Tony Perkins in attacking same sex marriage and civil rights etc. tries to dismiss inconvenient facts which do not support his prejudices or his religious ideology. It appears that there is no evidence about same sex marriage does not have a negative impact on traditional heterosexual marriages. Secondly there is no proof that children are worse off by being raised by same sex couples. David Boise points out the studies Tony Perkins and other anti-gay activists refer to either don't exist or their data and conclusions are questionable . Studies have been done over the last twenty years all showing either no real difference in either cases or are inconclusive.
Perkins et al just want to foist their religious political ideology and agenda on the rest of Americans by conjuring up negative stereotypes of Gays and Lesbians and appealing to the public's prejudices and raising non-existent concerns that traditional marriage will be destroyed if the state allows same sex marriages.
And it should be noted that if same sex marriages are made legal the state will not force a particular church or pastor to perform same sex marriages anymore than making a pastor marry a couple who are members of different denominations or different religions.
David Boise Destroys Tony Perkins' Bigoted Prop 8 Arguments
Publishers Simon & Schuster Fueling The Hate giving equal treatment to bigots as their Patriotic Duty. And "duty" it is.
And the voice of "Real Americans" is Islamophobic Pam Geller. Reading her blog is absolutely infuriating . She makes up facts and reads Faux scholars such as Robert Spencer and those who realize their is a lot of money to be made peddling hate against Muslims and Arabs .
And amazingly Pam Geller keeps out doing herself with one outrageous comment after another.
She claims she is not anti-Islam but rather against a large Mosque or Community Center funded by Muslims at 9/11 New York Ground Zero. Then she adds that all Muslims by definition are engaged in Jihad against Christians and Jews. Then she adds that Islam allows its adherents to lie in order to further their Jihadist agenda.
Next she says The Qur'an should be expunged and censored because it preaches hate and in her view The Holy Qur'an is on a par with Hitler's Mein Kampf .
Note all of the disturbing passages people like Pam Geller point to in the Holy Qur'an are similar to one in the Holy Bible/ the Torah etc. if one's aim is to abuse the text without considering context or the attitudes which may have been the norm at the time. Both Muhammad and Jesus went against some of the attitudes and beliefs of the status-quo and the establishment of their time. Both were revolutionary in much of their thinking.
So she is against religious equality for all Americans and would deny Muslims the right to build Mosques where they can go to pray and hear sermons.
She and other Islamophobes at Fox News etc. believe Muslims are hoarding guns and bombs in their Mosques.
Her attacks on Muslims are no different than the spurious attacks on Jews by anti-Semites who think the Jews are part of a two thousand year old conspiracy to control the West if not the whole world. Or these anti-Semites have made and make outrageous claims against the Jews such as that the evil Jews use Christian children 's blood in secret rituals. This lie and others led to pogroms and lynchings and mob attacks on Jews.Eventually in Western Christian Civilization such lies and misinformation and ignorance led to the deaths of many European Jews and led finally to Hitler's mass murder of six million Jews. The Holocaust/Shoah was not some sort of aberration but a logical extension of 2,000 years of vile, rabid anti-Semitism.
Now these anti-Muslim propagandists are setting the stage for first stripping Muslim Americans of their religious freedoms , their right to run for political offices and as one right after another is chipped away what will follow one hates to contemplate. Though we already see the wanton killing of Muslims/Arabs/Iraqis/Afghans in America's and Nato's so called war on terror.
Why Is Simon & Schuster Spreading the Wild Conspiracy Theories of an Unhinged Islamophobic Blogger? by Elon Green July 31, 2010 Via AlterNet .
(pssst Note I put the story up on digg to see what happens see article below on DIGG under attack by the Right in USA )
Pamela Geller has some crazy ideas, which the corporate media seem content to disseminate uncritically.
Threshold Editions, the imprint upon which megapublisher Simon & Schuster dumps books it’s too ashamed to release under its own name, made a ballsy bet: that Pamela Geller -- a deeply unhinged blogger who famously claimed that Barack Obama is the bastard child of Malcolm X -- has an audience sufficiently large and loyal to justify a six-figure advance. Makes sense! If MSNBC, Fox, NBC and CNN have Geller on, the pool of inbred, 50-something Tea Partiers desirous of an icky melange of silicone and Tom Tancredo talking points cannot possibly have gone dry. Right?
Mary Matalin, the head of the imprint, is making a play for a crowd that can’t spell “niggar” but won’t mind reading a book about a man they see as just that -- so long as it confirms their half-baked theories. What better way to siphon off Tea Partiers than through a lady who cheerfully befouls the Upper West Side with a toxic brew of rotating hatreds? On days ending in Y this includes Muslims (“The motor of this presidency is submission to Islam”), transgenders (“Does [Obama] chill with anyone who is normal?”) and health care reform -- or as she calls it, “rape.”
This is bull goose loony territory, but it happens to be the language of modern conservatism. William Buckley’s body had not been in the ground 10 minutes before the National Review embraced Geller, happily laundering stories they wouldn’t publicly touch with a 10-foot noose.
Here’s how it works: A couple weeks prior to the last presidential election, a Review editor linked to Geller’s blog and asked, “What is the deal with Obama's birth certificate and citizenship status?” (Sort of like Seinfeld, but Catholic!) This, in turn, gave the magazine license to spend 4,000 words answering the question.
In another era, Pam Geller would be rotting away on Blackwell’s Island, counting cockroaches. Instead, the former associate publisher of the New York Observer managed to parlay her ability to find common cause with fascists and mid-level neo-Nazis, and her overt hatred of Muslims and liberal Jews, into an asset instead of a disqualifier. For Geller, a Borscht Belt Ann Coulter shtick is profitable.
