Many Pakistanis on the internet are making fun of their government quite a bit right now:

If Pakistan’s telecom regulator has its way, millions of mobile phone users may be unable to send text messages with “offensive” and “obscene” words like crap, damn, hobo, flatulence, gay, lesbian and slime from Monday. These words are part of a list of nearly 1,700 words and terms that the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has deemed as offensive, and wants mobile phone operators to filter from SMS text messages.

Operators have been directed to start blocking text messages containing these words from November 21.

[...]

The move has been greeted with ridicule and derision, particularly by Pakistan’s vociferous users of internet forums and micro-blogging sites like Twitter.

Since the PTA’s lists of offensive English and Urdu words and terms – containing 1,106 and 586 items respectively – became public a few days ago, it has become the butt of jokes on the web.

While the English list has 148 items containing a four-letter swear word, it has had many scratching their heads by including words and terms like athlete’s foot, deposit, black out, drunk, flatulence, glazed donut, harem, Jesus Christ, hostage, murder, penthouse, Satan and “flogging the dolphin”.

This sentence would not be okay in Pakistani text messages anymore:

I was drunk in the penthouse with my harem of hostages, just flogging the dolphin like I always do before I have glazed donuts, when I realized I had athlete’s foot, which is OMG so embarrassing LOL!!

Anyway. In all seriousness, though, this is not a good thing, because, as Think Progress points out, LGBT people in Pakistan have virtually no protections:

Homosexuality is “punishable by whipping, imprisonment or death” and the country does not provide any discrimination protections on the basis of sexual identity or orientation or recognize same-sex civil unions or marriages. In July, conservative Islamic political and religious officials condemned a gay rights meeting being held at the U.S. Embassy as “cultural terrorism” against the country. “Such people are the curse of society and social garbage,” the Islamic officials said. “They don’t deserve to be Muslim or Pakistani, and the support and protection announced by the U.S. administration for them is the worst social and cultural terrorism against Pakistan.”

At least they’re getting made fun of by Pakistani people, themselves.

I do want to know whether “santorum” is on the list, though.

Truth Wins Out’s acclaimed Center Against Religious Extremism (TWOCARE), offers original, in-depth, and on-site reporting.

“Please, come join us,” insisted an attractive college student flashing her bright Aquafresh smile.

Before I was able to decline her friendly invitation I was gently pulled into a large prayer circle of thirty or so Charismatic Christians. “I’m sorry my hand is sweaty,” the girl said with a sheepish grin.

Those were the last words she spoke that I understood. We quickly surrounded a handful of young preachers who whooped and hollered before surrendering English for the unintelligible language of tongues.  The manic participants sounded like a cross between a prayer service and a Native American tribe preparing for battle.

Eventually, they raised their hands toward the sky pointing to God, which allowed me to escape and enter the seating area at Ford Field, where Lou Engle, founder of The Call, had gathered 27,000 fundamentalist Christians from across the nation on 11.11.11, a date that came to him in what he believes to be a divinely inspired vision. The majority of the crowd was Caucasian, however a significant number were African American. There was a large youth component, but the age of participants reached across the spectrum.

While I can’t speak for the entire conference, which was a 24-hour call to fast and prayer, I did spend 14 hours at Ford Field watching sermons, surveying sideshows, videotaping the gathering, and interacting with the hyped-up crowd. So, my observations, while not complete, do offer a significant snapshot of the 11.11.11 Detroit rally.

In a press release prior to the event I wrote that I expected 11.11.11 Detroit to be a “gay bashing” and “Muslim trashing” extravaganza. After all, The Call had chosen Detroit as its rally site in an effort to convert the region’s estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Muslims.

The Associated Press reported that Apostle Ellis Smith, Engle’s local “point person” for The Call, referred to Islam in a sermon leading up to the revival as a “false,” “lame” and “perverse” religion.

Engle had previously held an infamous event in Uganda that whipped up anti-gay hysteria. In 2008, the electrifying preacher organized a rally at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium in support of Proposition 8, a successful measure to prohibit marriage equality in California.

