James Hartline, professional idiot

When a gay friend’s house was threatened by one of the recent wildfires, I said to him, “How long do you suppose it will be before the gays get blamed for this?” Answer: Not long at all, thanks to James Hartline, one of the crankiest ex-homos you’ll ever meet. James, who lives in San Diego, spends a lot of time—a lot of time—at pride parades and other gay gatherings, occasionally taking time out to browse the latest porno magazines, all for the sake of research, naturally. Not surprisingly, James had plenty to say about the fires raging in California, so I’ve picked out a few highlights (you can Google him if you want to read the whole thing; he gets no link-lovin’ from me):

“Each time homosexual activists attempt to force their agenda on California, there have been raging, massive, incinerating fires sweeping across the California landscape.”

In other news, incinerating wildfires sweep across the landscape each time Californians approve Constitutional amendments stripping gays and lesbians of their civil rights.

“You see, the problem is this: God has plans for California in the near days ahead. Thus, these attempts to force an ungodly tyranny on this state are being met blow with blow by God. God is saying, ‘California shall be a refuge for America when the catastrophes come. California belongs to Me, not the advocates of sexual anarchy.'”

James, since you and God are BFFs, do you think you could tell him that….uh, this is awkward….he’s burning the wrong stuff? He obviously meant to flame-broil West Hollywood and San Francisco, but his aim is about as accurate as a Fox News report.

“The more that homosexual activists press their battle in California, the more there will be great calamaties in this state. Go ahead, challenge the Lord Thy God in this season. For I have heard the voice of the Lord say, ‘This state belongs to God! It is not the land of degradation and immorality anymore. I shall have My way, for this land, I created. And this land is Mine!’ thus saith the Lord.”

Hmm. I was led to believe by no less an authority than Woody Guthrie that this land was your land, and this land was my land. But never mind that; I’m relieved, though a little surprised, to learn that if we stop protesting, California will see all its disasters come to an end, including fires, earthquakes, and Barry Zito’s tenure as a Giant.

“How low will we go? Why won’t they listen? Why won’t they stop their madness? The Bible says that in the last days, the nations will rebel against God until He can’t take it anymore. Was it all worth it? Were the few years of sexual immorality worth the eternal destruction and earthly chaos it brought? How low will we go?”

Apparently, quite low.

By the way, when a commenter on Hartline’s blog suggested that God might not be entirely responsible for these events, James responded swiftly and scornfully:

“…the idea that these fires are not God’s judgment or His doings because the fires were started by arsonists or overcrowding or drought, is just plain stupid. God uses many factors at His disposal to bring forth His will and His purposes.”

Did you catch that? Arsonists can’t be held responsible for their actions, but gay people make the choice to be wicked! In other words, if you’re a firestarter, you’re doing God’s work, but if you’re a flamer, you’re going to hell. Right, James? ….James? Oh, I guess he already left for the Boom Boom Room.

Postscript: My gay friends’ house, unlike most of the homes around it, was spared. And if you’d like to do something for the wildfire victims besides channeling a vengeful God to crow over their misfortune, click here to learn how to help.

Jim Garlow, professional idiot

If you hear a great rumbling sound in the vicinity of downtown San Diego this weekend, it will be either the groaning stomachs of the thousands of faithful evangelicals who plan to gather at Qualcomm Stadium to fast and pray against the evil scourge of gay marriage, or the earthquake God sends to shake some sense into their undernourished brains. The arena altar call is in part the brainchild of Jim Garlow, the senior pastor of La Mesa’s Skyline Community Church, and one of the most creatively offensive bigots yet featured on this site.

Now, Skyline is a big, diverse place, with something for every Christian—for example, if you enjoy killing animals for Christ, you’ll want to sign up for Crossfire, the gun-lovers’ ministry—but its main purpose these days is Protecting Marriage. Let’s let Jim tell us a few of the reasons that this is so important:

“Satan is obsessed in destroying marriage, the coming together, fitting together of the two complimentary halves of humanity – male and female, since they are on earth, a mirror, an image, of what is to be fulfilled at the end of this age. And that is why we are in the battle we are in. It is not ultimately about earthly marriage, about our religious freedoms, our churches, or even about the practice of homosexuality as such. It is about the desire of Satan to decimate the picture of God’s ultimate design for the Cosmos – the Grand Wedding of His Son to the Prepared Bride.”

