Today's Cultural Warfare Update (1 of 2)

Focus on the Family celebrates Nicaragua's new comprehensive abortion ban; the previous ban had a "loophole" - specifically, a health and life of the mother exemption. It required a signoff from three doctors to get the exemption - but that wasn't good enough. The new law, that they like, has no exemptions - including the life of the woman. And while this is a law in another country, it's "pro-lifers from around the world" who are cheering this "fuck the bitch, let her die" law;

ADF has lawyers on standby to sue over the "war on Christmas" bullshit;

DC Court of Appeals upholds lower court ruling throwing out a challenge to the Weldon Amendment;

Focus on the Family tap-dances around a Fox News poll showing 60% support for some form of lesbian and gay partnership recognition;

Focus on the Family: "Even One Porn Web Site Is Too Many"; also dismisses the idea of filtering software and, you know, just not going to pr0n;

FotF take on the new Bush appointee to Health and Human Services as Deputy Secretary: they love him. He's an anti-birth-control activist, tho' they don't mention that; they just trumpet his anti-abortion/"abstinence-only" activism;

Mitt Romney continues his bid for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination by addressing an anti-marriage rally;

I'm including this only because it's an ACTION ITEM: NBC is reportedly going to be airing a show called VeggieTales with the biblical lessons attached intact; Focus on the Family wants letters thanking NBC for the airing;

FotF reports on new iterations of anti-gay activities by churches, particularly the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (against civil unions as 'morally impermissible,' GBLT people are objectively disordered, adoption is wrong), but other denominations as well;

FotF ACTION ITEM to demand the lame-duck Congress pass PERA, the bill that would make it much harder to act against local governments endorsing religion by making losers not responsible for court costs;

Arizona anti-gay group to try again with a state constitutional marriage ban;

Family Research Council claims the election was a victory of "values voters" retaking (parts of) the Democratic party, but that it won't last because "San Fran Nancy" will be "the most liberal House speaker in American history," and that the "moral winds of change" won't tolerate a "summer-of-love, anything-goes mentality";

American Family Association ACTION ITEM against Wal-Mart and Sam's Club over Wal-Mart's joining (as an affiliate member) the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce; also for including ads for Brokeback Mountain in store, and selling "pro-homosexual items on their wbsite;" The AFA have called the NGLCC a whole bunch of things in the past, such as a "radical homosexual marriage group" and so on; they want to 'send a message' to Wal-Mart;

American Family Association ACTION ITEM against Best Buy, because Best Buy is using the phrase "Happy Holidays" in its advertising instead of "Merry Christmas"; they want a phone call, specifically, not email, because Best Buy is apparently rejecting email sent via the AFA form;

Soon to be former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney: if the Legislator won't approve the anti-marriage amendment, he'll take it to the courts and get the courts to override the process and send the amendment straight to the voters, rules and process be damned; this has no chance in hell, but hey, it'll play well with the theocons;

WorldNetDaily writer Pat Boone promotes the American Family Association's anti-Wal-Mart boycott;

Freedom Press Canada (linked to from the Pat Boone article above) says GBLT marriage rights will destroy "faith, family, and freedom" and says "we can kiss our continent good-bye" if t3h gay aren't stopped;

AFA's newsbriefs include a series of anti-gay news items;

Traditional Values Coalition: Democrats in Congress will "criminalise criticism of homosexual conduct";

TVC asserts that keeping count of anti-gay violent crime is anti-Christian, claims again Congressional Democrats will make anti-gay talk illegal.

( Articles and excerpts below )

Today's Cultural Warfare Update (2/2)

Concerned Women for America claims Plan B doesn't actually work anyway, so shouldn't be on the market; they quote Dr. W. David Hagar, who has been in these updates before as a source of pro-fundamentalist quotes on other issues; they abstract of the study linked to as being one that "refutes" claims of Plan B's effectiveness is worth reading; it's a study of the methodological difficulties of studying drugs like Plan B, and suggests methodological improvements. It does not declare, as they imply, that Plan B doesn't work. The "further studies" they link to are newspaper articles. Mixing and matching misrepresented science and tabloid newspaper articles for fun and profit;

