Paul Revere by Cyrus Dallin, North End, Boston

~~~

~~~

Friday, March 27, 2015

Indiana Governor Pence signs bigotry into law.


UPDATE BELOW


The new law allows people to refuse services and goods to folks they don't like, because their religion says they're icky and worse.

Congratulations Governor Pence and Indiana!

(I wonder if Mary Cheney and her partner have any plans to visit Indiana and have Christian businesses (and Muslim businesses because like fundy Xtians, the Muslims HATE teh gaii!) tell them to take their business elsewhere?)

This little experiment in Christian Sharia law isn't working out quite the way Pence and his fellow bigots hoped it would:



Broadway's Audra McDonald Just Took Down Indiana Gov. Mike Pence In A Glorious Twitter Rant



Christian Group Is Ready To Boycott Indiana If Governor Signs ‘Religious Liberty’ Bill



Gen Con threatens to leave Indy over religious freedom bill; Tourism, City leaders fear the worst



Salesforce CEO Benioff Takes Stand Against Indiana Anti-Gay Law



"This medieval measure was supposed to be a moment of triumph for bigots throughout Indiana, for men and women who hate Jews, who hate Muslims and atheists and gays and lesbians and transgenders. Instead, Governor Mike Pence slunk away and signed it in private like the shameful act it was. 

You see, an actual religious freedom bill has to protect all people. Indiana’s RFRA, by [Franklin] Graham’s own admission, only protects the rights of fake Christians like him to persecute everybody they don’t like. I can think of a very prominent episode when it was legal to refuse to serve Jews: Nazi Germany. Stay classy, Indiana. 

The RFRA is religious tyranny, the act of one religion saying it’s better than all others and deciding it will get to make all the rules for everybody else, regardless of their own beliefs. That’s pretty much the history of Christianity for the better part of the last 2000 years. People came to this country to get away from that. We were bequeathed a secular Constitution to protect us from religious tyranny. The RFRA is the very thing the Founding Fathers were trying to prevent when they wrote Article VI, paragraph 3 of the Constitution, and later, the First Amendment."
---Hrafnkell Haraldsson



One small correction to Haraldson's article above.  The Puritans and Pilgrims who came to this country were actually religious bigots who left their native lands so that they could practice their bigotry in peace.  The early Christians in Colonial America not only persecuted people who were not of their particular religious sect, they tortured and killed them as well, sort of like the Sunnis and Shi'ites do.

This is exactly why we don't want our secular country to favor any religion.  As soon as one religion is favored over any other, bigotry, persecution, and worse, is the result. When presented with the same sort of legislation in Arizona, Governor Brewer votoed the bill.

Governor Pence has made a fool of himself and his state. 



READ MORE HERE @REPUBLIC OF GILEAD




UPDATE:

What is it with these people and their fevered fantasies about gays and atheists? Fundamentalist Christian and teevee Duck Person, Phil Robertson, gave a truly bizarre talk at some Christian gathering where he said some things that only a Jeffrey Dahlmer-like brain could conjure up, and yet this crazy man was comfortable in sharing his twisted and sick fantasy of torture, rape and murder of atheists with his fellow religionists:



Phil Robertson Hypothesizes About Atheist Family Getting Raped And Killed


“I’ll make a bet with you,” Robertson said. “Two guys break into an atheist’s home. He has a little atheist wife and two little atheist daughters. Two guys break into his home and tie him up in a chair and gag him. And then they take his two daughters in front of him and rape both of them and then shoot them and they take his wife and then decapitate her head off in front of him. And then they can look at him and say, ‘Isn’t it great that I don’t have to worry about being judged? Isn’t it great that there’s nothing wrong with this? There’s no right or wrong, now is it dude?’” Robertson kept going: “Then you take a sharp knife and take his manhood and hold it in front of him and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if this [sic] was something wrong with this? But you’re the one who says there is no God, there’s no right, there’s no wrong, so we’re just having fun. We’re sick in the head, have a nice day.’”

WTF is his point?  That atheists have no morals?  But in his degenerate story, it isn't the atheists committing torture, rape, and murder, is it.  Has this Robertson character been tested for mental stability?  Because anyone who can think up a story as depraved as the one he told has to have some serious mental issues.  I wouldn't let anyone in my family or any friend near the man.  He's a major degenerate with dangerous rage issues, very much like certain right wing bloggers we know.


20 comments:

Nick056 said...

I always remember Pence, after some Limbaugh-related incident, talking about how he “cherished” Limbaugh. That stood out to me as odd even for a winger. Finding out he’ll go where Brewer wouldn’t is not surprising.

Ray Cranston said...

In the stroke of a pen Indiana went from Hoosiers to losers.

Dave Miller said...

And he is also frequently cited as a potential Pres or VP candidate. I wonder if Mike Pence would favor not serving black people because your religion "supposedly" treats them as the curse of God?

Years ago this was the religious justification for denying people of color goods and services and a seat at many a lunch counter.

If you are to the right of Gov Brewer, that says something. I think every GOP Presidential contender should have to answer whether or not they support this law and others like it.

Shaw Kenawe said...

Someone posted here in the comments a while ago that these laws are the last gasp of a group of people who know they've lost the battle to discriminate against gays, nonbelievers, etc. So they come up with unConstitutional laws (that will be struck down) as a way of holding back the march of progress.

