Business As Usual

So yeah. It's been months since the last post here. And even longer since the last post by me. A lot of shit's happened, keeping me away from this.

I'm going for it. With half a year left, it's time I crossed the Atlantic and dipped my toe into the murky, santorum-stained pool that is the US presidential election. It's fair to say at this point that if Obama had any intention of rolling back Bush's hideous 'keep Arabs in prison for the fun of it' schemes, his 'spy on everyone everyfuckingwhere' schemes and his terrifying overstepping of the checks on executive privilege that stop a President from being a monarch, he would have done so already. It's very unlikely that he'll do anything of the sort for his second term, but you know what? Despite all that, he is still the lesser of two evils. Thanks to the Republican candidates willingly turning their entire primary nomination procedure into a contest to see who can go the craziest to appease the lunatic fringe of their voters, Obama knows for a fact that there's a hell of a lot of bad shit he can do between now and November while remaining the lesser of two evils. So thanks, Republicans, for making sure the bar for qualifying as a feasible presidential candidate was set so low that so far the only lifeforms able to fit underneath it have been tapeworms and...well, your own failed candidates. Let's see some of the funnier ones who've already shot their bolt here, shall we, and remind ourselves of just what the sweet screaming fuck they tried to get away with:  

HERMAN CAIN: Complete fucking idiot. Apparently decided that running a country is the same as running a chain of third-rate pizza joints, and lifted his tax code from a vidja game designed to make half-arsed micromanagement fans think that adjusting percentages on big sliders was the most work you had to do to fix a financial crisis. At one point tried the slogan 'Let's Beat Obama With A Cain', in what has to be the ballsiest attempt by a black guy to appeal to unreconstructed racist shitkickers in the history of ever. In a similar vein, actually went before audiences and claimed that for President, QUOTE, "We need a leader, not a reader." Claimed he wanted to electrocute immigrants, then said he didn't mean it when he realised sane people had heard him, then said no he actually meant it after all. He blamed liberals for the crucifixion of Jesus. He thought "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was in the Constitution. He thought federal tax law wasn't in the Constitution, when in fact it is in Article One of the Fuckmothering Constitution. He wanted to put an upper page limit of THREE on any law anyone wanted to pass. He seemed to base his entire presidential run on looking at Sarah Palin and deciding she had too much class, too much knowledge about foreign policy and not quite enough skeletons in her closet. Finally brought down by a running tackle from a decades-long sexual escapade that was actually kinda tame by Republican standards. It was consensual, it was heterosexual and between adults. There weren't even any diapers involved.*  

RICK 'SILENT P' SANTORUM: Ohhhh, this motherfucker. He had a lot going for him, in the eyes of the crazy foaming zealot demographic. Whiter than Herman Cain. More Christian-zealot than Mitt Romney. More god-given man-parts (and thus by zealot logic more leadership ability) than Michelle Bachmann. Thanks to a genius little viral-rebranding move by Dan Savage, Santorum's name was rapidly redefined so that he lived up to it perfectly (look it the fuck up, I'm not typing that out) but it didn't so much as slow down his attempts to legislate his thinly-veiled anti-gay barbarism. Example: "The reason the left has gone after same-sex marriage is because it’s a two-fer. When you redefine marriage, you cheapen marriage. You make it into something less valuable, less special... it is a sure bet that will undermine faith." He's almost right, in that gay marriage will undermine certain belief systems common to Christianity, as well as some of the other more authoritarian religious systems out there. It's not gay people's fault, it's not an intentional thing, it's just happening. Same reason that the act of looking up undermines the beliefs of people who think the sky doesn't exist. Happily married gay couples undermine the stupid idea that gay marriage will lead to man-on-dog sex and give EVERYONE AIDS. But that's not faith, because faith is belief without evidence. Believing in things that're proven to be untrue is denial, not faith, and one of the best things we can do on this planet is undermine denial whenever we see it. It would fix the creationism-in-schools problem for a fucking start.

Aside from this, Santorum's campaign was pretty lacklustre. His entire platform was basically 'BIBLE BIBLE BIBLE', which was doomed from the fucking start, and his recent withdrawal was a whimper rather than the hilarious bang I was half-expecting: Rick himself being caught buried up to his nuts in a gay dog.

