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Donald Trump, Delusional Sociopath or Political Genius?

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Post by David Swanson, originally titled The Even More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.

Twenty-seven psychiatrists and mental health experts have produced a book called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, which I think, despite stating that the fate of the world is in the hands of an evil madman, understates the danger.

The case that these authors make is one that I believe would strike most readers not loyal to Trump as common sense. The evidence that they compile, and with which we’re mostly already familiar, strongly supports their diagnosis of Trump as hedonistic, narcissistic, bullying, dehumanizing, lying, misogynistic, paranoid, racist, self-aggrandizing, entitled, exploiting, empathy-impaired, unable to trust, free of guilt, manipulative, delusional, likely senile, and overtly sadistic. They also describe the tendency of some of these traits to grow ever worse through reinforcing cycles that seem to be underway. People, they suggest, who grow addicted to feeling special, and who indulge in paranoia can create circumstances for themselves that cause them to increase these tendencies.

As the Justice Department closes in on Trump, writes Gail Sheehy, “Trump’s survival instincts will propel him to a wag-the-dog war.” Of course, this builds in the assumptions that Trump stole the election and that we will all remain dogs, that we will start approving of Trump if he starts bombing more people. Certainly this has been the U.S. corporate media’s approach thus far. But need it be ours? The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists disapproves and has moved the doomsday clock closer to zero. The Council on Foreign Relations has begun listing the United States as a top threat to the United States. A Congressional committee has held a hearing on the danger of a Trumpian nuclear war (even while feigning impotence to do anything about it). It’s not beyond the realm of imagination that the U.S. public could refuse to cheer for more mass murder.

In this regard, certainly most past presidents have been more successful, not less, than Trump at what Robert J. Lifton calls the normalization of evil. He gives as an example the creation of the acceptance of torture. And certainly we’ve moved from Bush Jr. secretly torturing to Obama refusing to prosecute to Trump publicly supporting torture. But many still deem torture unacceptable. Hence this book’s assumption that the reader will agree that torture is evil. But murder by bomb or drone missile has been so normalized, including by Barack “I’m really good at killing people” Obama, that it’s passed over by this book as simply normal. Lifton does refer to the normalization of a nuclear threat during the (previous) Cold War, but seems to believe that phenomenon to be a problem of the past rather than one so successfully normalized that people don’t see it anymore.

Most of the symptoms found in Trump have existed in various degrees and combinations in past presidents and in past and current Congress members. But some of the symptoms seem to serve only as icing. That is, alone they are deemed unobjectionable, but in combination with others they point to severe sociopathy. Obama switched positions, lied, schemed, falsely marketed wars, reveled in the commission of murder, joked about using drone missiles on his daughter’s boyfriends, etc. But he spoke well, used a better vocabulary, avoided blatant racism, sexism, and personal bullying, didn’t seem to worship himself, didn’t brag about sexual assault, and so on.

My point, I very much wish it were needless to say, is not the equivalence of any president with another, but the normalization of illnesses in society as much as in individuals. This book goes after Trump for falsely claiming that Obama was spying on him. Yet the unconstitutional blanket surveillance of the NSA effectively means that Obama was indeed spying on everyone, including Trump. Sure, Trump was lying. Sure, Trump was paranoid. But if we avoid the larger reality, we’re lying too.

The symptoms from which Trump suffers may be taken as a guide to action by his followers, but they have long been understood to be an outline of the techniques of war propaganda. Dehumanization may be something Trump suffers from, but it’s also a necessary skill in persuading people to participate in war. Trump was given the presidential nomination by media outlets that asked primary candidates questions that included “Would you be willing to kill hundreds and thousands of innocent children?” Had a candidate said no, he or she would have been disqualified. The authors fault Trump for his joining the long list of presidents who have threatened to use nukes, but when Jeremy Corbyn said he wouldn’t use nukes, all hell broke loose in the UK, and his mental state was called into question there. Alzheimer’s may be a disease afflicting Trump, but when Bernie Sanders mentioned important bits of history like a coup in Iran in ’53, the television networks found something else to cover.

