And this guy is a CHRISTIAN!
Courtesy of SF Gate:
A Southern California attorney’s “shoot the gays” initiative is not destined to become law — for one thing, it’s clearly unconstitutional. But Attorney General Kamala Harris is scheduled to clear it for circulation in May, and she may not have any choice. Matt McLaughlin, a lawyer from Huntington Beach in Orange County, paid his $200 filing fee Feb. 26 to submit the “Sodomite Suppression Act” to the voters. Declaring it is “better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God’s just wrath,” it would require that anyone who touches a person of the same gender for sexual gratification be put to death by “bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”
The measure would also make it a crime, punishable by 10 years in prison and permanent expulsion from the state, to advocate gay rights to an audience that includes minors. It specifies that its constitutionality can be judged only by a state Supreme Court that has been purged of LGBT justices and their advocates. And it authorizes private citizens to step in as executioners if the state fails to act within a year. Another provision would require that the text of the initiative be posted prominently in every public school classroom.
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The introduction of this incentive language has already prompted a call by a handful of politicians to the California Bar Association to look in to the law license of Matt McLaughlin. The California Bar’s requirements for legal professionals requires that they demonstrate “good moral character.”
This measure of his, which calls for the complete disregard of the legal and human rights of others, could be considered to be a failure to demonstrate such. Whatever the case, that someone would call for a Sharia-like arbitrary execution measure in this day and age is alarming.
That it is someone who has as their day job upholding and respecting law and order is disconcerting. And that there are not avenues aside from a ponderous supreme court battle to prevent the wasting of effort on such a clearly unconstitutional measure tells us that the initiative mechanism in place in California is in dire need of some checks so as to balance it. After the fiasco of Proposition 8, and the millions spent arguing it, there needs to be a better way.
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People! We live in a country that harbors these sorts of mentally twisted people who take advantage of our system of governing and use it to try to initiate this sort of annihilation legislation.
Thankfully, we know that many conservatives will find this proposal plainly insane. But the fact is that the extreme right nurtures this sort of insanity, and so California's AG has to deal with this as though it were a routine initiative instead of the sick ravings of a certifiable lunatic.
Jesus, Mary, and Joe Pepitone! What the hell happened to this country and its crazy conservatives?
Think of this when you hear the crazies say we have to get this country back to its Christian roots. Those roots look exactly like those of the Taliban and other radical religious sects.
12 comments:
I'd like to see some of the Republican Presidential candidates asked whether they'd condemn this initiative or not. At least some of them would end up tying themselves in knots trying to avoid sounding like they were endorsing it while still not offending the turbo-wingnut fundies who approve of this king of thing (the Dominionist wing of fundamentalism has been advocating bringing back laws like this for some time).
And somebody should ask McLaughlin if he would favor throwing gays off of tall buildings like ISIS does. That's pretty "convenient", plus it would save on ammo.
Infidel753, it's difficult for me to accept that I live in a technically advanced country that harbors these sorts of insane people who take advantage of our due process.
As for your speculation on whether or not any of the current front runners for the 2016 presidency would outright condemn this 15th century idea, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that none of the front-runners will have the cajones or the humanity to say outright that this is not just absurd, but against everything this country stands for. They don't want to alienate the mentally challenged in their party.
the people who buy into this lunacy are the same people who say Obama is destroying the country...the guy who proposed this legislation is a conservative right winger who probably represents a lot of other conservative right wingers...now when was the last time that the Goopers heard Mr. Obama suggest that we kill Americans because they're minorities?...do these people even use what little intelligence they havee... oh i think i know the answer: NO! Yeah, shaw... they want this country to get back to its Xtian roots that want to kill Americans who are not like them!
Shaw, have you looked into what is called "Dominionism" or "Reconstructionism"? It's a minority tendency within American fundamentalist Christianity, but by no means an insignificant one. The Dominionists have been openly calling for the re-imposition of Old Testament law including death penalties for homosexuality, adultery, etc. for at least a couple of decades. I can remember reading about them back in the nineties. It's not difficult today to find examples of preachers calling for homosexuals to be executed. The only thing unusual about what McLaughlin is doing is that he's taking it to the ballot initiative process.
As I say, the Dominionists are a minority within fundamentalism, but they're not insignificant. And if one insists that everything in the Bible must be taken as literally true and the valid word of God (the definition of fundamentalism), including the Old Testament laws, I don't see how it's possible to avoid arriving at the Dominionist position. If I take a rather harsh stand against fundamentalism on my blog, this kind of thing is part of the reason. It has genocidal implications which many of its adherents openly and explicitly embrace.
