Yesterday, people were appalled when it was reported that Rick Santorum, a man who holds such grotesque opinions on a host of topics that he repels all but the worst wingnuts, had seemingly outdone himself by telling Piers Morgan that women who become pregnant by rape should accept it as “a gift in a very broken way.” Here’s the quote:
Last Friday, CNN’s Piers Morgan asked Santorum to clarify his reasoning behind such a callous position. Insisting that “it’s not a matter of religious values,” Santorum explained that sexual assault victims should “accept this horribly created” pregnancy because it is “nevertheless a gift in a very broken way” and that, when it comes down to it, a victim just has “to make the best out of a bad situation“:
SANTORUM: Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice. I understand that. As horrible as the way that that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or doesn’t, it will always be her child. And she will always know that. And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time, I’ve always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life. We have horrible things happen. I can’t think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation.
The Lord works in mysterious ways, you silly ladies, and sometimes it comes in the form of a brutal rape! So saith Frothy. Or as Tbogg put it, Santorum is saying that “when life gives you rape, you should make rapeanade.”
Here’s video [viaWonkette] of that, and then some more thoughts:
My god. I must pause for a moment, quickly, to point out that just after 1:35, he says, “this is not an easy choice.” That is the point, wingnut! It’s a choice that only a woman can make! C-H-O-I-C-E!
But that gets to the larger point here. This is not about abortion. This is not about morals. This is not about religious belief. This is about men, like Rick Santorum, believing in a worldview that says that they, as white, straight men are superior, and the rest of us — women, people of color, LGBT people — are all subject to their control. I want to quote a lot of what Tbogg said on the subject, because though people know him as a “funny writer,” he’s remarkably on point on the greater implications of this worldview:
Twisted version of a living thinking human being Rick Santorum is not a “the uterus is half empty”-kind of guy. To him the uterus should always be popping out babies like a Pez dispenser because, what are women after all, besides elaborately constructed EZ Bake Ovens for man batter. And if you happened to be raped (which Rick, always angling for the lady vote, thinks is “horrible”) well you should look at the bright side of things: you might just get to be a mama!
[...]
God gave you a gift albeit through a horrible violent soul-crushing emotionally scarring way that you will carry with you every minute of your life until you die. And, if you choose to not accept God’s very mortal man-like awkward attempt at gift giving and you say “no thanks” and give it back to Him, well, you’re an ungrateful bitch. And probably a whore for leading your rapist and God on so you don’t deserve the baby, just the rape.
Exactly exactly exactly. And lest you think he’s being hyperbolic, think of many of the “typical” things people say on the subject of women avoiding rape. They’re all focused on the victim and suggest that, well, as long as the lady doesn’t wear a certain thing and as long as the lady doesn’t walk alone and so on and so forth, as if violating one of these rules means somehow that the lady had it coming. Perhaps what’s most striking about Santorum’s quote isn’t the general worldview behind it — we’ve lived around that for a long, long time in the United States, but rather that he is able to move from “brutal rape” to “gift from the Lord!” in a whiplash-inducing two minutes.
Amanda Marcotte suggests in a piece yesterday that modern fundamentalist Christians [whether Catholic or Evangelical -- they've really blurred together over the past few years over common hatred of others] don’t really believe in Jesus anymore, but rather in Sperm Magic. If the term doesn’t make sense to you now, it will in a minute. In writing about the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and where the pro-choice movement stands today [on shaky ground], she discusses the larger worldview of the cultural fight that is often reduced to being simply about abortion, using this image of the Duggars as a springboard:
Amanda:
…[I]t’s important to realize that this battle is not and has never been just about abortion. It’s about women’s rights and women’s roles, and whether we should be full citizens or be managed and controlled by fathers, husbands, ministers, etc.
[...]
In a single image, we get what anti-choicers believe men have lost, and what they believe stripping reproductive rights will return to them: Woman as pet dog.