Also, they don't see themselves as an American version of the fundamentalists in the Muslim religion, who also discriminate (and kill) gay people and atheists. Phil Robertson of the Duck People fantasized about torture, rape, and murder of atheists.

Agains, it's their last gasp in a battle that they know they've lost.

Happily, a majority of Americans don't agree with them and choose to be part of an enlightened populace that believes in equal protection under our Constitution.

Dave Miller said...

Shaw, this is the "I just want to be left alone to live my life as I see fit" caucus.

The problem is people can no longer live in personal vacuums, unless they choose to live off the grid. We are all interconnected in so many ways that harmful actions, such as this legislation, and the views behind and supporting it, do nothing to move us forward, moving us instead, back.

I find it interesting that conservatives a short while back criticized Pres Obama for not following the will of the people. I wonder why many see no need to follow the will of the great majority of people in this instance?

Shaw Kenawe said...

Nick, thanks for coming by. Pence "cherished" Limbaugh? Do we need to know anything more about him? He cherishes a 4 or 5 times (I can't remember) married guy who used his housekeeper to score illegal prescription drugs and who got out of serving his country because of a cyst on his ass. Yeah. That seems "cherish-worthy" to someone like Pence.

Shaw Kenawe said...

Titan, just remember, not all Hoosiers agree with what Pence signed, but they'll all have to bear the shame.

Ahab said...

Thanks for the shout-out, Shaw! RFRA was never about religious freedom -- it's about giving fundamentalist Christians license to discriminate and demand special treatment.

Think Progress recently posted a commentary piece on how "religious liberty" has been used to justify both homophobia and racism. Something of interest?

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/02/26/3333161/religious-liberty-racist-anti-gay/

C. Johnson the 3rd said...

Being gay is natural; hating gays is a life-style choice.

Americans don't like to see a group of people discriminated against. This is America 2015, not Mississippi 1940.

Pence will regret this.

Ducky's here said...

It serves to draw attention from the HIV epidemic in southern Indiana.
The locals have not been receptive to attempts to establish a clinic and we'll see if any progress can be made on a needle exchange program knowing that the cases have all been traced to dirty drug needles.

Pence has a chance to show he can govern effectively or continue to be guided by cheap plays to bigotry.

Leo T. Lyon said...

These sort of social conservatives are all for freedumb so long as it's the sort of freedumb they approve of which means no freedumb for gays.

Infidel753 said...

What I think Phil the Duck is trying to say, in his bird-brained and clomping-footed fashion, is that an atheist would have no basis for objecting to being treated that way because atheists, not believing in God, cannot have standards of right and wrong and are therefore unable to judge anything as immoral.

The ignorance thus displayed is multi-faceted, of course. It's easy to verify from observation that atheists do, in fact, pass judgments of right and wrong; humanity would not have survived at all if it had freely engaged in random violence during the many generations before the Ten Commandments (as Christopher Hitchens was fond of pointing out); there's an abundance of data from studies of babies and non-human primates showing that our basic morality is inborn and is an evolved trait like the rest of our psychology.

Of course, one would not expect Phil the Duck to be aware of such things, or of anything else that can't be fitted into the Procrustean matchbox of his Biblical world-view.

Anonymous said...

I can't find the article again - it was a link on a link kind of thing. Anyway, I read Marcus Bachmann was asked to leave a dress shop on Indiana because the shop owner thought he was gay. If true that is too funny.

Craig said...

An Indiana legislator offered an amendment to the bill that would require those businesses that want to exercise their 'religious freedom' to post in their windows who they will discriminate against. It was defeated. You'd think the Proud Christian Patriots would want customers to know they are standing up for liberty.

<a href="http://www.christianspeakers360.com/speaker/phil-robertson.php:>For $50,001 & above</a>, you can have Phil say this kind of shit to you in person.

There is no floor to their ignorance.

Shaw Kenawe said...

For $50,001 & above, you can have Phil say this kind of shit to you in person.

There is no floor to their ignorance.


Fixed your link, Craig.

Christians believe, with encouragement from charlatans like Ted Cruz, that they're being marginalized and that they are "losing power." Imagine if Muslims in a heavily Muslim state passed a law that allowed them to not give Christians goods or services because it offended their deeply held religious beliefs?

People like Pence are too stupid to understand the far-reaching implications of discriminatory law he just approved.

There is no floor to their ignorance and their perceived persecution.

Shaw Kenawe said...

BTW, the link you provided advertises that Phil Robertson is a "Christian" speaker who can be hired for a hefty price to share his malignant, murderous fantasies with others of his ilk.

I'm glad that group wholly owns hims.

Shaw Kenawe said...

Anonymous, I wish there were a link to that story, too. ANyway, now that Gov. Pence has passed the anti-gay law in Indiana, a gay person can be asked to leave a good "Christian's" place of business because of the owner's deeply held religious bigotry.

okjimm said...

pffftttt.....I am a new member of St Jim of the Holy Beer.....the only religion worth drinking about. ...and....I always thought of Indiana as a foreign country....we should kick them out of the United Nations, is what I'm thinking.

Anonymous said...

I found the link :)

http://conservativefrontline.com/marcus-bachmann-refused-service-in-indiana-store-owner-assumed-he-was-gay/

Unknown said...

@Anonymous - was asking abut that article on Marcus Bachmann he couldn't find, where he was asked to leave a dress shop in Indiana because the owner thought he was gay came from a site called conservativefrontline.com which links it back to a National Report website. http://goo.gl/SIy7FC