World News Korner

Courtesy of Facebook

Caption: waiting for karate to start

You know I think martial arts training is really good for kids. IF they get a good instructor.

Not sure what the dojo situation is like in Arizona.

By the way I thought I might take this opportunity to reveal that a little birdie told me a certain reality show might play an important part in an upcoming court case.

Hmm, I wonder which parts will be of the most interest to the judge?

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Courtesy of Salon:

The small city of Missoula, Montana recently grabbed headlines after the Department of Justice sent a letter to the Missoula County Attorney’s Office, asserting it had “substantial evidence” that the county has completely failed at the job of dealing with sexual assault. A lot of details of the allegations against Missoula officials were disturbing, including a prosecutor who allegedly told the mother of a 5-year-old rape victim that “boys will be boys,” but another thing that jumps out is the role religion played in justifying the minimizing of rape allegations. According to the Justice Department, a deputy county attorney responded to one rape victim by reading her Bible verses “in a way that the victim interpreted to mean that the Deputy County Attorney was judging her negatively for have made the report.”

Sadly, this kind of reaction from Christian conservatives to sexual assault—blame the victim and make it about sex, not violence—is surprisingly common.

Kiera Feldman, writing for the New Republic, captured this problem perfectly in her piece about the sexual assault problem at the hyper-Christian university Patrick Henry. She chronicles one case where the alleged assailant attacked the victim in her sleep, which should be a clear-cut case of non-consent. But, since Patrick Henry is a school focused on preventing and punishing all sexual contact between students, the criminal and abusive aspects appear to have been ignored in favor of seeing this mainly as a sexual transgression. The assailant kept referring to his behavior as “taking liberties,” as if the problem with what he did was that it was sexual, not that it was violent. The dean decided therefore that both the victim and the assailant were to blame, reportedly telling the victim, “You are in part responsible for what happened, because you put yourself in a compromising situation,” and adding, “Actions have consequences.” Both students were given counseling, and the victim reported that her counseling was just more blaming her for the assault through lessons in “modesty.”

This is not just a problem for Patrick Henry College. The other big name in fundamentalist universities, Bob Jones University, reportedly has the same problem. Writing for Al Jazeera America, Claire Gordon reports similar stories coming from rape victims at BJU. One alleged victim reported that the dean asked her, “Is there anything that you did that made him do that?” and also that the content of her counseling sessions, which she thought were private, were shared with the administration. The counselor herself claims that the school then terminated the sessions because they felt she was becoming too sympathetic toward the victim, which suggests that from the get-go, the intention was to get dirt on the victim to discredit her claims. Shortly thereafter, the victim was expelled from the university.

Things only have grown uglier since then, as BJU recently terminated, rather abruptly, a contract with a firm it hired to help improve its responses to sexual abuse on campus. As the New York Times reported, critics of this decision suspect it was because BJU didn’t like the firm’s findings. Victims of abuse told the Times various horror stories about the administration’s response to their reports. “They said not to go to the police because no one will believe you, to defer to authority like your father or especially someone in the church,” said one woman who reported abuse.

“The person who supposedly counseled me told me if I reported a person like that to the police, I was damaging the cause of Christ, and I would be responsible for the abuser going to hell,” another victim reported.

You know I was raised with very little religion in my life, but with a great deal of focus on personal responsibility. Early in my life my mother made me responsible in caring for my younger siblings when she was at work, and hammered home the importance of treating people with respect and not simply as objects.

Of course I was also never raised to think that sex was anything to be ashamed of, or that having it outside of wedlock meant you were a bad person.

Sex was considered a healthy part of relationships, and not something that was given away or used for barter.

However rape was an entirely different matter altogether. If I had been accused of rape my mother would have gladly led the police right to my door, and if I had the audacity to blame what I had done on the victim my mother would have slapped me across the face.

To that point if anybody had been ignorant enough to violate my sister my mother would have insisted that I find that person and punish them severely. Which I would have done gladly.

And as I have said repeatedly on this blog, rape is NOT sex. It is violence.