Is it possible that refusing to confront reality has been normalized so deeply that the authors join in it, or are required to by their agent or editor? Academic studies say the U.S. government is an oligarchy. These doctors say they want to defend the U.S. “democracy” from Trump. This book identifies Vladimir Putin as being essentially the same as Adolf Hitler, based on zero offered evidence, and treats Trump denials of colluding with Russia to steal an election as signs of dishonesty or delusion. But how do we explain most members of the Democratic Party believing in Russiagate without proof? How do we explain Iran being voted the biggest threat to peace in the world by Americans, while people in most countries, according to Gallup and Pew, give that honor to the United States? What are we to make of the vast majority of Americans claiming to “believe in” “God” and denying the existence of death? Isn’t climate denial child’s play beside that one, if we set aside the factor of normalization?

If a corporation or an empire or an athlete or a Hollywood action film were a person, it might be Donald Trump. But we all live in the world of corporations, empire, etc. We also apparently live in a world in which numerous men enjoy abusing women. That all these sexual harassers in the news, some of whom I am guessing are innocent but most of whom appear guilty, have convinced themselves that women don’t really mind the abuse can, I think, be only a small part of the explanation. The large part seems quite clearly to be that we live in a country of sadists. And shouldn’t they get a chance to elect someone who represents their point of view? Trump has been a public figure for decades, and most of his symptoms are nothing new, but he’s been protected and even rewarded throughout. Trump incites violence on Twitter, but Twitter will not disable Trump’s account. Congress is staring numerous documented impeachable offenses in the face, but chooses to look into only the one that lacks evidence but fuels war. The media, as noted, while remarkably improving on its enabling deference, still seems to give Trump the love he craves only when he brags about bombing people.

The U.S. Constitution is and has always been deeply flawed in many ways, but it did not intend to give any individual beyond-royal powers over the earth. I’ve always viewed the obsession with the emperor that this article I’m now writing feeds as part of the problem of transferring power to him. But the authors of The Dangerous Case are right that we have no choice but to focus on him now. All we’d need would be a Cuban Missile Crisis and our fate would be sealed. The Emperor Formerly Known As Executive should be given the powers of the British queen, not be replaced by an acceptable Democratic emperor. The first step should be using the Constitution.

Similar analyses of George W. Bush’s mental health, not to mention a laundry list of abuses and crimes, never resulted in any action against him. And despite this new book’s claim to defend “democracy” it does not use the word “impeachment.” Instead, it turns to the 25th Amendment which allows the president’s own subordinates to ask Congress to remove him from office. Perhaps because the likelihood of that happening is so extreme, and because further stalling and protecting of Trump is naturally a means of appearing “reasonable,” the authors propose a study be done (even though they’ve just written a book) and that it be done by Congress. But if Congress were to take up this matter, it could impeach Trump and remove him without asking permission of his cabinet or doing any investigations. In fact, it could impeach him for any of a number of the behaviors that are studied in this book.

The authors note that Trump has encouraged imitation of his outrages. We’ve seen that here in Charlottesville. They note that he’s also created the Trump Anxiety Disorder in those he frightens. I’m 100% on board with treating fear as a symptom to be cured.

Quote of the Day: Why Are Women Rarely Accused of Sexual Harassment? by Maria Puente

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sexual harrassment
Cartoon by Matt Bors

In the fire-hose torrent of sexual harassment scandals we are staggering under these days, one thing stands out as a common factor in all the cases: The accused are men.

“One of the reasons it is men who harass women, and sometimes other men, is that this is about power and overwhelmingly (workplace) upper management is male, so the positions of power are disproportionately occupied by men and the bottom is disproportionately occupied by women,” says Abigail Saguy, professor of sociology and gender studies at UCLA and author of the 2003 book, What is Sexual Harassment?

You may be thinking at this point… well, duh, this is something we all know instinctively. Women don’t do this kind of thing — grope, talk dirty, assault, sexually coerce, even rape their work colleagues. It’s a Y chromosome kind of thing, right?

But not so fast. Franklin Raddish, a South Carolina Baptist pastor with a nationwide following, last month declared, as a means of supporting Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore (who lost Tuesday), that accusations of sexual harassment against men in politics and Hollywood amounted to a “war on men.”

“More women are sexual predators than men,” opined Raddish. “Women are chasing young boys up and down the road, but we don’t hear about that because it’s not PC.”

