Brickbat: Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?
U.S. Senators Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono, both Democrats, say they are concerned that Brian Buescher, who has been nominated by President Donald Trump to a federal district court in Nebraska, is a member of a "extreme" group: the Knights of Columbus. The Knights of Columbus are a Catholic fraternal service organization and charity known to many for the colorful hats members wear. But Harris and Hirono say they have taken "extreme" positions such as defending traditional marriage and opposing abortion.
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And thereby Democrats are perfectly fine with religious bigotry, as long as it is against practicing Catholics who take their religion seriously.
Semi-serious question: why do most progressives despise Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and anything that feels like fundamental Christianity, but tolerate Muslims and practically swoon over native American mythology?
can’t abide objective standards in any form…
Divide and conquer.
Because they don’t know any Muslims and they do know Christians. There’s probably a name for this attitude. Same as that famous map of the world as seen from NYC. What’s nearby and known is familiar; what distant and unknown is up for nothing but speculation. I’d throw on a corollary that if you like the nearby and familiar, you will fear and despise the distant unknown; and contra-wise, if the nearby familiar disgusts you the distant unknown will be intriguing and be assumed good.
Most of what organized religion does right is on the personal level and mostly invisible. It’s the hierarchy which screws up in public: hiding perverted priests, getting rich off TV mega churches. Thus the non-religious find it easy to treat religion as a fraud, but of course, that’s the familiar nearby religion, which means the distant unknown religion must be good in comparison.
Interesting points. Now I wonder how that familiarity with christian religions (if nothing else, by way of family heritage) is also coupled to typical liberal self-hate.
And while I get that some religions offer people value at the personal level, even there the core drivers of faith and magic obstruct rational thinking.
Like that guy that came up with the Big Bang Theory. Totally obstructed.
To the left, the only evil in the world are white Christian males.
The Kennedy dynasty collapsed.
The draw of the exotic. Pretentious claptrap becomes great art when rendered by a foreign genius. Meaningless, even contradictory, platitudes are the wisdom of the ages when spouted by someone who spent thirty years meditating on top of a mountain in Tibet. Not to mention foreign “delicacies” no sensible person would feed to a dog.
Also, Native Americans have been mostly exterminated and thoroughly subjugated, so they’re totally safe. Muslims are far more numerous, but the global jihad pretty much ground to a halt a few centuries back, and now the ummah is mired in internecine strife and economic stagnation. Today even the most militant Muslims can’t do more than blow up a few people now and then, which is a pretty big comedown from the days when they were conquering entire countries.
Do you include Catholics’ stale gay-bashing in your description of religious bigotry?
given the number of pedophile priests/ pastors/padres and their nominal victims (alter boys), I’d say that the gay bashing is mostly protective coloration…what flavor of pedophile are you Rev., little girls, little boys or goats? asking for a friend.
Tell your friend to either stay seated, or to keep flat against a wall.
Artie likes relatives.
Mostly his hermaphroditic parentalsibs.
A century ago, progressives focused on undoing the results of the Civil War and eliminating immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. That legacy still shapes their inconcistancies.
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What kind of future can you have working for squirrels.
Interesting to know…
https://aladyofreason.wordpress.com/
If Kamala Harris continues down this path, she’s sure to hurt herself in the New York primaries, and it isn’t just that the Knights of Columbus are as all-American to Democrats of the northeast as baseball and apple pie. It’s also that picking on Italian-American Catholics isn’t likely to impress Irish-American Catholics either.
If there’s anything smart about this at all, it’s that Kamala Harris’ biggest problem right now is name recognition. Outside of California, nobody knows who the fuck she is. Getting yourself noticed in places like New York might be to her advantage even if it’s for something bad at this point. On the other hand, maybe Kamala Harris is just a buffoon.
I was thinking much the same thing. Things like this will do nothing but guarantee being heavily stomped by Warren and/or Biden in large swaths of the northeast in the primaries. At the same time, there probably isn’t much she can do to prevent being stomped in the northeast regardless of what she does so perhaps this is a sign of her strategy and she plans on skipping the northeast. Perhaps the key is to see what her map looks like if she ignores New England, NY, & NJ as it’s only about 600 delegates out of roughly 4000 (not counting super-d’s). It should also be noted that Catholics also make up about 25% of Floridians.
So the new slogan for 2020 will be, “Democrats – The Party of Anti-religious Bigotry”, I guess.
Bigotry — such as old-timey gay-bashing — is not improved by a superstitious cloak.
At least, not among reasoning adults.
How about we bash some our enlightened religious leaders eh Rev.?
Dhmmicrats works well in this context.
Stupid is as stupid does.
Stupid is as stupid does.
I had an uncle who was a member of the Knights. When I was 15, he took me to the bar they hung out at and ordered me a shot of whiskey. The bartender laughed when I said ‘wow’ after I drank it.
Maybe I can be in a commercial for the democrats and say the Knights get the children drunk on whiskey and how that’s bad and that’s why the progressives made the alcohol illegal for your own good and the good of the children.
