Our favorite out-of-touch televangelist Pat Robertson recently dove into what he knows best: biology, sexuality, evolution, psychology, child development, and genetics.
Pat said repeated that age-old myth that gays are just gays because they were abused by an authority figure and are now all confused and lost. (Hell, why did he just throw in the ‘…and they haven’t found the right girl’ argument, too?)
Boys are “made homosexual,” Robertson says, “because of a coach or a guidance counselor or some other male figure… abused them.”
As a thought experiment let’s concede the point: homosexuals are made, not born (with the exception of the few of us with “biological problems”). Who do you suppose is making homosexuals out of kids from fundamentalist Christian homes? Alen Keyes has a gay kid, Randal Terry has a gay kid, Dick Cheney has a gay kid, Phyllis Schafley has a gay kid. Seattle’s Capitol Hill is crawling with gay teenagers and young adults who grew up in—and escaped from—their fundamentalist Christian homes. The documentary For the Bible Tells Me So profiles numerous kids from fundamentalist Christian families who grew up to be gay.
Who’s raping all these Christian kids?
Not openly gay people. Fundamentalist Christian parents don’t allow their children hang out with openly gay men and women. Openly gay men do not get hired to work as a guidance counselors at fundamentalist Christian middle schools; out lesbians do not get hired to work as coaches at a fundamentalist Christian high schools; openly bi graduate students don’t get to serve as dorm captains at fundamentalist Christian colleges. So it isn’t out gay men and women—openly gay coaches and counselors and youth pastors—who are raping all these Christian kids and leaving them “confused” about their sexualities. Most fundamentalist Christian kids have never met an out gay or lesbian person. Which can only mean…
All these Christian kids are being raped by straight-identified, nominally-Christian coaches and counselors and youth pastors and dorm captains.
If you buy into Robertson’s theories on origins of homosexuality then you have to embrace a highly unflattering picture of Christian America. If Pat is right then all those fundamentalist Christian churches, schools, counseling programs, and summer camps—the whole parallel Christian universe—are teeming with sexual predators. That Christian day care center? An extremely dangerous environment for children. That Christian summer camp? The hunting grounds of countless child rapists. That youth group at the mega-church? Ditto. That football team at a Christian high school? No responsible parent would let her child try out for one.
Christian America: a bad place to raise your kids.
UPDATE: Some folks in comments have pointed out that Christian kids could wander off and be raped by, say, a gay secular humanist who runs the local Dairy Queen or comic book shop. But the examples cited by Robertson were of authority figures to whose control Christian parents might entrust their children, i.e. counselors, coaches, etc. Children being raised in the Parallel Christian Universe—home schoolers, mega-church parishioners, fundy college applicants—don’t have non-Christian authority figures. No pagan soccer coaches, no openly-gay school counselors. If these fundy Christian kids are “made homosexual” when they’re raped by authority figures, they’re being raped by Christians.
The body of a man believed to be homosexual has twice been dug up from a Muslim cemetery in Senegal.
The man, in his 30s, was first buried on Saturday before residents of the western town of Thies dug up his body and left it near his grave, police say.
His family then reburied him, but he was once more exhumed by people who did not want him buried there. His body was dumped outside the family house.
Fucking holier-than-thou animals.
Senegal is apparently attempting to become the most homophobic place on Earth (watch out Iran/Jamaica/most of Africa!).
File this under “There Is No Morality Without Religion.” From CNN:
The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.
Let’s get Biblical on them ter’rists!
It would be nice to see that unaffiliated number a little lower than 4 in 10, but I’ll still take it.
Playwright/novelist/screenwriter Paul Rudnick penned a piece for this week’s New Yorker and it’s totally hilarious. It’s essentially a letter to Mr. Haggard from fictional character Pastor Stan Belker, who has much in common with Mr. Haggard.
As a teen-ager, I found that I was attracted both to serving Our Lord and to Jimmy Wiggins, the assistant coach of my high-school soccer team. I was in torment, and I would pray for hours on end, asking God why He would command me to love Him so deeply and at the same time just go and create Jimmy’s snug little soccer shorts. I told my clergyman, Father Josiah, about my conflicting urges, and he tried to reconcile them by explaining that from certain angles Jesus looks just like Dennis Quaid. Still, I had agonizing doubts: was I just experiencing a completely normal phase of adolescent uncertainty, or were Jimmy Wiggins’s firm, high buttocks really a calling card from Satan?
(Oh sweet Jesus how familiar I am with that calling card!)
The letter recounts Stan’s life as it follows the expected trajectory: male lover in college, then wife and a male prostitute/drug dealer in adulthood, and finally a public downfall.
It kinda missed the whole Ted Haggard media explosion (all three (?) of them) but it’s good enough to be forgiven.
This ad is being shown nationwide. Says one fear zombie: “My freedom will be taken away.” …by gay marriage? Really?
If anyone wonders why I’m an atheist – you know, after basic common sense - or lack respect for most of organized religion and its followers, it’s people like this.
On the bright side, here is a sampling of some of the comments on YouTube:
Your bigotry is not finding root in the new generation. My generation knows that there is nothing to fear from two people who love each other.
Your populist support is waning, and your scare tactics are becoming more and more transparent. You’re not simply loosing this battle; you’ve already lost.
The idea that permitting a tiny number of people to marry one another is likely to be the tipping point that finally destroys the institution of marriage seems to grant enormous power and influence to gay couples.
I confess I find this improbable. And I find this ad repulsive.