To my surprise, the festivities, which were aired on God TV, were appreciably toned down. Sure, there was red meat on the menu, but it was not the all-you-can-eat buffet that I had come to expect from Engle and other leaders of the 7 Mountains Movement (aka The New Apostolic Reformation) that he is a key part of.

Indeed, most of the aspersions on Friday evening and Saturday were deliberately cast though euphemism. Homosexuality was never explicitly mentioned, but was instead lumped together with other “sins” under the umbrella of “sexual immorality.” Other times, speakers camouflaged their anti-gay agenda by simply saying they supported “traditional marriage.” During the entire time I observed the event there was not one reference to healing homosexuality and no “ex-gays” were trotted up on the stage to tell tales of how they “prayed away the gay.”

However, the Detroit Free Press reported that Apostle Smith claimed that at the event, “a lesbian came from the homosexual community and said she has never experienced such love. And she is now working to change her lifestyle.”

(I’m sure this alleged lesbian was very stable and well adjusted because it is common for healthy and secure LGBT people to spend weekends attending revivals that consider them demonic.)

The conversion of Muslims was also downplayed and “Dearborn,” referring to the Detroit suburb with perhaps the nation’s largest Muslim population, euphemistically replaced the word “Islam.”

It took several hours to figure out what was really going on – but I gasped when the disturbing pattern finally revealed itself. This elaborate show had all the trappings of a modern religious revival – from the thumping music to the two gargantuan video screens suspended above the enraptured audience. But this ostensibly religious event was little more than a political front.

Its real aim was to peel African American support away from the Democratic Party in a swing state during a critical election year. Not only is President Barack Obama’s reelection at stake, Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow is locked in a tight race that includes social conservative and former GOP Rep. Peter Hoekstra. This cynical revival was not about “values” — it was about votes. It was not about worship, but winning office for Republicans by promoting what writer Ed Kilgore called in The New Republic, a “big-God, small-government creed.”

The amazing part was that the audience seemed totally unaware of the underlying motives and machinations. After all, the words “Democrat” and “Republican” were never spoken and there was only one local politician identified on-stage. It seemed that even some of the minor speakers might not have been privy to the overarching strategy. Nonetheless, a brilliant display of political subterfuge was unfolding as the oblivious crowd bopped to Christian rock with their hands swaying above their heads.

This is not the first attempt of white fundamentalists to lure black voters away from the Democratic Party. Immediately following the 2004 presidential election, social conservatives made a strong push to lure African-Americans. Rev. Lou Sheldon, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center hate group, The Traditional Values Coalition, hosted a right wing meeting of 70 black religious leaders in Los Angeles.

“In 2004, the religious right was concerned about re-electing George W. Bush,” said Al Sharpton at First Iconium Baptist Church. “They couldn’t come to black churches to talk about the war, about health care, about poverty. So they did what they always do and reached for the bigotry against gay and lesbian people.”

Unbelievably, at the Los Angeles meeting Sheldon played an anti-gay video featuring disgraced Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss. Remember, Lott had to step down as Senate Majority Leader after he publicly pined over Strom Thurmond not winning the presidency as a Dixiecrat. African-American columnist Leonard Pitts put Sheldon’s power grab in perspective:

“Whether the issue was slavery, segregation, lynching, voting rights or housing discrimination, social conservatives have always taken a position that history later judged to be ignorant and flat-out wrong….which leaves me at a loss to understand why any African American possessed of a functioning brain would give this atavistic bunch the time of day.”

Still, the attempt was gaining some momentum until Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, which badly frayed the burgeoning unholy alliance. The effort was further hampered by the emergence of Barack Obama as the Democratic standard bearer.

In this renewed effort in Detroit, Lou Engle and his minions were smart. They wisely figured out that direct attacks on the Democratic Party would not fly, nor would all-out verbal barrages against President Barack Obama, who still has strong African American support. They also understood that the baggage surrounding white Evangelical racism would have to be addressed and surmounted before real progress was made.

To overcome these obstacles and recruit African Americans to vote for the GOP they devised what seems like a five-part strategy.