MICHELLE BACHMANN: Where to start? As early as 2008, this walking pile of crazy was declaring that it was essential to dig up Alaska for the few weeks' worth of oil that might be under there, and in October of that year she actually went on Hardball and implied that Congresspeople who disagreed with her were traitors, saying they should be investigated for 'anti-American views'. And then claimed Chris Matthews actually laid a trap for her to get her to say that. What the fuck.

Bachmann also suffered something of a setback to her chances among sane people when two things were made public about her husband: first, he runs an 'ex-gay clinic' in Minnesota, AKA a fucking psychological torture facility for people who've been convinced by their families and culture that the way they fall in love is morally wrong. Second, Michelle would do the biblical thing and submit to his judgement even if she were made President. So she wouldn't really be running the country, she'd just be handling the bits of governance that her husband didn't dictate to her. Which is basically like being a secretary who's also been divinely commanded to submit to the boss' sexual whims and bear his children. Because that's the kind of brain that could run a country perfectly. Throw in some perfunctory red-baiting(because all the cool wingnuts were calling the nasty black guy a communist) and the usual creationist bullshit forced onto schools wherever she could manage in her Minnesota district, and that's about it for her. Not even very entertaining as a candidate, beyond inspiring me to invent the word 'Cocktrocious' (to this day, that's only been used twice on the Internet if Google is to be believed. This must be rectified.)

RON PAUL: Now this guy was crazy. From his racist-as-fuck newsletters marketed to the tinfoil-hat black-helicopter survivalist nutcases in the Nineties, to his defence of those newsletters in the later nineties, to the public's rediscovery of those newsletters in 2011 and his claim never to have read them or been involved with them. There were all sorts of things wrong with Ron Paul's views, let alone his campaign, and having his picture taken with fucking actual I-shit-you-not nazis can't have helped. The sad thing is that he had more sane ideas than all the other Republican candidates did, and he was still so frothingly insane that it was a bad idea to even consider him as a candidate at all. Being right about Wall Street fuckery and cheating bankers, for example, didn't mean he was also right when he wanted to disband the EPA and remove the main federal restrictions on what corporations were allowed to pump into the soil and water. And that whole newsletter thing? First he defended them, then claimed he'd never read them. The latter had to involve either lying out of his arse or going senile and honestly forgetting they'd ever existed at all. Neither of these is a good qualification for Leader of the Free World, which people seemed to twig on because Paul's candidacy didn't last long after that, and now seems to exist solely on the bumper stickers of people who completely miss the fucking point that they're driving down STATE HIGHWAYS. Chumps.

NEWT GINGRICH: Ohhh boy. This candidacy had everything. So did the candidate, including a history of absolutely reprehensible shit like serving divorce papers to his first wife while she was on a cancer ward, and then marrying his mistress. Then divorcing that mistress to marry his *new* mistress. All the while promoting the 'sanctity of marriage', which apparently allows straight men to shrug women on and off like they're trying out shirts, but makes women into sluts if they end one and can't ever fit gay people of any kind ever. So when the morally bankrupt womaniser who spent the Nineties chastising Bill Clinton for being a less morally bankrupt womaniser started outlining what his policies might be, we all knew it would be interesting - even before he declared he would arrest judges who didn't agree with him. The way a laughing poodle with hands is interesting. Let's have a look.
 
"If he will accept it, I will ask John Bolton to be Secretary of State. But I will only appoint him if he will agree that his first job is the complete and thorough transformation fo the State Department and the replacement of the current Foreign Service culture with a new entrepreneurial and aggressive culture dedicated to the proposition that defending freedom and defending America is the first business of the State Department, not appeasing opponents." - so his foreign policy idea seemed to be screaming 'FUCK YOU' at the entire world by making them have conversations with someone who absolutely hates other countries. Nice.

"Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal." - Newt 'clarifying' his budget plan to save school districts a few bucks, as if 'have the black kids clean up after the white kids' needed clarification.

