It’s rot, of course. The Jacobins have as much relationship to today’s American progressive movement as a spaceship has to a buggy whip. In fact, a primary achievement of the French Revolution was to disestablish the Catholic church as official state religion. France is a far more faith-diverse country today than it was in 1792. Remember, this was also the same moment in history when the First Amendment was being penned to prohibit government from interfering in the free exercise of religion in America. Though separated by an ocean, the two stories have a similar thread. Our revolution influenced theirs, and theirs became a caution for ours.

But what does Bell mean by “family”? Indeed, like many revolutionary periods, there were some odd attempts to do away with patriarchy — the end of the 18th Century was also the beginning of the French female suffrage movement — but France remained a male-only franchise until 1944. Women wore skirts and had babies and generally did so in wedlock, just like they always had. The radicalism of the 1790s didn’t even last through the 1810s.

No, something else is going on here — and Rick Santorum, who wants smaller government in every area except your birth control, gives us a clue. Via ThinkProgress:

They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is the government that gives you right, what’s left are no unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we do and follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.

Santorum’s claim — that patriarchy (tyranny of the father) is our bulwark against political tyranny — is ridiculous. Patriarchy is in fact a defining characteristic of political tyranny (see: Nazi birth programs, the Saudi kingdom, and Ceausescu’s Romania). Nor is he simply talking about “God-given rights” in the sense that conservatives believe human rights come from a power higher than government.

He’s referring to his fecund Catholicism here: Santorum’s “rights” are to have potent, motile sperm for life; his wife has a “right” to unbroken fertility until menopause. They have these “rights” because their God endorses population growth. When Bell and Santorum say “faith,” they mean official faith. When they say “family,” they mean their own families.

Neither would admit that what they’re advocating is the very mirror of Sharia law in its most pernicious Salafist strain. Instead, both say the president is destroying faith and family — ridiculous claims, given his consistent Christianity and idyllic family life. But they aren’t chiefly concerned with the empirical universe, or the enlightenment values that make it possible. The French Revolution proclaimed “brotherhood,” not fatherhood, and to them this is the greatest of crimes.

It’s a cultural compound of Christian, classical, and then the folk traditions of Europe…we don’t define it as just ‘democracy’ or ‘rule of law,’ these universal institutions, we say it’s a specific culture that comes from a specific cultural experience.

Deanna is quick to say that converts to his cause are mainly concerned with their own perception of “double standards” on race and culture. The plentiful courses on European history, art, etc. at every college campus in the United States are not enough to hold back the barbaric tide of “multiculturalism,” by which he means the study of cultures that are not European and/or Caucasian. Requiring a white student to understand or tolerate any culture that is not his or her own is “indoctrination” — against which the white student must “fight back.” Whites are now the ‘victims’ of oppression by historically-oppressed minorities.

But then watch this other YWC spokesperson speak of the “victim” mentality in GOProud, which has been purged from the country’s premiere conservative convention:

Kulturkampf is primarily the assertion of one cultural value system as normative, with all others as competitors in a zero-sum game. Tolerance and diversity are eschewed in favor of purity. The problem with the world-view these two young men espouse is that Europe has always been an incredibly diverse continent in terms of culture and ethnicity — there is no such thing as “European culture,” but there are European cultures.

The term ‘kulturkampf’ was coined in Germany to describe Bismarck’s campaign against Catholicism; religion was just one of the many cultural fault lines in central Europe at the time. A few decades later, Germans would become so concerned with cultural purity that they took kulturkampf to genocidal extremes. These young men are speaking the language of fascism — and either don’t know it, or don’t care.

They’re not the only white supremacists at CPAC this year, either.

I’m not pissed at Barack Obama, and I’m not pissed at Russ Feingold. I’m just pissed.

I used to be a Catholic (before I saw the light and became an atheist), but Catholicism, theologically and intellectually, always taught me that women were held of the highest esteem in the Church, because of the Virgin Mary. In fact, all the chivalric romance that came from Mediaeval times, this placing of the pure damsel on a pedestal, came from likening the woman to Holy Mary, Mother of God.

However, there’s another side of the coin here too. And if Mary’s face graces one side, then Eve is on the other. And Eve is the evil sister, the woman – yep, it was a woman, folks – who tempted Adam in the garden and introduced us all to sin. For that, alone, we were condemned, if you believe the Bible, to suffer in childbirth, amongst other things.

It goes without saying that Catholics use birth control – and I don’t just mean the rhythm method, which is mostly unreliable. And most Catholic women of child-bearing age use artificial birth control. Chris doesn’t seem to have a problem with the pill, but he seems to get really angry about IUDs and morning-after pills, which he calls abortifacients.