Blaming a woman for her own rape is the kind of response you might expect from those who believe that everything wrong with the world today can be traced back to Eve's transgression in the Garden of Eden. No rational person would blame a child for their own abuse, nor should they blame a woman for the violence done to them.

In Saudi Arabia a female rape victim was sentenced to 200 lashes for the crime of being unable to fend off her attacker.

One would think that in America we had progressed past this kind of antiquated thinking, but apparently in some areas of the country they would be wrong. And that should shame us all.



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Courtesy of Liberals Unite:

“Dear Arizona,

Congratulations. You are now the first state actually to pass a bill permitting businesses–even those open to the public–to refuse to provide service to LGBT people based on an individual’s “sincerely held religious belief.” This “turn away the gay” bill enshrines discrimination into the law. Your taxi drivers can refuse to carry us. Your hotels can refuse to house us. And your restaurants can refuse to serve us.

Kansas tried to pass a similar law, but had the good sense to not let it come up for a vote. The quashing came only after the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and other traditional conservative groups came out strongly against the bill.

But not you, Arizona. You’re willing to ostracize and marginalize LGBT people to score political points with the extreme right of the Republican Party. You say this bill protects “religious freedom,” but no one is fooled. When I was younger, people used “God’s Will” as a reason to keep the races separate, too. Make no mistake, this is the new segregation, yours is a Jim Crow law, and you are about to make yourself ground zero.

This bill also saddens me deeply. Brad and I have strong ties to Arizona. Brad was born in Phoenix, and we vacation in Show Low. We have close friends and relatives in the state and spend weeks there annually. We even attended the Fourth of July Parade in Show Low in 2012, looking like a pair of Arizona ranchers.

The law is breathtaking in its scope. It gives bigotry against us gays and lesbians a powerful and unprecedented weapon. But your mean-spirited representatives and senators know this. They also know that it is going to be struck down eventually by the courts. But they passed it anyway, just to make their hateful opinion of us crystal clear.

So let me make mine just as clear. If your Governor Jan Brewer signs this repugnant bill into law, make no mistake. We will not come. We will not spend. And we will urge everyone we know–from large corporations to small families on vacation–to boycott. Because you don’t deserve our dollars. Not one red cent.

And maybe you just never learn. In 1989, you voted down recognition of the Martin Luther King holiday, and as a result, conventions and tourists boycotted the state, and the NFL moved the Superbowl to Pasadena. That was a $500 million mistake.

So if our appeals to equality, fairness, and our basic right to live in a civil society without doors being slammed in our face for being who we are don’t move you, I’ll bet a big hit to your pocketbook and state coffers will.

George Takei”

Damn, that's a good letter.

And Takei makes a very powerful point.

If Arizona wants to discriminate against gay people then perhaps all of them, and all people who support them, should avoid Arizona and leave it to the narrow minded folks like Sarah Palin and Jan Brewer.

You know ultimately it really doesn't matter, gay acceptance is coming. And these states that are digging in their heels and threatening to hold their breath until they are allowed to gay bash again, just show themselves to be stubbornly prejudicial.

Remember it was Arizona Senator John McCain who voted AGAINST declaring Martin Luther King Jr's birthday a federal holiday back in 1983, so the state has a long history of being intolerant and behind the times.

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Courtesy of Raw Story:

In an interview that aired on Sunday, ABC’s Martha Raddatz asked the former president if the new initiative helped him cope with the 6,800 service members killed, and 51,000 wounded.

“No question it helps,” Bush stuttered. “I have a duty.”

“I obviously get slightly emotional talking about our vets because I’m in there with them,” he added with a single tear spilling down his right cheek.

“But my spirit is also uplifted when I visit with vets. As I say, there is no self-pity… They don’t say, ‘Woe is me.’ They say, ‘What can I do to continue to serve?’”

There are NO amount of tears this asshole could shed that would ever match the number shed by the families of the soldiers that he sent to their deaths based on a lie.

A lie by the way that I believe he knew about all along.

There were too many people telling him that Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons,and lacked the capability to manufacture them, for Bush to claim he was ignorant of that fact.

He used the terror from 9-11 to wage a war of choice, to get revenge for his daddy, that sent thousands of trusting soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, to their deaths.