With ideas like these, you can see why people who were, oh, parents might have something to say about his chances. As well as those who recognise that while America is very heavily armed, that does not make it necessary or remotely wise to flip off the rest of the planet at every opportunity. But that's Newt all over. Ugly to the core. No wonder the fucker's bid collapsed.

It's possible I've missed someone. If I did, they were such a fucking joke that I've currently forgotten they were ever even considered for it. Either way, looking at this lineup of chumps they were willing to put in the seat instead of Mitt 'My Wife Works Hard Through Our Nannies' Romney, they've got absolutely no chance. Which means Obama will be under no pressure at all to act like a decent human being to keep his seat. Thanks, you bastards.



*Your Magical Truthsaying Bastard Mick-approved google search for this is "David Vitter diaper prostitute". Bring a vomit bag, but notice that to this day there is no detail on whether he was wearing the diaper, or the hooker was. Fucking mainstream media.

SOPA and washing away freedoms

Don't be afraid of standing up for what is right. I know that most people are just concerned about their own lives, and little beyond that. Why risk standing up when it could ruin what you've worked for? And beyond that, the only reason some people will stand is because they are taking a stance of their own Id, going by what is most convenient to them. They don't want school uniforms because it creates more laundry for instance. Never mind that it can be restricting and even sexist to create uniforms for children.

With the protests happening in 2011, and by extension the protests online against S.O.P.A. and P.I.P.A., most people aren't going to take the time to worry about it. Someone else will get it. Someone else will stop it. I don't want to take half a minute to sign a petition. Let someone else do it.

And here we are in today's world, watching movies, reading books, thinking "Man, I wish I could stand up for stuff like that. Wouldn't it be so cool to have these morals that we stand by?" Maybe you don't think it, but I do. I wish that the world we live in was brought to think that personal morals are more important than personal gain. That sometimes freedom is more important.

I'm an American, and I know that Mick thinks that it's cool to never live in this country, but I love it. My family lives here, my father worked in the military for twenty years of his life, same as most of my aunts, uncles and cousins. I love to hear of how my founding fathers (a little literally; my line goes back all the way to Thomas Jefferson and beyond) created a land for those who wish to live freely. They set key rules down for us all to live by, and one of them included Freedom of Speech.

They lived in a time when the King could punish them just for speaking their minds. But now in today's world, we should live with no legal consequence to speak what we want when we want (unless what we say leads to some incriminating evidence.)

Until today. With SOPA and PIPA, if a company says that anything you post is infringing their copyright, then they will have the power to take away what you posted, as well as black out the whole site that it was posted on, including Wikipedia, icanhascheezeburger network, reddit, craigslist, ebay, etc. Not just the big piracy and torrenting websites, but if you even have a link that leads to a website that infringes copyright law, then you can be punished in the process.

Think of a world owned by companies. It's horrific. While online pirates should be punished for taking work and claiming it as their own, as well as passing it around for free when it is illegal, the ordinary person and online websites should not have to feel this threat of first amendment laws.

So please, write to your congressman, shout out to them, beg at the feet of even judges if the law gets passed, just make certain that these laws do not get passed. Our freedoms should not be at the whims of poorly written laws.


Sincerely,

How We Do It, or Sometimes Shit Is Awful

It's funny. Sometimes you're in a discussion with someone and you wish for an example of something. You want a simple, effective way to help them understand what you're talking about - something you can relate to them with, so you can take it a step further and show them a perspective they otherwise probably wouldn't have noticed.

Sometimes you get an example and really don't fucking want it. Yesterday I was asked how I can deal with death and see life as anything other than pointless. Well, fucker, this is what you get.

This is my cat, Patsy (named for Joanna Lumley's character in Absolutely Fabulous). She's sixteen, and as I write this, she's dying. Her hind legs don't really work; she stopped eating yesterday, she can't drink water properly and she's losing her voice - which might be the most painful part of it for the rest of us. She was given to mimicking the tones of voice we use in greeting each other when one of us entered a room; it looked a lot like she was trying to communicate the way we did. Maybe she was. She's a fucking smart cat. Now she can't do that; she can barely make sounds.