“When Lou [Engle, another professional idiot] was in Cairo, Egypt, this pastor said to him, ‘The eyes of the world are on California. We’re watching California and the vote on marriage. Because…if you fail to stop it, what will be unleashed across the world will be a spirit worse than radical Islam.'” [And in case you’re wondering, Jim Garlow is no fan of Islam.]

“[If] we lose, [pastors] go to jail. How soon I don’t know….If you don’t care about this campaign, don’t want to get involved, you can go to jail and start a wonderful prison ministry. But if you want religious freedom, we’re going to have to win this thing.”

Okay, Jim, we hear you: The Axis of Homosexuality is 1) responsible for Satan’s habitual wedding-crashing, 2) worse than people who fly airplanes into buildings, and 3) destined to crowd our prisons with conscientious clergy who refuse to elevate committed adult relationships to the Godly status of paintball.

Just one request, Jim—if you dislike the gays so much, would you please give back their hair?

Wayne Lusvardi, semi-professional idiot

From blogger Wayne Lusvardi, also known as “The Pasadena Pundit,” comes a real gem of an article: No on Prop 8 is Anti-Feminist. Wayne, as you’ll immediately see, is both a champion of feminism and a brilliant scholar:

The word ‘marriage’ comes from the Latin word ‘mater’ for mother.

Great point! Except….it doesn’t. It comes from Old French (marier, “to marry”). He’s thinking of “matrimony.”

And ‘mater’ is what matters in marriage. Marriage is unavoidably built around female sexuality and procreation. Marriage can only concern a relationship to a woman for procreation. It is the opposite of concubinage, which is an involuntary relationship with a man of higher status in a traditional society.

All right, first, can we get T-shirts that say “MATER IS WHAT MATTERS”?

Second, let’s take a moment to marvel at the egregious, oblivious sexism in this paragraph. “Marriage is unavoidably built around female sexuality”? Wayne, that’s not true, but if it were, you could try not to sound quite so bummed about it. Check out that third sentence, too, which quietly assumes that heterosexual marriage is exclusively the domain of—guess who!—men (who, in their enlightened feminist benevolence, generally opt nowadays to possess us one at a time rather than keeping entire harems).

A social order that doesn’t protect a woman from rape or incest or concubinage can’t give women freedom to control who the father(s) of their children are, or their own bodies, or even their own health. Marriage is the structure of this freedom of choice for women in a modern society. Women’s freedom to control access to their body for procreation is what modern marriage is all about. Without that there is no societal or religious basis for laws to protect marriage, particularly gay marriage.

Aren’t you glad Wayne is such an ardent supporter of women’s rights to control their own health and their own bodies? I think we can safely assume that he’s on the front lines of the fight to keep abortion and contraception legal and available, to offer comprehensive sex education in all our public schools, to protect rape victims and toughen laws against rapists, and to provide universal health care to all Americans…….oh. He thinks a husband is all we need? Well, I guess he should know, being a man and all.

Defining marriage down to a mere contract between companions or non-procreative sex partners will only end up harming all women for if everyone can marry, no one needs to and it becomes meaningless.

Yeah, yeah, the magical hedge of protection. We already know. Move on.

Women will ultimately suffer most. Gay marriage robs something that belongs exclusively to women.

Fallopian tubes? Kotex? Supermarket Sweep? I give up.

Traditional man-woman marriage is not anti-gay, it is pro-feminine. Same sex marriage is anti-feminist.

Let’s review.

THINGS THAT ARE FEMINIST: All straight marriages, including those that involve spousal abuse and domestic violence; the use of “feminine” as a synonym for “feminist”; men who tell women what’s feminist and what isn’t.

THINGS THAT ARE ANTI-FEMINIST: Lesbians.

