HR 3685: Another Straw Man

Sometimes late at night, when my Seattle Air America station, KPTK, fades out, I tend to scan up and down the dial for alternative sources of talking head entertainment. Invariably that means I'm pretty limited to rightwing radio. But I'm willing to put up with it, if only to check in periodically on what the enemy is up to.

So that's how it happened that last night that I tuned in to a shrill harangue by wingnut harpy Diane Medved (who claims to be a "clinical psychologist" and who happens to be married to Jewish-Orthodox Crypto-Fascist Slavery-Wasn't-So-Bad Michael Medved) on HR 3685, the so-called ENDA bill, which would add sexual orientation to the list of things protected by federal anti-discrimination laws.

Well, that was pretty much the end of the world for Diane Medved. She went into a lengthy rant about the spectre of Christian bookstores having to hire cross-dressing child-perverting want-to-marry-your-brother homos, blah blah blah, and predicted that this would end up having to cater to a wide population of psychosexual personality disorders.

Nothing in the bill itself refers to any manual or text used by the American Psychology Association to define "deviant" sexuality, but that didn't stop Medved from claiming that it did, even going so far as to look up and read over the air such choice "sexual orientation" items as people who derive sexual stimulation from physical contact with an amputee's stump... (Never mind also that the APA has come out in support of gay marriage and gay adoption -- but that inconvenient fact is something Medved apparently wants to hide.)

You can read the text of the bill yourself and see that religious organizations are specifically exempted from compliance, as are the military services and businesses who employ fewer than 15 employees (like the vast majority, if not all, Christian bookstores, I would guess).

Medved did acknowledge that exemption for religious organizations, but maintained that it was "meaningless". Well, since she's a rightwing koolaid-drinking Rethug nutcase who hangs on every word of Der Monkey Fuehrer, since any part of any law can be rendered meaningless by a stroke of the signing statement pen, I guess a given portion of any law can be "meaningless".

And, what seems to be a little-known feature of the ENDA bill is that, of all places, the White House helped craft the religious exemption language in the bill. So maybe she's right about that "meaningless" crap.

All of which leads me to believe that the Giggling Murder Monkey wanted the bill to pass congress, just so he could make a swaggering show of vetoing it. And he's the one who decried "political theatre" not so very long ago.

I guess it makes a difference who the actor is.