We got Patsy from a shelter when I was thirteen, and she was three. She'd apparently had a bad life before that; beautiful as she was, someone had treated her so badly she almost panicked herself unconscious her first night in the house. Judicious application of cat treats was necessary to get her to come out from under the stereo (oddly, as soon as she came out, she picked up a pen in her mouth and carried it around with her for about half an hour, then never did anything of the kind again).

Now I'm twenty-six. She's sixteen, and fully half my life later she's finally over her fear of the vacuum cleaner...and I'm watching her body shut down over the course of a few days. There are people who'd call this pointless attachment to an animal. I would, quite honestly, be very fucking tempted to hit them in the face. Anyone who's owned and cared for an animal for any length of time can tell you that they very quickly become family, and seem to take on human traits. It's been posited that hanging around humans can affect some animals and raise their intelligence. Regardless of whether it's true, Patsy's the most stark example I've ever seen of why people might think so; she tries to talk to us, copies our intonation. I'm half-sure I heard her try a consonant once or twice. Her intelligence seemed almost comparable to ours, like a toddler who can't quite communicate; she very quickly became a well-loved part of the family. Watching her die is excruciating.

What I'm getting at here is that this is more or less how a materialist and anti-theist* like me reacts to every death of a loved one. The fact that she's a cat doesn't actually change much; the period of grieving is shorter as reality reasserts itself, but the thought of losing her, before the fact, is just as intensely emotive as losing anyone in my family.

What this has in common with a believer's view of losing a beloved pet is that neither I nor they believe that my cat is going to experience an afterlife. She will simply stop. Her clockwork's winding down, and she is going to die and that's it. Soon. Maybe tonight. Her body will become electrically inert, and begin to break down into its component molecules through decomposition. This is, give or take some greater or smaller knowledge of the biological processes involved, how - say - a Muslim or Jew or Christian in my position would also view the coming events. A Hindu or Buddhist, or someone of another faith that involves reincarnation, would have a slightly different view of things; for the three big monotheist groups, though, this works well enough as a comparison.

Where it differs, of course, is that this is exactly the same way I view a human's death. Same processes, with a lot more grieving for various reasons ranging from language and interaction (letting us get a lot more involved with humans than other species) to plain old human conceit making our brains tend to register other humans as more important. I've been told I'm a depressing person because of this; I've been told I shouldn't think such terrible, bleak things. I have had this said to me more than once, by people who really, honestly believed that if I didn't agree with them before my own death I would suffer until the end of time.

Next time someone tells you they'd be depressed without the idea of an afterlife, remember what faith they are; most versions of heaven involve a ringside gloater's seat for watching what happens in hell.

And next time someone mentions to you they think animals go to heaven, thank them from me for at least trying to help.


*Anti-theist, in the late Hitchens' definition: not only do I not believe that religious stories are true, but I think it would be bloody awful if they were.

Scouts Do Lead People Forward, After All

This is actually the most awesome thing I've heard about a kids' social activity in a long time: the Girl Scouts are allowing transgendered boys to join as girls. The second most awesome thing is that the usual bigots are losing their shit in exactly the ways you'd predict from something like this - I found out about this from the American Family Association, whose 'call to action' (read: 'oh no people are moving further from the 1950s and megachurches') email list I've hooked into for laughs.

The seven-year-old's name is Bobby Montoya, and she (biologically the kid's a boy, but identifies as a girl and frankly at that age there's no real difference) was initially rejected by the Girl Scouts of Colorado because of plumbing that won't be anyone's business for at least another eight or nine years:

“I said, ‘Well, what’s the big deal,'” Bobby’s mother, Felisha Archuleta, told KUSA. “She said, ‘It doesn’t matter how he looks. He has boy parts, and he can’t be in Girl Scouts. Girl Scouts don’t allow that [and] I don’t want to be in trouble by parents or my supervisor.'"

Hey, bureaucracy used as a thin veil over something that looks a fuck of a lot like pointless biological determinism. Who'd have thought? Only problem for this buttcloud is that the Girl Scouts as an organisation actually doesn't see it that way, and takes a much more accepting approach to the whole thing: the Girl Scouts of Colorado have released a statement saying that that's bull and the kid is welcome to join.

