Category: Religion

For Once, Obama Declines to Split the Baby (Fabulous!)

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After the failure of Congress to pass any LGBT civil rights legislation, Obama has signed an executive order banning it for government contractors.

The surprising bit is that despite entreaties from the religion-as-an-excuse-to-be-a-bigot crowd, the executive order does not grant a religious exemption:

President Obama, resisting calls from several prominent faith leaders, will not include a new exemption for religiously affiliated government contractors when he issues an executive order Monday barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, the White House said Friday.

Obama announced last month that he would sign such an order after concluding that Congress was not going to act on a broader measure prohibiting discrimination based on sexual discrimination or gender identity by companies.

Since then, faith leaders have urged him to include an exemption for government contractors with a religious affiliation, such as some social service agencies.

White House officials said Friday that the new executive order would not include such an exception. But Obama will preserve an exemption put in place by former president George W. Bush that allows religiously affiliated contractors to favor employees of a certain religion in making hiring decisions.

Gay rights organizations have criticized that earlier exemption, and they celebrated news Friday that Obama would not be broadening it.

“With the strokes of a pen, the president will have a very real and immediate impact on the lives of millions of LGBT people across the country,” said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group.

I think that one of the consequences of the Hobby Lobby decision is the understanding that accommodation of the Talibaptist crowd is a losing proposition.

I’ve thought this for a while.

People who use religion as a, “Veil under which anger can be legitimatized,” to are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.

Glenn Greenwald Reveals that NSA Spied on Americans for the Crime of Being Muslim

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Greenwald, and Murtaza Hussain, reveal that the NSA spied on hundreds of Americans with no justification:

The National Security Agency and FBI have covertly monitored the emails of prominent Muslim-Americans—including a political candidate and several civil rights activists, academics, and lawyers—under secretive procedures intended to target terrorists and foreign spies.

According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the list of Americans monitored by their own government includes:

• Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush;

• Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases;

• Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University;

• Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights;

• Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.

The individuals appear on an NSA spreadsheet in the Snowden archives called “FISA recap”—short for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the Justice Department must convince a judge with the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there is probable cause to believe that American targets are not only agents of an international terrorist organization or other foreign power, but also “are or may be” engaged in or abetting espionage, sabotage, or terrorism. The authorizations must be renewed by the court, usually every 90 days for U.S. citizens.

………

The five Americans whose email accounts were monitored by the NSA and FBI have all led highly public, outwardly exemplary lives. All five vehemently deny any involvement in terrorism or espionage, and none advocates violent jihad or is known to have been implicated in any crime, despite years of intense scrutiny by the government and the press. Some have even climbed the ranks of the U.S. national security and foreign policy establishments.

………

In one 2005 document, intelligence community personnel are instructed how to properly format internal memos to justify FISA surveillance. In the place where the target’s real name would go, the memo offers a fake name as a placeholder: “Mohammed Raghead.”



The vast majority of individuals on the “FISA recap” spreadsheet are not named. Instead, only their email addresses are listed, making it impossible in most cases to ascertain their identities. Under the heading “Nationality,” the list designates 202 email addresses as belonging to “U.S. persons,” 1,782 as belonging to “non-U.S. persons,” and 5,501 as “unknown” or simply blank. The Intercept identified the five Americans placed under surveillance from their email addresses.

Here is the kicker:

Last week, anonymous officials told another news outlet that the government did not have a FISA warrant against at least one of the individuals named here during the timeframe covered by the spreadsheet.

(emphasis mine)

For the past year, every time someone speculates about what the US state security apparatus does, we get a ferocious denial from the various three later acronyms (TLA).

And then, a few weeks later, some more Snowden docs get released, and we discover that they are lying through their teeth to us.

Both the White House and the Congress have completely failed in their duties to direct and oversee our surveillance industrial complex.

Pope Francis Takes Another Step Away from John Paul II

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Francis has defrocked the formal Papal ambassador to the Dominican Republic, the former Archbishop Josef Wesolowski for sexually abusing boys.

You saw a bit of damage control under Benedict, but this is strong statement against JP II’s willful blindness on this matter:

The Vatican has defrocked Archbishop Josef Wesolowski, the former Vatican ambassador to the Dominican Republic following an investigation into his sexual abuse of boys. He is the highest-yet ranking official of the Church to be so punished.

The former Archbishop, now just Josef Wesolowski, has two months to appeal his dismissal and laicization. He is no longer a priest of the Church.

Following his period of appeal, during which he may or may not choose to fight the decision, he will face a criminal trial under the Vatican City State tribunal. If convicted, he will face a jail term. The Vatican has recently updated its laws to punish with criminal penalties those who sexually abuse children and says it will take measures to ensure that Wesolowski does not flee justice.

