Bracing for the Worst

I'm posting this teaser a day ahread of time. It's one of the most important (and frightening) articles I've ever attempted. We must brace for the worst cpoming out in the Christian Right: if Romney wins, we'll definitely see a surge in righteous arrogance and a clamping down on reproductive and gay rights. If Obama wins, the Christian Right will definitely be a tiger to be reckoned with: the poor Presidetn will receive more hate mail and deat threats - an imprecatory prayers than ever.

Stay tuned....

"Vatileaks" Article Its #1 on OpEdNews FOR THE MONTH OF MAY!!

Even though you've read it here, help spread the word by clicking HERE and send the page view numbers through the roof! This article is the ONLY one on the "Vatileaks" scandal featuring past cover-ups and bringing to light the fact that Benedict KNOWS ALL. 

I Heartily Apologize To Readers

Yes, I've been REALLY remiss in postings lately. I know you're out there thinking, WTF? Well, I have to say that my OpEdNews posts have literally taken on a life of their own and the viewership makes it necessary. And it's difficult posting for numerous venues. Nonetheless, I apologize for the neglect. 


So here's a round-up of recent posts - the links will lead you to them.


For a Good Time, Call ... Your Local Church Lady. Leslee Unruh is an insane abstinence-only freak.


The Monday Sermon: Why We should Keep The Wall Between Church And State to Tear Down The Walls Of Bigotry And Hatred. Jefferson had motives.


Fighting The Richteous Right with 300 OpEdNews Articles. Was It Worth It? Boy, am I tired!

Fighting The Righteous Right With 300 OpEdNews Articles: Was It Worth It?

There is something to be said about a passion for exposing hypocrisy.

"... and then Dr.Meade thundered, losing his temper: 'Our men have fought without shoes before and without food and won victories. And they will fight again and win!...Think of - think of Thermopylae!'

...'They died to the last man at Thermopylae didn't they, Doctor?' Rhett asked, and his lips twitched with suppressed laughter."

Articles on religion and politics are like warriors in the culture wars: they can attack or defend whenever necessary. So when my number for OpEdNews came to 300, I could only think of : Thermopylae...
and Rhett Butler.


I have a thing for Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind, not only for the feisty character of Scarlett O'Hara, but for the wit and cynicism of Rhett Butler. A close examination of the characters reveals that Mitchell gives every character a certain amount of depth by revealing what their thoughts are, but not Rhett - he is observed in detail, but his inner self and motives are always mysteries left to the imagination of the reader. I like to think that his motives, his cynicism, his passion run too deep for analysis. Rhett Butler is passionate about life, people and beauty in the world, but he never lets on. He must be a tremendously frustrated, closeted writer.


That is one of his personality traits I differ with: I am certainly not reticent to write about my passion.


Passion. The culture wars do not lack for passion. OpEdNews makes a writer's work look serious and effortless in the same tome and at the same time. That's because there so much passion. Writers like Chris Hedges go about skewering the Right with an intensity and passion that seems almost inbred and the writing seems effortless. Would that were really so, at least with my own fare: an article can take me from 5 hours to three days.


Yes, every day writing about the culture wars can be said to be filled with passion, yet there's irony in that each day's writer's routine (at least mine) is frustrated by a tedium which must be endured to form the next soldier.


News Feeds: The Culture Warrior's Life's Blood and The Near Death Of His Soul. 


I often wonder if people realize how many news feeds a culture war writer has to go through each day to cull the best ideas - or how demoralizing news feeds are to someone who has to deal with the exigencies of the culture wars created by Rightwing politics and the Christian Right. They're a dream and a curse: emergencies on the screen occur as if they are there to personally frustrate writers like me. Yet each morning I wake up to a string of headlines for AP, CNN, CBS, MSNBC, LGBTQ Nation,  Firedog Lake, Crooks and Liars, Joe.My.God., Religion Dispatches, Right Wing Watch, Think Progress, The Daily Dish (Andrew Sullivan), OpEdNews and my own blog, The Devil and Dan Vojir (to prove to myself that I actually lived through yesterday). After perusing them with as much elation or rancor I can stomach, I can finally savor my morning coffee - usually my third cup.