“We accept all girls in kindergarten through 12th grade as members. If a child identifies as a girl and the child's family presents her as a girl, Girl Scouts of Colorado welcomes her as a Girl Scout,” according to the statement.

“Our requests for support of transgender kids have grown, and Girl Scouts of Colorado is working to best support these children, their families and the volunteers who serve them," the statement continued. "In this case, an associate delivering our program was not aware of our approach. She contacted her supervisor, who immediately began working with the family to get the child involved and supported in Girl Scouts. We are accelerating our support systems and training so that we're better able to serve all girls, families and volunteers."

That troop leader had better be fucking grateful. The organisation's just covered their arse out of the goodness of their hearts, even if it was an honest mistake - for one thing, a troop leader in an organisation that looks after young children had BETTER know all the fuckin' rules. On the other hand, if it wasn't an accident, and the troop leader was actually discriminating against the kid based on their own ideas of biological determinism rather than following the Scouts' rules, then the Scouts had better give the motherfucker a long talking-to.

And as usual, there's some motherfucker who's declaring this to be dangerous. How dare children play together!

But others think the Girl Scouts should be more steadfast in its policies, letting boys be boys and girls be girls.

To cross that line “is child sexual abuse, the violation of children’s genetic reality aided by a society that is reverting back to the dark," said Judith A. Reisman, visiting professor of law at Liberty University School of Law. "If he has male parts, he is a male. The children in a given society always reflect its belief systems. Until the 1950s the Western world was built and run by adults largely clear about their sexuality and their beliefs. People used to ask which is stronger, nature or nurture. Now we are so 'smart' we don’t even know we have a nature.”

I love the fucking false equivalency there. Letting kids be kids means ignoring that they're doomed to have sinful sexual thoughts about other people when they grow up!

Fox News' Keith Ablow, a fucking retard in his own right and a self-proclaimed 'doctor' with no actual medical qualifications (with a history of this shit - when that transgendered dancer Chaz Bono was on Dancing With The Stars, Ablow compared being transgendered to anorexia and cutting off one's own legs) has weighed in on this too. Starting with "I know a lot of experts will disagree with me" - because they're experts after all, they know what they're talking about - called this "a form of abuse" and said it should be stopped until more data was available on what potential harm it could do (because, y'know, there are ways to gather data on things without observation of their effects. Rush Limbaugh's never looked at something before complaining about it in his life).

“On the face of it, it seems to be expecting far too much psychologically of young girls to ignore the anatomy of a boy and act as though he is a girl," Ablow said. "The girls are just developing comfort with their own bodies, after all.”

How fucking loony is this man? He thinks these seven-year-olds won't be able to play together because THE GIRLS WON'T BE ABLE TO STOP THINKING ABOUT THE BOY'S PENIS. Because even that early in life, as far as Ablow's concerned, that's all women should focus on.

Loving The Money-Changers

Jesus was one of the 1%. Who knew?

With a hat-tip to the inimitable Hugh Kramer, I come with news that Bryan Fischer has declared that Jesus would attack Occupy Wall Street protesters. What the FUCK.

That's not big enough. WHAT THE FUCK.

Jesus would side with the rich and privileged and powerful over "the least of these", would he, you crazy old bastard? Son of a bitch. I don't say this very often, the most recent example was Jerry Falwell - but I hate this piece of shit and I can't wait until he fucking dies. He can sit there and write this epic Christian Taliban buttclump:

A CNN anchor asked earlier this week whether or not Jesus would occupy Wall Street.
That question can be answered with a categorical “No.”
First, Jesus has no truck with rank, blatant hypocrites*. The OWS crowd has now fallen to squabbling over who gets a slice of the $500,000 which has been donated to them, and which, by the way, they put in one of the evil, greedy banks they are out to destroy.

I love that. That's some quality fucking logic reversal there. It's not that OWS is made up of people sick of Wall Street being staffed by people so obscenely wealthy and greedy we can't call them robber barons because barons aren't rich enough. It's that the peasants are greedy! How dare they want to be able to eat and pay their bills in the same month!

Secondly, Jesus has no truck with those whose entire agenda is to flagrantly disobey two of the Ten Commandments of God.