Pope Francis has instituted a zero-tolerance crackdown on clergy who abuse children, saying they would not have any special privileges and that even high-ranking offenders would be severely and swiftly punished.

Pope Francis is the first Pope to take such drastic measures to deal with the problem of child sexual abuse in the Church although both Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI also took steps to protect children. The measures now instituted by Pope Francis are the most significant in history, ensuring that offenders cannot use the Church as cover and will face certain prison time if found guilty.

This guy really is a breath of fresh air.

Yes, Hobby Lobby is Almost Dredd Scott* Bad

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The basic decision is completely incoherent and contradictory.

The gist of the decision is that private corporations can ignore basic regulations if they are “sincerely held beliefs,” whatever the f%$# means, which ignores decades of jurisprudence which slapped down various flavors of bigots, sexists, and nut-jobs who have attempted to use religion to avoid following civil law.

They say that this is so because to quote Mitt Rmoney, “corporations are people too.”

They say that it only applies to “closely held” corporations, (fewer than 5 people holding over half of the equity in the firm) but provide no real explanation for why it should so be limited, and they do not explain why it does not, for example, apply to multibillion dollar corporations like Koch industries.†

Furthermore, they say that it applies only to contraception, and not, for example, to the JW’s objection to blood transfusion or vaccination, but again, they simply say this, and provide no real justification:

This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate andshould not be understood to hold that all insurance-coverage mandates, e.g., for vaccinations or blood transfusions, must necessarily fall if they conflict with an employer’s religious beliefs. Nor does it provide a shield for employers who might cloak illegal discrimination as a religious practice.

Basically, it only applies to contraception, because we care about what Catholics and right wing Evangelicals think, but not (Mercy!) Jehovah’s Witnesses.

What’s more, they redifine the definition of corporations to justify their opinion:

In other words, the Court has changed, definitionally, what it means to be a corporation under the state laws in question.

The existential condition of separateness is true even with closely held companies. The largest such companies – Cargill, Koch Industries, Dell, Bechtel, and Aramark, to name just a handful – have tens of thousands of employees and billions of dollars of revenue. (In 2008, Forbes reported that the 441 largest closely held companies employed more than 6 million people and enjoyed $1.8 trillion in revenue.) They are created under the same understanding of a wall existing between shareholders and the company. They could indeed not exist otherwise – the potential liability to individual investors would simply be too great.

So in evaluating whether Congress intended the word “person” in RFRA to cover corporations, the most reasonable assumption is that the states creating such entities intended such separateness and that corporations should not carry the rights of their shareholders. To assume otherwise flies in the face of decades, indeed centuries, of corporate law assumptions.

The Court makes a second corporate law mistake. In arguing that for-profit companies can have religious purposes, the Court makes hay from the fact that state incorporation statutes typically allow businesses to be chartered for any “lawful purpose or activity.” The Court uses this corporate law truth to argue, as a descriptive matter, that some corporations in fact engage in behavior that is in conformity with the religious views of their shareholders.

………

Indeed, I will not be surprised if we see, in the coming weeks, a host of closely held corporations – and a few publicly traded ones – asserting the right to discriminate against LGBT job applicants, employees, and customers notwithstanding various state laws to the contrary.

This is an unbelievably bad decision, and, unless the Congress revokes the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (the justification for the ruling), we are in for decades of counter productive anti-American religious zealotry.

This is a horrible decision, and if it had been made at the federal court level, we would assume that it would have been overturned at the appellate level before the ink was dry.

*Dred Scott v. Sandford. If you need this link, read some f%$#ing history.
†I dunno. Maybe they do want it apply to Koch industries.

Does Anyone Out there Have an Urge to See Rick Perry’s Circumcision?

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Yeah, not me either, but it appears that Rick Perry is about to make it available for public review:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) recently broke bread with The New York Times Magazine’s Mark Liebovitch at a Jewish deli in Beverly Hills.

“I’m more Jewish than you think I am,” he told Leibovitch over a corned-beef Reuben. “I read the part of the Bible that said the Jews are God’s chosen people.”

You’re more Jewish than we think you are?

A am NOT willing to check out this claim.

Some Thoughts on Eric Cantor

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First, the very serious people inside the Beltway are freaking for a number of reasons:

  • The results sh%$ on their “tea party is dead, and the Republican adults are back” meme.
  • David Cantor was “people like them”, in that he was a soulless apparatchik climber.
  • Freaking out is what they do.

