Concerned Women for America hate women in America. Hate ‘em.

Ever notice how pretty much every advocacy organization in this country which includes the word “family” in its name is focused on misogyny, homophobia and racism? If we see it in the plural form, then it might be okay, such as “healthy families” or “women and families,” but in singular, it’s nearly always bad news. Groups like Family Research Council are full of terrible proposals for women and children, and they keep repeating this word “family” to make horribleness sound nice.

The House GOP just passed a reauthorization of VAWA with all the good new stuff taken out.

In past years, VAWA enjoyed bipartisan support and garnered little controversy. This time around, however, top Religious Right groups have rallied against the bill due to the protections it would extend to immigrant, Native American, and LGBT victims of domestic abuse. These groups, including the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, Eagle Forum, and the Southern Baptist Convention’sEthics and Religious Liberty Commission, made noise on Capitol Hill and are most directly responsible for the events that will unfold in the House today.

And…what do these people have to say? Concerned Women for America took the lead in writing to Senators:

We, the undersigned, representing millions of Americans nationwide, are writing today to oppose the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). This nice-sounding bill is deceitful because it destroys the family by obscuring real violence in order to promote the feminist agenda. […]

There is no denying the very real problem of violence against women and children. However, the programs promoted in VAWA are harmful for families. VAWA often encourages the demise of the family as a means to eliminate violence.

Further, this legislation continues to use overly broad definitions of domestic violence. These broad definitions actually squander the resources for victims of actual violence by failing to properly prioritize and assess victims. Victims who can show physical evidence of abuse should be our primary focus.

They use “family” to mean that it’s better for children to grow up watching Daddy beat Mommy to a pulp (and possibly put her in an early grave) than to help Mommy take the kids and get away from Daddy. Such situations often also involve violence on children, but I suppose it would be so much worse for children to grow up without their fathers:

In 1998, Johnson was arrested by the Perrysburg Police, again on domestic violence charges. According to the police report, Johnson provided a “very similar” account of the incident to that his wife Ofelia and 14-year-old son gave police. Both wife and son reported that Johnson had Ofelia Felix-Johnson in a wrist lock, and when the son attempted to stop Johnson from hurting his mother, Johnson put the son in a head lock such that he was “unable to breathe and was choking up food,” according to the police report. After the son broke free, the police report continues, Johnson “put his right hand around [the boy's] throat and pushed [him] against the wall with his back to the wall and choked [the boy] for about 5 seconds.”

Timothy Johnson is one of the people who signed the letter opposing the Senate’s version of VAWA. Yes, I’m sure a convicted wife-batterer and child-batterer would know all about the demise of families.

In a sane world, a phrase like “family values” would bring up a commitment to caring for your kids, loving your partner, being there for your siblings and taking care of your elderly parents and grandparents. In public policy discussions, “family values” should refer to policies that empower people to build and maintain healthy family relations, but there is no room for battering in a healthy family. Part of caring for your kids is not beating up their other parent. Part of caring for your kids is also raising them in an environment in which you, and they, are not subjected to violence.

To say it “destroys the family” to empower battered women to leave their abusers assumes that a family no longer exists if the husband and father is no longer in it. It assumes that upholding a man’s relationship to his wife and children—even if the relationship is a toxic one—is more important than allowing women and children to live without battering. If that’s what “family” means, then, fuck it: I’m promoting the Feminist Agenda. Concerned Women for America can go concern themselves right off a short pier.

 

Virginia Del. Robert G. Marshall calls the kettle black

Thorne-Begland was the only one of more than three dozen judicial nominees — including 10 others from the Richmond region — who was not elected to a judgeship following a marathon legislative session dominated by review of amendments to the two-year state budget proposed by Gov. Bob McDonnell.

And how, you may wonder, is Mr. Thorne-Begland uniquely unqualified among nominees for a judgeship in Virginia?

A number of conservative House Republicans with military backgrounds questioned Thorne-Begland’s decision to speak publicly about his sexual orientation while he was in the military and subject to its code of conduct.

“For me it’s not not about fear and bigotry and ignorance and so forth,” said  Del. L. Scott Lingamfelter, R-Prince William. ”It is very definitely about duty.”

In an email blast to supporters late last week, the Christian conservative Family Foundation questioned Thorne-Begland’s fitness for the bench given his support for gay marriage, which is not legal in Virginia. Thorne-Begland and his partner, Michael, live together and are raising twins.

Marshall, too had charged that Thorne-Begland pursued an “aggressive activist homosexual agenda.”

“Duty” here is code for “don’t make us uncomfortable.”