God said, “Thou shalt not steal,” a commandment Jesus affirmed on numerous occasions. Stealing is wrong, and it doesn’t make it right when government does it under color of law.

Hoh-lee shit. Really, Fischer? Really? You couldn't say that to Bush, who (A) actually fucking stole under the guise of government, and (B) might've been fucking stupid enough to listen to you, and maybe stopped this shit from happening in the first place?

And the OWS crowd is animated by a thoroughly ugly disregard for the 10th Commandment as well. God says, “Thou shalt not covet...any thing that is thy neighbor’s.” And yet the Occupiers are driven by a dark, bitter, resentful, angry and acquisitive greed for stuff that belongs to other people.

I submit that no political program that is predicated on a violation of twenty percent of God’s moral law can possibly be right, can possibly work, or can possibly be good for America.

I submit that any per cent of your god's law, enshrined into the law of the land solely because you think your god said it, can never, ever be good for any nation. Especially the tenth commandment, which legislates against nasty thoughts and is thus both totally unenforceable and completely against nature. You prick.

And again, Fischer rails against hypocrisy and then turns around in the same fucking article and bludgeons his own point to death. OWS are greedy? Really? That's why they're protesting Wall Street's massive greed and acquisitiveness that drives the 1% to gather literally pointless amounts of money until their bank accounts are so huge they would take longer than a human lifetime to spend? It's that the 99% are greedy for wanting a big enough account that they can afford to take their children to hospital since you and yours declared free healthcare was an abomination in the eyes of your god?


Fuck you, Bryan Fischer. You're a gigantic piece of shit, and I'll be glad when you're fucking dead.


*Well, shit, now I need a new irony meter again. Until Karl Rove finally succumbs to whatever disease makes his head that shape, we won't have the raw materials to make one strong enough to withstand Fischer.

So Fucking Sick Of This Shit

It's time for an alternate viewpoint on this. 9/11 happened ten years ago. And what too few people seem to realise is that the terrorists have won.

Michael Moore was fucking right. Okay, yeah, he sounded preachy as hell about it, and everyone got a big laugh out of it ha ha look at the sanctimonious liberal okay time for some fat jokes FUCK YOU. He was right and he was lambasted for being right, in a time when the people who needed an excuse - and found that 9/11 fit the bill nicely - really wanted as few people as possible to catch on to what the fuck they were doing. Moore had it spot-on when Iraq was first invaded, sparking the second of two wars that have each dwarfed 9/11 on their own in terms of civilian casualties, in Dude, Where's My Country: 'Hey, let's dismantle our way of life so the terrorists can't blow it up!'

What was the biggest meme the bastards spread about Al Qaeda? 'They hate us for our freedoms!' What fucking freedoms? There aren't any left. America has become a place where mosques are vandalised just for not being Christian places of worship and innocent people are attacked - potentially fatally - for being Muslim, thanks to the shaved-monkey touchiness with which the US Christian establishment has succeeded in saturating the nation's congregation.

Islam has become the new Communism, the latest bogeyman, and no one with a vested interest has lost any time in turning anyone swarthy-looking into a target of suspicion and paranoia. The very word 'Islamofascist' was coined as a club for bludgeoning the American populace about the head until the nation's behaviour, seen from the rest of the world's viewpoint, closer resembles that of a chicken than a human being - convinced the world is coming to an end one minute, busily consuming as much as it can the next, and eagerly closing the barn door to shut itself in rather than deal with the rest of the world in a rational manner - sacrificing what used to be seen as essential human liberty for the mere illusion of greater safety.

And it's going to keep getting worse. Brian Kane has put a great phrase to it:

It’s time to give it over to history once and for all. There’s no question that the aftermath has long since overshadowed the tragedy itself. It is the aftermath that has reshaped the world in its twisted and destructive grasp. We’ve long ago stopped even pretending to be interested in the lives lost and lives disrupted. The power elite found every possible avenue of exploitation — political, economic, social — and have ruined anything and everything in their efforts to wring every last ounce of worth from them. And with the reality wiped away by the iconography and ideology, we can safely let it go. The whirlwind it created is now permanently self-sustaining without it.

It should be let go. It won't.