He provided no evidence of this because, well, there isn’t any.

Still, there are exceptions that prove the rule: On Friday, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Kansas dropped out of her race after The Kansas City Star found out she had been accused in a 2005 lawsuit of sexually harassing and retaliating against a male subordinate who rejected her advances when she was a corporate executive.

….

Which leads to the question: What are the numbers on women accused of sexual harassment? Has anyone conducted scientific surveys and found some? What’s the reason why it appears the vast majority of people accused of workplace sexual harassment are men?

And what’s the reason few men ever file formal complaints?

“Pride gets in the way,” says Todd Harrison, a partner in a California firm that handles thousands of employment-law cases per year. “Most good plaintiffs attorneys who handle discrimination and harassment claims take on female-to-male harassment and the same (laws) apply. It’s just a matter of whether the men who are victims want to come forward.”

There are few numbers available about women sexual harassers, and some of the numbers available are more than a decade old.

“It is extremely rare — it does happen but it is extremely rare,” says Genie Harrison, a Los Angeles-based attorney who specializes in workplace sexual-harassment cases. “Men can be victims and women can be abusers, and I’ve represented victims where a woman was the harasser, but I would say it’s at best a 99.9%-to-.01% ratio.”

Various government agencies, such as the military, the federal employee system or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, keep track of complaints of workplace sexual harassment but they generally focus on the accusers, not the accused.

— In the most recent data available from the EEOC, there were 6,758 complaints of sexual harassment allegations received by the commission in 2016, and a little more than 16% were filed by men. But the data don’t say who did the harassing — a woman or another man.

Moreover, EEOC data do not provide a comprehensive picture of the entire country. Plus, the agency estimates that most people, male or female, who have experienced harassment (more than 80%) never file a formal complaint about it.

….

Emily Martin, general counsel and vice president for workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, who handles workplace sexual harassment issues, agrees that women harassers are a “minority of cases” because women are less likely to exercise power over men at work.

“I’ve never worked with a client where a woman was the harasser; we’re a women’s-rights organization so the individuals who tend to reach out to us are women,” Martin says. “And women who target other women (for harassment) is an unusual fact pattern.”

Jennifer Berdahl, a professor in the business school at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who studies the harassment of men, says harassment is also about gender and how society defines it. Males learn a sense of superiority over females from the time they are children, she says.

Being a man means being superior to a woman and dominating women sexually or otherwise; sexual harassment is taking that (thinking) to an extreme,” Berdahl says. “It’s possible there’s a rare woman who might get off on dominating a person like that but men are socialized from the age of 3 to think of themselves as being ‘a real man,’ defined as dominating women.”

In her research, she says, she’s found that the most common way a woman would harass a man is to question his manhood. For many men, she says, being scorned as “feminine” or “weak” is too humiliating to report.

Another source of limited data on women harassers: Law firms that specialize in employment law and sexual harassment cases, such as Perona, Langer, Beck, Serbin, Mendoza & Harrison in Long Beach, Calif.

Todd Harrison, a partner in the firm, estimates he handles about 150 cases of employment law a year, and about 65% of them are sex harassment cases. Of those, 10% — or less than 10 cases per year — involve women as the accused harassers, he said.

“Sexual harassment is not just about sexual innuendo or jokes or pats on the butt, it’s about power and intimidation, so the cases I’ve handled (involving women harassers), it’s normally a woman in a control position and using that power to intimidate men,” Harrison says.

“Sometimes there are sexual overtures, inappropriate touching without consent, offers for quid pro quo or sex for promotion,” he added. “A lot of times it’s a powerful woman in an organization who will talk down or treat a man different from his female counterparts.”

But men can be reluctant to  come forward to complain due to fear of mockery, he says. Men may also buy into the notion that female-on-male harassment isn’t even possible.

“Embarrassment is always an issue,” Harrison says. “Societal norms say men are supposed to be able to handle this. But we have men (clients) who say, ‘It’s just not fair. We’re always accused of it, here’s a situation where we’ve been victimized by a person in authority.’ ”

….

