Fight them or be destroyed. Because they will not spare you.

Thoughts knocking around in my head today:

What’s frustrating about my current job situation is that I have several deadlines bearing down on me but am wasting this morning doing monkey-brain grade dirt nanny work because we can’t seem to find and hire (and keep) field techs with more brains and energy than an actual monkey.

 

If the American Taliban thinks that the SCOTUS will “stop abortion” they’re as stupid as they are credulous. Humans have been DXing their spawn since before the hippies invented sex in the Sixties.

 

The difference is simply “will emptying my womb kill or injure me, or not?” be the question, and the wingnuts are happy to answer “Maybe. Take your chances, slut.” because the wealthy ones know their cash will ensure their mistresses and daughters will be safely surgically de-fetused and the others are some combination of stupid, delusional, high on their own supply, or just mean as goddamn weasels. 

Of course, it's not really about "stopping abortion". It's about killing sluts with coathangers, and jailing them, and ruining their lives.

 

And the ultimate irony? The real Abortion Doctor is their precious Nature’s God, who ends some ridiculously huge number of pregnancies with miscarriage.

 

But. That’s not the real goal. The sleazy Alito screed spells it out in letters of fire. It’s marriage equity and contraceptives and every other ruling that keeps the Bible-bangers’ noses out of your bedroom, your workplace, your life.

Because it's not really about "stopping abortion". It's about making everything that Republicans think is icky - men kissing men, women loving up women, people dressing "funny", people not listening to them talk about sex and how if those people aren't doing it their way they're doing it wrong. And that's evil. And evil must be destroyed.

 

So stop kidding yourself. You have a choice; fight them now and stop them. Or be crushed by them.

 

If you’re not prostrate before the Cross?

 

Those nice happy friendly Jesus people in the picture below? 

 

They're coming for your fucking heads.

 

I hope you will never know

I see that the national news is full of people squeeeeing about abortion.

Here's the thing.

As the father of a girl who was delivered stillborn at full term, until you've walked that cruel hard road yourself your options are pretty much limited to agreeing that the decision is that of the parents, any family and friends they choose to involve, and their doctors, and then shutting the hell up.

The notion that you, or I, or anyone not intimately known to the parents of the child and anyone they choose to involve, can make that choice for them, or should? It would be insulting if it wasn't so vile as to be beyond insulting.

No one aborts a pregnancy for fun, or out of carelessness, or without deliberation and grief.

Abortion, like adoption and stillbirth, is simply a tragedy.

Had I known what would happen to Bryn would I have advised my wife we should end her pregnancy early? Before she had two hundred and fifty-odd nights lying listening to Bryn's heartbeat? Before she spent days and weeks and months hoping and dreaming of a future that would only be dust and ashes and even, to this day, pain and grief keener than the sharpest blade?

Hell yes. I would.

If that makes me a murderer in your eyes, stand over the corpse of my daughter.

And tell me how much worse that could be.

The Good Rapist

There are some ideas that are really, really important to other people that I just don't understand.

Not in the "Gee, I can see you're upset about that but I just don't see it the same way..." sort of don't-understand but the "What the fuck did you just say...are you speaking English?" sort of don't-understand.

Kid beauty pageants. Most country music. Medical marijuana. Arguments about great bands of the Sixties.

Stuff like that fall under the "WTF?"-don't-understand category for me.

The obsessive concern about abortions - who has one, who does one, and preventing both - is another one.

First, I start from the position of being a callous bastard. In my opinion there's an assload of people out there fucking up the landscape and wasting perfectly good oxygen. Most of these oxygen-thieves are fairly harmless and so in my mind constitute nothing more than a nuisance.

I mean, damn, people, I was a soldier for 22 years. You don't do that sort of thing for a living because you love people like fuzzy-bunny-wuffies. So the notion that some proto-human might get flushed down the crapper like somebody's discarded baby alligator doesn't exactly fill me with horror and revulsion to a greater degree than the notion of any other human being turned into inert biomass.

Less; in my personal evolutionary scale once someone's actually born they begin to acquire more humanness every day. Up to that point we're all sort of like internal organs with lungs. Born people trump pre-born people in my mind.

And, second, I'm a great believer in leaving other people alone.

And that means that, to me, that if you get pregnant what happens is up to you and the person you did the hard work getting pregnant with. Since I don't have a DSL connection to the Big Sky Daddy I'm not going to pretend that I know better than you what you should do if you get pregnant or your lover gets pregnant.

