Happy B-Day To me!

and it's also my twin kcstp's birthday too!

thanks ghyste and deansdirtybb for the messages and wongkk for the great little uk deco stickers, with which I am decorating my phone. :) and bugackt midori-chan for the great card! browngirl, amarissia and choir who have been friends for such a long time!

The American Religious Freedom Program pushes a ‘bigotry for all’ bill

As the saying goes, for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. I think none but the most self-deluded believed that homophobic bigotry was dead, or that the bad guys would simply sit back and let gay people have lives of happiness and equality.

As John noted in his article about Arizona this morning, in the past few weeks there’s been an eruption of anti-gay measures in state legislatures across the country. And it’s not a coincidence.

Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Utah have seen efforts — always introduced by Republicans, mind you – to pass laws they claim are to “protect” the free exercise of religion. (I was going to say “radical conservative fundamentalist Republicans” — but I’d be repeating myself.)

The Arizona state Senate just passed a bill with the following provisions:

1. Expands the definition of exercise of religion to specifically include both the practice and observance of religion.

2. Expands the definition of person to include any individual, association, partnership, corporation, church, estate, trust, foundation or other legal entity.

3. Changes the terminology within the prohibition of burdening a person’s exercise of religion to apply to state action instead of government.

4. Defines state action as any action by the government or the implementation or application of any law, including state and local laws, ordinances, rules, regulations and policies, whether statutory or otherwise, and whether the implementation or action is made or attempted to be made by the government or nongovernmental persons.

5. Specifies that a free exercise of religion claim or defense may be asserted in a judicial proceeding regardless of whether the government is a party to the proceeding.

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Shorter translation: The Arizona bill attempts to nullify all civil rights legislation ever passed, including federal laws, regardless who is being protected.

Here’s a few scenarios for you:

Don’t feel like paying women a wage equal to men? Or hiring women at all because in your religious opinion, all women should be housewives? No problem.
Hate people of color? You don’t have to hire them or rent to them or anything.

If you own a store, you can dust off that old “No Coloreds” sign and put it back in the window. Go ahead and add “No Gays” if you like. And according to the law, you can also re-add “No Chinese, Jews or Irish either” like they used to have in the olden days. Just have an asterisk — “* = The Lord My God Commands It“.

Let’s say you’re an EMT. And you come across a gay person bleeding out after a traffic accident. You don’t have to treat them if you think they should die. Same thing if you object to people being Jewish or Romani or ginger.

Or let’s say you’re a cop answering a domestic abuse call. You see a husband beating his wife. You’re free to say, “Fine — it’s there in the Bible, men are allowed to beat their wives. Sweetheart, you need to submit to him. Call me if he uses a stick larger in diameter than his thumb.”

Or a state-employed poll worker who believes that only white men should be allowed to vote, for people of color bear the Mark of Cain…
There literally is no limit. I saw one wag quip in a comment section, “Yay! Human sacrifice and slavery are back, baby!”



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Religion is the excuse. Gays, lesbians and transgender folks are the wedge issue. Hate-groups like Focus on the Family, NOM, FRC, and the rest are the foot soldiers. State legislators are the true believers, the paid-for enablers, and the useful idiots.

What is the actual goal?

In my opinion, Whelan’s organization didn’t write a sloppy bill to shop around. I believe the bill does exactly what it means to do, which is something the far-right conservatives have been itching to do ever since the first sweeping civil rights bills were passed in the 1960s: Repeal them.

Not just some, and not just to enable anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination, but all of the equal rights laws. Using ‘religious freedom’ as the cudgel to roll back women’s reproductive freedoms is just another prong of the attack.

After all, let’s not forget how their vision of America’s Golden Age is the fictional white-bread Ozzy & Harriett 1950s, when discrimination of all kinds was legal and segregation the norm. The time when the phrase “That’s mighty white of you” didn’t draw stares. When women held positions of employment no higher than secretary and abortions were almost universally illegal. And when gay people, of course, were reviled and shunned.

That, I believe, is the bigger picture.

In some respects, I take heart from these flailing efforts of theirs, because it reeks of desperation. Just as with women’s rights and reproductive freedoms, religious conservatives are trying to carve out special rights for themselves, exemptions from the movement toward full equality for all LGBT Americans. Plus, as I said, I do think the big enchilada is to try to repeal or overturn all the civil rights laws.

I’m glad to see the bigots on the defensive, I really am. But with the mid-term elections coming up and the relentless nature of the forces of hatred and intolerance, and especially given how radical they’ve become, complacency is one attitude we absolutely cannot afford right now.


Becca Morn for AMERICABlog, Mother Jones, thePoliticalfreakshow,

Things I would like in season ten of Supernatural

Jensen and Jared to be PRODUCERS so they have more of a say in what happens to the characters because without them there is no show (<3 Misha) and they know Sam and Dean better than anyone.

(after all,in two episodes in season nine they had to swap lines because the writers certainly don’t know who the bros are)