— Maria Puente, USA Today, Women are Rarely Accused of Sexual Harassment, and There’s a Reason Why, December 18, 2017

Quote of the Day: Roy Moore Spokesman Ted Crockett Says the Bible Trumps U.S. Constitution

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Witness the interview between CNN’s Jake Tapper and Moore spokesman Ted Crockett on Tuesday afternoon. Crockett responded “probably” when Tapper pressed him on whether Moore believed homosexuality should be illegal. Then came this exchange between Tapper and Crockett over Muslims serving in Congress. I’m excerpting a big chunk of it because, well, you’ll see.

TAPPER: Judge Moore has also said that he doesn’t think a Muslim member of Congress should be allowed to be in Congress. Why? Under what provision of the Constitution?

CROCKETT: Because you have to swear on the Bible — when you are before — I had to do it. I’m an elected official, three terms, I had to swear on a Bible. You have to swear on a Bible to be an elected official in the United States of America. He alleges that a Muslim cannot do that, ethically, swearing on the Bible.

TAPPER: You don’t actually have to swear on a Christian bible, you can swear on anything, really. I don’t know if you knew that. You can swear on a Jewish Bible.

CROCKETT: Oh no. I swore on the Bible. I’ve done it three times.

TAPPER: I’m sure you have, I’m sure you’ve picked a Bible but the law is not that you have to swear on a Christian Bible. That is not the law. You don’t know that? All right. Ted Crockett with the Moore —

CROCKETT: I don’t know. I know that Donald Trump did it when he — when we made him President.

TAPPER: Because he’s Christian and he picked it. That’s what he wanted to swear in on. Ted Crockett with the Moore campaign. Good luck tonight. Thank you so much for being here. My panel will react when we get back

CROCKETT: Merry Christmas, Jake.

TAPPER: Thank you, sir.

— Chris Cillizza, Jake Tapper Interview of Roy Moore Spokesman Ted Crockett, December 12, 2017

Did You Know Most Pedophiles and Rapists are Women?

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the predatory woman

Just when I think I have heard EVERYTHING, a Christian fanatic will send me an email such as the one that follows. According to the letter writer, contrary to what we know to be true about rape, pedophilia, and sexual assault, most perpetrators are actually angry ovulating females. Let that sink in for a moment. You see, ladies, it is men who are being harassed and molested, not women. It is men who must constantly be aware of their surroundings lest a woman jump out of the bushes and rape them. Birth control, according to the letter writer, has turned women into predatory animals who seek to sexually dominate men.

I suspect the letter writer is a Roman Catholic. What better way to deflect attention from the Catholic church’s sex scandal than to suggest that most sex crimes are perpetrated by women, not men. Countless children and teenagers have been sexually abused by Catholic priests, yet, according to the letter writer, the REAL scandal is sexual abuse at the hands of birth-control-using women.

Here’s an excerpt from the letter writer’s three-thousand-word tome:

CONTRACEPTION CREATES FEMALE PEDOPHILES & CHILD MOLESTERS

(To Eliminate Majority of Rape Just Ban Birth control)

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (the statistical agency of the injustice department) states: “Approximately 95% of all youth reporting staff sexual misconduct said they had been victimized by female staff. In 2008, 42% of staff in state juvenile facilities were female.”

This disproves the idea that women are more likely to molest children just because they are around them more often and have more access. No. The statistical data shows that even when the pagan women have less access to children and are less than half of the staff in juvenile prisons they end up committing a staggering 95% of child rapes. So shocking is this statistic that journalist Laura Burke of the Texas Observer out of curiosity decided to contact the justice bureau of her home state of Texas concerning the figures of female victimization of youth, since she knows that ‘nationally’ 42% of staff in child prisons are females, and that in Texas 50% of juvenile hall staff employees are females (in the Texas Youth Commission, which is the biggest chain of child prisons in Texas and dominates almost 100% of youth prisons there); now this is what she said in regard to her inquiry: “The justice bureau will not release percentage breakdowns of sexual offenses by female employees in Texas, or at individual facilities. The bureau cites confidentiality as the reason.”