We don’t even get the dignity that cats get, in their worldview. No wonder they don’t care if Gingrich told his second wife she should just put up with the third one. Your dog doesn’t get a vote when you get a new dog.
[...]
What Oppenheimer [the writer of the piece Amanda was criticizing] doesn’t talk about. but that picture illustrates so well, is what anti-feminists really feel is lost with what they call “contraceptive culture”: men’s god-given right to have a woman—perhaps several (though in a row, mostly)—who follow them around, worshipping their every move, submitting completely and joyfully. I suspect this fantasy never was a reality, but I suspect a lot of Christian fundamentalists have convinced themselves that giving women the power to say “no” to men is what made us so maddeningly unwilling to play the supplicant. No to sexual overtures, no to marriage, no to demands that we wait on you, and most importantly, no to letting your magical seed plant itself in our bodies whenever it wants. That’s why I believe that modern conservative Christians don’t worship Jesus so much as Sperm Magic.
So taking this belief — that women are, as Tbogg said above, little more than Pez dispensers for the products of what Amanda calls Sperm Magic — to its conclusion, it’s not at all surprising that Rick Santorum is more concerned that “God’s will” be done by forcing a woman who has been raped to carry that rapist’s child to term. Though he knows he has to appeal to at least a few female voters and remembers to say rape is bad, it’s obvious that once the idea of conception is on the table, Santorum is no longer thinking about a brutal crime, but about the great will of God to keep women in their place by relegating them to the status of babymakers and nothing more.
Indeed, they believe that this is the natural “gift” of women, that a woman’s highest calling is to churn out babies for God’s little army. Have you heard of the Quiverfull movement, of which the Duggars are members? The Santorums may be involved in creepy Catholic versions of these fundamentalist Christian movements [Opus Dei comes to mind], but it’s the same general idea. Women are the property of men, women are worth less than men, and if The Supreme God of All That Is deigns to use a man’s Sperm Magic to multiply the human race, then that harlot had better comply, regardless of how God decided to deliver that sperm magic, even if it was through violent rape or incest.
When you believe women are inferior, it’s not a big leap to punishing women for being raped. Look at much of the Islamic world, and continue to tell me how different their fundamentalists are from our fundamentalists. Sure, stoning women for being raped wouldn’t fly in the Western world, but I highly doubt it’s because our Fundamentalists wouldn’t find their way there if they didn’t have several centuries of the Enlightenment and the United States Constitution holding them back from exercising their true beliefs.
Rod Dreher is one of those writers I don’t mess with much, not because he doesn’t consistently churn out nonsense — he does — but simply because there are a lot of bloggers who really revel in messing with him, and they do it well. We have our favorites over here too.
But, to make an exception, here is Rod Dreher writing at the American Conservative about how he completely believes Rick Santorum when he claims that he would love a gay son just as much as a straight son. Frothy’s quote first:
“I’d love him just as much as I did the second before he told me.”
Well, that’s nice. Personally I’m quite sure Santorum is using one of the lesser definitions of “love,” but that’s neither here nor there for Rod:
I completely believe him.
That settles that. Wait, there’s more:
I found out that in my small, very conservative and churchgoing Southern town, there’s a lot of affection for Ginger Snap, a local black drag queen. Ginger Snap has her own float in the community Christmas parade. I guarantee that if you polled the people along the parade route, both white and black, nine out of 10 would say that homosexuality is wrong and that same-sex marriage shouldn’t be allowed. But they will also watch Ginger Snap roll by on her float and wave.
You see? These wingnuts think that Ginger Snap is a “morally wrong” person, and should not have the same rights as the parade-watchers, but they are willing to wave, and that is all you should be asking of fundamentalist Christians! I mean, it’s not like we live in a secular republic or anything or…oh, wait.
The idea that holding a critical moral position on homosexuality obliges one to hate this young gay man would strike most people around here as strange.