It will be kept going, the fear will be kept in the background of every news report possible (as well as almost every Fox News broadcast, pretending as they do to be an actual news service), the wars will be carried on until there's nothing further to be squeezed from the nation, and then the serfs will be given something else to be worried about. More than anything else for the past thirty years, 9/11 has been a supremely fortunate windfall for those who envision America as an aristocracy, who look at the country's middle class the way locusts look at fields of wheat, who can and will do anything possible to get away with taxing the living fuck out of anyone but the rich. Bush and the GOP senate were able to strong-arm a lot of their deregulation fantasies through, with almost no resistance, and loot the treasury in an orgy of war profiteering. Without 9/11 it would have taken another decade to achieve all this.

Meanwhile, the fundamentalists of both Islam and Christianity get what they want - a polarised, us-versus-them worldview spoonfed to every believer they can reach, each faith's leaders painting the other as controlled by , if not embodying, supernatural forces of evil. And everyone else, from the sane believers to the tired, angry idealist nonbelievers, gets a little bit more fucking sick of this shit.

I'm not a homosexual? (NSFW)

Reading about some insane shit that Michele Bachmann has said just reminded me about what a neuropsychologist said about me.

In a very long and detailed report, he basically summed me up as "Shy, manic depressed, suffers from ADHD, and while she says she's attracted to women, she isn't."

Sure, I'm not attracted to women in a normal way. I love women's bodies, I want to caress their breasts, to hold them tight against me, to kiss them tenderly, and to fuck them hard with my dick.

... wait a minute...

Yeah, I secretly want to bone women. That's how I am attracted to them. As for men, I want to bone them too, but I love the fact that my boyfriend can take me in a heterosexual manner. It's a weird feeling. I love being a woman, so I'm not transexual. I might be a transvestite though. Which is alright by Mick because I get to keep my vagina. And that's alright by me too. Even though my dream self keeps giving me dicks, I actually like being a woman.

And I like being in a heterosexual relationship with my man.

But sometimes I am reminded that I'm bisexual.

Now, I know that this blog isn't all about me. So I'm going to stop talking about me and talk about other people.

Like this neuro doctor, who spent 10 minutes talking with me, then shoved me in a small room to do a series of tests, and then decided he knew all about me (they were pretty good tests though.), there are multiple others who believe that being gay isn't the fault of the person.

But it is a fault and has a cure.

What is the cure you might ask? Why it's simple. Just pray the gay away.

You simply join a ministry, abstain from sex, and if you're a tranny you throw away the clothes that you feel good about wearing but isn't considered normal for the gender you were born in. Then you go to church, confess every sin, pray every day, read the bible, get a good job, date a few members of the opposite sex, and then just hate yourself because you're still sexually attracted to members of the same sex.

This has actually led to suicides.

Now, I'm not saying that being a Christian means that you have to be straight as an arrow. After all, I'm bisexual. In fact, I have met ministers and members of churches who believed that the bible doesn't come out and state that being gay is sinful. My boyfriend may speak differently, but if you take all of the bible and follow every single law to the letter, then my mother would still be married and not allowed to speak in church except through her husband, and I would be stoned to death at the door of my parents.

The bible is open to interpretation. And my interpretation is that all genders are equal, and all peoples of different faiths, cultures, and sexual orientation should be free to speak, free to live, free to worship (or not worship), free to learn, and, most importantly, free to love.

America wasn't founded on Christian beliefs, nor is it run on them like other countries are. America wasn't founded on hate or prejudice against others (even if some of the founding fathers were bigots, sexist, and racist... okay, all of them). And America wasn't born to hate.

But why are so many people saying that God should always stay in the pledge, as it always has; that all men, be they atheist, Muslim, Christian, or Buddhist should swear on the bible; that homosexuals should be killed or at the least they shouldn't be encouraged by marriage?

Well, let me tell you something.

The pledge of allegiance never contained the word "Under God" until the mid 1900s.

People swear on the bible because it is sacred to the individual, but for someone who doesn't believe in it, swearing on it is about as effective as swearing on a piece of toilet paper.

And one last thing.

Heterosexuals are the ones who have gay babies. ;p