TPM informs this "internets enabled" leftist that "Doctor" Dobson of "Focus on the Family" refused to apologize to Vermont Senator Leahy for calling him a "God's people hater".
WTF does that mean? Leahy hates people that like God? Leahy hates people that God likes? Leahy hates what Dobson thinks God prefers in the way of social policy?
Who knows? Who cares what Dobson thinks? He doesn't speak for me, or apparently 48% of the rest of the country. Back in the hole, doc.
In a related story, we see that Bush has selected a "Doctor" David Hager to head the FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. This committee, which has not met for two years and had essentially expired, makes crucial decisions regarding drugs used to treat infertility, contraception, sterilization and pregnancy termination.
In his "practice", "Doctor" Hager refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women, and has asserted, incorrectly, that the common birth control pill is an abortifacient. "Doctor" Hager counsels his female patients suffering from PMS to "pray and read the Bible".
Clearly the Hager and Dobson stories are cut from the same cloth. With Bush's election, we are now officially and rapidly entering a new "Dark Ages". As Garry Wills of Northwestern University recently pointed out eloquently on the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, the lamp of Enlightenment upon which this country was founded is being rapidly extinguished, much to the dismay of many here and around the world who look up to America as a model of religious and intellectual tolerance and diversity.
Where does all this crap come from? I believe it comes from the religious theory that humans have souls and are therefore fundamentally different from animals. We get to go to heaven when we die, we have dominion over all other living creatures, etc., precisely because we have souls. When we die, our soul goes to heaven or to hell, depending on whether we were good or bad, so be good for heaven's sake.
This soul theory ties in with two key extreme positions, that human life begins at conception, and that humans are not evolved from apes and other simians.
Why is this? Well, if we are to have souls, when logically would we get them? At passage through the birth canal? Too icky folks! What is the Missus gets a C-section? No, better to say that the soul is imbued by God into the impregnated egg, the zygote. No mention is made of how God does this, and why He would be lurking around the bedrooms of countless millions of horny men and women, waiting for that precious moment when the sperm meets the egg. Jeez, couldn't He come back later, while they're having a cigarette?
Regarding the issue of evolution, if we are descendants of animals, then either animals have souls too, or they (and by extension us) don't. Since we don't want Fido to go to heaven with us and poop there, and since we want to eat cows and pigs, animals must be spiritually different from us, and not merely dumber than us. We cannot be related to them.
The requirement that the Earth be only 6000 years old, instead of 4.5 billion years old, stems from the need to disprove the central tenet of evolution, that we descended from apes over a period of millions of years, and that life has been on Earth for 3.7 billion years.
In case you didn't know, Bush doesn't believe in evolution. This dovetails nicely with the idea that God intevened in the history of mankind to choose Bush to lead the free world during the "end 'o days". This is the destiny of mankind. Christ is coming back, and you better reform right quick, or you won't be raptured. The Bible drives social and foreign policy.
All this reminds me of my salad days as an altar boy in the Catholic church, when we were told that the strangely sexless and denuded wafer, once blessed, was God himself. If the priest, hands shaking from wine-induced delirium tremens, dropped a wafer on the sacristy floor, he had to mark the spot with his hanky where the sacred wafer fell, so that some poor nun could vacuum the spot later, presumably to pick up the microscopic crumbs of Christ with her special God vacuum.
And now this "crazy thinking" is invading and taking over the corridors of power of the greatest and most powerful nation the Earth has ever witnessed. We are entering a new Dark Ages, where we are required to refer to evolution as a theory, where we are required to give face-time to the notion that the Earth is 6000 years old, where it is OK to kill 100,000 Iraqis, mud people all, but it is not OK to sluff off a four-celled blastomere.
What about my poor scalp cells that die, because I forgot to shampoo with Head and Shoulders? Did I kill them? Hey, if I have hemmorhoids, am I murdering ass cells when I shit? And what did that nun do with those crumbs of Christ? What if she missed a couple and somebody stepped on them?
This is what happens when "black and white" religious thinking is conjoined with the apparatus of the state. This is what the brilliant Jefferson was so worried about 230 years ago. This is what we have to look forward to. This is why the phone is ringing off the hook in Toronto, for people wanting to emigrate to Canada at $1500 a pop, with a one year waiting period. This is why countless ordinary people came out of the woodwork to work against Bush, not for themselves, but for their children.
But that's OK, we'll get tax breaks, and they won't take the soft porn on cable away, will they? No, we Dems just don't understand values, we don't respect those folks in the red states who pass around snakes every Sunday. Whatever you do, don't insult anybody by actually telling them that what they believe in is completely nuts. No, that would be elitist. Instead, remain silent while they ruin your fucking lives, while they send you to the gas chambers of an insane world where war never ends, where Janet Jackson's boob popping out is unforgivable, where you can forget about collecting social security, and where the government must pay retail for a half trillion dollars of drugs. No, we must all be very quiet now, us castrated Dems. Be quiet, and very afraid.