Birth control creates the female pagan child predator epidemic. Women who use it are such beasts of impurity that they are driven to murder in the 1st degree in an act of ultimate betrayal the children they conceive. This vicious act utterly permanently destroys their maternal (and feminine) instincts. Contraception murders already conceived children. It prevents them from attaching themselves to the womb after conception when they travel to that place. It would also seem there are tons of female sodomites (no doubt themselves child killers) in action too, because 14% of juvenile hall youth are females and this figure in general has not changed since 1997 and yet 95% of all minors reporting child molestation say female staff did it. So statistically this means male staff are less likely to molest girls than their female staff counterparts, despite constituting over half of the staff in juvenile prisons. This tells us that it’s very much possible the majority of the female pedophiles in juvenile hall are sodomites and that the remainder who are not sodomites are nonetheless guilty of child murder (and that being a murderess of children is what drove sodomite women to be sodomite in the first place). It’s scientifically undeniable, birth control turns women into pedophiles. Young males in detention are being sexually assaulted more so by female guards and caretakers than females in detention by male guards. Female staffers are more likely to committ [sic] sexual assault and rape inmates than male staffers.

Female staff committ [sic] more forcible sexual assualt [sic] than male staff; indeed females committ [sic] 86% of it according to the 2012 BJS report of staff indecent misconduct in juvenile hall. Here is a situation in which women in complete power have no hesitation using it to hurt children. It shows that when presented with the opportunity women will rape and this should raise concerns not only about female staff in juvenile prisons, but women in general because women have much greater access to children than men. This means that people should suspect all contracepting [sic] women of being child rapists or potential child rapists and at the very least, as pedophiles. I repeat; women who use birth control are either active child predators, a developing child molester, or a child molester in training. Statistics do away with the ridiculous notion that sexual violence is always or mostly male-on-female assaults.

The epidemic of woman predators molesting school children is so bad that even CBS News has a well-updated special section on their website dedicated to showing the profile photos of teacher female molesters and briefly mentioning the details of their child molestations.

According to Richard Nixon’s Commission on Obscenity for every female prostitute there are 9 underage male prostitutes. Birth control turns women into pedophiles. An extensive study in Canada found that high rates of homeless children are being molested. Staggeringly, 3/4 of the molestations of boys were done by adult women.Arguably, pagan female child killers (among whom are many woman sodomites) are more intense in their child lust than male sodomites.

With prescience Giuseppe Cardinal Siri (His Holiness Pope Gregory XVII) wrote on June 12th, 1960 the epistle “Notification Concerning Men’s Dress worn By Women”. Logically outlining the evil effects of women wearing pants, he said it leads to “the rising of the primary instincts” which “push forward to uncontrolled acts.” For such a change of clothing “helps to diminish the vital defenses of the sense of shame” or “obstructs that sense” and “when this sense of shame is absent because of some obstacle or impediment, then the relations between men and women degrade to pure sensuality devoid of all mutual respect and esteem.” He also says: “Experience teaches us that when the woman is de-feminized, then defenses are undermined and weakness increases.” He added: “What can these women give their children when they have worn trousers for so long that their self-esteem is determined more by their competition with men than by their function as women?”

Indeed, the feminism heresy (of which contraception and wearing men’s clothing is a part) turns women into pedophiles. The statistics robustly go on. Apart from raping boys, pagan women harlots also love raping men, gang raping men, kidnapping and raping them; especially if the male victim is a handicap or blind or immobile or non-verbal or unconcious [sic] or sedated or restrained.

These swine love to abuse the role of “care giver.” 12 years ago one careerist pedophile with the usual indiscretion, candor of snobbery and mockery, said: “Had an incident the other day, a pt. had a tight foreskin. First i couldn’t get the thing to go back, THEN couldn’t get it to go back over!! What didn’t help matters is that there wasn’t much to take hold of. Plus 5 sets of eyeballs watching.” Indeed, one only need peruse the blogs owned by nurses (which will not be named here because they are awful and moreover frequently criticized by doctor blogs and websites and a few nurse blogs as unprofessional and incredibly damaging to the profession) to discover their unladylike strange appetites; their supercilious ribaldry and shocking amount of inappropriate comments they make regarding the physique of boy patients, their belittling comments; detraction, their disturbingly fanatic attraction to minors, their fascination with personal areas of the body, their frank admissions of how they love it when they do “physicals” on boys, how they love to undress them and digitally penetrate the male part of boys with a catheter while the person is drugged under sedation (and in most cases then removing it prior to the child awaking, who never find out that they were undressed and lost their virginity) and this undoubtedly would constitute rape (this also happens to male adult patients). They also constantly love to gloat and bask in their status of total impunity and predation, the wide culture of acceptance of these deviancies, and how co-workers with ogling eyes watch and even participate in it. Any place of care of the vulnerable has always been a magnet for these types of perverts, who take pleasure in the degradation, hurt and humiliation of their victims. Indeed 6 female Minnesota teens at a nursing home raped their elderly patients. I mean, high school girls unleashed their devastating desires on the elderly, presumably after taking birth control.