Sort of like how half of Mississippi still can’t get behind interracial marriage, but it doesn’t mean they hate the nice black lady who works at their kids’ school. It seems more to me, Rod, that what we are dealing with is Southerners who are ingrained with the notion that you can say or believe anything as derogatory or bigoted as you want about any human being or group, but as long as you begin all statements on the subject with “Now you know I’m not racist but…” and end them with “bless their hearts,” you remain officially in line with polite Southern decorum.
What’s strange is that Rod seems to notice that there is a Southern thing at play here, but draws asinine conclusions:
If you want logic to dictate social life, stay out of the South, and especially stay out of southern Louisiana.
That’s true, but when he next describes his town as a Love Your Neighbor kind of place, he doesn’t see that the people in his town don’t really love Ginger Snap, just like they don’t love the nice black lady who works at their kids’ schools, just like many wealthy white conservative Southern women are more than happy to have a gay interior decorator or hairdresser, but will vote against gay rights at the drop of a red hat, given the opportunity.
In short, this is the residue of the age-old Southern tradition of “diversity is great, as long as everybody knows their place.” Those of us who are Southern liberals tend to recognize this for what it is, because as the late, great Molly Ivins once said [I am paraphrasing], “Once you realize they’ve been lying to you about race, you question everything.”
But I reckon when you belong to a party for whom such meaningless platitudes know not the boundaries of dialect [refer to above Santorum quote], it’s a little bit easier to rationalize institutional bigotry and discrimination. After all, I’m sure Frothy Mix would wave at a drag queen if you asked him nicely, and Michele Bachmann’s husband might even add, “Oh that wig…bless her heart.”
I could spend a lot of time rebutting this List of Whine Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission has put out, pointing out, as Joe does, that the one incident that approached violence on the list was probably a hoax, but I think I’ll just remind readers of how sadly often we have had to report in the year 2011 of gay teens taking their own lives due to relentless bullying for their sexuality or their perceived sexuality. Then I would also like readers to remember where anti-gay messages originate, and who gives tacit permission to bullies.
Then read Gary Cass whining about how “victimized” fundamentalists are.
If you’ve been following The Gay News for a while, you probably remember the story of Jennifer Keeton. She was a counseling student at Augusta State University who wanted special treatment from the school based on her fundamentalist beliefs. Specifically, she wanted to be able to go against accepted mental health guidelines when it comes to treating gays and lesbians. When the school politely explained to her that if she was to graduate, she would have to make sure that her beliefs did not interfere with the accepted standards of that profession, she cried “victim!” and sued. That has not been going well for her:
A federal appeals court on Friday upheld a lower court’s ruling against a graduate student who had sought a court order preventing Augusta State University from expelling her from its school-counseling program.
The student, Jennifer Keeton, sued the Georgia university in July 2010, saying that it had violated her rights to free speech and the free exercise of her Christian faith when it told her that, in order to stay in the program, she would have to change her beliefs about homosexuality—that it is immoral, unnatural, and a “lifestyle choice” that can be reversed through “conversion therapy.”
[...]
The court noted that the requirements of the counseling program—needed for its continued accreditation and compliance with the American Counseling Association’s Code of Ethics—are similar to the rules for judges, who must apply laws even if they consider them erroneous.
“In seeking to evade the curricular requirement that she not impose her moral values on clients,” the court said, “Keeton is looking for preferential, not equal, treatment.”
Oh, ouch, that must have burned when she read it.
This is a parallel issue to the one we highlighted with our ad in the Ithaca Journal recently. In that ad, we took to task town clerks in the state of New York who are unwilling to perform their jobs acceptably, using their religious beliefs as an excuse, and are demanding a special pass to discriminate against gays and lesbians by refusing to issue marriage licenses. Obviously, the clerks are a government issue, whereas the standards of the counseling profession are not, but it’s a similar theme these days. Religious Fundamentalists want reality to impose to their weird notions of how things are, and when reality intervenes and treats them the same as everybody else, they have a temper tantrum. We’ll be seeing a lot more of these in the coming years.
