Religious Right Now Cheer NJ Decision
Religious right leaders are reportedly now celebrating the NJ decision, believing it will ignite their base. Um, so now they are admitting that their divisive agenda is political — they’re happy that what they have called the biggest threat to religious freedom in America today is being furthered because now they can cash in on it politically. I can’t wait until this season is over and we can go back and highlight what has come out of the mouths of the religious right leadership over the last few months.
The Washington Post’s Alan Cooperman has the story. Cooperman however doesn’t let them off the hook that easily, highlighting how unsuccessful their attempts to politicize gay marriage have been this year:
Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson, for example, held “Stand for the Family” rallies in three cities in September and October, drawing considerably smaller crowds than anticipated. The first rally, in Pittsburgh on Sept. 20, attracted 3,000 people to a 17,000-seat arena that Focus on the Family had predicted would be full.
The next two rallies, in St. Paul, Minn., on Oct. 3 and Nashville on Oct. 16, were moved from stadium-size venues to smaller auditoriums, and the tickets, which had been on sale for $7, were given away. Each event also drew about 3,000 people, according to Focus on the Family spokesman Paul Hetrick.
“We don’t gauge the success by the number of people,” Hetrick said, adding: “I don’t think it’s the rallies [that flopped]. I just think it’s more of a challenge to enthuse people about midterm elections.”
Of course, you heard it here first.
They can say what they want. The people will decide on November 7th.
How ironic that some of these very same Family Values people have been found out to be pedophiles.
Unfortunately, Land, Perkins, Dobson, and the other “christian” leaders of assholes are correct.
Their crazies will get out and vote, in all eight states that have marriage bans on their ballots, and in all eight, they will win.
The courts are our only hope for justice. When civil rights of an unpopular minority are left to a popular vote, they will always lose.
This morning I’m reading about GOP candidates harping on this all over the country. Bush, who has claimed that Jesus (gotta be a different one than mine) directs his decisions, claimed that “activist judges” are responsible. The only way they could be considered activist, in my opinion, would be by making the opposite ruling.
Wonder if “Jesus” also “told” him he’s directly or indirectly responsible for the preventable deaths during Katrina, their not being able to return to their homes, their homes being sold to the highest bidder, their being abused in jails after and during the storm, and some being in camps to this day. Of course, they “deserved it” according to Bush and the RR (those sinful New Orleans X-residents), who said fixing it would cost too much (their argument for not addressing global warming, which is about to be turned on it’s head), and used it to advance the GOP agenda.
Like a mentally ill person, his “voices” tell him to hurt, kill, and let others BE killed. Funny how his “divine guidance” always “leads” him to do things to increase his power by terror, war, and now torture.
RIGHT on ….err…uhhh….LEFT on Rabbit!
Isn’t it horrible how Bushbaby and his psueudo-cons have CORRUPTED the words”conservative” and
“right”?
The judicial system was created by the founders to make sure that a majority does not repress a minority, as they did in New Jersey. It is unconstitutional for those states to vote ammendments directed as supressing any class of people. We often see later that the majority is not correct.
I invite you to
READ & LISTEN TO
something.
You’re “correct” yah weh, I’m a “bleeding heart” liberal. Lately, it bleeds so much it’s a distraction. Oh well. What do you do?
Can men marry if they have ovaries? By Faye Flam
Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer
Recent efforts to pass amendments that define marriage as a union between a “man” and a “woman” are going to run into more than just political opposition.
Scientists are contending there’s no clear definition of the gender divide.
There are at least seven definitions, but not everyone qualifies as male or female across the board, says Galdino Pranzarone, a psychologist at Roanoke College who has argued against marriage amendments on the editorial pages of the Roanoke Times.
Some people are born with a mix of male and female characteristics. The incidence of intersex births is between one in 1,000 to one in 2,500, says Pranzarone. “That’s a lot of people.”
Alice Dreger, part of the medical humanities and bioethics faculty at Northwestern University, has also written on the flaws of the “one man and one woman” equation.
You could define the sexes by their sex organs, Dreger says, but those are vulnerable to birth defects, accidents or cancer. Not to mention that some people have an organ whose size fits somewhere between a small penis and a large clitoris.
