Say you're taking a break and you see something like this.

I was taking a break from the Cultural Warfare Updates, and I still am, really, but I have to surface for this.

Below is a link to photographs of pages from a children's book for fundamentalist kids. It teaches the "ex-gay" bullshit theology message and that homosexuality is caused by child molestation, and that gay people molest kids in order to reproduce. (The first and second are foreground messages. The third is background message.) It does this for third graders. Or that's my guess, anyway. I hope that this is fraudulent, but as it encapsulates the whole fundamentalist mindset on this perfectly, I'm assuming - for now, at least - that it's not.

Also, here are few other items that were sitting queued up anyway:

Anna Quindlen points to an interesting YouTube short: a cameraman going around asking anti-abortion-rights protesters about how much time a woman who gets an abortion should spend in jail;

Christian Broadcasting Network coverage of the Huckabee-Brownback fight; a Huckabee supporter sent mail to a bunch of "evangelicals" in Iowa telling them not to support Brownback because he's Catholic. Yay, sectarian politics;

"Hikes for boys, pedicures for girls"; Canadian town sets up a hiking camp, and then makes it boys-only. Girl who wanted to go hiking told to go to get a pedicure at a girl's glamour camp. Mmmmm, brutal sexism.

( Articles and excerpts below )

Oh the outrage just keeps coming

CNN.com carried the news, but downplayed it in the headline; "Federal ID plan raises privacy concerns."

No.

"Federal ID plan implements internal passport" is the correct headline. Quoting the article:

(CNN) -- Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states defying the federal Real ID Act.

[...]

More than half the nation's state legislatures have passed symbolic legislation denouncing the plan, and some have penned bills expressly forbidding compliance.

[...]

The cards would be mandatory for all "federal purposes," which include boarding an airplane or walking into a federal building, nuclear facility or national park, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the National Conference of State Legislatures last week. Citizens in states that don't comply with the new rules will have to use passports for federal purposes.

"For terrorists, travel documents are like weapons," Chertoff said. "We do have a right and an obligation to see that those licenses reflect the identity of the person who's presenting it."

Read Mr. Chertoff's commentary real carefully there, will you? "Travel documents are like weapons." Relocating without government authority is a bomb waiting to go off.

Those of you not familiar with the history of the Soviet Union may not be familiar with the concept of the "internal passport." The "internal passport" was the document set you needed in order to move about within the country, get jobs - really, do anything. But key to this was controlling mobility. Most of the Soviet sphere had them, or variations on them, inherited from the old Czarist imperial era, though initially condemned and dropped by the Communist revolution. They were reimplemented during the Russian Civil War and never, ever dropped; they were a great way to control the population, since you couldn't move, rent, etc., without them.

Now we have cabinet ministers saying that surprise! We're implementing that here.

Yes, some of you will say, I'm overreacting. NO, I'M FUCKING WELL NOT. Yes, you can still drive across a state border without one. But have you tried, say, renting without showing photo ID lately? You can't. Well, you can, but it's illegal. It's not policy: it's law. It's part of "immigration reform" law, passed a few years ago. Right now, that ID requirement can mean all sorts of things, such as a state identification card. Or a student card. Or a driver's license.

Tomorrow, it can mean Federal ID only. Like, say, a passport. Or an internal passport.

Our state, I'm proud to say, is one of the states which have passed bills banning implementation. Obviously, this is payback, intended to whip the states into compliance with the new system. As Mr. Chertoff said:

"This is not a mandate," Chertoff said. "A state doesn't have to do this, but if the state doesn't have -- at the end of the day, at the end of the deadline -- Real ID-compliant licenses then the state cannot expect that those licenses will be accepted for federal purposes."

"It's not a mandate, but we'll beat you down good and proper if you don't go along." I'll be telling my legislators not to back off, under any terms. I recommend you do this too. Because seriously - fuck this.

Work at the state level, people. We won't hear much against this from Congress; they're too busy making things worse. State governments will have to fight it.

Oh, and why the hell not, here's some more fuel to the fire

( Torture states love internal passports. )

( Torture states love state secrets laws and internal spying )

( Torture states love lying about wars )

Even More

elfs pointed me at this here. I'm elevating it. So much for my holiday.

Family Security Matters is a sockpuppet organisation of the Center for Security Policy, and its influential National Security Advisory Council. Note the partial lists of members of the latter two organisations. Note their various positions in the Federal government, past and present. Sadly, the lists are out of date.

On 3 August 2007, Family Security Matters posted an article by FSM Contributing Editor Philip Atkinson calling explicitly for a coup d'etat to keep Chief Executive Bush in office indefinitely. (Backup link here.) FSM have since disappeared the article (note the   in the Must Read Articles list on their frontpage) and are in the process of disappearing the contributing editor and his other articles. Here is another cached copy of the article calling for a Bush dictatorship.

I care very much about the list of members in FSM's parent Center for Security Policy, and very much that an organisation with this many people at this level of government could publish an explicit call for coup d'etat and the establishment of a dictatorship. If you don't, then what the fuck is wrong with you?

[ETA: Free Republic reposts a lot of FSM Contributing Editor Philip Atkinson's stuff, and notes that he is, in fact a contributing editor. I was trying to find his FSM bio cached somewhere, but haven't succeeded. Link courtesy risu.]