1) Pick a key swing state with a beleaguered city that had an economically disadvantaged African American population

2) Create an emotional spectacle where tearful white people pleaded for forgiveness and repented onstage for past racism

3) Sharply define new wedge issue(s) and create a racially-based conspiracy theory that could ultimately be used against the Democratic Party

4) Exploit these emerging wedge issue(s) to the point they become more important than fixing the economy

5) Redefine voting criteria so candidates are primarily judged by where they stand on these wedge issue(s) – with the ultimate goal of leading many African Americans to conclude that they are best represented by the conservative GOP.

Lou Engle understands that much of Michigan is conservative. If he were able to peel off fifteen or twenty percent of Detroit’s black Democratic vote, he might be able to turn the state solidly red. The main wedge issue he selected to accomplish his plan is abortion. For good measure, he helped weave a conspiracy theory: Sinister white bigots who run programs like Planned Parenthood were using abortion to reduce African American birthrates.

“What Birmingham is to the civil rights movement, Detroit is to abortion,” bellowed Engle at the event. “Detroit has a calling…blacks and Latinos could lead the parade of history.”

Engle’s message was aided by a parade of socially conservative African American ministers.  One preached that black people must choose “BC (Biblical Correctness) over PC (Political Correctness).” The subtext was that the pro-life GOP is on the side of the Bible and thus should be the party of African Americans. Another pastor was even more explicit when he declared that African Americans had a choice: “God’s way or a political party’s way.” (Read More)

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is meeting in Baltimore today. According to NPR and the Associated Press, the main focus of this meeting will not be on poverty, income inequality, or economic justice, not on racism or immigration reform, not on feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, or healing the sick. Instead, the bishops’ primary focus will be on attacking loving same-sex couples and families and the freedom to marry that they deserve under our secular Constitution, and perpetuating the lie that marriage equality somehow represents a threat to religious liberty and an attack on Christianity. Not at all surprising, but nevertheless, absolutely disgusting.

UPDATE, courtesy of Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress: The bishops “unveiled a new website — MarriageUniqueForAReason.org — to compliment the [USCCB's] ongoing effort to enshrine their anti-LGBT religious bigotry into civil law ‘promote and defend marriage as the union between one man and one woman.’”

Furthermore, in a report delivered to the conference, Oakland Bishop Salvatore Cordileone, chairman of the USCCB’s “Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage,” stated that the Catholic Church’s fight against civil marriage equality “affirms the inviolable dignity of every human person.”

On what planet exactly, sir?

They are all smiling because they believe they deserve greater rights than you and I do. Of course, if the tables were turned, we’d never put their rights to a vote, because we have character.

A few minutes ago, somebody posted this picture and quote on Facebook, and I’m not sure how new/old it is, but it so simply encapsulates the worldview of the people in the above video [click to embiggen, of course]:

[h/t Joe for the video]

Occasionally it’s good to check in and see what our favorite anti-gay hate groups are up to when they’re not hating gay people. Lest we fail to understand that the fights for LGBT equality and reproductive rights are inextricably linked — they are both about the ability of fundamentalist Christian men to control the bodies and sex lives and autonomy of anyone who doesn’t look like them — let’s take a look at the “personhood amendment” being debated in Mississippi right now.

If you’re not familiar with a “personhood amendment,” it goes like this:

Garden variety “pro-life” people tend to be concerned with stopping abortion, and favor using the law to enforce that, rather than actually fighting for things like economic freedom for poor women and sex education, things which have been proven to reduce the need for abortion. [Those are the things the pro-choice movement works toward.] However, there is a subset within the activist anti-choice movement which seeks dominion over all female bodies, and will go to any length to achieve it. A “personhood amendment” would codify in a state’s Constitution that human life begins at the point of fertilization and grant that embryo all the rights of an actual human being. This is patently insane to anyone with a rudimentary  understanding of the human reproductive process. By this definition of “personhood,” millions of people “die” every day when embryos which haven’t yet implanted simply don’t turn into actual pregnancies. They aren’t even miscarriages.

