Polygamy: It's God's Plan

Okay, let's talk about that whole "one man one woman" thing. Despite the history-denying hypocritical Mormons and their support of California Prop 8 with that very slogan, the entire Right Wing is up in arms over the "destruction of marriage" by Teh Gay.

Usually I consider it beneath me to comment on this (yeah, right), but I read something today, AFA Hopes To Save Marriage From The 'Forces Of Evil' on RightWing Watch, that kind of peckered up my interest, so to speak:

The American Family Association placed a full-page advertisement in today’s edition of the Washington Post, in which the group warns the Supreme Court not to “bend what God designed merely to suit the desires of man, knowing that you do so at the expense of children, perhaps even civilization itself.”
The AFA’s Fred Jackson, who was guest-hosting “Sandy Rios In The Morning,” hailed the ad’s “forceful message” to the court and claimed that gay marriage undermines what God established in the Garden of Eden about 6,000 years ago.
“So for at least 6,000 years, people have understood marriage as between a man and a woman and it is only fairly recent history and certainly in this country have the forces of evil attempted to change all of that,” Jackson said. “It is absolutely amazing — one of the saddest facts is how many denominations, church denominations in this country, have succumbed to this pressure.”

Yeah, I know, "Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve". I get that. But what I don't get is this: "for at least 6,000 years, people have understood marriage as between a man and a woman". [emphasis added]

There's obviously a typo in there, since it should read "a man and women". Even a casual reading of the so-called Word of God, the "Holy Bible", shows that polygamy was not only tolerated by God but accepted as no big deal, if not actively encouraged. See What the Bible says about Polygamy for a few of the references to multiple wives and "concubines" in The Book.

One of the main arguing points that the wingnuttery pops up with regularly is that legalizing so-called Gay Marriage (or, as we over here in the Reality-Based Community call it, "marriage") is that it will lead to any number of "icky" things -- like polygamy. For some reason polygamy is generally number one on their list, followed closely by Rick Santorum's celebrated "man-on-dog sex" and so on down the increasingly-disgusting line.

But we need to take a step back here and look at this. Despite it being given a bad rap by child-raping assholes like Warren Jeffs and others in Fundo-Mormon and other cults, is there really anything fundamentally wrong with it? I'm open to all the usual arguments -- it demeans women, it removes too many fecund pubescent girl-children from the breeding pool, etc. etc., but if three (or more, in any combination of genders) people want to set up a household together and have the legal and contractual advantages of "marriage", why shouldn't they?

Interestingly enough, ironically enough, if the agenda for so-called "religious freedom" gets through the state legislatures and through congress, the unintended-consequence backlash may be more than the Religious Right has bargained for. For example: "My particular religion demands that I must strictly follow the practices outlined in the Old Testament. I can't eat shellfish, I can't plant my field with different crops, I can't wear two kinds of cloth, but I can and do have multiple wives. You say I can't do that? Sorry, Charlie, but The Law says I can..."

As I said the other day, be careful what you ask for -- you just might get it.

Rick Santorum, Communism, and the Separation of Church and State

Rick Santorum. Just when you thought he'd gone away, he's ba-a-a-a-ack! And true to form, he's whipping himself up into an ill-informed frenzy about shit that he knows nothing about.

Yesterday, in a radio appearance that not only telegraphs but also semaphores and bullhorns his intent to run for the presidency again, he ran off the rails about the separation of church and state, and how it's not "American" -- no, it's a communist idea that has no place in the good ole USA.

I'm sure that this will come as a surprise to the ghosts of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who were moldering in their graves long before Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles wrote The Communist Manifesto. (For those of you who were home-schooled, that was the "revolutionary year" of 1848.)

In addition, Santorum says that the words "separation of church and state" are NOT in the US Constitution, but are in the constitution of the former Soviet Union. True enough, that phrase does not exist in the constitution, but the idea, the concept, of separation of church and state is inherent in the document and in Jefferson's and Madison's writings about their "original intent".

A caller to the program which featured Santorum stated that “a number of the things that the far left, a.k.a. the Democrat [sic] Party, and the president is pushing for and accomplishing actually accomplishes a number of the tenets of ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ including the amnesty, the elevation of pornography, homosexuality, gay marriage, voter fraud, open borders, mass self-importation of illegal immigrants and things of that nature.”

I've actually read The Communist Manifesto in the past and -- because memory can be hazy -- I just now refreshed my memory of it by reading through the text again.

Funny thing, but I just couldn't find any "tenets" in that document that deal with the amnesty, the elevation of pornography, the homosexuality, the gay marriage, the voter fraud, the open borders, the mass self-importation of illegal immigrants and "things of that nature". Not even in an indirect way. And pornography? Really?

But maybe it's just me. Rick Santorum must see it in there; otherwise wouldn't he have corrected the caller?

Yeah, silly question.

