Some have said that since Donald Trump is no longer president, we should forget about him or ignore him. I don't want to forget Donald Trump. I don't want to ignore him either. I want to wreck his legacy and piss on his reputation. I don't want there to be ANY possibility that anyone in the future could repair or recast the shame of his presidency into something great.
Take time out whatever drama you may or not may not be dealing with and help me out with this rather easy Twitter poll. I have a feeling that I know how it will turn out. Still, it's simple fun. Enjoy yourself. and by all means, leave comments either on this post or Twitter.
What's the best thing about Donald Trump no longer being president?
— Holy Bullies (@holybullies) March 11, 2021
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| Sen Rand Paul made a fool of himself with his bad faith questioning of Dr. Rachel Levine. |
It should surprise no one that the Family Research Council doesn't like any of President Biden's appointees. The group especially dislikes Dr. Rachel Levine, Biden's pick for assistant secretary of health at the Department of Health and Human Services. If Levine is confirmed, she would be the first openly transgender pick confirmed by the United States Senate. Like FRC, other members of the conservative right have been scrambling to derail her nomination. The most egregious attempt came from Sen. Rand Paul during her confirmation hearing. Paul conjured up images of genital mutilation done to children and so-called dangerous drugs when he questioned her. Justifiably, he was widely criticized for trafficking inaccurate information;
However, in its recent Washington Update, FRC attempted to rehash the exchange between Paul and Levine in way which makes Paul look like a hero:
Rachel Levine . . . is the kind of person Joe Biden believes should be second-in-command at HHS. Senator Paul, not caring how the media would savage him, decided to ask some pointed questions about how Levine's transgender agenda would impact the children of this country. Now, a week later, he's been called everything from a "transphobe" to a bigot. "And what's amazing about being labeled as a 'hater,'" he told listeners on "Washington Watch," "is that I never even mentioned Levine or the surgery and things that [he's] done to [himself]. I just asked whether a minor, whether a 10-year-old, could override parental consent [to get access to transgender hormones or surgery]." Levine refused to answer, leaving all of us to wonder just what brave new world Americans would be entering under his direction at HHS."So your parents say, 'You're 10-years-old, and you're not going to do this.' And then the 10-year-old says, 'No, I am.' And then the government would adjudicate that as the minor having the right to overrule their parents. I think that's horrendous to imagine. People also need to realize what's going on in these [gender] clinics. Ten percent of the kids are between the ages of three and 10. And when they go in... what they do is if the child is confused... four or five people will come up to them and say... 'Oh, you're so brave. It's a great decision.' No one's telling them the opposite. The people who work in these clinics are often people who've undergone these surgeries or done these things themselves. It's one opinion that they're hearing, and then their parents would be overruled."It doesn't matter whether you're a Republican or Democrat, Paul said. "I think there's a lot of mainstream people who would be horrified to know that a 10-year-old could be goaded into these decisions. And I think Levine's [position] is so far out of the mainstream that people need to hear about it."
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| President Biden |
No matter how many times Donald Trump demonstrated that he wasn't fit for office, one person he could always count on to kiss his butt was Franklin Graham. Graham would publicly support Trump or send out tweets like the following which served to build Trump up as a great president:
Now that Trump is out of office (leaving the country wrecked by a pandemic he refused to lead us through, crippled by an awful economy his incompetence is to blame for, and picking up the pieces of an insurrection he is responsible for in an attempt to overturn his election loss), Graham seems to think that folks will forget how easily he sacrificed the Christian integrity he claimed to have in exchange for White House status and a few conservative judges.
But folks aren't going to forget any time soon nor will they let Graham forget, as he learned after sending out the following tweet:
The piece Graham was linking to criticized the recent decision by Bethany Christian Services, one of the largest Christian adoption agencies in the country, to begin working with LGBTQ couples. Graham is implying that Bethany is dangerously "pivoting" away from the word of God by helping LGBTQ couples to adopt children. But many of those who responded to Graham's tweet reminded him of his "pivot" when he began supporting Donald Trump (click on the tweets to make them larger):
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| The Liberty Counsel's Mat Staver |
"This [situation] involves a young lady, Ann*, who is getting married in May," says Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel. "She was shopping for a bridal dress with her mother and sister and she's been saving herself for her husband." According to Staver, the store employee helping "Ann" in and out of dresses in the dressing room turned out to be a man dressed as a woman. "This young woman felt completely violated and deceived by the bridal store," says Staver. "This day was [supposed to be] a day of celebration and joy – and it turned into a disaster. And it should never have happened."
