.

Coming the day after the Supreme Court overturned state-sanctioned discrimination, her claim that she – a “Catholic, conservative” woman – only felt the need to boast to the world her pride at being a straight person in order to show she is “pro-me” was highly disingenuous and utterly and completely insensitive.

As a straight, white, Christian woman, she has never been made to feel inferior because of her race or her sexual orientation. She hasn’t had to fight for her rights for anything. She has never had to hide who she really is.

Her posting this sign is akin to posting a “white pride” sign the day after Loving v. Virginia. It was not meant to be a benign personal expression. And I found it extremely hard to believe that she didn’t think it would be taken negatively because I don’t think she is stupid. She posted it in an act of counter-protest to the many expressions supporting marriage equality, or in her words, the people “shoving gay acceptance” down her throat.

At best, it is a mockery of a day that was about freedom for an oppressed minority. At worst, she is just another bigoted liar.

Faking Persecution

Yes, bibles are allowed in public school. No, bibles are not banned from public schools. Anyone who tries to tell you bibles are banned is selling you something: that is a flaming bag of malodorous fakery.

Bibles ARE allowed in schools. Just because a kid might feel embarrassed to bring a bible to school is not proof of any claim that the kid is prohibited from doing so. Peer pressure and prohibition are not the same things. Kids can have bibles in school. Kids can talk about religion in school as it may relate to history or literature. If such a discussion goes off on a tangent, I can see how a teacher would want to bring the discussion back onto topic. I can see how a teacher or other students might feel uncomfortable about talking about it. But that doesn’t make it against the rules.

Additionally, I hold that attributing the increased incarceration rate to lack of bible reading is not wholly truthful. Consider the role institutionalized racism has played in increasing the incarceration rate in this country. I believe that racism is the most influential factor in our increased prison population. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics‘ report “Prisoners in 2010,” Black men are imprisoned at 7 times the rate of white, non-Hispanic men. Black women are imprisoned at 3 times the rate for white, non-Hispanic women. Racism stymied education. Racism motivated the War on Drugs, which is singularly responsible for the imprisonment of nearly 20 percent of today’s prison population. Racism drives people to the streets and to crime to earn a living.

Racism is built into our social and government institutions. Urban centers with majority Black populations tend to have poorer schools, higher teacher-to-student ratios, higher teen pregnancy rates, and higher dropout rates. If one cannot get a job because because he or she lacks the necessary education, what does one do? Many people take the easy way out: sell drugs, become a prostitute, go on welfare, join a gang (all of which are arguable harder than taking the high road in the end). Sure, some people can and do turn to a church. But the church doesn’t have jobs for everyone. And joining a church won’t magically earn one a diploma.

Injecting religion into schools serves only to violate the rights of those – like me – who choose not to observe any religion as well as those who observe a different religion. The solution to every problem may seem simple when ones solution to everything is more religion. But religion doesn’t make racism go away. (Heck, religion even motivates bigotry in some cases.) And the fact that a simple claim of religious piety does not elicit the blind respect of yesteryear does not prove that our society needs to dump the First Amendment.

Personally, I’ve got no problem discussing the role religion played in shaping our society. But I draw the line at using lies to support giving religion a higher priority in public schools.

Faking Hate

If you follow the femme rampage that is my blog space, you might have experience my utter disgust with a certain local radio personality. Let’s not mince words: I think Mark Madden is a racist jerk.

Now, that is not really saying much. So many people say racist, insensitive things nowadays, it would be impossible to preserve the meaning of the word racism if we attached that label to every person who tried to argue that Black people should “turn white” to get ahead in their careers. (NOT!) It has become politically correct to apply a hierarchy to racist behavior such that, those who say things that are only moderately offensive to minorities are labeled “insensitive,” while reserving the harsher “prejudiced” label for blatant discriminators and the full-on “racist” label for imbecilic, teenaged assholes who attack the first Black person they encounter and murder him by running him over with a truck.