No he is a POS and there should be NOBODY who wastes an ounce of their precious sympathy on the likes of him.

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Courtesy of Addicting Info:

Audio of outrageous comments made by Frank Taaffe, on a weekly podcast called ‘Stand Our Ground,’ prove that in spite of denials to the contrary, Taaffe is a full blown white supremacist. Taaffe’s podcast was produced and distributed by ‘The White Voice Network.‘

Here are just a few of Taaffe’s podcast comments:

‘The only time a black life is validated is when a white man kills him.’

“That minority group, they don’t do anything productive for this country, except for the NBA.”

“If it wasn’t for the NBA Joe like I always say, the country would have the tallest garbage men. Thank God for the NBA.”

“I always say if you lie down with dogs, you’re going to get up with fleas – especially if they’re black dogs.”

“Yeah she’s a nigg** (Oprah Winfrey). She keeps spewing out all that bullshit. She Keeps defending her boy Obama, who can do no wrong. You know it’s birds of a feather they flock together and stick together and to me she’s a NIGG**, Oprah Winfrey is a NIGG**.”

Seriously which respectable news outlet would put this guy on their show.

Well apparently quite a few, including Dr. Drew, CNN, and Nancy Grace.

Why? Well as it turns out he is apparently a friend of George Zimmerman.

Taaffe, supposedly a neighbor and close friend of George Zimmerman, became a regular on cable TV stations during the Zimmerman trial. He is best known for his many appearances on CNN and HLN’s ‘Nancy Grace,’ and ‘Dr. Drew.’ As a guest on the Nancy Grace show, Taaffe argued in defense of George Zimmerman, during the Trayvon Martin murder trial.

A "close friend" to George Zimmerman? Now why doesn't that surprise me?

Now you would think, considering what a pig this guy is, that after the Zimmerman trial this guy would be cut lose immediately. But you would be wrong.

Even after the Zimmerman trial ended, however, cable programs continue to give Taaffe air time. During the trial of Michael Dunn, a white man, who, like Zimmerman, shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Taaffe was invited on cable tv shows, to share his views on the Dunn case.

Gee I wonder what a white supremacist believes about a man who shot an unarmed teenager over the issue of loud music?

It is pretty much what you would expect:

Taaffe's task is defending Dunn, who shot 17-year-old Jordan Davis outside of a Jacksonville gas station after arguing with the teen and his friends over loud music. Dunn claims he saw Davis holding what looked like a shotgun and that he fired at the boys in self-defense, but witnesses maintain that Davis was unarmed. On air, Taaffe has argued that the killing was justified, even if Davis wasn't pointing a firearm, because young black men are prone to violence.

Yes of course "everybody" knows that black men are violent, so apparently simply shooting them dead to prevent that violence from occurring makes perfect sense.

Frank Taaffe, was the man that George Zimmerman stayed with while he was waiting to be arrested for the shooting of Trayvon Martin, and he was the one that he asked to go to the media and speak on his behalf.

I think that speaks volumes as to who Gerorge Zimmerman is, and how he views people like Trayvon Martin.

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Courtesy of Alternet:

Atheists want the benefits of a secular society, but too many refuse to do the work. They are more concerned with a dictionary definition of atheism that they forget what is at stake.

Without atheists united in some form of community, the US would be lost overnight to a theocratic right. Ready to overturn whatever secular laws remain in the constitution.

While some atheists are worried about definitions, the right is worried about overturning women's rights, ending marriage equality and enforcing bad economic policies that drive more Americans into poverty. While we are busy infighting claiming, "no one speaks for me", the right is speaking and gathering followers. If we continue to run around unorganized, they will overtake this nation.

So there is, and should be a strong atheist movement, groups like American Atheists, American Humanist Association, Secular Coalition for America, Freedom From Religion, The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and countless others are atheist based organizations all fighting to enforce secular laws in this country and around the world.

These are the groups who put the weight on their shoulders to make sure the theocratic right do not overtake the US and anyone who believes in upholding the secular history of this nation and the further secularization that rebuilds the wall that separates church and state that the right has spent decades taking apart. We should be thanking these groups and individuals in this fight, not chastising them for being "the face" of atheism as many have.