As to the significance, I think that this is all about, as TBogg so eloquently, “All things considered, Eric Cantor probably lost because he’s a dick.”

On a slightly more serious note, Cantor did not take his constituents seriously.

To paraphrase Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill story goes, Cantor never asked for their votes.

The Beltway consensus is that it was all about immigration, but as TBogg, and many others noted, immigration reform was supported by nearly 4 to 1 in the district, and that same night, Lindsay Graham not only won his primary, but did so in a large field with enough of a margin to avoid a runoff.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that Cantor being Jewish had much to do with his loss, with a margin over 11% in a district that he had dominated before, but I do think that some of the advertising did seem to invoke this (though note that in the article, Salon solipsistically posits that it was anti-Silicon Valley sentiment).

Looking at the ad, where he’s hanging with Mark Zuckerberg, I feel compelled to invoke Mr. Subliminal.

You have an ad with the picture Cantor a guy with a Jewish name who looks stereotypically Jewish, and accuses him of giving their jobs to foreigners, and I wonder if this is not a sly reference to his religion.

A Mobbed Up Bank is the Least of His Problems

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Pope Francis just fired the whole board charged with overseeing the Vatican bank, the Financial Information Authority (AIF):

Pope Francis has removed the entire board of the Vatican’s financial watchdog in his latest attempt to rehabilitate the troubled Vatican bank.

 Two years before they were due to step down, the five Italians heading the Financial Information Authority (AIF) have been replaced with a more international group of experts, including one woman.

 The change follows reports of clashes between the board members and the body’s Swiss director, René Bruelhart, an anti-money laundering expert.

 The new members are Marc Odendall, who manages and advises philanthropic organisations in Switzerland, Juan Zarate, a Harvard law professor who was a security adviser to President George Bush, Joseph Yuvaraj Pillay, former managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and Maria Bianca Farina, the head of two Italian insurance companies.

 ………

 Pope Benedict XVI created the watchdog in 2010 to supervise and regulate the widely discredited Vatican bank – which is officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR) – and prevent it being used for money-laundering and for terrorism.

 But when Bruelhart, who cleaned up Liechtenstein’s banking system, arrived as director in 2012 he encountered resistance to the reforms from an old guard.

 The group reportedly wrote to Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin earlier this year complaining that they were being kept in the dark, after Bruelhart’s arrival.

 Reformist members of the Curia had urged Francis to bring in professionals with a global perspective who could work with the Swiss lawyer.

 ………

 And in January he sacked all but one of the five cardinals in the commission that supervises the Vatican bank.

The Vatican Bank is clearly a big can of worms, but compared to Irish Orphanage scandal which includes hundreds of surreptitiously buried bodies and involuntary medical experiments:

It gets worse. One week after revelations of how over the span of 35 years, a County Galway home for unwed mothers cavalierly disposed of the bodies of nearly 800 babies and toddlers on a site that held a septic tank, new reports are leveling a whole different set of charges about what happened to the children of those Irish homes.

 In harrowing new information revealed this weekend, the Daily Mail has uncovered medical records that suggest 2,051 children across several Irish care homes were given a diphtheria vaccine from pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome in a suspected illegal drug trial that ran from 1930 to 1936. As the Mail reports, “Michael Dwyer, of Cork University’s School of History, found the child vaccination data by trawling through tens of thousands of medical journal articles and archive files. He discovered that the trials were carried out before the vaccine was made available for commercial use in the UK.”  There is no evidence yet – and there may never be – that any family consent was ever offered, or about how many children had adverse effects or died as a result of the vaccinations. Dwyer told the Mail, “The fact that no record of these trials can be found in the files relating to the Department of Local Government and Public Health, the Municipal Health Reports relating to Cork and Dublin, or the Wellcome Archives in London, suggests that vaccine trials would not have been acceptable to government, municipal authorities, or the general public. However, the fact that reports of these trials were published in the most prestigious medical journals suggests that this type of human experimentation was largely accepted by medical practitioners and facilitated by authorities in charge of children’s residential institutions.” In a related story, GSK — formerly Wellcome — revealed Monday on Newstalk Radio that 298 children in 10 different care homes were involved in medical trials in the ’60s and ’70s that left “80 children ill after they were accidentally administered a vaccine intended for cattle.”

 Irish Minister of State for Training and Skills Ciaran Cannon has called for a public inquiry into the treatment of the children and their deaths.  The archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has also called for an investigation, adding that it should be free of Catholic Church interference. “We have to look at the whole culture of mother and baby homes; they’re talking about medical experiments there,” he told RTE Radio this weekend. “They’re very complicated and very sensitive issues, but the only way we will come out of this particular period of our history is when the truth comes out.” And a spokesman for GSK said the latest revelations, “if true, are clearly very distressing.”