….

SHOCKER: MORE MEN ARE VICTIMS OF RAPE THAN WOMEN

“More men are raped in the US than women, figures on prison assaults reveal:  “More men are raped in the U.S. than woman, according to figures that include sexual abuse in prisons. In 2008, it was estimated 216,000 inmates were sexually assaulted while serving time, according to the Department of Justice figures. That is compared to 90,479 rape cases outside of prison.”

Sexual misconduct is not an uncommon complaint to state boards of nursing. 38 to 52 percent of nurses report knowledge of colleagues who have had sexual misconduct with patients. The NCSBN reports that in some states sexual activity with a consenting adult patient is considered a criminal offense (since it is statutory rape for a person in a position of trust to use it for lewd activity).

According to individual state boards of nursing disciplinary records; the ratio of female nurses committing boundary violations as compared to male nurses is 26/1. That is for every male nurse that has sex with his patient, 26 female nurses have done so as well.

CONTRACEPTING FEMALE PAGAN (HARLOTS) CAN BE MORE VIOLENT THAN MEN

Contracepting female [sic] are just as violent, if not more violent than their male counterparts: “It has often been claimed that the reason CTS studies have found as many women as men to be physically aggressive is because women are defending themselves against attack. A number of studies have addressed this issue and found that when asked, more women than men report initiating the attack.”  According to CDC study: “Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases.”

USA FLAG INSPIRES FEMALES TO BE CHILD MOLESTERS

Another factor driving female pedophilia is venerating the anti-Christian USA flag whose tricolor represents the condemned rebellious masonic slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity” under which millions of Christians were murdered (it represents man against God and the overthrow of Christian order and Monarchy which uphold inequality). This purges all their moral sensibilities, drives them to lust and therefore birth control and child molestation. After speaking to a rebellious foul-mouthed heretic in the South who audaciously pretends to be Catholic, I should point out in regard to the tricolor, that anti-Christian France and the USA republic are masonic creations. Both colonial and French freemasons [sic] collaborated in fomenting the revolution in America (1775-1783) and France (1789-1799); so the significance of the tricolor ‘red, white, and blue’ as representing the heresy ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ remains. When adopted and used by masons, it carries a particular meaning; in the same way that the rainbow though given to mankind by God as a sign of peace and promise that he would never destroy the world again with a flood; when that symbol is used by secular religion it takes on a whole different meaning, namely, the total repudiation of Marriage and the family, which is the lifelong union of man and the woman. When the Cross is used by Christianity it signifies Christ but when used by American religion especially on gravesites [sic] of the USA missionaries (I.e soldiers) it represents the condemned doctrine of ‘universal salvation.’ When Christians use the upside down Cross on the Feast of St. Peter it represents his upsidedown [sic] crucifixion martyrdom, but when used outside that context it represents Satanism. The more pagan woman tries to conform to the women of Christianity (the only authentic standard of womanhood) the better; for pagan women would not generally be harlots and murderesses of innocent children in the 1st place.

….

I think I can now safely say that women really are to blame for EVERYTHING! Pity us men. It is unsafe for us to even leave our homes with female sexual predators prowling about seeking to drop their pants and ride every man in America. Men must demand action be taken by law enforcement to protect them from angry, ovulating, birth-control-popping, child-molesting, rapist females.

Or we can safely assume that the writer of the aforementioned screed is bat-shit crazy, a Roman Catholic loon who hates women. What say ye, female readers? Has the letter writer exposed the truth about women — that it is women, not men, who commit most sexual crimes? Please share your angry, hormone-driven, birth-controlled thoughts in the comment section.