News feeds can kill the creative spirit, however: the barrage of news is frightening and it often looks as if absolutely EVERYTHING has been written already. The soul is almost fatally challenged. I keep reminding myself that writers like Chris Hedges, Andrew Sullivan and Joe Jervis must also endure the same barrage of news, commentaries, trivia, anecdotes, and WTFs. They sift through it all to come up with ten, twenty posts a day. All original. God! Sometimes I hate their prolific, creative asses.


The State of Religion and Politics Today: The Rise Of Demonizers and The Fall Of Reason


One might think that writing on religion and politics presents a constant inner, suicidal struggle: to kill yourself now by means of sheer depression or to kill yourself later by means of uncontrollable laughter. Yeah, it's true. With the machinations of Cindy "Japan-is-shaped-like-a-dragon" Jacobs,  Anne Coulter(geist), Pat Robertson, Bryan Fischer, Rick Santorum, Pope Benedict XVI, Concerned Women of America, the NRA, the GOP and FOX/Faux News, it's a wonder that any progressive writer is still alive.


I chose the latter form of suicide: I figure that laughing AT them all while I'm going to my death can cause the most damage: "Against The Assault of Laughter, Nothing Can Stand" - Mark Twain. Yep, I'm going to take as many of them with me as I can.


And I have so many, many potential victims: the demonizers who feed their righteous arrogance by spouting hatred and fake morality are on the rise. Crouching behind the rise in hate groups is the growing number of what Andrew Sullivan calls "religionists" or "Christianists", those people for whom separation of church and state is the greatest biblical "abomination" outside of  homosexuality and women's reproductive rights. They are joined by coat-tail demonizers such as Tea Party Obama-haters.


And with their rise, comes the fall of reason: Kentucky's Creation Museum has spawned a $175 million Noah's Ark theme park (sans dinosaurs, of course). The State of Tennessee has flown in the face of reason by passing an "abstinence only" (non)sex education bill. The GOP denies that there's any war on women while BOTH parties pay their women staffers less than men. To the rest of the world, America has become one big WTF? and is now hiding its conservative and over-religionized head in the sand.

3 years - 300 articles - 250,000+ words - 464 comments - 410,000+ page views

All this begs the question: is any of it worth it? The long days and even longer hours. The frustrating feeling  that one is tilting at windmills. The never ending string of bigots and hypocrites. The constant nurturing of a snarky attitude.  Is there any encouragement? Is there any sense of accomplishment? Is there any sense of ... self?


The drive to communicate in some people (like me) is defeating in that we rarely stop for a response, so a venue like OpEdNews  let's us experience encouragement in many ways: thank God for OpEdNews readers. And as for my own  sense of accomplishment, to me, exposing hypocrisy is exhilarating to the point of orgasm.


You could say that exposing hypocrisy is its own reward.


Dealing With The Depths of Contempt and The Heights of The Orgasms


I have a small black named Katie Scarlett (of course). She has a special perch attached to my desk -a slideout topped with a pad from an old footstool. She routinely scratches at my shoulder to demand attention or treats. But most of the time she lays across the pad with her head slung slightly over the edge of her spot. It may not seem a taxing job for a writer's cat, yet she works tirelessly at being my guardian, my critic, the mirror of my tired soul. She is the innocence I lack. Her presence helps me deal with the highs and lows of writing against the Christofascist Right and Conservative Clowns. She sees me through the depths of contempt and the heights of those orgasms brought about by sadistically skewering hypocrites.


Thank you Katie. Thank you OpEdNews readers.

Check This Out: The Estate Sale Blog and OpEdNews!!

It's all hitting the fan at once!


My Estate Sale Blog is finally up
and now ... an interview with OpEdNews profiles my plight with Section 8!

"Rapture Kitty" Hits #1 On OpEdNews!!!

Proof that Cuteness really matters: I think the reason the article hit #1 on OpEdNews was this pic. Hope people are actually reading the article!