Any questions?

James Dobson, professional idiot-isn’t-a-strong-enough-word

As long as we’re chatting about naked James Dobson, why don’t we find out what he’s been up to lately? If you haven’t seen him around, it’s because he’s been visiting the future, producing a 16-page single-spaced document for his cult members faithful flock, entitled Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America. It’s scary stuff, I’ll warn you—a dark, dire glimpse of an America that has lost its way, a Back to the Future 2-esque nightmare with Barack Obama playing the role of Biff Tannen.

Here’s how it starts:

“Dear friends,
I can hardly sing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ any more. When I hear the words,
O say, does that star spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
I get tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. Now in October of 2012, after seeing what has happened in the last four years, I don’t think I can still answer, ‘Yes,’ to that question.”

Sixteen pages is a lot, so I’ve picked out some of the more terrifying predictions from the rest of the letter to encourage you to straighten up and fly right. Read on if you dare.

“The most far-reaching transformation of American society came from the Supreme Court’s stunning affirmation, in early 2010, that homosexual marriage was a ‘constitutional’ right that had to be respected by all 50 states because laws barring same-sex marriage violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.”

“Tens of thousands of Christian teachers either quit or were fired, and there are hardly any evangelical teachers in public schools any more.”

“All businesses that have government contracts at the national, state, or local level now have to provide documentation of equal benefits for same-sex couples.”

“Lawyers who refuse to handle adoption cases for same-sex couples … now lose their licenses to practice law.”

“After it declared same-sex marriage to be the law of the United States, a subsequent Supreme Court decision predictably ruled that universities had to prohibit campus organizations that promote ‘hate speech’ and have discriminatory policies.”

“Dozens of Bush officials, from the Cabinet level on down, are now in jail, and most of those are also bankrupt from legal costs.”

“Conservative talk radio, for all intents and purposes, was shut down by the end of 2010.”

Oh my stars! Look where we’ll be in four short years! And there’s much more where those came from—handguns will be restricted, abortion rights will be guaranteed to all women, and not one inch of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve will have been drilled for oil. It’s a brave new world.

Friends, now that Dr. Dobson has shown me this stark vision of our future, all I can say is 1) Vote for Obama, and 2) is it 2012 yet?

Sarah, Sarah, no time is a good time for bigotry

Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin:

“[I]n my own, state, I have voted along with the vast majority of Alaskans who had the opportunity to vote to amend our Constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman. I wish on a federal level that that’s where we would go because I don’t—I don’t support gay marriage. I’m not going to be out there judging individuals, sitting in a seat of judgment telling them what they can and can’t do, should and should not do, but I certainly can express my own opinion here, and take actions that I believe would be best for traditional marriage….”

Would it be too much trouble for someone in the media to ask Governor Palin for her exact definition of “judge”? That word gets thrown around a lot by fundies as something that they would never, ever presume to do to gay people, because it’s something that only God gets to do, but I can’t figure out precisely what privileges it confers. “I think we should enshrine inequality in our Constitution so that gay couples can’t marry—but I would never judge them! I’ve used my authority to strip domestic partners of their state benefits—but, nope, still no judging! I pray daily for my dear, dear, dear gay friends to abandon their revolting, Christ-infuriating ways lest they fry to a crisp in the fires of Hell—but always without judgment!”

Well, Governor Palin, I would never judge you, but I hope your foolish, small-minded self never gets any closer to the White House than Wasilla is to Moscow.

O’Neal Dozier, professional idiot

“The Law, Prophets and all of Scripture compel us to preach and teach that a decision to sacrifice the life of a child or to pursue same-sex intercourse or lesbianism, is a gravely serious matter of… sin. Yes, politically-incorrect as it may be to say these days, same-sex unions and child sacrifice are still sins…. Although free societies must tolerate certain pathologies to a point, the Bible, medical science, and demographic science in combination make it abundantly clear that no healthy society should encourage, institutionalize or subsidize the immoral, unnatural practices of homosexuality and child sacrifice.”