The result of such an amendment would, of course, go around Roe v. Wade and ban all abortion in a state, but it would also put in danger lots of other things 99% of women take for granted in the United States. Irin Carmon has a great piece in Salon today which exposes what Mississippi is trying to do right now:

[T]he Personhood movement hopes to do nothing less than reclassify everyday, routine birth control as abortion. The medical definition of pregnancy is when a fertilized egg successfully implants in the uterine wall. If this initiative passes, and fertilized eggs on their own have full legal rights, anything that could potentially block that implantation – something a woman’s body does naturally all the time – could be considered murder. Scientists say hormonal birth-control pills and the morning-after pill work primarily by preventing fertilization in the first place, but the outside possibility, never documented, that an egg could be fertilized anyway and blocked is enough for some pro-lifers.

On the chopping block: the morning-after pill, IUD’s, most forms of in vitro fertilization and, according to some, the regular old birth control pill. Moreover, the door would be open to investigating women who have recently miscarried. It happens in lots of countries.

You may be reading this and thinking, “that is insane. Nobody is that insane.” Have you met Fundamentalist Christian men before?

But a Colorado-based Personhood activist, Ed Hanks, is more than willing to publicly take things to their logical conclusion. He wrote on the Personhood Mississippi Facebook page that after abortion is banned, “the penalties have to be the same [for a women as well as doctors], as they would have to intentionally commit a known felony in order to kill their child. Society isn’t comfortable with this yet because abortion has been ‘normalized’ — as the Personhood message penetrates, then society will understand why women need to be punished just as surely as they understand why there can be no exceptions for rape/incest.”

[...]

At several public forums organized by the secretary of state to discuss ballot initiatives, resident Scott Murray’s statement was typical: “I know there is an issue with pregnancies, unmarried pregnancies, but I tell you the greatest prevention is God, and we’ve got to return to God.” So was Stephen Hannabass’ assertion that “we’ve got to repent. We’ve got to come before God and beg for mercy for our state and for our country.”

You see, if Mississippi just “repents” and “turns back to God,” there won’t be any problems anymore! Left unmentioned by these men, of course, is the fact that Mississippi has one of the worst infant morality rates in the nation, as well as one of the worst rates of child poverty. For these people, life truly begins at conception and concern for it ends at birth, especially if you happen to be a woman.

Irin explains that this measure [which was once supported by most Mississippians, until they actually heard the details of it] didn’t really have legs until one of our favorite hate groups got involved. Yes, the American Family Association is an anti-gay hate group, but it’s also an anti-woman and anti-family hate group:

It was the American Family Association endorsement that put media muscle behind the movement in Mississippi, with email blasts, radio PSAs and interviews, promotions on its own website, and combined with the grass-roots energy, the state’s anti-choice groups took notice. Suddenly, people who had previously focused on incremental change – parental consent laws, waiting periods, ultrasound laws – were ecstatically heralding an end of the “murders.” Mike Huckabee keynoted a fundraiser and even presumed GOP front-runner Mitt Romney to endorse the concept on his show.

Ta-da! When they’re not letting Bryan Fischer lie shamelessly about gay people and screaming and crying about hardware stores being mean to them, the AFA is quietly working to take away most of women’s fundamental rights over what they can and cannot do with their bodies. I cannot imagine what the next step would be, should something like this ever pass. Once they have women’s reproductive systems firmly in their hands, will they move on to controlling what they eat or when they speak? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Please, do yourself a favor and read Irin’s whole piece. The part about how this could affect the treatment of ectopic pregnancies will make you sick. There is a good chance that, as the details of the Personhood Movement, and their true goals, come to light, that this will go down in history as one of the patriarchy’s grand overreaches. I hope so. Again, 99% of women think birth control is just great.

And remember — groups like the American Family Association don’t just hate you as an LGBT person. They hate you in any way you might be different from their poorly conceived, bastardized fundamentalist “Christian” view of how people should live.

[h/t LGM]

UPDATE: Two more things. First, here is the video from Freda Bush, a proponent of the amendment, who is also an OB-GYN. Watch as she lies through her teeth about what this bill is about.

Her lies are solidly refuted in Irin Carmon’s piece.

Also, please read PZ Myers, an actual scientist, on the matter.

As Joe points out, this is quite a righteous rant. Well spoken, sir.

