Stygius

Breeders beware!

Hilarity ensues at Soapblox Colorado:

Without a Constitutional restriction on his freedom, Allard's marriage will remain victim to the temptations of sanctity eroding man-love.

[snip]

For how you can defend against Allard and Musgrave going all queer on us, you might want to consult the color coded Equal Rights Colorado 2006 GLBT voter guide. It will show you which lawmakers are willing to put the legal breaks on Allard's cravings, and which are willing to leave his marriage undefended.

Mapping Theocon Land

Sean-Paul Kelley:

The New York Times Magazine has a review of Kevin Phillips' new book, "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century" that you simply must read.

Okay. And while we're at it, let's re-read Fred Clarkson's Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy.

Privatizing our test cases

Michael Roston e-mails along an interesting Village Voice piece on the powers behind the anti-abortion test case being constructed in South Dakota.

The state legislature earlier this week passed a bill flat out banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest. The governor, Michael Rounds, while nominally neutral, is thought to be ready to sign it. Then, the legislation will be challenged in court. And it is here that the real political battle begins.

Since South Dakota would be the defendant in a case intended to eventually reach the Supreme Court, which will take years and millions in litigation costs, the state attorney general has realized that his taxpaying constituents might be a little annoyed they are being used as proxies in this fight.

So [Attorney General] Rounds is studying ways of accepting into the state treasury private funds with which to wage the battle in the name of the South Dakota citizenry. In short,the well-heeled opponents of abortion are going to hire the public state government to fight their battle.

And why not Rounds' salary while they're at it? And the state government is protecting donors' confidentiality too, it would appear.

Anyway, the local NARAL folks are saying that this legislation just can't reflect the views of a majority of South Dakotans, citing the legislature's refusal to put the measure to a public referendum. If that's the case, then  get ready to mount a citizen initiative. Unfortunately, I just looked at the South Dakota Constitution, and there is no provision for a citizen ballot initiative process outside of the legislature (such as we have in Colorado).

Beginning of The End for Roy Moore?

In October, I posted on a fabulous Atlantic piece on Judge Roy Moore, theocrat extraordinaire. He's running in the Republican primary for governor of Alabama right now, and I have to say I'm sort of rooting for him in a malicious kind of way. But the shtick isn't taking hold, apparently. Charging RINO reports:

A new Mobile Register-University of Alabama poll of likely GOP primary voters showed Riley with a 56-28% lead over the demagogic theocrat Moore.

Riley is also walloping Moore in the fundraising department; he currently has raised more than eight times as much money.

Radio days

I've been sick lately, and so brain-addled that I've been listening more to radio then reading anything. (However, I highly recommend this nice little biography of colonial-era theologian, civil libertarian, and Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, as recommended by Reason's editor.) So I've been listening to a lot of radio. Check out:

• Marketplace is doing its broadcasts from China this week, and Tuesday's edition concerns the nouveau riche's discovery of the soul-crushing, purposeless banality of conspicuous consumption.

• Living on Earth has an excellent, balanced segment on the controversy over mercury toxicity in fish, and since I try to follow mercury politics (for example), I was chagrined that I had missed -- but pleased to be informed -- of the Chicago Tribune's series, "The Mercury Menace".

• American Radio Works takes a generally unsympathetic look at neo-creationism in "Intelligent Designs on Evolution," where I learn about the Discovery Institute's notorious gameplan, the "Wedge Strategy" document. For folks arguing there to be "parity" between evolution and the pseudoscientific ID, it has no positive features to its argument, only the incompetent, burden-shifting argumentum ad ignorantiam (Also see previously here and here.) To quote Elvis:

Points up to heaven with cathedral spires
All the time indulging in his base desires
Ever since we said it
He went and took the credit
It’s been headed this way since the world began
When a vicious creature took the jump from Monkey to Man

SCOTUS upholds patient rights

I was going to put this in the Styg Feed, but the del.icio.us RSS seems to be having problems updating. So the Supreme Court has upheld states' authority to legalize physician-assisted suicide. The vote on Gonzales v. Oregon was 6-3 to uphold Oregon's "Death With Dignity Act," which the Federal Government argued violated the Controlled Substances Act.

Jurist provides many handy links. The decision doesn't constrain Congress's authority, so much as the Attorney General's authority to interpret his delegated discretion to add substances to the banned list. Actually, the opinion puts it more directly:

The Attorney General has rulemaking power to fulfill his duties under the CSA. The specific respects in which he is authorized to make rules, however, instruct us that he is not authorized to make a rule declaring illegitimate a medical standard for care and treatment of patients that is specifically authorized under state law.

Science and the supernatural

By now, everyone's already heard and read about the Judge Jones' brutal bitch-slap of intelligent design in the public classroom. So I'll just quickly link to a helpful Jurist post that includes links to the actual opinion.

Read the full opinion [PDF text; opinion is also available from the ACLU here (PDF)]. The US District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania has a case website, including pleadings and orders in the case, and the ACLU of PA, which represented the plaintiffs, also provides case documents.

Salazar a culture war general?

Using a speech at Denver's Brown Palace hotel to hit back at SpongeDob.org's latest attack on him, Senator Ken Salazar essentially accused Focus on the Family of lying. (See Rocky Mountain News.) Colorado Pols also noted the futility of FoF's assault on Salazar; Dobson just doesn't carry the political weight in Colorado that he thinks he does.