It was bound to happen and personally I think it's about time. Conservative online publication Deseret News is sending out the warning alarm about the concept of "religious liberty." There is a growing belief that "religious liberty" is more about weaponizing faith to discriminate. And this belief, according to the publication, is going to lead to problems.
Amid growing calls to advance LGBTQ rights, conservative religious freedom advocates are scrambling to avoid potential fallout for people of faith. In so doing, they’ve been forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: Many Americans see faith-based protections in the public square as a bad thing. A recent survey from Public Religion Research Institute found that only 22% of U.S. adults support exempting business owners with religious objections to some LGBTQ rights from anti-discrimination rules. Twice that many Americans (44%) feel their own rights are threatened by other people’s religious liberty claims.
Deaton, who is gay, acknowledged that faith groups played a role in bringing about religious liberty’s current PR crisis. As support for gay rights grew in recent decades, some religious leaders vilified the gay community in hopes of protecting themselves. For example, in the lead-up to gay marriage legalization, U.S. Catholic bishops often argued that same-sex relationships damaged society as a whole. “There are people who have misused and misappropriated religious freedom to harm LGBTQ people,” Deaton said.
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| Former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly is telling another lie. |
Y'all, I'm trying so hard to be nice today but people are working my nerves. They are trying to make me forget how much I love my Jesus.
In the middle of all of this madness with regards to anti-trans athlete bills which supporters have proven there is no need for, Biden trying to clean up Trump's messes while the GOP undermines him, etc etc, comes a mountain of hot mess with Dr. Seuss, the Muppets and Mr. Potato Head.
Three companies recently made private decisions about their products. The publisher of Dr. Seuss books decided to no longer publish six of them because of their racist imagery. The company which makes Mr. Potato Head decided that the toy will not be sold as Mr. and Mrs. Last but not least, Disney will be adding content warnings to certain episodes of The Muppet Show on its streaming service.
Whoop te do. No big deal, huh? Guess again. Via the extensive conservative and GOP televised and social media pipeline, those three seemingly innocuous incidents are now claimed to be a part of a huge conspiracy of supposed "cancel culture" by liberals, Joe Biden, George Soros, and who ever else are considered as left-wing boogeymen to control action and stamp out free speech, And this nonsense has been blasted all over the right-wing blogsphere. Seriously, Fox News went absolutely apeshit over the Dr. Seuss non-controversy for two days.
The big booby prize, however, for the dumbest way the right has exploited this junk is a tie between Mike Huckabee and Megyn Kelly. Huckabee tweeted a meme which placed the blame on Joe Biden:
Not be undone, former Fox News personality (she was never a journalist) Megyn Kelly channels Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion with her tweet:
This goes beyond silly. It's downright depressing. Huckabee and Kelly are many things (none of them are positive) but stupid isn't one of them. They know exactly what they are doing by repeating these lies. And both have prominent positions in the media. As much as it disgusts my very core to think admit, both of them have the power to influence a lot of people and power like that shouldn't be abused.
Yet here they are abusing it with no concept of care or integrity.
But can we really blame Huckabee or Kelly more than we blame ourselves? Who in the world decided to give these two so much power? I keep hearing all of the whining about how divided America is and how we seem to be at each other's throats. Maybe we should make better choices in terms of our social influencers. That could help a lot.
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| This wonderful book set off a ridiculous moral panic on Twitter. |
In the latest episode of "Homophobia makes you stupid" comes this tweet from a woman in England. Apparently she finds it disturbing that a child is reading book about LGBTQ people:
The 'progressive alphabet' for the next generation. God help us! pic.twitter.com/h7wPt6jdDN
— Dianne 🏴 (@DianneLester) February 28, 2021
The Equality Act, passed last week by the House and awaiting a Senate vote, is a comprehensive LGBTQ rights bill. The religious right is attacking the bill in the same manner it attacks all things pro-LGBTQ - via bad science, horror stories, and out-and-out lies.
The Family Research Council has just come out with a booklet denouncing the Equality Act. Calling it a booklet is being nice on my part because it's actually a mess. FRC throws so many arguments against the Equality Act that the booklet gives an impression of sad desperation.
I am not going to link it because one of the claims turned my stomach:
The Equality Act would also virtually do away with sex-segregated spaces, meaning women and girls would no longer have privacy when in publicly accessible bathrooms, locker rooms, and other such spaces. Similar laws mandating SOGI in public accommodations at the local and sate level have already resulted in litigation. In one case, a kindergartener was assaulted by a boy classmate in her school's bathroom.
Any type of assault is nothing to make light of, particularly that of children. We must always be careful to guard against it. We should also be careful to get all of the facts before making claims of assault
But in this case, it would appear that FRC didn't bother to.