This is not even the first time information on these kinds of vaccine trials has come to light. In 2010, the Irish Independent uncovered how children born in the homes were subjected to a single “four-in-one” vaccine trial without their mothers’ permission. The children often didn’t even know what they’d been subjected to until well into adulthood. Appallingly,  Ireland had no laws regarding medical testing on humans until 1987. Mari Steed, who was born at the Bessborough home in the ’60s, told the Sunday Independent, “We were used as human guinea pigs.”

Yes, very distressing. 

Seriously, I don’t think that Francis could live long enough to drain this swamp.

I don’t think that he could live long enough to drain this swamp if he became Pope when he was 12 ……… And his dad was Methuselah.

The First Rule of Fight Club is ………

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Do not piss off Jon Stewart.

That goes for you, Rush Limbaugh:

With 200-300 school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, and Limbaugh decides to take the side of the terrorists, because Michelle Obama took up their cause.

Stewart is rahter pithy about this:

So that’s our choice: Malala [Yousafzai, who was shot in the face by the Taliban for saying that girls should go to school] or Rush, the quivering rage heap who is apparently desperately trying to extinguish any remaining molecule of humanity that might still reside in the Chernobyl-esque superfund cleanup site that was his soul.

Follow the hashtag, “#F*@KYOURUSH”.

Magnets How do They F%$#ing Work?

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Once again, it’s time to roll the Insane Clown Posse video Miracles, (Completely NSFW) because the Talibaptists are going full ICP Here

One of the joys of Neil deGrasse Tyson and his science show Cosmos, is the way that it makes the heads of the primordial wing of the Christian right explode.

Case in point, they have now come out opposing electromagnetism:

If there is one topic in each week’s Cosmos that sends the Christian fundamentalists into a frenzy, it is evolution.

 You see, scientists understand that most sciences cannot be done correctly if you ignore the scientific fact of evolution. Yet, week in and week out, creationists critique the job Tyson and his team of writers are doing, calling them speculative and misleading.

 Creationists would have you believe that Tyson and his crew are force-feeding viewers a story of evolution dreamed up in the minds of those who simply want to refute God and spread atheism.

 Calling evolutionary biologists names such as “evolutionists”—a word not used outside of the creationists sphere—is an attempt to demean the science as nothing more than a religion; ironically, the very thing they are trying to sell you on.

 This week’s episode, titled, “The Electric Boy” was about scientist Michael Faraday. Faraday’s study of electricity led to some of the biggest discoveries and inventions in the history of mankind, ranging from the electric motor to the discovery of electromagnetic waves that surround just about everything.

 How on earth could creationists be upset with electricity? Well, Tyson had the audacity to mention that Faraday’s discoveries helped us explain how birds navigate the globe using the earth’s electromagnetic waves, and that their brains are evolutionarily wired for such a task.

Seriously. What is wrong with these people, and why do we allow them to breed?

Not Dredd Scott Bad, but Maybe Plessy v. Ferguson Bad

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In a 5-4 vote the Supreme Court just ratified sectarian prayer at government meetings:

A divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that legislative bodies such as city councils can begin their meetings with prayer, even if it plainly favors a specific religion.

The court ruled 5 to 4 that Christian prayers said before meetings of an Upstate New York town council did not violate the constitutional prohibition against government establishment of religion; the justices cited history and tradition.

“Ceremonial prayer is but a recognition that, since this Nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond the authority of government,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court’s conservative majority.

The ruling reflected a Supreme Court that has become more lenient on how government may accommodate religion in civic life without crossing the line into an endorsement of a particular faith. All nine justices endorsed the concept of legislative prayer, with the four dissenters agreeing that the public forum “need not become a religion-free zone,” in the words of Justice Elena Kagan.

But there was sharp disagreement after that, and the majority ruling could encourage public bodies to give more leeway to religious expression in their ceremonial prayers and less deference to the objections of religious minorities.

The court’s five conservatives said legislative prayers need not be stripped of references to a specific religion — the prayers at issue often invoked Jesus Christ and the resurrection — and said those given the opportunity to pray before legislative meetings should be “unfettered” by what government officials find appropriate.

It is stupid, petty, small minded, and bigoted ruling.

I’m disappointed, but not particularly surprised.

I will say the fact that the bigotry-deaf Kennedy is now the “moderate vote” on the court.

I Want to be Sephardic

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First, there is the food.

They got olive oil, we got schmaltz.

They sit on the spice road, and we got ……… schmaltz.