Marking 200 For OpEdNews: The Best of Times (Sex With Ducks), The Worst of Times (The Deaver Fetus)

I'm tired. If you want to feel the frenetic pace my writing life has been like, just click on this old Leroy Anderson tune of a typewriter and read along. It will set a light tone to some very heavy subjects (hey, that's my style!).* 

Marking 200? No, I'm not 200 years old, although sometimes I feel like it. And tabulating how much I've submitted to OpEdNews for the last 3 years makes me feel older: it's certainly not a prodigious output by any means, but my perspective is queer: it's not how much I put out, but how much I am able to fit in. In between things, that is: no, not a sob story, but one that compels me to relay it to OpEdNews readers because they've been a part of my life.

For the last 5 years, I've been a caregiver to a loved one who is terminally ill (liver cancer) and life has gone from week-to-week, to day-to-day. Now, it's kind of hour-to-hour. It's also cooking, cleaning, errands, hospital visits, prescription refills, doling out meds, travel planning, kitty care, and fending off labels like "angel" and "saint" (curses on the love life - saints and angels don't get laid.). Not that I'm complaining, but ...o.k., I'm complaining. Because amidst all of this I'm compelled to communicate to people news and views about the realms of religion and politics ... and everything in between.

Yeah, it's an addiction: first thing in the morning I scan google alerts (at least a dozen "men of the cloth" are arrested for various crimes each day), devour rss feeds, answer comments on the blog, and plan the new ministry. I eventually come up for coffee (not air), then I have a breakfast consisting of religious and political hypocrisies, then I uncover them, rant on them and laugh at them. (I have to laugh at them: I take to heart Mark Twain's dictum: "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.") The rest of the day alternates between something mundane like changing the sheets and writing about the latest malapropisms of Michele Bachmann or the newest pronouncements of Benedict XVI.

Occasionally, I indulge myself with the luxury of our view of the ocean and the realization that I live in the most beautiful and compassionate place on earth (San Francisco).

IT'S ALL PERSPECTIVE

Times are getting bleaker and there's w-a-a-ay too much to rant about: atrocities like The Deaver Fetus and David Kato's murder in Uganda infest my laptop screen like giant termites, making it harder to laugh. The viciousness of today's Christof*scism, the blatant bigotry of people like Bryan Fischer and the eviscerating evangelism of Lou Engle propose a future too dreadful to imagine. Turning them on their ears becomes less fun, hence more difficult to write about.

Oh, occasionally Pat Robertson comes up with a hoot, a statement so self-righteously inane that it wipes the brain clean of all seriousness,* but writing about senile musings is too easy and breezy: the psyche just starts to relax when up comes a horror worthy of Halloween: suddenly there is too little time to write about LGBT issues, Islamoph*bia or even Ann Coulter(geist). 

Then there's the outright ruthlessness of the newly invigorated Republican Party: I hope I don't drown in that tsunami of vengeance! It overwhelms humanity! Don't get me started.

BACK TO THE POINT

OpEdNews has been a godsend for writers like me: the chance to get a word in edgewise is coupled with an association of some of the brightest minds we have today. And knowing that some people out there are actually reading my rants helps me contend with all that's happening to me and to the rest of the world. So now I'm up to 200 articles (150,000 words. 300,000 page views). I may flag a bit in the future, but I'll never kick the addiction of writing about the Right Wing's religious world of hypocrisy or things like ...Sex with Ducks. 

*Sorry if you're too young to know what a typewriter sounds like

** The article that has garnered me the most page views is, ironically, the one about Pat Robertson's remarks about Haiti titled The Senility Defense: Pat Robertson's Trial In The Court Of Public Opinion. 

Murder Is Popular

It seems that the last post was more popular than most. Check out the treatment on OpEdNews. Note that they didn't publish the photo (AP might have objected - I couldn't get permission in time). Feel free to comment there as well as here. 

Hey Guys, Please Help Out!!

I really want to take this chance to say THANKS to people who follow this little blog o' mine. I know you're out there and you're the reason I keep on writing. I'm sorry I'm so inconsistent: posting daily articles is something I just am not able to do. Furthermore, blogging the particular subjects of religion and politics is not easy: it takes time and research and effort (especially with the graphics - not that good, but they help me lighten things up a bit).