U.S. Senators Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono support Prohibition 2 – let’s get it right this time – for the children.
Especially if you can prove the whisky made you rape or otherwise oppress somebody.
Pity that being seated in Congress doesn’t have the requirement “Must not exhibit the mental capacity of a turnip”, we could clear out all the Democrats in one go.
Of course we might also clear out too many Republicans to seat a quorum….so there is no actual down side….
Seriously; how freaking desperate are the Democrats going to get. Will they be eliminating former members of the Boy Scouts next?
But that is the requirement now. They’ve just interpreted it as the upper bound rather than the lower bound.
That should depend upon whether the relevant former members of the Boy Scouts are gay-bashing bigots (without regard to the precipitate of their intolerance).
if you don’t want to fondle little boys don’t join!
This is great news. Kamala Harris was already my top choice for President in 2020, and this makes me respect her even more. Drumpf is literally trying to turn this country into The Handmaid’s Tale, so of course everyone in the progressive / libertarian alliance should take the threat to abortion access extremely seriously. Ideally nobody with anti-abortion views should have a job anywhere in government. I’m glad leading Democrats recognize this.
Of course Republicans will seize on this as an example of “anti-Catholic bigotry,” but that’s a disingenuous argument. Actually the Democrats are not anti-Catholic at all. In fact many of the most prominent Democrats in the country happen to be devout Catholics ? Pelosi, Kaine, Biden, Kerry, etc.
#LibertariansForHarris
#SaveRoe
#SUPER-PRECEDENT
#NotAntiCatholicJustAntiHandmaidsTale
You just think she’s hot.
Best looking attorney general, amirite?
To a particular (stale, paunchy, narrow-minded) audience, Pam Bondi likely seems a prize.
You seem to not be aware I was quoting Barack Obama.
You need to take off the beer goggles for a while. 🙂
As do you.
TV News video.
Washington Post.
devout? are you out of your fucking mind?
Perhaps we should ask Franklin Graham’s pool boy?
Devout; I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
Buescher was quite cautious and noncombative in his responses. You’d think the Senate was majority-Democrat.
I’m sure that if it came to a conflict between his career aspirations and the principles of any organization he belonged to, career aspirations would come first.
Recall that the judge who put Kim Davis in prison was a Catholic, presumably a Catholic in good standing with his church, and that the Pope, having visited Kim Davis, then felt it necessary to lie about it as if he was more ashamed of meeting her than with promoting the career of a sex predator.
There is no reason to fear that Buescher will pose any danger to the sacred rights of abortion or SSM.
This is the same shit that drove the white, blue collar, middle class into the arms of Trump in 2016.
The problem with social justice warriors is that, eventually, they run out of other people to hate.
If the white, blue collar, middle class would vote for a white nationalist Russian intelligence asset over the most qualified candidate ever, maybe we don’t even want them in the progressive / libertarian alliance. Besides, even with their votes Drumpf still lost the election by 3 million. And the white vote will become less important going forward as the Koch / Reason immigration agenda makes this a “majority – minority” nation within the next few decades. When demographic change gives Democrats a lock on the Presidency, the Libertarian Moment will finally arrive.
You just think Kamala Harris is hot.
hahahahahahahahahaha…what a douche!
Dear God in Heaven, you are so stupid.
Your credulity knows no bounds. If a talking head on the telly insinuates something, you believe it like gravity and the rotation of the earth.
I thank God that I will never meet you.
Satire ain’t your strong suite, is it?
Poe’s Law!
Not likely. They will continue to subdivide and consume their own (e.g. cancellation of the Eureka women’s march).
It was a spin on Margaret Thatcher’s, “The problem with socialism is that, eventually, they run out of other people’s money to spend”, and the point was that, eventually, the social justice warriors always turn on their own.
Not satisfied with having alienated the white, blue collar, middle class of the rust belt, now they’re coming after Irish-Italian Catholics in the northeast–some of the most reliable Democrat voters in the country.
It’s all fun and games when they’re going after rednecks and people somewhere else. Now the cows are coming home.
Let’s ask the inverse: Whom do you NOT hate, Reverend?
Wow. You are one fucked up dude, rev. Seriously fucked up.
Hirano isn’t running for president. What gives?
Democratic politicians don’t need to be running for President in order to do the right thing. They’re motivated by a commitment to social justice, not by personal ambition.
OK, that one was a bit over the top.
I dunno, OBL gets “6/10, low effort” a lot of times, then when he makes me lol, he get “meh, a little too much”.
Poor guy.
It’s the path he chose. He wants to be an almost-believable version of a Reason-style cosmotarian and Demcratic partisan. He needs to exaggerate a bit to emphasize the parodic aspect of his schtick, but if he takes the easy way out and does full-on sarcasm I’m going to deduct points. Sorry about that, because it *was* funny.
If I may humbly venture an OBLism: “Democratic politicians are ambitious, but unlike Republicans their ambitions don’t conflict with the interests of the country and they aren’t as unscrupulous as Republicans are in service of their ambition. Sometimes I wish the Democrats would be a bit more unscrupulous, just to be able to battle cynical Republican tactics.”