CWA on a Democratic congress; "Religious freedom will be threatened with each advance of the homosexual agenda";

CWA links to a Jerusalem Post article about South Africa's parliament legalising same-sex marriage;

Another WorldNetDaily article promoting the American Family Association action against Wal-Mart, condemning them for working with GBLT-owned companies and the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce;

Boston Globe has a story on the anti-contraception activist that the chief executive, Mr. Bush, appointed to be deputy assistant secretary for Health and Human Services; amoungst other things, he claims that sex outside of marriage leads to destruction of a person's ability to enjoy things and a heroin-like addiction to oxytocin;

Focus on the Family Canada claims Canadians back anti-abortion laws;

Canada Family Action Coalition report on anti-marriage initiative by religious groups in Canada; reportedly, a re-debate on C-38 could start in December;

Canada Family Action Coalition puts a whole series of anti-marriage videos online, linked to from a single web page;

New York plans to allow ID changes for people with GID without requiring genital reconstruction surgery (GRS); CFAC is not amused;

Canada Family Action Coalition reprints a Phyllis Schlaffy article against t3h gays who will destroy Christianity;

Washington Post editorial on Dr. Eric Keroack, mentioned above as a new Bush appointee to be deputy assistant secretary for Health and Human Services; notes that he'll be directing the Federal effort to make contraceptives available to low-income women, but doesn't support using contraception at all, so you can guess how good he'll be at this job; thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the URL;

Andrew Sullivan also links to the PDF on abstinence.net - authored by Dr. Keroack - in which he claims that premarital sex causes brain damage, as per the Boston Globe article above. I link to it below, with a sample slide excerpted;

Focus on the Family ACTION ITEM to encourage Mr. Bush to continue nominating fundamentalist-law supportive judges. They don't put it that way, of course, but c'mon;

FotF short article on US Catholic Bishops saying that gay Catholics who aren't abstinent should not take communion; they don't mention that the statement also outlined gay people as lessor, even if abstinent, and incapable of roles in the Church - again, even if abstinent;

Faith and Freedom network updates and promotes its "Just Say Christmas" petition to retailers;

This is old, but I include it because of one interesting phrase; in the Dobson broadcast of November 6th - on Ted Haggard - Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler said, "I think one of the biggest dangers here is solitude. Someone has to be there to interrogate and investigate every aspect of our lives." That's quite the statement to be making, isn't it.

( Articles and excerpts below )

bits and pieces

Christ, MSNBC is stupid. Story title: "Is China spying on us?" Um, yes. And we're spying on them. In other news, we're spying on Russia, they're spying on us, we're spying on Germany, on France, on Egypt, on Indonesia, everybody's spying on Iran and Israel - the list just keeps going. I would presume we're even spying on Canada, and that they're peeking down at us quite regularly as well. Most likely more - at least they are if Harper's government has the sense the gods gave grain. Good morning, MSNBC; this is what countries do.

"Is China spying on us?" OMG OMG OMG. Morons.

Thursday's miles: 0.6
Friday's miles: 1.6
Sunday's token: 0.1
Monday's miles: 1.7
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1413.5
Miles out of Rivendell: 955.5
Miles out of Lothlórien: 501.5
Miles past Rauros Falls: 83.6
Miles to Isengard: 378.1

Yay, short week. Today's lab was a movie on the human genome project. @whee. I took a lot of notes on process and science issues, but the "post-lab" wants things like names of people, which I mostly didn't bother with, except for this one jackass at a biotech who really annoyed the fuck out of me, bitching about unfair competition from universities. Then I also wrote down the name of the other guy at the company so I wouldn't think they were all like that. But the rest, eh, not so much. But oops, I guess this was a history lab, not a science lab. Fortunately, searching t3h intarw3b thingie should have some answers.

Japanese class was a conversation class with the Japanese students who are here from, you know, Japan, in the HRT programme that's taught in Japanese. I've talked about it before. Unsurprisingly, their English was much better than our Japanese, but they were all very nice about it, so it was stressful but okay.

Here, I thought this came out kind of neat. The image is a tad grainy, but that's what you get sometimes with monitors and digital and such:


Recursive

Right, back to homework. Yay.