Female by Keith Urban

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keith urbanWhat follows is a video of the Keith Urban singing Female. The song fits well with the current national discussion about women and sexual harassment.

Video Link

Lyrics

When you hear somebody say somebody hits like a girl
How does that hit you?
Is that such a bad thing?
When you hear a song that they play saying you run the world
Do you believe it?
Will you live to see it?

Sister, shoulder, daughter, lover
Healer, broken halo, mother
Nature, fire, suit of armor
Soul survivor, holy water
Secret keeper, fortune teller
Virgin Mary, scarlet letter
Technicolor, river wild
Baby girl, woman child
Female

When somebody laughs and implies that she asked for it
Just ’cause she was wearin’ a skirt
Oh, is that how that works?
When somebody talks about how it was Adam first
Does that make Eve second best
Or did He save the best for last?

Sister, shoulder, daughter, lover
Healer, broken halo, mother
Nature, fire, suit of armor
Soul survivor, holy water
Secret keeper, fortune teller
Virgin Mary, scarlet letter
Technicolor, river wild
Baby girl, woman child
Female
Yeah, female

She’s the heart of life
She’s the dreamer’s dream
She’s the hands of time
She’s the queen of kings

Sister, shoulder, daughter, lover
Healer, broken halo, mother
Nature, fire, suit of armor
Soul survivor, holy water
Secret keeper, fortune teller
Virgin Mary, scarlet letter
Technicolor, river wild
Baby girl, woman child
Female
Mhm, female

Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

The Roy Moore vs. Jimmy Kimmel Fight: Never Pick a Fight with a Comedian

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roy moore

Comedian and late-night  TV host Jimmy Kimmel has mentioned Alabama senate candidate and Evangelical Christian Roy Moore several times on his program, Jimmy Kimmel Live!  Yesterday, Moore decided to “fight” back by tweeting on Twitter:

If you want to mock our Christian values, come down here to Alabama and do it man to man. #ALSen

Kimmel responded:

Sounds great Roy – let me know when you get some Christian values and I’ll be there!

Moore replied:

Despite D.C. and Hollywood Elites’ bigotry towards southerners, Jimmy, we’ll save you a seat on the front pew.

Kimmel, showing why it is never a good idea to get into a fight with a comedian, replied:

OK Roy, but I’m leaving my daughters at home! P.S. – wear that cute little leather vest.

During Thursday night’s monologue, Kimmel said:

I accept the invitation. I’m going to come down with a team of high school cheerleaders. … And when the girls and I show up, if you can somehow manage to keep little Roy in your cowboy pants, you and I will sit down in the food court and have a chat about Christian values.

There is no one I would rather fight. I will put my Christian values aside to fight you. I’ll wear a Girl Scout uniform, so you have something to look at. Whoever wins the fight, we’ll donate the money from tickets we sell to whatever charity we want. I’ll donate mine to the women who claim you molested them.

Smack! Checkmate!

Video Link

If you have not seen the Anthony J. “Tony” Barbieri (AKA Jake Byrd) video of Roy Moore’s recent rally at Magnolia Springs Baptist Church in Theodore, Alabama, please check it out below. It provides a serious, yet funny look into the minds of Moore supporters. It also shows how homophobic and bigoted Moore really is.

Video Link

Evangelical Pastor Flip Benham Defends Roy Moore and His Taste for Teen Girls

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flip-benham

I am convinced that Evangelicals have so prostituted themselves on behalf of the Republican Party that they lost any sense of decency, ethics, and morality. Take Flip Benham, director of Operation Save America:

Judge Roy Moore graduated from West Point and then went on into the service, served in Vietnam and then came back and was in law school. All of the ladies, or many of the ladies that he possibly could have married were not available then, they were already married, maybe, somewhere. So he looked in a different direction and always with the [permission of the] parents of younger ladies … He did that because there is something about a purity of a young woman, there is something that is good, that’s true, that’s straight and he looked for that. (Crooks and Liars)

There’s something about the PURITY of a teen girl? Yes, he actually said that. Benham’s argument seems to be that all the older women were being fucked by men and were married, so Moore had to seek out teen girls who had not yet lost their virginity. We should be very glad that all the teen girls weren’t “impure.” Moore would have then had to seek out prepubescent girls to meet his purity standard.