Look, it’s Wingnuttia’s favorite football player, Denver Bronco and Focus on the Family spokesperson Tim Tebow, sharing a loving and enthusiastic kiss with Demaryius Thomas on the field:

Andy reminds us that Tebow is not allowed to talk about same-sex marriage anymore, presumably because his wingnut views on the subject really don’t play well with the American public anymore.

PZ Myers put out a call today for All Radical Homosexuals to go take this survey. It’s that “Public Advocate” thing, the website anti-gay wingnut Eugene Delgaudio set up to project his delusions of grandeur, and he’s looking for data to prove that people really don’t support gay rights. It’s a really easy survey — just five questions! It’ll take you two seconds. Go help him collect the data he needs!

Mitchell Gold, friend of Truth Wins Out and founder of Faith In America, went on MSNBC this afternoon and discussed anti-gay bullying, and the root cause of it, which is spiritual terrorism inflicted by the Religious Right, on the kids of this country. Refusing to mince words, he called the religious messages of hatred against LGBT people exactly what they are: “child molestation of a child’s mind.”  Here’s the pull-quote:

I would say this, that clergy people who stand at their pulpit and they speak about gay people as sinners and an abomination, that is bullying a young kid. That is really — and I know this may sound exaggerated — but that is nothing less than child molestation of a child’s mind. [...] It is devastating to a 14-year-old-kid to hear their rabbi or their imam or their priest or clergy person say that they are a sinner or an abomination…and I’m here to tell them, they are full and whole and wonderful and they will learn as life goes on that there are many, many people who feel that way.

Preach it. The Religious Right doesn’t particularly like to hear that they are at the root of the higher rates of bullying, depression and even suicide that gay teens experience, but we at Truth Wins Out aren’t in business to make the bigots feel better. Here’s the video:

I’m working on a story right now on the boys in Gibson County, Tennessee, who were assaulted while trying to attend a service at one of the guys’ father’s church. According to reports, the attackers were the boy’s father [the pastor] and two deacons [one of whom is the boy's uncle]. So here I sit, compiling my notes on that and making phone calls, and then I see this story, out of a different part of Tennessee:

MADISONVILLE, Tenn. – A 17-year-old senior at Sequoyah High School was reportedly shoved, bumped in the chest and verbally harassed by his principal last week for wearing a T-shirt in support of efforts to establish a gay-straight alliance (GSA) club on campus. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Tennessee sent a letter to the school district today demanding that students’ rights to free speech be protected in the classroom.

The ACLU has been assisting the student, Chris Sigler, in his and other students’ efforts to overcome resistance from school officials to establish a GSA. Principal Maurice Moser had previously threatened to punish students who circulated petitions about the club.

“It is totally unacceptable that a young man who was peacefully exercising his First Amendment rights would have his speech shut down by the public school principal,” said Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the ACLU of Tennessee. “Last week’s incident clearly illustrates the hostile environment LGBT students face at Sequoyah High School. Given this context, it’s especially important that supportive voices like Sigler’s can be heard in order to overcome the school’s resistance to a GSA.”

Here, I will answer my own question as to what the hell is wrong with Tennessee:

Anti-gay wingnuts are babies. They are not adults in any sense of the word. They react to any perceived slight to their fragile, ignorant worldviews no better than toddlers. They lash out and scream and cry and no amount of reasoning or coddling will sate them. The problem is that these babies are adult-sized and they have been granted positions of authority in Third World states like Tennessee. [Sorry if you're from there. So am I. I'm slinging shit at my own here.]

When the people we are brought up to show respect and deference to fail to pass the simplest smell test of what it means to be a “grown-up,” we end up with situations where high school principals physically assault kids, pastors and deacons physically assault kids, and state “family values” leaders bitch, moan and then gloat about what a good job they done did hurtin’ LGBT families across the state. And they know that, in the age of the internet, their antics travel fast, leading to millions of people at all points across the country and beyond beginning to mock, scorn and laugh at them, and in a way that makes it worse, as their resentment against the “cultural elites,” the people they hate and of whom they are secretly painfully jealous, causes them to dig their heels in even further and strengthens their commitment to hurting anyone who challenges their pea-brained worldviews.

It’s a sad situation, but that, in short, is what the hell is wrong with Tennessee.

[h/t Towleroad]