We can’t have a new judge who spoke out against DADT at the expense of his military career and who now raises twins openly with his partner. If you’re gay and pursuing a legal/judicial career in Virginia, you’d best stay in the closet.

But his nomination came under fire late last week, as the Family Foundation and Del. Robert G. Marshall, R-Prince William, stoked fears that the 45-year-old attorney would allow his sexual orientation to influence his judicial decisions.

If you’re queer, and you might make judicial decisions that make life suck less for queer people, then according to Del. Marshall you are allowing your sexual orientation to influence your judicial decisions, and to him that is unacceptable. However, Del. Marshall doesn’t seem to consider that some might accuse him of allowing his bigotry to influence his legislative decisions, and in ways that would do a lot more damage than any “aggressive activist homosexual agenda.” Amanda Marcotte has more of his nonsense:

“Marriage is between one man and one woman, and the the applicant has represented himself in public in a relationship that we don’t recognize in Virginia,” Marshall said in an interview with WRIC, the ABC affiliate in Richmond.

Of course he’s just making shit up as he goes along. We don’t see him applying this “relationship propriety test” to people who are against marriage equality. I think he’s freaking out over the fact that support for civil marriage equality is shooting up like a rocket all over the country, and Tracy Thorne-Begland is a handy target for his anxiety.

*shhhhh!* Grown-ups are talking!

Oh, the self-obliviousness is overpowering:

While it’s great to listen to your kids’ ideas, there’s also a time when dads simply need to be dads. In this case, it would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage. Or that – as great as her friends may be – we know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home. Ideally, fathers help shape their kids’ worldview.
In this situation, it was the other way around. I guess we can be glad that Malia and Sasha aren’t younger, or perhaps today’s press conference might have been about appointing Dora the Explorer as Attorney General because of her success in stopping Swiper the Fox.

Sometimes dads should lead their family in the right ways of thinking. In this case, it would’ve been nice if the President would’ve been an actual leader and helped shape their thoughts instead of merely reflecting what many teenagers think after one too many episodes of Glee.

Bristol Palin, you are the very last person whose opinion is of any use to us on well-adjusted families or the roles of fathers. Oh, and your grammar is lousy. Please learn the third conditional before you use “would have” in another sentence, will you?

Seriously, though, Pres. Obama has forgotten more about how to be a good parent than you have ever learned. Your comfort zone is not a good place to be.

The Caucasian Race allowed Jodie Brunstetter to happen.

The latest argument against marriage equality: “Because white people need to breed more.”

Pam’s House Blend points us to Yes Weekly, which shows us…this:

MICHAEL:

“I had my back to her like this. She said, ‘The reason my husband my husband wrote Amendment 1 was because the Caucasian race is diminishing and we need to uh, reproduce.”

UNIDENTIFIED POLL WORKER: “(Mrs. Brunsetter said) … the Caucasian race is diminishing. ?The reason that’s a problem is that it was white people that founded this country.”

Meanwhile Mrs. Brunstetter is all like, “Sure, I said that, but if I said ‘Caucasian,’ it wasn’t about race! Why won’t you people leave me alone, with your gotcha questions and your ‘facts’!”

This may seem incoherent, as reading this exchange has cost me a couple dozen IQ points.

So…like…North Carolina needs a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality, because by barring same-sex couples from marriage, they’ll be able to force white people to have more kids, relative to people of color?

But…what? On what planet does that even begin to make sense?

Yay!

I heard this on Facebook via Robyn Ochs today, but Anna North also comes bearing good news. Washington state now has marriage equality! Celebration!

Now, y’all should expect this blog to be quiet and terse for a while. An Authoring Situation has introduced itself, and it demands my attention now rather than later. Don’t worry! I’m okay! I just have to take care of this, and it’s going to take up all my spare time until it’s done.

 

The Gays Are Out to Destroy the Institution of Family

And this is what it looks like when they succeed!

If same-sex marriage means an increasing number of children will have grandfathers like that one, then this country is just gonna get more fabulous by the day!

 

 

Florida Family Association wants TV to be just as hateful as what’s in their heads.

Whenever a group has “Family” in its name, it has to be a hate group. There’s just no way around it. You may have heard about corporations such as Lowe’s pulling out of advertising on All-American Muslim because the Florida Family Association is pressuring them. Dodai Stewart went and read the FFA’s website so that we don’t have to, and here is what the assclams have to say:

Clearly this program is attempting to manipulate Americans into ignoring the threat of jihad and to influence them to believe that being concerned about the jihad threat would somehow victimize these nice people in this show.

They complained to Lowe’s about advertising on the show because, of all things, TLC is showing the lives of Muslims who aren’t trying to blow shit up. They think it’s a threat to American liberties to show non-violent, non-threatening TV. They think it’s a problem when a show discourages bigotry.

