Christian Leftist

There are now 462 children, some of whom are young mothers in their teens and others no older than five, who are in temporary foster care in Texas today after acourt in San Angelo ruled that their parents cannot have the children back until DNA tests are done.

The Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), a breakaway Mormon sect that practices polygamy and marrying off its girls when they are underage or barely legal, has its own batch of lawyers. What sounds like a “class-action child removal” may bring about legal challenges to the state’s right to remove children based solely on the treatment of a smaller number of girls and women from the Yearning for Zion Ranch.

The Washington post has an article about the Constitutional challenges Texas may face when the case splits into individual child-custody hearings. There is no question that were the children to be returned to their parents, they would be forced to conform to the sect’s religious and sexual practices. What is not so clear is whether or not the government has the right to take children away from their parents if the abuse has no yet occured. The Supreme Court has consistently upheld the freedom of religious expression in previous cases.

In my opinion, practising your religious freedoms is one thing; forcing a teenage girl to conform to them is not. Hoever, it sn’t difficult to say that there is no clear line in the sand as to how much religion one is allowed to insert into a child’s life.

There aren’t many examples of the male variant of the human species more repugnant that Joe Francis, the eternal bachelor and frat-dropout wannabe who turned exploiting drunk female co-eds at wet t-shirt contests into an art form, went a step further and convinced them to flash him when they were only half-sloshed, packaged the results, marketed the hell out of them, and made a fortune doing it.

That would be the Girls Gone Wild video franchise to which I am referring. You know, the one that splashes ads all over Comedy Central during the Daily Show and the Colbert Report where the screen flashes an adult content caution disclaimer along with an audio warning, then bombards your eyeballs with images of scantily-clad, glassy-eyed, barely legal, stock pale-skinned women with animated sparkles covering up their genitalia.

Now he’s in jail, and he’s pissed that Access Hollywood reporter Maria Menounos didn’t paint a flattering enough portrait of him in his new pad(ded cell). In a GQ post-Menounos interview interview, Joe Francis calls her some choice sexist slurs, rants a bit more, then compares himself to Rosa Parks, MLK, Jr., and Jesus Christ.

My question is, will more time in the slammer calm his well-concealed inferiority complex, or will it simply lead to Girls Gone Wild: Jailhouse Jailbait Edition?

You’d think after the debacle that was The Open-Source Boob Project, mankind would be physically incapable of spewing more complete and utter idiocy in the direction of the blogosphere this week. But noooo, we have another reminder of how it’s okay to use words like slut, whore and bitch when women don’t behave in a way that men like or dare to have opinions that may spoil men’s fun.

Yes, I am using those words in this post because I have to look at them and hear them all of the time. There are no proper male antonyms for such words in the English language, mind you. Son-of-a-bitch is, after all, more of an insult to someone’s mother than the male someone himself. Joe Francis has been a lost case for some time now; he’s made his livelihood off the skin of young women who are too buzzed at the time to realize that they are signing their reputations away for a few dollars and a ‘free’ tank top.

The price they’ll pay when they discover that DVD videos last forever in the digital age will be immesurable. Society has taught us to think less of women who participate in stripping contests: NOT because they exercised poor judgement in a moment of exhilaration, flattery and peer pressure, but because they were half-dressed or not dressed at all while they were exercising it.

If and when I ever look thin enogh to consider strolling on the beach in a two-piece, will there ever be a time when I can expect to be treated like a human being and not a piece of meat, when I can have a conversation with a man and not wonder if he’s simply talking to me because he likes staring at my chest or wants to get into my pants?

Yeah. I didn’t think so.

Props to Racialicious, where I first saw this.

Bloggers have been advocating legislation that ensures the equal exchange of information between internet users regardless of class, status, or the content being transmitted — in other words, net neutrality — for a while now. It’s an incredibly important issue for those of us who rel on the internet for not only our livelihoods but our entertainment. What we download and upload is nobody’s business, period, and the whole proposed “tiered pricing system,” where users have t pay internet providers depending on how much they use the internet and how much bandwidth is consumed, would allow wealthy corporations to have the fastest connections and screw everyone else furth down the ladder, especially the average consumer. Who wants to pay fees based on how many YouTube videos they watch per week? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

As with almost any other issue these days, the major news networks have avoided talking about net neutrality whenever possible. But now that the WGA, which has recently ended a several-month-long strike against film and television producers, understands just how dependent the rest of the writing world depends on those flate-rate internet packages to communicate and thrive, its members are suddenly MUCH more ardent supporters of fair legislation, according to this Yahoo News report:

Writers push for laws to maintain Internet freedom

Don’t misunderstand me; I am fully in support of the WGA, and I think they’re doing the right thing. What I am frustrated with is the lag between the attention many news stories about the internet receive from those of us in the ‘electronic generation’ and those who are, despite the explosion of blogging aware, web 2.0 and the internet revolution, still incredibly slow and old school about bringing national attention to online issues OFFLINE.