You might think you could get out a microscope and use chromosomes, defining men as having an X and a Y, women as having two X’s. It’s simple enough except some people have just a single X, or XXY, or XYY. There are XX men, XY women, and people with a “mosaic” of genetically male and female cells.
As an activist for the intersex community, Dreger often gets asked for advice and recently heard from a 19-year-old man whose medical workup revealed he had two X chromosomes and ovaries.
His situation was due to congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a hormonal disorder that often causes women to become masculinized. Once in a while it will cause a genetic female to become outwardly male. Dreger said this young man wanted to know what to tell his parents and girlfriend and whether he should have surgery to become a woman. He felt like a man and liked being a man, so she advised him to stay a man.
And as Cindy Stone learned, women can sometimes get a Y chromosome. For her, it was Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS). A faulty gene on her X chromosome makes it impossible for her body to respond to her male hormones, so though she has male genetics, she developed along a female pattern.
Stone, who teaches gender studies at Indiana University, said her genitalia look female on the outside, so she didn’t suspect anything until she failed to menstruate. When she was 17 her doctors told her she had a birth defect and would never have children.
But when she reached her 30s, she went to another doctor who had a more complete explanation. She not only had a Y chromosome, she had testicles inside her body and no ovaries or uterus.
And yet, she always wanted to be female, felt female and looked female. In some ways she’s more “feminine” than ordinary women, whose bodies make and respond to small amounts of testosterone. Stone has never had a zit, she says, and grows almost no body hair.
She says like many intersex people, she submitted to surgery she now regrets. Doctors removed her testicles, she said, after which she lost much of her sex drive. Testicles secrete some female hormones, so once hers were gone she had to go on hormone replacement.
Other intersex people got surgery at infancy before they could let anyone know whether they felt more like girls or boys, says Stone.
As for marriage reform, she wonders who her politicians think she should marry. “I have testicles and a vagina. I have an F on my birth certificate but my bloodwork says my cells are all XY.”
Twenty states have already passed constitutional amendments to restrict marriage to a union between a man and a woman, and eight more will be voting on it this November, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. But Pranzarone predicts that once lawyers start representing intersex cases, these laws will fall apart.
gOOD INFO, dALE, THANKS!
The RR idiots will probably say these intersex people chose to be that way.
Oh….and that they’re immoral and against God, too.
Interesting to me is how many of your comments are hateful toward people. Comments like “Bushbaby”, “crazies”, using quotes to reference “christians” only show those folks how much fear you have of them. What makes you any better? The answer is that we all have viewpoints and are not wrong for having them.
I would think we would all have a cooler head when discussing these issues.
Chuck,
You shouldn’t take life so seriously, it’s not permanent.
Chuck, we don’t fear them.
We’re better because we don’t try to change the laws of the country to fit a narrow fundamentalist “christian” viewpoint.
We find it hard to tolerate them because they have no tolerance themselves, AND want everyone else to have to live by their religious views.
If they did not insist on doing that, we could tolerate them.
[…] We all know how exasperated the religious right has become in recent weeks. Tony Perkins has been celebrating the NJ ruling re-affirming what he has called a serious attack on his religious freedom — because he believes the decision can be exploited politically — and James Dobson has been using his daily radio show to pleade with supporters to continue to blindly follow his marching orders. […]
Chuck,
Many people here put quotes around the word Christian when they are describing the words/actions of those Christian religious fundamentalists who seem to be determined to make their version of Christianity the supreme law of the land. This is done to differentiate between those types of Christians and the Christians who don’t seem to have this urgent need to force everyone to believe as they do. It has nothing to do with fear; it is merely a way of distinguishing between two groups who use the same name.
Lynne,
Well thought out and well written. Thanks.
Thanks, Dale. It took me a while to word it properly. I’m working at trying not to appear to be the naive little idiot that some people Mark Jumper seem to perceive me as being.
Naive maybe, but not a little idiot. No way.
I realize that I am naive in a lot of ways, because I have a difficult time understanding prejudice and why people can’t simply let other people live their lives. I also don’t understand why there are people who seem to be so utterly fascinated with the sex lives of others. To me, people are simply people and that there is good and bad in everyone.