So this is a plea to anyone who likes this blog to please spread the word about it. If you can post something about it on your Facebook page, that would be awesome. Better yet, recommend that your friends get it automatically through an RSS feed so they don't have to go to it and check constantly whether or not something new has been posted.

As you know, the articles are also submitted to OpEdNews, getting really good responses (according to page views and ratings) and they usually wind up being in the top ten articles (in one week, OpEdNews publishes 350 top-notch articles!), but I'd really like to see more encouraging traffic to the site.

Again. Thanks for all your support. I'll always try to give you the truth in a light-hearted way.

Dan

We Don't Have To Be Nice, Ctd: Goodness Is Our Sole Propriety

 

I've always had a problem with the phrase, "It's the Christian thing to do." Somehow I always imagine it being said with a slight air of contempt. It's always said by self-righteous old ladies (English ladies, to be sure) with their noses firmly pointed towards the sky and their eyes looking down at their underlings. To me, it is the most insufferably arrogant phrase in our very difficult, but very precise language and it conveys to the listener that the person saying it, like others of his or her ilk, have a corner on goodness. 

So in the midst of the furor brought about by the Cordoba Center ("Ground Zero Mosque"), I'm wondering when the phrase will be uttered. Oh, it's been bandied about in several ways by that paragon of Christofascism, Bryan Fischer (he of the SPLC-listed hate group, American Family Association), but not with anything even resembling compassion, even condescending compassion. (He said that deporting all Muslims would be "compassionate" but he couldn't be heard thereafter above the laughter).

The Christofascists will certainly have a difficult go of it: the closest they can come to "the Christian thing to do" is to tolerate the building of the Center, but they won't do that since they've been demonizing Muslims so long it would be totally out of character. So here is an instance where "the Christian thing to do," becomes different than "the American thing to do." Again, a stumbling block, but one which Christofascists are certainly more experienced in handling. For years, Christofascists have made equal rights for gays "unAmerican" in their circuitous reasoning, so they will somehow turn the freedom of religion for Muslims into an attack on America's principles. Don't ask me how they will do it, but there will be ads/billboards demonizing Islam and Muslims. Maybe they'll cling to that imaginary string (a leftover from some Southern Baptist minister's sermon) that Islam is not really a religion, but a cult of bloodthirsty thugs. And when they get through demonizing, we'll be glad if the KKK moves in on the spot.

Forget the "insensitivity" issue. It's dead. In it's place will come "evil." Christofascists will talk of evil more than any thing else from now on. They have to use force. Maybe force will be "the Christian thing to do."

Now the GOP has chimed in and said it will definitely make the GZM a talking point in midterm elections. Why? Is it necessary for politicians to take a stance at all? To Christofascists across the country it definitely is, because involving politicians only lends credibility to their stance: more politicians on their side is the "American" bridge they need. It will be "the American thing to do."

Rob Kall of OpEdNews had an interesting take on the situation:

The world we live is no longer so simple, so small that we can speak to one group and assume another group will now know what we've said. It hasn't been for a long time. Yet this is how the opponents of the Cordoba building, which is not being built on Ground Zero, are acting. They need to come out of their caves and wake up to the reality that their small, bigoted response does not stand the smell test, when they claim failed Muslim "sensitivity." On the contrary, their own sensitivity to the threat to America is the problem.

I will agree that Christofascists are zenophobic because they realize the wisdom of taking on one country at a time, but Kall is wrong when he thinks that they will ever "come out of their caves." Many of those "caves" are Fundamentalist congregations owned by the new "Christian" leaders like Tony Perkins, Rick Warren, Rod Parsley and Lou Engle.  And if they come out at all, it will be too late.

America's pop religious icons are coming very close to expelling Muslims altogether, from jobs, from homes, from America. And they will somehow manage to take Bryan Fischer's  "compassion" and fashion it into one big, righteous package: "It's the Christian AND American thing to do." I don't know exactly how or when (or who), but someone like Tony Perkins will re-enact Queen Isabella's expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain which, being the "Christian thing to do" allowed people to keep their lives in some warped worldview of compassion and humanity. And of course, it won't be "nice" just "Christian." 

And "good."