We wouldn’t want to celebrate the family values of people who use a different name for God, after all.

 

Anti-choice bill has idiotic name.

Our old buddy Rep. Trent Franks (R-idiculous) is riding that hobby-horse again, using his highly salaried time in Congress to write bills to combat problems that don’t exist.

The Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011

…

restricts sex-selection abortion and race-selection abortion, and the coercion of a woman to obtain either. The woman seeking an abortion is exempted from prosecution, while abortion providers are held to account.

Right. There’s a real epidemic of abortion providers rounding up pregnant women and coercing them into aborting their female and/or black fetuses. Sure.

The use of Frederick Douglass’s name in the bill’s title, however, is especially hilarious. From what I recall of his writing, the rape and forced breeding of enslaved women was one of the horrors of slavery that he set out to expose. I don’t think he would have been on-board with this legislative hand-wringing over black women having too much abortion access.

I’ll say it again: Trent Franks does not care about black people!

 

If you don’t want to be called racist, then don’t pull racist shit.

Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church has been given the smackdown by their denomination’s governing body and will just have to find other ways to promote the unity of their church body.

Did the church itself change its mind on the issue? Not really.

Stepp said the Sandy Valley Conference of Free Will Baptists declared the vote on Thompson’s resolution null and void during a meeting on Saturday.

The former pastor of Gulnare got the church members to pass a resolution that says, “We don’t have a problem with those people, we just don’t want them marrying our girls!” and the Sandy Valley Conference effectively took the matter out of their hands. It doesn’t matter if they’ve changed their minds, it doesn’t matter whether the sudden uproar from all four corners of the Earth has persuaded them that cross-racial marriage should not be considered a bad thing, and it doesn’t matter whether they’ve considered that the resolution they’d passed was a really crappy message to send to their church secretary about his family. In this case, it’s not their decision. Their church WILL NOT bar interracial couples from church membership, as long as they’re a member of the Sandy Valley Conference.

On the one hand, I don’t think they actually have to worry about any interracial couples trying to join their church any time soon. The message has already been sent that the church environment will not be a welcoming one. On the other hand, at least their current pastor has his head screwed on tight w/r/t race relations.

The response to having All the Internet gape in horror at them has been thus:

[Pastor Stacy Stepp] said he told church members on Sunday about the decision and proposed a resolution to promote “peace, love and harmony.”

…

Stepp said about 30 people who attended church services voted on a new resolution that welcomes “believers into our fellowship regardless of race, creed or color.”

Where were those 30 people, I wonder, when the anti-interracial-couples resolution was passed 9-6?

I would like to note that the new resolution is not exactly a reversal of the previous one. In spirit, yes, but in letter, not really. Former Pastor Thompson would probably argue that he’s not racist, and the effect of the resolution was not racist, because it wouldn’t have stopped people of color from joining the church—just as long as they’re not married to white people.

Realistically, if you actually believe that all racial groups are human first and foremost, and that all groups are equally good and worthy, and that it’s the variation between individuals that really means something, and that no one group needs to be protected from contamination by another, then you should have no problem with people of different colors getting married and having mixed-race kids together. And if you have no problem with their families, then you should not have any problem attending church with them.

However, the new resolution is about welcoming believers. It doesn’t say anything about their spouses. It shows that the church has been reprimanded, but not that it’s thinking differently.

 

One might get the impression that your org is all about self-promotion.

Listen, HRC, when a suburban LGBT group asks you to lend them a banner promoting MARRIAGE EQUALITY because they’re marching in their town’s Labor Day Parade at the last minute in order to balance out (read: PWN) a pro-patriarchy (I’m sorry: “protect marriage”) bunch from somewhere else in the state, it is really obnoxious to send them an HRC banner that has nothing to say about marriage.

If they carried your strictly HRC-promoting banner in the parade, it would sort of make them look like they’re just an affiliate of the HRC, as opposed to the neighbors of the people watching the parade. The message that you’re communicating to the group in question, meanwhile, is that you’re a pack of parasitic, self-promoting assholes. You wouldn’t want a nearby local LGBT group to think such a thing, now would you?

Fortunately, my Greenbelt-specific LGBT group had a banner with our name, and we had plenty of handmade signs to carry in the parade, so there was no need to provide free ad space to the HRC. By the time we reached the judges’ stand, our contingent had swelled to about 100 people carrying pro-equality signs, walking dogs, corralling children, and generally looking very colorful, happy and engaged in the event.

The protect-marriage bunch paraded around teenagers in wedding costumes, just in case they weren’t gross enough already. They got booed.