Which brings us, alas, to the book. The Post-American Presidency is filled with complete sentences and grammar that is not conspicuously bad. But the chapter and section headings tell the tale: "An Islamo-Christian Nation," "Freedom of Speech in the Age of Jihad," "ACORN: Federally Funded Fraud," "Muslims in High Places," and so on. The John Birch book club search for a summer read is over.
and on the ADL taking the side of the Islamophobes has caused a little bit of a storm:
Fareed Zakaria Returns Award; Puts Final Nail in ADL’s Reputation Over Muslim Center Fracas by joshua holland via Alternet.org, Aug 6, 2010
Dear Mr. Foxman,
Five years ago, the ADL honored me with its Hubert Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize. I was delighted and moved to have been chosen for it in good measure because of the high esteem in which I hold the ADL…
That is why I was stunned at your decision to publicly side with those urging the relocation of the planned Islamic center in lower Manhattan. You are choosing to use your immense prestige to take a side that is utterly opposed to the animating purpose of your organization. Your own statements subsequently, asserting that we must honor the feelings of victims even if irrational or bigoted, made matters worse…
The purpose of this letter is more straightforward. I cannot in good conscience hold onto the award or the honorarium that came with it and am returning both. I hope that it might add to the many voices that have urged you to reconsider and reverse your position on this issue. This decision will haunt the ADL for years if not decades to come. Whether or not the center is built, what is at stake here is the integrity of the ADL and its fidelity to its mission. Admitting an error is a small price to pay to regain your reputation.
I think it’s way too late for the ADL to restore its reputation as a civil rights organization. Many of us had already come to see it as something else under Foxman.
Now, I imagine that I have never agreed with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg about much of anything — I’ve probably attacked his arguments a dozen times over the years, as a matter of fact. But this week, I think he hit this one out of the park:
This seems like such an obvious point, but it is apparently not obvious to the many people who oppose the Cordoba Initiative’s planned mosque in lower Manhattan, so let me state it as clearly as possible: The Cordoba Initiative, which is headed by an imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf, is an enemy of al Qaeda, no less than Rudolph Giuliani and the Anti-Defamation League are enemies of al Qaeda. Bin Laden would sooner dispatch a truck bomb to destroy the Cordoba Initiative’s proposed community center than he would attack the ADL, for the simple reason that Osama’s most dire enemies are Muslims. This is quantitatively true, of course — al Qaeda and its ideological affiliates have murdered thousands of Muslims — but it is ideologically true as well: al Qaeda’s goal is the purification of Islam (that is to say, its extreme understanding of Islam) and apostates pose more of a threat to Bin Laden’s understanding of Islam than do infidels.
I know Feisal Abdul Rauf; I’ve spoken with him at a public discussion at the 96th street mosque in New York about interfaith cooperation. He represents what Bin Laden fears most: a Muslim who believes that it is possible to remain true to the values of Islam and, at the same time, to be a loyal citizen of a Western, non-Muslim country. Bin Laden wants a clash of civilizations; the opponents of the mosque project are giving him what he wants.
Those opposing this project are simply clueless.
-----
and here's a tid bit about how the extremists on the right in America are attempting to control various social networking platforms such as Digg and Twitter etc.
He argues progressives and liberals need to be more alert to how a small number of people can have a major impact on such sharing platforms on the Internet.
Vast Right-Wing Digg Conspiracy Expose Shows JournoList Scandal to Be a Lot of Conservative Hot Air Take note, right-wing scandalmongers, this is what a politically motivated media conspiracy looks like.
August 7, 2010 Via AlterNet
Finally, a real media conspiracy! After weeks of right-wing bloviating about the JournoList non-scandal, we finally have evidence of a secretive plot to hijack the media in pursuit of an ideological agenda. But the scandal has nothing to do with JournoList-- a superhyped non-event about liberal journalists emailing each other. Instead, an investigative report written by oleoleolson published on AlterNet Thursday exposed that a cadre of conservatives, including multiple journalists, has been abusing Digg's social media platform to bury stories with a progressive bent.
The Digg conspiracy is as devious as it is simple. Digg is a program that allows people to rate stories on the Internet. If you like a story, you click a button marked "digg." If you don't like it, you click "bury." Stories that get the most diggs and the fewest buries are featured prominently on the Digg.com Web site, scoring millions of clicks from Digg's vast audience. As AlterNet reported yesterday, a group of conservatives calling themselves the "Digg Patriots" have been aggressively voting down progressive stories, gaming the system by creating multiple accounts to cast multiple votes on stories, and adopting a secretive, coordinated effort to silence progressive ideas.
If the facts are as plain as yesterday's report, these Digg shenanigans are a clear-cut right-wing online media conspiracy. Members of the Digg Patriots operated anonymously and did not publicly disclose their coordinated effort to crush progressive stories as part of a broad, conservative ideological agenda.
The conspiracy is not contained to the Digg platform. Several members of the Digg Patriots write for a conservative newspaper called the Examiner that's distributed in many American cities. The group includes blogger Kurt Hoffmann, who embarked on a campaign to ban progressive Digg readers from the site by instigating petty online disputes with them. The reaction across the Internet has been huge-- the investigation has been highlighted on the Huffington Post, Gawker, masher, the Atlantic Monthly, dozens of blogs, the CEO of Twitter Rose, and been the topic of discussion among dozens of Twitter celebrities, including legendary film critic Roger Ebert.
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