We may not elect atheist leaders, but many people shine through and stand up for all of us. We don't have to claim to agree with what every group does or says all the time either. Just as each atheist is unique in many of their own ways, so are groups.

Just so you know I am the king of the non-joiners.

Sure I can work as a part of a group for short periods of time, but after awhile things like clashing egos, mismatched ambitions, and attempts to define ourselves always force me to reevaluate why I joined and typically I walk away.

I identify as an Atheist simply becasue it is the label that best reflects my view of God, mankind, and the universe.

I have never formally joined any Atheist group and never really planned to in the future.

However there is some sense in what the author of this piece, Dan Arel, is saying.

As a group we are woefully unorganized, and we are often dealing with a group that is not only organized, but also well funded and with vast political connections.

As much as I hate to say it, the time may have come for those of us who want to keep religion from infiltrating our schools, and fight the oppressive laws that are dictating what women can do with their own bodies, as well as whose love is worthy of marriage, to get off our asses and start working together to help shape the world that we want our children to inherit.

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And you know she's right. Just wait for it.

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Courtesy of the Tundra turdslinger's Facebook page:

Congratulations Iron Dog champs Team #16 Minnick/Olstad! It was great seeing racers cross the finish line on the frozen Chena River in Fairbanks yesterday.

Team #11 Palin/Huntington had to leave the hunt early due to a rarely seen crank shaft bearing failure (yes, these racers are mechanics speaking their own language), so they jumped in support mode for others in the extended family of hardcore endurance racers.

They jumped into "support mode?"

Didn't they simply run right back to Wasilla?

How exactly was that supportive to the other teams?

Okay I have a silly question. How is it that there was a crank shaft bearing failure so quickly along the trail with this group of guys supposedly working to make the snowmachine race ready?

Here is how Palin described this photo right before the race:

The guys doing last minute wrenching before the start of the 2000-mile long Iron Dog race tomorrow! And taking a break to "fuel up" on (the usual) moose chili and blueberry pie.

So that "last minute wrenching" did not include checking the crank shaft bearings? How odd.

Well on the plus side I understand that the Sportsman Channel got all the footage they needed for the first episode of Amazing America.

And really once you have that what's the point in actually finishing the race?

Especially when you know there is no way to win?

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Courtesy of The Palm Beach Post:

Officers responded to the area of South Congress Avenue and Neptune Drive where a man said he had accidentally shot himself. He was found sitting in the bed of his pickup with a gunshot wound to his right leg. He told police he’d just left a firearms safety class and pulled over to inspect his new Glock 17 handgun. He said he removed the magazine and was manipulating the slide when the gun discharged. He was treated by fire-rescue at the scene, then taken to an area hospital.

Does this mean he earned and F?

I always thought that lesson one in any good firearms class was that you always handle every gun as if it was loaded.

Lesson two should be that you never play with your gun sitting next to a busy street.

This could have been much, much worse if that bullet had struck a passing car or hit a child playing on the street.

This leads me to believe that either the safety class this guy took was woefully inadequate, or he simply is not somebody intelligent enough to be trusted with a firearm.

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Courtesy of Freakout Nation:

After it’s come to light that illegal activities, not to mention, extremely bad business decisions took place, folks in the area are fighting back, asking for three board members’ resignations.

In a surprise move, a Tea Party member tried to implement a vote for the school board to use a different attorney, and when asked why, he said, it’s because he’s less expensive. That of course, was found to be a lie. The attorney turned out to specialize in fighting unions. In addition, that attorney has no experience with education law. On top of that, the attorney costs $15,000 more than the board’s lawyer.

John Prager at Americans Against the Tea Party explains, “The lawyer who, under their plan, would be representing the school district is Kevin Maloof. Maloof is the President of the West Clermont Education Foundation, a fund-raising group. School board members Mark Merchant and Tina Sanborn are also on the board of the WCEF.”

So much for Tea Party transparency.