It’s been a while since we’ve posted a video from Molotov Mitchell of WorldNetDaily. He’s a sad attempt at right-wing humor and “biting” commentary, which fails for all the reasons right-wing “comedians” and commentators always fail, and honestly, unless you really go looking for his work, you’re not going to just run across it. As with all right-wing attempts at being cool, what comes across is a sad, weakling of a man who is so frightened of the world around him that he simply spews hatred at all the people who are smarter than he is. He believes he has gay friends, like so many bigots do. “I have a black friend! I have a gay friend!,” they are known to say. In reality, it’s usually that there’s a gay person or a person of color who lives in their neighborhood, and who tolerates the right-wing idiot in their midst, while making fun of them behind their backs. He expressed support for the Ugandan “Kill the Gays” bill, of course claiming, like so many stupid right-wingers, that it wasn’t about killing gay people, except for the times he pretty much advocated for genocide.
Anyway, Porno Pete is excited about Molotov’s new video where he goes after Dan Savage for saying mean things. I’m not going to defend every single thing Dan has ever said — Dan doesn’t even defend every single thing he’s ever said — but I will point out that while there are those on the side of fairness and humanity who are lit fuses and sometimes pop off, we are actually fighting for good. This is in direct opposition to fundamentalist religious bigots who tend to value “civility” in discourse, all while advocating, for instance, for non-existent policies on teen bullying and promulgating hateful messages which lead to kids taking their own lives. I’ll side with the people who actually fight for good, with a liberal use of the word “f*ck,” thank you.
Moreover, Molotov claims that Dan has bragged about “cheating” on his spouse. Um, no. Dan has explained the arrangement of his marriage many times, and all literate people are free to look that up. But as Dan and Terry’s arrangement is “consensual,” it wins the moral contest over the Fundamentalist Christian version of open marriages, which tends to involve a lot of lying and closet homosexuality.
In this video about Dan Savage, Molotov also expresses his adoration for Rick Santorum, which makes sense, as overgrown WATB child-men with bizarre fixations on gay sex tend to flock together.
Hey Molotov? Actually, a majority of Americans support marriage equality. I know you simply can’t get your small head around that fact, but it’s true. You’ve lost.
Porno Pete adds:
If you haven’t seen Molotov’s previous video “My Gay Friends,” please watch this YouTube of it as well. It is compassionate yet honest Christianity in action and I believe the finest short video ever produced on this H. issue.
The video he’s talking about was universally reviled by gay people. But I will agree that it’s a good example of Porno Pete’s perverted version of Christian love in action. If you want to see it, click on Molotov’s name above and do some scrolling.
Bryan Fischer is so stupid that he thinks that guys had unprotected sex and contracted HIV/AIDS because Barney Frank “modeled a lifestyle” for people. Yes, everybody was just a-followin’ Barney Frank’s lead.
It’s sad that there are people in this country who are uninformed/fearful enough to believe this crap. The good news is that their numbers go down every day. Fundamentalist idiots just aren’t replacing themselves in actuarial tables.
“It’s becoming increasingly clear that the gay rights movement, the gay marriage movement, really does believe you’re like a racist if you think marriage is the union of husband and wife,” explained Maggie Gallagher, co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage. “They want to rip Genesis out of our Bibles.”
Maybe I should leave it to one of my Christian friends to say this, but it’s adorably quaint listening to a representative of the Religious Right say this, since the entire “family values” Christian Right pretty much ripped the Gospels out of the Bible as the first order of business for their movement. Isn’t that sort of the basis for the religion they claim to follow?
[Warning: There is some, ahem, language in this piece.]
