Analyzing and refuting the inaccuracies lodged against the lgbt community by religious conservative organizations. Lies in the name of God are still lies.
Media Matters has done a lot this year to fight right-wing nonsense.
They were very helpful in fighting the lies against Kevin Jennings (helpful? Hell, a lot of my information came from them) as well as other lies pushed by some those on the right who seek to exploit ignorance and fear.
So with that in mind, I want to throw out props to the group and encourage you all to support them. Lgbt issues are just one of the things they deal with:
Now secondly, some of you may have noticed that I have been hinting about a second book.
Well to give you more information, I have been working on a second book. But this one won't be as detailed as Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters, my first book.
I want to break down religious right distortions in a manner that conveys their nastiness as well as shining a light on the entities who spout them. My goal is to bring more attention to the historical hypocrisy of these so-called pro-family groups.
Heterosexual Menace: Father forces sex on son - This mention is not meant to bash heterosexuals. Lord knows if lgbts were the offending party, this incident would be in a religious right email as well as a "news item" on One News Now. This mention is just to show the depths of ignorance people can stoop to about us.
Every now and then, a situation takes that place that's so strange, it diverts my attention away from focusing on the religious right.
During the mad battle over health care reform, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) recently gave a speech on the Senate floor hoping that a senator would not make the vote. He encouraged prayer on the matter:
What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote tonight. That’s what they ought to pray.
Now some people thought the Senator he was implying about was 92-year-old ailing Robert Byrd (D- West Virginia). Coburn's comment got much criticism, including from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois):
I have been trying to reach Sen. Coburn. … This statement troubles me, and I’m trying to reach him come back to the floor and explain exactly what he meant about a senator being unable to make the vote tonight. … I’m reaching out to Sen. Coburn. I’ll be on the floor for the next 45 minutes, and I hope that he will join me there.
As far as it is known, Coburn did not clarify what he meant by his statement.
In an interesting case of irony, when a vote did come up, a senator missed it - Republican James Inhofe.
And all of that led to this mindboggling, bizarre call to CSPAN from a teabagger who not only thought Sen. Inhofe was dead but that his prayer caused it.
Personally I prefer on-camera breakdowns to be done by either Joan Crawford or Maggie Smith.
Don't worry, by the way. Senator Inhofe is not dead - he just didn't make the vote.
But I don't know what's so weirder about this video - the fact that it reveals yet again the abject cluelessness of these teabaggers or the fact that both the CSPAN host and Senator John Barasso (R-Wyoming) kept a straight face throughout the entire thing:
Transcript:
CALLER: Yeah doctor. Our small tea bag group here in Waycross, we got our vigil together and took Dr. Coburn’s instructions and prayed real hard that Sen. Byrd would either die or couldn’t show up at the vote the other night.
How hard did you pray because I see one of our members was missing this morning. Did it backfire on us? One of our members died? How hard did you pray senator? Did you pray hard enough
HOST: Senator Barasso, he was referring to Senator Inhofe, who was not part of the round of voting this morning.
BARASSO: The votes today, they needed 60 votes in favor of the bill. Senator Inhofe is opposed to the bill, and whether he was there or not didn’t make any difference. There was no way that Jim Inhofe was going to vote for the bill, the senator from Oklahoma. So that’s why he wasn’t there this morning.
HOST: Do you know where he was, senator, why he wasn’t able to make the vote this morning?