But I mainly want to highlight Colorado Luis' interesting take:

The last time Salazar went toe to toe with James Dobson and FoF, he pointed out anti-Catholic remarks that had been made by a member of the FoF board, and I observed at the time that Salazar was driving a wedge between Protestant fundies and the Catholics they are trying to unite under a right wing Christian banner.  Today's "Eighth Commandment" reference -- which had to be explained by the Rocky's reporter for the Protestant readers -- is a return to that theme.  Salazar is sending a message to his fellow Catholics that his attackers are a bunch of Protestant fundies.

Socially conservative Catholics makes up a significant portion of the radical base on which the current Republican ascendancy depends; thus, they are politically unified with evangelicals despite the historic anti-Catholicism of radical Protestantism. An example of a Christian-Evangelica alliance is the Christians-under-siege conference led by Sen. Rick Santorum and Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput. Another is the token Catholic presence at events like Justice Sunday. See also a March New York Times piece from the Terri Schiavo fiasco.

Yet this alliance is inherently temporary, being unable to escape its oxymoronic tensions. For while the two groups may share some sort of visceral theocratic fantasy, these mutual fantasies are not only competitive, but definitionally depend on the elimination of the other. This recent bit of jabbering paranoia gets at what I'm describing.

Perhaps Luis is right, and Salazar -- like former Senator John Danforth, an Episcopalian -- is emerging as a crucial warrior in the culture wars pushback, now beginning to gather steam. The papered over ideological differences in "the base" may be precisely the right focal point for them.

Rise up Christmas Soldiers

Ah, 'tis the season for "saving Christmas," in this edition of When Wingnuts Attack! Brad Plumer:

At long last, we're going to have a real, honest-to-goodness war on Christmas. It's about time. I've always been a bit mystified that the biggest holiday in the universe was such a wilting violet as to constantly need saving—first the Grinch had to save Christmas, then Ernest, I think at one point the job got pawned off on Elmo. Come on. But now that there's going to be an actual war, I'm curious to see what cartoon character they'll trot out to play defense? Perhaps the Smurfs, though we all know they're a bunch of anti-yuletide communists.

And read this hilarious NYT op-ed to which Brad links. Adam Cohen writes:

The American Family Association is leading a boycott of Target for not using the words "Merry Christmas" in its advertising. (Target denies it has an anti-Merry-Christmas policy.) The Catholic League boycotted Wal-Mart in part over the way its Web site treated searches for "Christmas." Bill O'Reilly, the Fox anchor who last year started a "Christmas Under Siege" campaign, has a chart on his Web site of stores that use the phrase "Happy Holidays," along with a poll that asks, "Will you shop at stores that do not say 'Merry Christmas'?"

Commercialize Christmas . . . or else! At least it's a temporary break from having our families saved by the faux-fundamentalists.

You may recall how the Sterling, Colorado WalMart took all this to its logical conclusion in 2002. At any rate, it sure takes the pagan out of Christmas.

Addendum: Via Duck of Minerva, this Apollo Creed post is priceless.

Have you heard that liberals are trying to destroy Christmas? Apparently the GOP, busy fighting its Global War on Terror and its concomitant War on the Geneva Conventions, is making time to fight a rearguard battle against the War on Christmas. Crazed harpy Michelle Malkin and likeminded nativity-worshippers everywhere are said to be besieged on all sides by the encroaching forces of secularism, Judaism, animism, Muhammadism, and assorted other malign “isms” seeking to overthrow the rightful hegemony of the American consumerist celebration of Christ’s birth.

Painting by Robert Cenedella.

Conscience and control

Were I filling a prescription, whatever hackneyed, misinformed, ill-considered, cliché-ridden dogmatisms my pharmacist may consider his or her "values" holds no interest to me. They are totally irrelevant, and for that reason it never occurs to me to wonder about them. I never see how someone should have to stop and think, "Gosh, I wonder what my pharamacist will think about this." Who cares? And who do they think they are if they think I ought to?

For that reason, I find the entire debate over various "ethical" objections to emergency contraception -- even for rape victims -- rife with red herrings and false sanctimony. This briefing paper does a good job covering some of the implications of this.

A Rocky Mountain Bullhorn piece examines how this pernicious refusal affects women in rural Wyoming, for whom there may simply be no other venue to get EC. Someone in Wyoming, see, was attempting to stealthily draft regulations upholding pharmacists' power to refuse service to anyone for whatever reason.

The amended wording, [opponents] said, would open the door for pharmacists to reject ’scripts for everything from birth control to AIDS drugs to depression meds.

This has significant social implications, because women in a huge, sparsely populated state may not have other access options. Hence, the sneering rhetoric of mere "inconvenience," versus the 'deep principles' of some pharmacists, smacks of that false, hateful piety we all know so well here in Northern Colorado.

For that Bullhorn piece instantly reminded me of US Rep. Marilyn Musgrave's vile sanctimony along just those lines last July; as did this October piece in the Arizona Daily Star, detailing how a rape victim spent three days trying to find EC in Tuscon.  Listen to this NPR piece to hear Musgrave heap her contempt on women.

Given Colorado CD-4 is such a sprawling, rural district, it would be interesting to see if such tales exist closer to home.