This was making the rounds yesterday and I didn’t get to it. There was a post on Daily Kos the other day about how refreshing, and how different in tone, pro-gay messages are when they come from straight guys. Rather than making long, well-thought out arguments about why marriage equality is right, etc., the messages from straight guys — and I know this to be true with my own straight male friends — tend to be more along the lines of “who cares? And go to hell if you don’t like it!” The Kos piece used Clint Eastwood’s message of support as a springboard — if you don’t remember, it went like this:
Warren Throckmorton has changed quite a bit over the years. Having become disillusioned when he realized what a motley crew of science-denying liars he was surrounded by in the Religious Right, he has increasingly spoken out against harmful “ex-gay” corporations and the anti-gay bigotry of the Religious Right. As a college professor, he was uniquely positioned to make this change, as his job description requires actual thinking, as opposed to people like Tony Perkins and Porno Pete, who are only expected to bark out anti-gay catchphrases, lie a lot, and in the case of Porno Pete, keep an encyclopedic photographic catalogue of what goes on at fetish sex events.
Porno Pete is upset that Warren has gone over to the “dark side” of thinking, analyzing and generally not being a reactionary, fearful wingnut, and he is asking him to apologize:
This morning I sent the following public letter to Grove City College professor and homosexuality-affirming blogger Warren Throckmorton, as well as dozens of pro-family leaders. Note that Throckmorton, a frequent critic of conservative evangelical leaders, has been singled out for praise by the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center — the same SPLC that outrageously labeled AFTAH, Family Research Council, American Family Association and other mainstream pro-family organizations as “hate groups.”
I am sure this letter was the highlight of everyone’s day.
In another post we will publish Prof. Rob Gagnon’s response to Richard Cohen’s new and curiously “gay”-affirmative approach to the homosexual issue.
So here is the letter. Let us correct its grammar and ideas:
Warren,
I certainly don’t think Richard Cohen or anyone needs to apologize for stating the obvious truth that “Change [away from and rejecting homosexuality] is possible.” If we were to apologize for everything that “offends” hardened LGBT activists, we’d be apologizing 24/7.
Probably should get on that then. Of course, we’re not just talking about offending “hardened LGBT activists,” we’re also talking about destroying the families of gay people who end up killing themselves, having been so abused by the messages that come from people like Peter LaBarbera and Richard Cohen.
The question is, when will YOU apologize for affirming homosexuality as an acceptable (or innocuous) identity — while claiming (falsely) to uphold biblical orthodoxy?
“When will you apologize for pulling your head out of the sand and embracing reality, Warren? You don’t seem to be taking religious fundamentalist, reality-denying, pathetic, fearful wingnuttery seriously AT ALL. I am beginning to question your commitment to Sparkle Motion!”
When will YOU repent for working hand-in-hand with “gay” activists who are diametrically opposed to the Christian worldview on homosexuality as an overcomable sexual sin (and an abomination) — by actively discrediting the need AND potential for wholesome change away from same-sex behavior and indulging same-sex desires?
“When will YOU repent for telling the truth and not having a psychological problem, like my friends and I have, that compels us to give a hateful, knee-jerk response to everything that isn’t just like us? And you haven’t come and visited my photographic leathersex archives in a long time, and I’ve been texting you about it, like, a lot!”
You should either publicly apologize for undermining Scriptural (and observable) Truth — or renounce your claims to be faithful to historic Christian sexual teachings. This request is made more urgent by your employment with an evangelical institution, Grove City College, which purports to be “authentically Christian” — something few biblically-faithful observers of your recent flirtation with pro-”gay” advocacy would accuse you of being.
“While I am aware that my reference to ‘observable Truth’ is hilarious to all but the dumbest American citizens alive, I still feel the need to stand up and attack you and shame you in front of your employer, from my dark cubbyhole in the Chicago suburbs. This is actually my job! I am the leader of a hate group of one!”
I can document all the above statements concerning your conduct and “gay”-affirming advocacy, which has caused widespread consternation and confusion in Christian circles, and within the pro-family movement. You (or anyone) may publish this if you wish.
“I have the internet, just like everyone else does! Why, why, why won’t you call me?”