Come to that, the BSD might not know better, either. Here's that well-known theologian Doghouse Riley on the subject:

"My own concern, though, is with God. What's up with Him, now? Fer chrissakes, the man had 66 books, at least three versions of the Ten Commandments, not counting the twenty or so that follow those and are generally ignored even more fully. He's got Seven Deadly Sins, an equal number of Virtues, thousands of historical exemplars, untold thousands more ahistorical exemplars, and the world's biggest sales force; He Himself gets to choose who becomes a writer, a painter, a composer, a scientist, a dialectician, plus he's fucking tax exempt. He Personally chose Al Gore to invent the internet, yet the internet is just a global porn factory. So I'm told.

Yet He never just came out and said "No abortions, ever. My will. Oh, except to save the life of the mother, once I allow the general acceptance of antiseptics, sometime in the 19th century. Got it?" For the sacred life of me, I can't understand why the central tenet of Christianity remained impenetrable for 19th centuries, especially with all those hair-splitters, pinhead-dancers, and secret coders poring over every Word. I mean, the Man's a fucking loon."

But here's the part about this entire conniption that I do agree with; if you believe, as this guy Mourdock and his supporters and about 69.8% of the GOP circa 2012 seem to believe, that Every Sperm Is Sacred, that life begins at conception, and that Jesus Loves Every Little Fetus...why should you agree that the mother's life...or the circumstances of the conception, for that matter...should make a difference?

The whole business of rape-exceptions and incest-exceptions and mother's-life-exceptions are really a farrago, aren't they? They're sort of an Enlightenment wallpaper over the cold stone walls of Solomon's Temple, a facade to hide the hard Biblical rules from the shrinking sensibilities of modern Westerners unused to notions like presenting your fiancee' with the foreskins of 200 dead Philistines as an engagement present.

So I don't have a problem with Mourdock and his ilk.

I get it.

They're pre-civilized Biblical savages, the direct intellectual descendents of the desert-wandering Jehovah-pesterers that descended on the innocent peoples of the eastern Levant like homicidal locusts and killed everything they didn't rape, carry away, or sacrifice.

I've said this before; I don't love the God of the Hebrews, the God of the Torah, but I can respect Him and his followers. They're at least philosophically consistent. Their God is a desert patriarch and they are His Tribe. What's good for them is Good, and if that's Bad for you?

Too fucking bad for you. Sucks to be you, eh?

So the idea of a happy little rapey family, rape-daddy, raped-mommy, and little rape-baby frolicking around?

Perfectly in keeping with the entire framework that this approach to life brings with it. Hell, in this context even married sex is, well...as Fred Clarke puts it, "kinda rapey":

"When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us."

(This being a quote from someone named Douglas Wilson, who apparently has written a book for devout Christians entitled: Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man)

"In other words (Wilson continues), however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed."

Um. Gee. Well.

Eeeeeeewwwwwwww!!!!!

Ick! Ick!

Okay, I'm going to have to go shower my brain to get THAT image out.

Colonizes? Plants? Suddenly my entire sex life history feels like the chronicle of the existence of the Borg. Next time I have sex with the wife maybe I should start the pillow-talk with "Resistance is Futile. You will be Assimilated."

Gak.

But, anyway, this is It. This is how these people think. This is what they want YOU to think. Or, at the very least, this is how they want you to behave.

Not surprisingly, most modern humans don't WANT to behave that way. There's a reason we no longer wander around deserts living in tents and collect people's foreskins for gifts. The sorts of people who DO still want to do this have probably figured this out.

So if they want to place themselves in a position where they can make the other people, all those other people who DON'T want this to DO this, they will have to...

...lie.

So while I don't doubt that they really feel all warm and lovey about little unborn babies, I suspect the main reason they most of them don't come right out and say, like their idiot pal Mourdock said, that they believe that little unborn rape-babies are as precious and special as ALL little unborn babies is because they understand that the rest of us will look at them like their heads had just spun all the way around like the creepy little girl in the old Exorcist movie.

But they DO believe that.

And because they believe that their God is the one that makes them believe it they want you and me and everyone else to live your life like that, too.

And that tells me everything I need to know about where I want to see them in the political life of my country.

Update 10/27: As always, The Rude Pundit says it better and more filthily:

"The ideologically inconsistent icing on this cake of religion and politics and the well-being of women? If that pregnant rape victim's life is in danger, then, according to Mourdock, she should be able to abort the fetus, God's rape gift be damned. If you point this out to Mourdock or any of the Jesus's wound-lickers of the evangelical right, they would say that we cannot know the ways of God or that everything is part of God's plan or some such shit. And then you might say that if we cannot know God's ways, then how do they know that the rape baby is a gift. And then they'll just give you that look that says they think you're crazy, and it just makes you wanna kick 'em in the taint. Hard."

Yep. What he said.

An Open Letter to Randall Terry and Friends, from The Devil

Dear Randall, and my dear Christian fundamentalists;

I don't know what to say about the recent sudden 33% reduction in doctors willing to treat a woman with a horribly damaged fetus or other dangerous complications of late-term pregnancy that Fred Clark and Doghouse Riley haven't already said better.