Well, the lovingly racist radio jock Mark Madden took to the airwaves once again this past week to rail against another supposed injustice – this time aimed at him. It seems poor, portly little Markie is mad because Krystal Cozzo of the Pittsburgh Passion called him a fag or something.

OH NO! Poor Mark Madden!

He got called a mean name. He feels personally insulted – insulted enough to spend 15 minutes of airtime ranting and raving about how he doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment and sponsors should drop the Passion and they must hate gays and dont allow gay people into their stadium and…blah, blah blah…

OH SHUT THE HELL UP YOU HYPOCRITICAL MORON!!!

The only thing I feel sorry about Mark Madden for is that he can’t stop shoving crappy, unhealthy food into his mouth and get off his lazy, palid butt long enough to do something healthy for his body before it quits on him for good. It’s no wonder he only speaks highly of women who take their clothes off for a living, since he couldn’t get a decently intelligent woman to put up with his arrogant, sexist drivel for more than the few minutes it takes her to chug the beer he pressured her into accepting.

Maybe Mark Madden should spend less time being offended by random twitter remarks and spend more time learning why his own public, on-air, racist, sexist, and homophobic comments, which he and Clear Channel broadcasted to an entire city, are offensive to other people.

Unhealthy Relationships

Have you ever felt rage? I am not talking about the temporary ire we all occasionally feel when an office mate is won’t return repeated calls or when some other driver veers dangerously close to a car that we only owe three payments on. I mean an enduring tempest the likes of which is sustained only by the unending onslaught of bigotry and ignorance that plagues our existence. Have you ever felt that?

Sometimes, I am amazed and enraged at the things some people consider acceptable human behavior. For instance, today, Liberty Council released a sickening internet meme that compared homosexual people to drug addicts. Liberty Council compared people loving each other to people with a self-inflicted disease. Liberty Council labeled genuine love of another person, “unhealthy relationships” Their insistance that the “deep hunger” (read, the general need for love that most humans feel!) homosexuals feel can only be sated by an intimate, personal relationship with a meat sack that may or may not have even existed and (if he did exist) died nearly two millennia ago notwithstanding, I find Liberty Council’s opinions about gay and lesbian people highly offensive. And this comes just a day after reading this sectarian diatribe from a walking douchebag over at LifeSite pseudo-News. (I won’t link there directly so as not to boost their misogynist egos.)

The rage is hard to portray with polite words; but I imagine it would go something like this:

Dear enormous jerk,

Thank you for bathing me in your horrendously unkind words and spreading your hateful lack of wisdom over me and my people. I appreciate your genuine enthusiasm. But I and my colored, slant-eyed, Semitic, handicapped, heretical, retarded, lesbo, faggot family would be unabatedly happy on the occasion that you dropped dead so that we and the rest of our human family could get on with our short lives in un-accosted bliss.

Sincerely yours,

Nuclear Grrl

Does your state discriminate against you?

Imagine you want to run for public office. Maybe the state senator for your district just went to jail for corruption charges, or has resigned amidst a scandal. Or maybe you are just sick and tired of listening to the incumbent gas-bag who always votes party line and refuses to collaborate with his or her counterparts in the legislature.

You have an impressive CV – B.S. and Masters of Science degree, decades of business experience, student government positions, volunteer work. Your platform? You are pro-choice, support paycheck equality, increasing education funding, investing in infrastructure and emerging markets, diversifying energy supply, protecting the environment, push for Medicaid and Medicare reform, preventing religious instruction in public schools, protecting religious freedom & etcetera. You get all the necessary signatures, file all the necessary papers, build a website, rent a headquarters, shake a zillion hands, kiss a thousand fat-cheeked babies and……

But WAIT! You are an atheist, meaning you do not acknowledge the existence of a god.