Is it just me, or does it seem that the only Catholics who are really, really, really, really, really stressed on this are men? Watch Chris go into spittle-flecking mode:-

Personally, I don’t think this has anything to do with religious freedom. I do think it has a lot to do with a religious institution imposing its values on employees of its various business institutions who either aren’t Catholic or operate from a different viewpoint within the religion, itself (the “cafeteria Catholic” variety). And as for the commentator bewailing the fact that the government has been “beating up” on the Catholic Church for the past ten or twelve years, I think that just might have something to do with a little issue called child abuse and the Church’s efforts to sweep this under the carpet.

You know, I don’t miss Catholicism.

Cross-posted from Emilia Wahoo ]]> http://www.osborneink.com/2012/02/chris-matthews-is-out-of-sync-with-the-rhythm-method.html/feed 0 http://www.osborneink.com/2012/02/science-is-yummy.html http://www.osborneink.com/2012/02/science-is-yummy.html#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:27 +0000 MagicLoveHose http://www.osborneink.com/?p=18859

When unmanned pizza delivery drones show up, I will start a charity to buy pizza for everyone in war zones. The Million Meat-Lover’s March. You wait and see.

JC Penney’s hired Ellen de Generes as their official spokesperson. I think that’s a good move. Ellen’s smart, she’s honest, she’s probably so trustworthy she could sell ice to Eskimos. I can’t think of a better representative for this traditional American store. In fact, I can’t think of a better role model for young women than Ellen.

But the One Million Moms activist group aren’t happy mommies. They object to the fact that Ellen is gay, and that whenever Ellen appears in a JC Penney commercial or in an advertisement in a magazine or newspaper, Ellen brings her “gayness” into the lives of the millions of children who belong to the one million moms who make up the group raising this protest.

Honestly, all that’s missing is Marcus Bachmann.

Well, as the old saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and that old broken clock struck twice last night in the person of Bill O’Reilly. Bill addressed the issue that One Million Moms is actually demanding that JC Penney fire Ellen de Generes as their spokesperson, based entirely on the fact that she is gay.

This annoyed O’Reilly, who tried to get at least one of the one million moms to appear on The O’Reilly Factor and explain why they thought this private retail corporation should, basically, discriminate against de Generes, or, indeed, any employee or potential employee based on their lifestyle – but, as Bill said, all the million moms were busy. Instead, he got Sandy Riios of Culture Campaign and the lobby group Family Pac Federal to argue their case, with which he vehemently didn’t agree.

I’m no fan of O’Reilly, but it was refreshing to hear someone associated with Fox News’s brand of conservatism (which is anything but compassionate) speak up in defence of any person or corporation discriminating against an American (or anyone) based on their lifestyle. He went as far as calling One Million Mom’s actions a witch hunt and something akin to McCarthyism.

You can watch his takedown below:-

O’Reilly makes sense. If people object to JC Penney’s choice of spokesperson, all they need to do is withdraw their custom. Don’t shop at JC Penney. Boycott the store. But, as he rightly stated, to deny a person a position in any walk of life based on their race, religion, colour, creed or lifestyle is totally against everything for which this country stands. These Rightwing defenders of “family values” (some of whom probably have LGBT family members) are just as wrong to call for the sacking of Ellen de Generes as are some on the Left who call for the sacking of Bill O’Reilly. If you’re offended by O’Reilly or anyone on television, change the channel.

Shopping at JC Penney won’t make you gay because they have a gay spokesperson. You’re born that way. And for Ms. Rios to remark that homosexual agendae are encroaching on more traditional family values, she’s wrong. Gay people have always been with us. They are among us, they’re part of our heritage and they’re a part of us and who we are.

It’s the 21st Century. Get over it.

Cross-posted from Emilia Wahoo

“The question is now about these extended, affiliated institutions like hospitals and universities. And there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of women who work in these hospitals and universities who are not Catholic or they may be Catholic, but they use birth control. And the question is whether they’ll have the same package that every other woman in the country has, the same right and access to basic preventive care,” said Axelrod.

There is no reason why any employer in America should be exempt from this rule — none. If the Catholic church can ignore the law, then so can any employer who objects to birth control on religious grounds. I expect that 99% of American women would object to their employers trying to deny them a basic necessity of modern life. The suffragettes used to talk of “controlling the means of reproduction,” without which a woman was not economically independent. Patriarchy has never stopped fighting them.

No, I won’t be reading them. Unlike 99.99% of comic book readers, I have a strict “don’t read it if you’re sure you’ll hate it” policy that has served me wonderfully.

David Rees, I’m not – but no harm in trying.

Of course I was gonna do something with that thing from Thursday.