Welcome to a rhetorically fallacious orgy hosted by O’Neal Dozier and his nauseating website, “The Judeo-Christian View”! This author (uncredited, so we’re going with Dr. Dozier) clearly completed the Bush-Cheney-Velvet Jones Institute of Debate Technology, where he learned (among other useful tactics richly evidenced on his website) that if you associate two unrelated concepts in your speech often enough, people might actually be dumb enough to believe that they have something to do with each other. Let’s try it, shall we?

“Politically incorrect as it may be to say these days, O’Neal Dozier and Osama Bin Laden are still unrepentant wankers. Although free societies must tolerate miserable and worthless specimens of humanity to a point, common sense, reading comprehension, and basic human decency make it abundantly clear that no healthy society should encourage loathsome, execrable douchebags like O’Neal Dozier and Osama Bin Laden.”

Hmm. It kind of works.

We want….a shrubbery!

Meet Jane Chastain, professional idiot, who’s written several columns for WorldNetDaily (better known in these parts as WingNutDaily) about the sanctity of marriage and the audacity of the preening homosexuals who want to ruin it for everybody else. Here’s a snippet that pretty well sums up her take on the issue:

“By legalizing unions between a man and a woman, the government was able to put a ‘hedge of protection’ around the family unit and give the partners in these unions certain rights that went along with their responsibilities, along with certain benefits to encourage the formation and the stability of these units. Gay rights activists want to change the definition of marriage from a union between a man and woman, to a union between any two (or more) people living together in a ‘committed’ relationship. Are you beginning to see the problem? If everyone is allowed inside the hedge, then the hedge, for all practical purposes, ceases to exist.”

Let’s review: There’s a special, magical hedge encircling a secret garden reserved for godly married straight people who already have children or are appropriately hell-bent on creating some, and if we start letting just anyone traipse around on the Lawn of Righteousness, then the hedge will miraculously disappear (or wilt, or get Raptured, or something), and the riffraff will start mingling alongside the VIPs as if they were all equals or some such uppity nonsense.

But remember, folks, it’s the GAYS who want “special rights.”

Maggie Gallagher, professional idiot

“Same-Sex Marriage sends a terrible message to the next generation: alternative family forms are just as good as traditional families, children don’t need a mother and a father, and marriage is about adult desires for affirmation or benefits, not about the well-being of children.”

Maggie Gallagher’s bio on Townhall (I read it so you don’t have to) says that she’s “a leading voice in the new marriage movement.” I’ll let you parse that last phrase while I tell you that this quotation is one of her Top Five Reasons To Oppose Same-Sex Marriage. She’s pretty clear, isn’t she? Marriage is about making babies—BABIES!—and if you’re thinking child-free thoughts about how marriage might benefit you, well, you’re just a selfish, lustful, greedy little so-and-so who frankly isn’t fit to wax Maggie Gallagher’s minivan.

You should, however, feel free to buy multiple copies of her book, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially.

Cal Thomas, professional idiot

Most of the wisdom on this site comes from everyday people—ones who aren’t actually paid by the word to be bigots—but I’d like to make an exception for this gem from conservative columnist Cal Thomas, writing about the California Supreme Court’s May decision in favor of marriage equality:

“[California Supreme Court] Justice Richard N. Palmer revealed his acceptance of the liberal doctrine of a ‘living Constitution’ constantly in need of updating in keeping with the times: ‘Our understanding of marriage must yield to a more contemporary appreciation of the rights entitled to constitutional protection.’ Using such a standard, if the ‘understanding’ of the endowed rights of blacks were to devolve to a pre-civil rights-era acceptance of black inferiority, would Justice Palmer argue that blacks would then have to give up their rights in order to serve ‘contemporary appreciation’?”

If the Olympics gave medals for disingenuousness, Cal would be standing on a podium right now mangling the words to the National Anthem. It takes world-class rhetorical contortionism to argue that progress and acceptance are the direst threat to…..progress and acceptance. (Oh, and bonus points for his extensive use of the Quotation Marks of Contempt.)