By the way, Barack Obama is the only presidential candidate that I know of who has pledged to support net neutrality and protect the rights of individual citizens against a lack of regulation of the corporations who seek play gatekeepers and thus control access to the web.

They are many, many people who cannot afford to have internet service at home but who may someday. There are many, many people who are just now learning how to utilize the vast resources that the world-wide web provides. They and their children deserve to know about issues that will affect them when the ever-changing economic situations in all countries force them to seek jobs that require the internet.

This is one of those stories that should garner more attention than a quarterly blurb in the technology section of a newspaper.

When I went to vote this morning, the second screen for voting on the touchscreen display had the representative delegates already committed to either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. It said, in incredibly small print, that you had to vote for three women and two men. I found three women for my candidate, but I didn’t see the second possible man for my candidate and thus checked one male candidate for the other candidate. The lesson: read the names three times.

Ah, well. I was an Edwards/Kucinish supporter, anyway.

Yes, it is just what it sounds like. A cool person over at the livejournal discussion group debunkingwhite (please read their info page before you make assumptions about what their name means) explains it much more succinctly than I can at this hour, so let me just link you there:

Europeans = Native Americans???

This makes me so angry, but it’s just one in laundry list of things that have pissed me off today. I need God to give me strength to see the inherent worth of humanity right now, because it is just not happening on its own here.

Lou Dobbs has been hitting the crack pipe again.

“Isn’t the church all about saving souls? … We already have enough fools running around with their social programs, social engineering…”

Um, Lou? It’s called SOCIAL JUSTICE. You know — feeding the poor, healing the sick, fighting for the oppressed, like a certain Nazarene carpenter did.

Just because not all of us buy into every piece of jingoistic claptrap that spews from your mouth doesn’t mean that churches apart from the fundamentalist, bigoted, close-minded, gossiping congregations don’t exist.

Just for tonights extra-special hothead diatribe, I’m going to give you a present. Not, it’s not a cookie. It’s your own sub-category. Now whenever you say something stupid, you’ll be able to look it up under ‘national media,’ and it will be right there! Isn’t that special?

In the meantime, please refrain from speculating on people’s motives for believing in God. Mine are clearly not the same as yours. Kthnxbai.

Despite the fact that he served in the Clinton administration as Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich is endorsing Barack Obama. This is according to CNN, where Wolf Blitzer interviewed the ex-editor of the leftist weekly magazine The Nation.

Apparently, the tipping point came last week, when Reich saw the obnoxious ads with people complaining about Obama’s ‘”bitter” comment that have played here in Pennsylvania.

So far, according to CNN, Hillary has lost a net 2 delegates since February 5th, while Barack has gained 77 in the same time period. She still leads him with her 251 to his 228.

Man, I knew those FreedomWatch ads were horrible, creepy little packs of lies, but I didn’t think that GOP members would see a need to script them personally. Can’t the crazies even write their own propaganda anymore?

The Washington Post is reporting that Democratic Party officials are going to file charges with the Federal Election Commission (note: they also intended to do this against McCain for using public money and then turning the rest of it back to avoid spending caps in the fall). See here:
Democrats Accuse GOP Campaign Arm Of Covertly Writing Ad

The issue here is not that Political Action Committees can’t support party causes, be they the Democratic National Campaign Committee, the Republican National Campaign Committee, or whoever else they so choose, or PACs wouldn’t exist. As DCCC Executive Director Brian Wolff puts it, “Freedom’s Watch is coming to the NRCC’s rescue. The problem is that they’re doing it illegally.”

What’s that you say? Poverty-stricken black people being part of medical experiments without their knowledge? It’s not like that has happened before! *cough* TUSKEEGEE *cough*

The AP first reported on this two days ago, and the only major newspaper I can see reporting on it is the Baltimore Sun. The Post-Gazette reprinted the AP article, though, so it’s bound to be more widespread than how it looks on Google News.

I just…there are no words. UGH.