Today's Cultural Warfare Update

Fundamentalists say 'we p0wn the courts now,' case study one: Supreme Court will hear abortion-procedure ban previously struck down as unconstitutionally vague and also an undue burden for not taking the health of the woman into account;

Fundamentalists say 'we p0wn the courts now,' case study two: LIberty Council intervenes on behalf of Georgia's sales tax exemption for some religious books and not others; money quote: "In case the Wiccans haven't realized it, if they haven't been watching the news, the court has changed" - or, put another way, 'we're in charge now, minourities can suck our manly throbbing cocks and like it';

Fundamentalists say 'we p0wn the courts now,' case study three: now that the Supreme Court has let stand Florida's blanket ban on adoptions by GBLT people, 16 new states have potential bans in various states of play, all being pushed by fundamentalist groups;

Fundamentalists say 'we p0wn the courts now,' case study four: South Dakota passes blanket abortion ban; it doesn't contain a health exemption, which is standard theoconservative practice;

South Dakota, on the other hand, fails to pass abstinence-only education;

Focus on the Family trumpets creationism again, giving creationists quacks airtime as "scientists";

Focus on the Family complains that their "ex-gay" crap is being persecuted; well, gosh, someone did paintball one of their billboards; they transition directly to plans for protests later by GBLT groups to link the paintball to queers - they obviously have no direct evidence or they'd have run with it;

Focus on the Family attacks atheists for demanding "the rights of the majority," which I think highlights the two-tier rights-only-really-belong-to-the-majority system they assume;

American Family Association: fags want to destroy Christianity, still quoting satire piece from 1987 as real manifesto; they now admit that it was described as satire but use skeery quotes to imply it isn't really;

CWA's Robert Knight applauds France for a report saying queers shouldn't get to marry or adopt kids; claims gay people want children for "adults’ desires," returning again to their all-fags-are-child-rapists roots; a person replying to my previous post about this says that they aren't mentioning the fact that the report is put together for the conservative party and recommends support for civil unions, which American fundamentalists call "counterfeit marriage" and ban wherever they can;

"Faith and Freedom Network" announce series of organisational events in Washington State, most in the east;

David Horowitz, who used to claim there were 30,000 communists in academia, now says there are "about 60,000"; do I hear 40,000? 80,000? 20,000?

( Articles and excerpts )

in case you were wondering

It's safe to trim your roses now. It's probably still a little early for seedlings; give that another week, but roses should be safe. I'm going to trim mine tomorrow, I think. I'd have done some today - I really wanted to - but I was busy putting in another six hours or so just on sorting tax papers. Our taxes are stupidly complicated. And then it was late and raining. If the weather is better, tomorrow I will work some more on the ivy and hopefully also get a couple of those birch trees from the neighbour to our north.


Meditating Monk

Also, for no clear reason, our previously-nonfunctional KVM¹ switch seems to be working again. Apparently, it needed to be unplugged for a few days. So that's good, I've hooked it back up. But I don't trust it, of course. And with the new KVM switch (which I suddenly don't seem to need), the monitor can't sync up with CPUs 1 and 3—when it tries, it has a flippy display and makes a horrible rattling failing-relay noise—but can with CPU 2. But it can sync to all the systems through the old switch, and can sync up with the video output from any of them when when connected directly. These are all VGA TEXT screens, running on Linux consoles, it shouldn't exactly be a big strain. To wit: what. the. fuck.

¹: Keyboard, Video, Mouse. We share one console monitor and keyboard across the CPUs in our server rack to save space.