Over Passover, they get to eat rice and beans, legumes are known as kitniyot, which Ashkenazic rabbis have ruled could be made into something too close to flour, though this does not apply to things like chestnuts, whose flour is actually used to make pastries. (Go figure)

Well, Rabbis have now declared marijuana to be kitniyot, and hence forbidden on Pesach, so no 420 on 4/20:

It’s that time of the year again — Passover and 4/20, the unofficial marijuana celebration day. On the same day.

The celebration of all things green poses a particular problem for the chosen people. Namely, is smoking pot kosher for Passover?

Sorry to disappoint, but it seems not.

In 2007, Israel’s Green Leaf Party, which supports the legalization of marijuana, declared that cannabis is among the substances Jews are forbidden to consume during Passover.

“You shouldn’t smoke marijuana on the holiday, and if you have it in your house you should get rid of it,” Michelle Levine, a spokeswoman for the party, said at the time.

Why? Because hemp seeds are considered to be kitniyot.

While biblical law prohibits eating leavened foods, rabbis have since extended the rules to apply to foods like beans, corn and rice. Hemp seeds, found in marijuana, falls under that category. So voila, no Mary-Jane for you — if you’re Ashkenazi that is.

Sephardic Jews have traditionally been allowed to eat kitniyot during Passover, so when it comes to 4/20, they’re in the clear.

I’m seriously bumming, even if I have not indulged in over 20 years. (The joys of a pee in a cup career)

H/t my hairier brother, who posted this to Facebook.

Why the Catholic Church Should Be Out of the Hospital Business

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A Catholic hospital in (where else) Oklahoma has forbade its doctors from prescribing birth control:

Doctors affiliated with a small Catholic hospital in Bartlesville, Okla., are no longer allowed to prescribe contraception for the purposes of birth control, according to a report from the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise.

Administrators at Jane Phillips Medical Center are reported to have held a meeting last week to inform doctors of the new directive barring them from prescribing contraceptives as birth control; according to the Examiner-Enterprise, doctors are allowed to prescribe contraceptives for non-birth control purposes, such as cramps, menstrual pain or endometriosis.

“I have spoken to my doctor about my birth control options,” one patient impacted by the directive told the Examiner-Enterprise. “I was told that my physician has been instructed that they can no longer write prescriptions for birth control as birth control. This effects me because I take birth control as birth control. There are other ways to receive birth control, for example headaches, cramps, excessive bleeding — but I have none of those symptoms.

Note that this is not just employees, or on the hospital premises, this is a directive given to any doctor with admitting privileges.

The Catholic Church has been engaging in a massive hospital buying binge, and they are using it to make not just abortion, but birth control, unavailable across the nation.

And Ukraine Returns to Form………

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I am not surprised that a prominent Ukrainian rabbi has called for Jews to flee Kiev.

He is that there have been credible threats against the Jewish community:

Ukrainian Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, called on Kiev’s Jews to leave the city and even the country if possible, fearing that the city’s Jews will be victimized in the chaos, Israeli daily Maariv reported Friday.

“I told my congregation to leave the city center or the city all together and if possible the country too,” Rabbi Azman told Maariv. “I don’t want to tempt fate,” he added, “but there are constant warnings concerning intentions to attack Jewish institutions.”

According to the paper’s report Azman closed the Jewish community’s schools but still holds three daily prayers. He said the Israeli embassy told members of the Jewish community to avoid leaving their homes.

It’s a fact that a significant number of of the protesters had ties to right wing nationalists, most notably the Svoboda party.

What’s more the history of the Ukraine, and Kiev in particular has been extremely antisemitic Even By the Standards of the Russian Empire and the Republics of the Former Soviet Union.

Seriously, the 200,000 or so Jews living in the Ukraine need to make arrangements for a quick exit.

I expect to see synagogues to burn.

Former Bush Aide Matt Dowd Goes There

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He compares the anti-gay right to Islamic Terrorists.

Of interest is his invocation of the history of religious justifications supporting slavery:

“This is one of those problems when people use religion as a way to sort of enforce discriminatory practices,” he continued. “People used religion back in the 1860s when they defended slavery. They used religion to defend slavery.”

 “We’ve used religion to go to war. People have criticized Islam because they use religion to fight people and kill people. This is the problem with that [bill].”

That first bit seems to me to be a subtle slam at the Southern Baptists, whose genesis was a schism with the American Baptists over the morality of slavery. (The Southern Baptists were on the wrong side of the argument.)

I’m not quite sure what, if anything, was his intent in saying this, but I agree with Max Blumenthal’s analysis, which is that Dowd is primarily an opportunist, so I think that there is some sort of an angle on this.