Christians Say the Darnedest Things: Raising White Christian Boys in a Culture That Hates Them

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scott alan buss

You just don’t talk about white people, boys or not, as if they’re somehow deserving of equal consideration and treatment in America when we all know that every other gender (of which one is real), every other ethnicity, and every other religious perspective is totally deserving of “special consideration” above and beyond what “Christian white boys” in America ought to have or even expect.

You aren’t supposed to notice, and certainly not speak out against, the fact that American culture has been systematically programmed to embrace and promote an attitude of open hostility, discrimination, and disdain for several groups, with particular hostility acutely focused on Christian white boys, who literally embody the sin of being several problematic things all at once, namely: Christian, white, and male.

To be not only a male, but a young male in America, makes you the target of an anti-Christian educational system and a pagan pop-culture designed to feminize and castrate you by various means, including the mass prescription of mind altering drugs (and I mean literally mind altering – the brain is radically altered by these things) to compensate for and/or crush the more “annoying” aspects of maleness in youth.

To be a Christian – an actual Bible-believing Christian – in this culture makes you a fringe kook even in most “conservative Christian” churches. To actually believe in Jesus as Lord over everything in His creation for real is to be a relic of America’s Calvinistic past that it’s anti-Calvinistic/anti-Christian present can’t seem to ditch fast enough or impugn loudly enough.

I mean what kind of racist, sexist, homophopic, islamophobic, transphopic, global warming denying white devil do you have to be in America these days to dare to publically acknowledge that your children are, um, white, and that said whiteness is totally cool and good?

….

Yes, my children are white.

Really white.

Glow in the dark white.

They make Dracula look tanned and SPF 100 seem reasonable.

You get the picture.

The very white picture.

Now on to more important things…

Like open discrimination.

As in: If you’re a white boy or man in America, it is 100% A-Okay (and virtuous even) for you to be openly discriminated against through any number of “special considerations” given to everyone who is not like you.

Every other gender (of which one is real) gets preferential treatment.

Every other ethnicity (of which all are a part of one race – the human race) get’s preferential treatment.

Every other religious worldview gets preferential treatment.

As a Christian white boy and Christian white man in America, you are and will be uniquely targeted for attack, criticism, discrimination, and blame.

— Scott Alan Buss, AKA Fire Breathing Christian, Raising Christian White Boys In A Culture Programmed To Hate Them, November 22, 2017

Note

Buss is a Calvinist. He attends Christ the King Church in Centerville, Tennessee.

Quote of the Day: Atheists and Progressive Christians Must Work Together for the Common Good by Sarahbeth Caplin

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work togetherLately, it’s occurred to me that progressive-leaning Christians like myself have more in common with atheists right now than with white evangelicals, the ones who, overwhelmingly, will stop at nothing to see the United States turn into a theocracy, using Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale as a handbook rather than as a cautionary tale.

Religious beliefs aside, atheists and progressive Christians need each other during these uncertain times. Our politics, if nothing else, are more alike than they are different. You don’t need to share spirituality to understand the consequences of enforcing so-called “bathroom safety” laws that target transgender people, rejecting climate change, allowing businesses to deny women’s health care, or allowing Creationism to be taught alongside evolution in public schools. As citizens, we all have common adversaries, among them faith-based ignorance and bigotry. As human beings, we also have common causes worth uniting for: freedom and education.

— Sarahbeth Caplin, The Friendly Atheist, Atheists and Progressive Christians Must Work Together to Fight Evangelicals, November 26, 2017

Quote of the Day: The American Declaration of Independence Dethrones God by Robert Ingersoll

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robert ingersoll

The Declaration of Independence announces the sublime truth, that all power comes from the people. This was a denial, and the first denial of a nation, of the infamous dogma that God confers the right upon one man to govern others. It was the first grand assertion of the dignity of the human race. It declared the governed to be the source of power, and in fact denied the authority of any and all gods. Through the ages of slavery — through the weary centuries of the lash and chain, God was the acknowledged ruler of the world. To enthrone man, was to dethrone God.

— Robert Ingersoll, Individuality, 1873