And then someone files a lawsuit to block your candidacy on the grounds you do not believe in their god. The Constitution of the United States of America states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust.” The Supreme Court of the United States of America also reaffirmed in Torasko v. Watkins that the states cannot require a person “to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.”

But that may not matter. Your candidacy could be rejected or your appointment or election to public office revoked. And then could follow the court battles.

It’s a simple equation. While laws affirming religios tests exist in state constitutions and laws, the subversion of atheists’ rights prevails. Arkansas, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas all prohibit atheists from holding public office. Freedom of religion also means freedom from religion.

We are not free.

F you Pat Robertson, F you

Pat Robertson is a lying son of a bitch. Every gay, feminist or non-christian person on the planet should sue him for defamation. Pat Robertson is a bigot who has made it his personal mission to spread lies about homosexual, bisexual, and transgender people. His message is that homosexuality is an “abomination.” And his wish is elimination (shall I say “extermination?) of LGBT people from the American landscape.

Oh, and he thinks people who disagree with him about it should just “shut their mouths.” (Note his emphasis on the word “white” in the following video clip.)

“I defy these homosexuals to bring forth a baby from that part of the anatomy which they concentrate on, when that happens I will change everything I’m saying; until that happens, I wish those demonstrators would shut their mouth.”

Well Marion, do you know what I have to say about that? Get bent!

Christian conservatives don’t own free speech. Christian conservatives don’t own the Constitution of The United States of America! And Pat Robertson (who probably looks half dead under the two pounds of stage makeup cosmeticians have to put on him every day and who cannot even remember what year it is) has no right to tell me or you how to think, what to feel, or what to do.

It really does not matter to me what the almost 2,000-year-old irrelevant, ridiculous tome Pat Robertson worships so much says about anything at all. It does not matter to me whether LGBT people can have children (they can by the way). I do not care if Pat Robertson is considered a voice of authority in his church. I am not inclined to defer to his implausible wisdom. What matters to me is that theocrats like Pat Robertson never gain the authority to tell me how to live.

Pat Robertson and his supporters laud the First Amendment and free speech when defending religious speech they condone. But when free thinkers (in this case, “homosexual activists,” to use his words) speak out against bigoted views and discrimination, suddenly free speech becomes a misnomer. Deign to boycott a company that donates its profits to anti-gay hate organizations, and suddenly free speech is transformed by Pat Robertson and the religious right into religious persecution.

Sometimes, little people say little things that other little people just soak right up. Pat Robertson is a small man with a small mind that relates only small thoughts. I’m thinking big. And I’ll say any damn thing I want.

Congratulations Ye Shiwen, from The World

China is a BIG country. And Ye Shiwen gave a billion people something to really smile about. Two gold medals, a new World Record and a new Olympic Record. So why is it such a fine young athlete can have so many critics. Chinese Olympian and World Champion swimmer Ye Shiwen won a gold medal and crushed the olympic record in the 400-meter Individual Medley by almost a second. But for some odd (NOT) reason, people are accusing this fine lady of doping.

I was appalled when the talking heads on CNN Starting Point [transcript] deigned to criticize this talented woman about her performance in a sport about which they are far from experts.

O’BRIEN: “You know what? I think the five-second gap is a very big gap. It’s that issue. You know, at this level, people do not break records by five seconds to beat their own record.”

Well, I think Soledad O’Brien and her arrogant buddies should back their racist butts the frack up. Rude.

Even fellow athlete Ryan Lochte knows to show respect where respect is due.

“We were all talking about that at dinner last night… It was pretty impressive. And it was a female. She’s fast. If she was there with me, I don’t know, she might have beat me.”

Ye Shiwen didn’t beat the world record for Pete’s sake. She crushed it!

Ye Shiwen, CONGRATULATIONS!!! Keep up the good work! You keep kicking ass and win some more medals, girl. In the words of Titan Sports, winning again “is the best form of sporting  vengeance.”

Well played. Er….swam.