I'm actually glad to see him running. It will give me and a bunch of other politicky-snarky people a lot of enjoyment, having such a fat and floundering fish in the barrel to shoot at.

And one more thing: Given that the collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the death knell of the Communist worldwide conspiracy -- in fact, consigned it to "the dustbin of history" -- why are we still trying to find communists lurking under every "red" rock?

The Low Point of the "Debate"

I don't know why I continue to put myself through this torture. Unless it is that, like the Faux News-Google-Orange County FL staff who set up the stage and placed Romney and Perry within arm's length of each other, hoping that the verbal sparring will turn into physical confrontation.

It was as boring and sad and scary as I expected it to be, except for the appearance of former New Mexico governor Gary "Dogshit" Johnson, who got in the best dig by saying that his neighbor's dogs are responsible for more "shovel ready" jobs than Barack Obama.

I admit, I had to laugh. It was a good laugh line. Too bad Johnson won't be around much longer, since he seems to be the best with the one liners out of everyone on the stage.

But the low point of the whole two hours (two hours, that's all that it was? Jeez, it seemed like six or more. I was calling it the Orlando Death March long before it was over...) was our buddy Google-me Rick Santorum, who fumbled and stumbled his way through a question from now-openly-gay soldier Stephen Hill, currently serving in Iraq (cue chorus of boos from the audience) concerning a new GOP administration's intended handling of the gays-in-the-military issue:

Yeah, I — I would say any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military. And the fact that they're making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to -- to -- and removing "don't ask/don’t tell" I think tries to inject social policy into the military. And the military's job is to do one thing, and that is to defend our country.
We need to give the military, which is all-volunteer, the ability to do so in a way that is most efficient at protecting our men and women in uniform.
(APPLAUSE)
And I believe this undermines that ability.
(APPLAUSE)
MEGYN KELLY of Fox News: So what -- what -- what would you do with soldiers like Stephen Hill? I mean, he's — now he's out. He's — you know, you saw his face on camera. When he first submitted this video to us, it was without his face on camera. Now he's out. So what would you do as president?
SANTORUM: I think it's -- it's -- it's -- look, what we're doing is playing social experimentation with -- with our military right now. And that's tragic.
I would -- I would just say that, going forward, we would -- we would reinstitute that policy, if Rick Santorum was president, period.
That policy would be reinstituted. And as far as people who are in -- in -- I would not throw them out, because that would be unfair to them because of the policy of this administration, but we would move forward in -- in conformity with what was happening in the past, which was, sex is not an issue. It is -- it should not be an issue. Leave it alone, keep it -- keep it to yourself, whether you’re a heterosexual or a homosexual.

Get that? "Any type of sexual activity has no place in the military"!

What is it with these people, that it all comes down to sex? And not just sex, but "sexual activity"? So I guess that all of you straight people in the military, when President Santorum (god, it gives me the willies just to write that) takes over, you are all cut off for the duration.

Jeez, think of the depressed local economies that will result in every town that exists at the front gate of every US military base in the world. No more hookers, no more massage parlors, no more party girls in the barracks. Yeah, way to go President Ricky.

I guess the GOP really wants a bunch of mindless robots, automatons whose only job it is to kill the "enemy" (whoever they are determined to be) and not be real people, with real lives and real issues. Supporting the troops? Yeah, right...

And no, except for some dueling "Read my book!" jibes from Romney and Perry, they didn't get into any fights. Too bad. I was kind of hoping for some WWF smackdown action.

Santorum: "Crusades Not Aggression, Smeared by The Left..."

Just when you thought that they couldn't get any fucking crazier, Rick "Man-On-Dog-Sex" Santorum comes out with a doozy:

Rick Santorum launched into a scathing attack on the left, charging during an appearance in South Carolina that the history of the Crusades has been corrupted by “the American left who hates Christendom ... The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical,” Santorum said in Spartanburg on Tuesday. “And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom.”
He added, “They hate Western civilization at the core. That's the problem.”
After asserting that Christianity had not shown any “aggression” to the Muslim world, the former Pennsylvania senator — who is considering a 2012 run for the White House — argued that American intervention in the Middle East helps promote “core American values.”

Anti-historical???!!!! As in when you raise an army of avaricious "Christians" and invade another culture's homeland which is thousands of miles away from your own and you do this repeatedly over the course of a couple of centuries and you do this in the name of your god and you slaughter not only those heathen and nasty adherents to a "different" god but also a bunch of adherents to your own god who look and dress and smell different, that's NOT aggression?????

WTF??????

I mean, you can actually look this up in a couple of seconds and see that Ricky is as full of shit as a Christmas goose.

Jesus, and just the fact that Little Ricky Dogsex Santorum can spew it right out of his mouth to a knuckledragging crowd of awe-struck true believers tells me that as a nation, as a culture, we are fucked. No one has a sense of history any more, so anything that anyone wants to say about historical events, regardless of how many lies they contain, is swallowed whole by the Moron-American Voting Bloc.