This same thing is being attempted up here in Alaska as well, only for us the pressure is coming from our Governor, and in Anchorage the mayor, whose decisions to cut funding have resulted in the layoff of 6% of our teachers thus far.

These people do not want to fix public education, they want to sabotage it.

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The above image is courtesy of Brancy's blog, on which there is a link to a Breitbart article that then links to an article from The Courant, a local Hartford, Connecticut paper that reported how shocked Connecticut politicians were that fun owners were resisting a new law requiring residents to register their military styled weapons:

Everyone knew there would be some gun owners flouting the law that legislators hurriedly passed last April, requiring residents to register all military-style rifles with state police by Dec. 31.

But few thought the figures would be this bad.

By the end of 2013, state police had received 47,916 applications for assault weapons certificates, Lt. Paul Vance said. An additional 2,100 that were incomplete could still come in.

That 50,000 figure could be as little as 15 percent of the rifles classified as assault weapons owned by Connecticut residents, according to estimates by people in the industry, including the Newtown-based National Shooting Sports Foundation. No one has anything close to definitive figures, but the most conservative estimates place the number of unregistered assault weapons well above 50,000, and perhaps as high as 350,000.

And that means as of Jan. 1, Connecticut has very likely created tens of thousands of newly minted criminals — perhaps 100,000 people, almost certainly at least 20,000 — who have broken no other laws. By owning unregistered guns defined as assault weapons, all of them are committing Class D felonies.

"I honestly thought from my own standpoint that the vast majority would register," said Sen. Tony Guglielmo, R-Stafford, the ranking GOP senator on the legislature's public safety committee. "If you pass laws that people have no respect for and they don't follow them, then you have a real problem."

Of course the Breibart article takes the side of the assault rifle owning scofflaws, while encouraging citizens in other states to follow suit, and by linking to it one would assume that Bristol is in full agreement that these people should not be required to let the police know that they own these weapons.

Which of course begs the question as to WHY anybody would be so fearful of allowing the government to know how many military style weapons are in their possession.

I mean we are not talking about simply owning a handgun for personal protection, which is ground zero for the NRA, nor is this even about restricting access to these high powered weapons. It is only about allowing the police to know who purchased which weapon, so that if it is used in a criminal manner they can trace it back to its source and perhaps put a bad guy behind bars.

If you are simply planning to use the weapon for target practice, or display it in your gun case so your fellow Cro-Magnon buddies know how manly you are, there should be no problem with registering the weapon just like you do your car, dog, and marriage.

The reason for that is also behind much of the NRA driven fervor to buy more and more guns. And THAT is the idea that the government is working on a plan to repeal the 2nd Amendment, and even more conspiratorial than that is the belief that Obama is, at some point, going to declare martial law, and that the only hope to fight against that is heavily armed citizens ready to fight back with unregistered weaponry.

In the old days this would have been considered the very fringe of the fringe of the conservative movement, but with the help of Sarah Palin, talk radio, and NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre this is now considered a reasonable concern for millions of gun owners in this country.

It is insane, and the flames of that insanity are fanned by Right Wing blogs like Breitbart, Sarah Palin, and now Palin's hateful little parrot Bristol.

You know there was a time when being a conservative meant respecting, and following the law. They actively called for more laws, more law enforcement, and longer prison sentences for those who would break the law.

Today they are the ones promoting lawlessness, calling for open revolt, and nurturing distrust of the government.

What could possibly have happened to change their point of view so dramatically?

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One of my favorite segments on the Daily Show is "Back in Black" and I don't think Lewis has ever been quite as on the mark as he was during this bit.

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Courtesy of Yes Magazine:

To truly understand how we came to believe our educational system is broken, we need a history lesson. Rewind to 1980—when Milton Friedman, the high priest of laissez-faire economics, partnered with PBS to produce a ten-part television series called Free to Choose. He devoted one episode to the idea of school vouchers, a plan to allow families what amounted to publicly funded scholarships so their children could leave the public schools and attend private ones.

You could make a strong argument that the current campaign against public schools started with that single TV episode. To make the case for vouchers, free-market conservatives, corporate strategists, and opportunistic politicians looked for any way to build a myth that public schools were failing, that teachers (and of course their unions) were at fault, and that the cure was vouchers and privatization.