Or at least more eloquently.

What I can say is this.

Religion, and religious speech, or speech that is uttered in houses of worship, or by people who profess to have a special affinity for God, is and are accorded particular deference. It is seldom disputed, even more seldom refuted or mocked, by your fellow Americans.

By contrast, lack of faith, or A faith, or, worse, an open dismissal or contempt for religious sentiment is treated as a best a lack, at worst the sort of grievous moral failure that can and should prevent the holder from being elected to public office, teaching the young, or providing care for others from the troubled to the dying. And don't get me started about the way they treat MY worshippers...

Now I will be the first to admit that I am somewhat...unchurched. And that I usually consider religion at most a pleasant diversion that keeps credulous and gullible people occupied who would otherwise spend the time they spend in worship and worship-y activities in irritating or angering me. And I'm usually pleased to accept the credit for most human mayhem and malfeasance.

But not this time. Not this time.

This cowardly little man, who I will not aggrandize by naming, was actuated not by Me, or by the human emotions of lust, fear or greed, but by the promptings of your religious groups, and you religious people, people who have filled his and others' heads with the idea that Dr. Tiller was the moral equivalent of a Nazi SS death camp kommandant, that his actions - though medically critical for the survival and health of the grieving mothers (and no mother who has lost a baby that late could be anything but grieving) - were deserving of death.

Of course, the very churches and pundits and bible-wallopers who have ginned up this Crusade against Abortion (as if the completion of pregnancy was a sacrament right up there with communion and repentance, although Jesus himself in the Gospels speaks nothing about abortion and little about birth) will platitudinously deny that their thunder from pulpit and television had anything to do with this murder. They will blame me, wattling with anger that any of the Godless will dare to connect them with this conscienceless thug, while at the same time uttering mealy-mouthed half-praise for his deed as a "heroic but misguided" act of saving the unborn (superbly unmindful of the words of the apostle Paul, who wrote "Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay,' says the Lord" (Romans 12:19).

And, as always, those of your fellow Americans who don't share your fanaticism but respect your "faith" will nod sagely and sadly, and let you pass. Again. And the war of words - and bullets, bombs and hate - will continue. Because you are People of Faith! People of God! Good People! Your hands may be bloody but your hearts are pure, right?

So. Now I have some words from your God (You may have heard that I'm partial to quoting Scripture? Heh. True.) They are these:

"For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in; naked, and you covered me; sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me." Then the just will answer him, saying: "Lord, when have we see you hungry, and fed you; thirsty, and given you drink? And when have we seen you a stranger, and taken you in? Or naked, and covered you? Or when did we see you sick, or in prison, and visit to you?" And in response, the King shall say to them, "Amen I say to you, whenever you did this for one of these, the least of my brothers, you did it for me." (Matthew 25:35-40)

After I helped boost your Christian brother Bush up to spend eight years as King Shit of Turd Hill, we heard a lot down here from you Jesus Jihadis about Abortion.

And public prayers.

And Ten Comandment plaques, Gay Marriage, Evil Islamic Terrarists, and America the Holy Bible Christian Nation where athiests and lib'rels and homos and heatherns were unfit to sit at the table with the Elect.

But y'know what we didn't hear so much from y'all?

Feeding the hungry.

Clothing the naked. Taking in the stranger. Visiting the prisoner. Comforting the sick.

So I'll make you a deal, a Deal with the Chief of all the Devils.

When every last, every single fucking, swinging-dick hungry American is fed by your hand. When every goddam stranger in this Strange Land is safe and encompassed, every last prisoner given hope, every nit-picking, phlegm-coughing sick person given loving care and tender rest.

Then I'll be willing to listen to our abortion shit with a straight face.

Because until then, my Real True Christian brothers, each and every one of you is just another phony, lying, canting, hypocritical sack of shit. And, what's more, I know that most of you won't stir a finger to help. Most of you anti-abortion zealots will travel across the country to protest Rove v. Wade, you'll bus across town to scream in the ear of a terrified 19-year-old running into Lovejoy Surgicenter, but you wouldn't cross the street to help a hungry derelict to a soup kitchen.

And I'm laughing, for I know what your buddy God has planned for your sorry asses:

Then he shall also say, to those who will be on his left: "Depart from me, you accursed ones, into the eternal fire, which was prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry, and you did not give me to eat; I was thirsty, and you did not give me to drink; I was a stranger and you did not take me in; naked, and you did not cover me; sick and in prison, and you did not visit me."

Heh.

I'll be seeing you. Soon, I hope.

Very truly yours,

The Devil(A Proctor & Gamble Corporation. Visit us on the Web at http://www.churchofsatan.com/!)