You don’t have to choose between faith and your job when you’re a doctor. If your faith stands between you and doing what you were hired to do, maybe you shouldn’t have spent eight years getting your medical degree. If you’re a vegan who can’t set aside his values at work, don’t get a job at McD’s flipping burgers.
Seriously, what does the freedom to refuse medical care have to do with this issue in the first place?
Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget.
We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying. Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen.
Get that? If you’re too busy to actually be religious, you can pay to (allegedly) have some computer (probably located in the basement of a web-savvy 13-year-old atheist) say your prayer for you. Of course, you’ll never have any proof that your prayers are actually being said, but that’s besides the point.
To ensure that your omniscient God knows who paid to have that computer “say” a prayer, IAP displays the purchaser’s name on the screen while the prayer is said.
Conveniently, (it is the information age, after all), IAP will allow you to subscribe to certain prayers so they’ll always be said – they’ll even initiate automatic re-billing! They’re so nice!
Check out the website to get the full crazy, complete with requisite cloud imagery (that’s where God is!).
A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a 75-year-oldSyrian woman to 40 lashes, four months imprisonment and deportation from the kingdom for having two unrelated men in her house, according to local media reports.
According to the Saudi daily newspaper Al-Watan, troubles for the woman, Khamisa Mohammed Sawadi, began last year when a member of the religious police entered her house in the city of Al-Chamli and found her with two unrelated men, “Fahd” and “Hadian.”
Fahd told the policeman that he had the right to be there, because Sawadi had breast-fed him as a baby and was therefore considered to be a son to her in Islam, according to Al-Watan. Fahd, 24, added that his friend Hadian was escorting him as he delivered bread for the elderly woman. The policeman then arrested both men.
It was revealed in court that Fahd was never breast-fed by the woman. Fahd was sentenced to 4 months in prison and 40 lashes; Hadian was sentenced to 6 months in prison and 60 lashes.
The strict Islamic law the viciously sexist Saudi Arabia follows prohibits “mingling” with non-familiar members of the opposite sex because it’s 2009 and mingling would clearly cause the world to instantly implode.
As the article notes, the religious police also came under scrutiny in 2007 when their actions led to the prosecution of a 19-year-old gang rape victim. (Her sentence of 200 lashes and 6 months in jail was pardoned after international outrage).
A teenager interviewed about this story said that the powers of the religious police need to be scaled back because their actions are “giving a bad reputation to the country.” Um, “giving?” Yeah, a little too late for the present tense there, buddy.
I know I’m heavy on the religous postings today, but how does anyone still subscribe to this garbage?! Barbarians.
- A nine-year-old girl weighing 80 pounds, who was raped and impregnated by her step father and is now carrying twins. Doctors say she will not survive the child birth and receives an abortion.
Now, who do you excommunicate from the Catholic church?
A) The girl’s mother, who authorized the abortion B) The girl’s doctors, who performed the abortion C) The girl’s step father, who raped and impregnated his nine year old step daughter
If your answers were “A” and “B,” you must be regional Brazilian archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho who authorized the excommunications or senior Vatican official Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who defended the excommunications!
Why is the step father still a welcome member of the Catholic church, you ask?
Because “the crime [the step father] is alleged to have committed, although deplorable, was not as bad as ending a fetus’s life.”
London's "Atheist Buses" by the British Humanist Association
According to a new study, the percentage of non-religious Americans has grown 6.8% since 1990 while most major religious groups lost membership. Non-religious Americans now constitute an estimated 15% of the population, with Catholics and Baptists representing 25.1% and 15.8%, respectively.
The “Christian” category (which included non-denominational, unspecified Christian and Protestant, and evangelical/born-again) is estimated at 14.2%, a 0.6% decrease since 1990.
“Mainline Protestants” and Baptists accounted for the largest decreases since 1990, at 5.8% and 3.5%, respectively.
The religious groups with the largest gains? “Protestant denominations” (i.e., Churches of Christ, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-day Adventist) and “Eastern religions,” which both saw modest 0.5% gains.
Article and full data (check the table at the bottom of the article) at USA Today.
My obsession’s poll has ended and we have a winner for the new definition of saddlebacking:
Saddlebacking: sad•dle•back•ing \ˈsa-dəl-ˈba-kiŋ\ vb [fr. Saddleback Church] (2009): the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities
After attending the Purity Ball, Heather and Bill saddlebacked all night because she’s saving herself for marriage.
This weekend’s New York Times Magazine had a profile of Mark Driscoll, a pastor at the Seattle-based Mars Hill Church. Driscoll preaches Calvinism, which states that your soul’s destiny is pre-determined by God and it doesn’t matter what the fuck you do on Earth because you can’t have any impact on whether you’re going to Heaven or Hell. Oh, and women should be subservient. And, to make sure he’s pissed off everybody, he’s also very concerned that God and Jesus have become too “limp-wristed.” (Does that mean he knows about my plan to sell t-shirts printed with the line, “Jesus Was A Bottom?”)
Anyone that has seen Bill Maher’s “Religulous,” particularly the ending, knows how scary it is to think of a large group of people being indifferent to the consequences of the good or bad actions they take here on Earth.
Our favorite out-of-touch televangelist Pat Robertson recently dove into what he knows best: biology, sexuality, evolution, psychology, child development, and genetics.
Posted by Mark 
But it’s okay because they’re religious!
Posted by Mark 
Posted by Mark 
Playwright/novelist/screenwriter 
This weekend’s New York Times Magazine had a 