Nice try, but “as unscrupulous as” is too fair-minded; better as “unscrupulous like”. Also scratch the subsequent “more”.
Very good points.
Eddy, that’s not even parody.
Those are the exact sentiments expressed by progressives when they bitch about not getting their way.
See: Tony, for example
where to begin with the egregious stupidity of this post!
Hirano isn’t running for president. What gives?
She is a US senator from Hawaii. It’s a job for life, if you don’t piss off the labor unions. She can say almost anything she fucking wants and keep her job.
Harris is an awful person, but she is not dumb. She has read the tea leaves and decided it is beneficial to insult Catholics, and religious people in general. She has decided to oppose the underpinnings of the US republic by violating the fundamental civil liberties guaranteed in the Constitution. This is the Democratic party, and these positions are popular with a substantial portion of US citizens, and a majority of illegal aliens.
This is a fight the US must not lose lest we become a much lesser country.
Horono is just dumb, so she naturally gravitates to dumb communist ideas.
Do you support gay-bashing bigots solely when their intolerance is superstition-laced, or do you just hate gays in general?
Carry on, clingers. So far as your betters permit, at least.
assertion /= argument
You just…say things. There is no point of purchase for intellectual engagement. Of course, that’s what makes it a decent troll-the fact that there are literally millions of real people who do the same thing: just assert dubious, over-simplified or totally incorrect things and from them draw awesomely ridiculous conclusions.
So you sometimes come across as plausibly real, but not through any great effort of your own.
6/10
I say that bigotry is not improved by a cloak of superstition. Do you disagree? Do you consider that point unworthy of respect in reasoned debate?
Regardless whether that superstition is religion or left-wing ideology.
They may have different values but they’re both based on beliefs, not facts. And they’re both intolerant of heresy.
PROVE that religion, and all religion, is just superstition. No points for targeting only Christianity. Only once you can prove that beyond a reasonable doubt can anyone start to accept any other portions of your repeated attempts to introduce your own brand of bigotry.
All evidence is that all religions are superstitions. It is on the backs of religionists to prove that their superstitions are real. No points for gods in the gaps. We just flew by a chunk of rock billions of years old and billions of miles away. None of that was accomplished with prayer or prophecy.
I support the US constitution. I support the right to worship a God as you see fit without being persecuted by the power of government. The US constitution is what makes America exceptional. I oppose the destruction of that exceptionalism.
Your last sentence sums up where the left wants this country to end up. I oppose that.
People should be free to believe as they wish. Whether they are entitled to special privilege against compliance with generally applicable law (or have bigotry excused because it is based on superstition) is a substantially different point.
Perhaps this point will be illuminated when people start to claim inclusivity, abortion, refusal to deal with infidels, doobies, and other things as religious sacraments.
Meh, the courts are currently divided over whether or not one can compel someone to support same-sex relationships in writing, which means a judge is hypocritical if he complains about the “LGBT Pride” spray painted on the side of his courthouse.
😉
Hello, Detective Nase. I haven’t heard from you in a while.
In this case, the US constitution IS the applicable law. Sadly, the left has fully embraced authoritarian thuggery.
Carry on, clingers.
So sayeth the Reason Gecko.
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“…shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States….”
You do know the Constitution is just a patriarchal racist manifesto that cannot apply to womyn, right?
When Trump appoints Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ginsberg, I fully expect another Democrat inquisition regarding her Catholic faith.
I’d really like her to turn the tables and explain to the inquisitors that by inquiring into her faith they betray their oath of office to support and defend the Constitution, in particular Article VI Section 3.
We have moved SOOOO far beyond that racist, gender-binary document. I expect we’ll hear proposals to start over on a new guiding document for the country long about the 250th anniversary of the Constitution.
A glorious new Contitution; just, diverse and inclusive! It will combine the gender wisdom of the Middle East with the generous “power to the people” economic policies of Mugabe, Chavez and Maduro. We will insist on having the enlightened policing practices of Mexico, and the….ah fuck, I can’t do it
And British chefs.
We’ll have the best of Europe in the US – Italian government, British food, and French cars.
Extreme views such as, say, disagreeing with Kamala Harris.
“But Harris and Hirono say they have taken “extreme” positions such as defending traditional marriage ”
Democrats seem to be increasingly incapable of rational criticism. There are plenty of sane ways of criticizing tradition, then there is calling it “extreme” which is basically advertising to everyone that you recently escaped from the nuthouse
Harris grew up going to both a black Baptist Church and a Hindu temple.[11] She has one younger sister, Maya.[12][13] They both sang in a Baptist choir.[14]
Talk about “extreme”.
The framing is good, and the antagonists clearly believe gunfire is the solution. This is a golden opportunity for Kamala to revive the honorable traditions of the Code Duello for resolving differences among legislators. It doesn’t even matter which is quicker on the draw or surer in drawing a bead. Either outcome would be a net public benefit.
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