Yes, it's incongruous to see this in an advanced society, but in a way, that's a testament to how fast technology has progressed. McLaughlin's position was thoroughly mainstream in Western society just a few centuries ago, when fervent belief in Christianity was the norm. Yes, technology has come very far in that time, but is it really so surprising that cultural inertia has made changes in social attitudes far less complete?
I am at a loss for words. This dude McLaughlin, he represents religious extremism equal to that of our extremist Islamist adversaries.
As a country we are being threatened from within by mentalities that would eradicate the liberties and freedoms all humans have right to possess
Oh, on the loss for words thing. I lied.
Infidel753, I have read about the Dominionists. What's strange is that a lot of the extremist right wingers are hysterical about Islam, and ignore what members of their own sect believe (which is almost parallel to what crazy Islamists believe):
"In the early 1990s sociologist Sara Diamond and journalist Frederick Clarkson defined dominionism as a movement that, while including Dominion Theology and Reconstructionism as subsets, is much broader in scope, extending to much of the Christian Right In his 1992 study of Dominion Theology and its influence on the Christian Right, Bruce Barron writes,
In the context of American evangelical efforts to penetrate and transform public life, the distinguishing mark of a dominionist is a commitment to defining and carrying out an approach to building society that is self-consciously defined as exclusively Christian, and dependent specifically on the work of Christians, rather than based on a broader consensus.
According to Diamond, the defining concept of dominionism is "that Christians alone are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns". In 1989, Diamond declared that this concept "has become the central unifying ideology for the Christian Right" (p. 138, emphasis in original) in the United States. In 1995, she called it "prevalent on the Christian Right". Journalist Chip Berlet added in 1998 that, although they represent different theological and political ideas, dominionists assert a Christian duty to take "control of a sinful secular society.
In 2005, Clarkson enumerated the following characteristics shared by all forms of dominionism:
Dominionists celebrate Christian nationalism, in that they believe that the United States once was, and should once again be, a Christian nation. In this way, they deny the Enlightenment roots of American democracy.
Dominionists promote religious supremacy, insofar as they generally do not respect the equality of other religions, or even other versions of Christianity.
Dominionists endorse theocratic visions, insofar as they believe that the Ten Commandments, or "biblical law," should be the foundation of American law, and that the U.S. Constitution should be seen as a vehicle for implementing Biblical principles."
Rousas Rushdoony, who died only about 10 years ago was a leader of this movement.
It advocates a doctrinaire Calvinist government.
I have no idea how large his following is because I think they finesse the message a bit to avoid scaring the horses.
American Taliban.
He sounds like a prime republican presidential candidate.
This is from Infidel753's link on fundamentalism that he provided in his last comment, and it is relevent to this post:
"It is often said that the Old Testament condemns homosexuals to death, but this is actually not the case. Let's look at the wording of the relevant text, Leviticus 20:13 (KJV translation):
If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
Note that this wording does not condemn "homosexuals" as such (a concept which, as far as I know, didn't exist until the nineteenth century anyway). It condemns anyone who has committed a particular action. Any man who has engaged in sexual relations with another man, ever -- even once -- is condemned to death.
This is a much larger number of people than just "homosexuals". Most studies on the subject have concluded that around 2% of the adult population is predominantly homosexual or bisexual in orientation; given an adult male population of at least 100 million in the US, this means there are at least two million gay or bisexual men, and executing all of them (as some hard-line Christian sects such as the Dominionists apparently aspire to do) would mean mass murder approaching the scale of the Holocaust.
But carrying out the actual clear intent of Leviticus 20:13 would mean executing every man who, say, ever went through a period of homosexual experimentation in late adolescence or early adulthood (something which as many as 20% of males may have done, by some estimates), or once had one isolated gay encounter while he was drunk, or resorted to such an act due to prolonged deprivation in an all-male environment such as prison or certain military deployments. This would likely run to tens of millions of people, most of whom don't think of themselves as "gay" at all and wouldn't be considered such by anyone else."
The pius Xtians on the extreme right wing blogs are pretending this didn't happen becuz only crazy Muzzies propose killing people their god doesn't like.
Xtians don't believe that, do they. The Tea Party Goopers don't see the similarities between the fanatical fundamentalists in their religions. But there it is.
And Dominionists are not without influence. Ted Cruz, for example, was raised by his Dominionist father to believe this nonsense.
Ted Cruz's father believes God chose Ted for greatness a/k/a POTUS.
I wonder if Teddy will tell us that god wants him to be president when he announces he's running on Monday. Let's see, Michele Bachmann, Huckabee, and at least 2 or 3 other Goopers have informed the American people that gods want them to be president.
God can't seem to make up her mind on which Gooper she wants to be preznit.
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