Jonathan Kozol, the author and tireless advocate for public schools, called vouchers the “single worst, most dangerous idea to have entered education discourse in my adult life.”

Armed with Friedman’s ideas, President Reagan began calling for vouchers. In 1983, his National Commission on Excellence in Education issued “A Nation At Risk,” a report that declared, “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

It also said, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

For a document that’s had such lasting impact, “A Nation At Risk” is remarkably free of facts and solid data. Not so the Sandia Report, a little-known follow-up study commissioned by Admiral James Watkins, Reagan’s secretary of energy; it discovered that the falling test scores which caused such an uproar were really a matter of an expansion in the number of students taking the tests. In truth, standardized-test scores were going up for every economic and ethnic segment of students—it’s just that, as more and more students began taking these tests over the 20-year period of the study, this more representative sample of America’s youth better reflected the true national average. It wasn’t a teacher problem. It was a statistical misread.

The government never officially released the Sandia Report. It languished in peer-review purgatory until the Journal of Educational Research published it in 1993. Despite its hyperbole (or perhaps because of it), “A Nation At Risk” became a timely cudgel for the larger privatization movement. With Reagan and Friedman, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist, preaching that salvation would come once most government services were turned over to private entrepreneurs, the privatizers began proselytizing to get government out of everything from the post office to the public schools.

Corporations recognized privatization as a euphemism for profits. “Our schools are failing” became the slogan for those who wanted public-treasury vouchers to move money into private schools. These cries continue today.

There is very little that angers me as much as listening to people bad mouth teachers.

When I was struggling in school with behavioral problems and lack of motivation, the intervention of teachers saved my life. That is a debt I will spend a life time repaying.

In my day teachers were on par with firefighters in public trust and admiration, and today they are vilified at every turn by those who want to undermine our education system, destroy teacher's unions, and sabotage secular education.

By the way it is no surprise that all of this happened on Regan's watch. In fact it appears likely it was all part of his plan to return America back to its "Christian roots." Even if those did not really exist in the first place.

This from Salon:

(Frank) Schaeffer himself developed the theme in his most influential call to action, “A Christian Manifesto,” a 1981 book that (Jerry) Falwell described as “probably the most important piece of literature in America today.” As in his other recent works, Schaeffer stressed the inevitability of an authoritarian takeover if Bible-believing Christians remained indifferent to politics and failed to take a stand. He believed that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 might represent a window of opportunity to reassert Christian values. But he also warned that the power of relativistic secular humanism was so strong in the government, in the courts, and in the schools that it soon might be necessary for Christians to resist through civil disobedience—and even with violence—much as the United States had resisted British tyranny at the time of the American Revolution. Christianity and secular humanism, he emphasized, were opposites. “These two world views stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other,” he declared. “It is not too strong to say that we are at war, and there are no neutral parties in the struggle.”

It is no secret that many of the applications for charter schools are submitted by religious groups hoping to insert Christianity into the daily lesson plans of their students. (We have already seen that on display in Texas charter schools.)

The scariest thing in the world for a group that relies on ignorance and reliance on faith, is a fully funded public education system that teaches critical thinking skills and confidence in logic.

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Ask yourself honestly, how long do you think it would take a Florida jury to give this guy the death penalty?




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If that had been a full grown moose this poor guy would be a stain on the snow right about now.

Though I have read about many fatal encounters, I have been lucky enough to only have a handful of close calls in my life and no actual stomping.

The closest I came was accidentally blocking the only exit of a back yard and being charged by a bull moose and then chased all the way back to my car.

Update: I originally was told this was Alaska, but it turns out to be in Maine.

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Son Cody Coots, pictured on the far left.

Courtesy of TMZ:

Bite me once shame on you ... the new pastor in the "Snake Salvation" church will NOT accept medical treatment today if he's bitten by the rattlesnake that killed his father exactly one week ago.

Cody Coots tells TMZ ... he will indeed handle the deadly snake during the afternoon Kentucky service. What's more, he says there will be NO anti-venom meds on hand in case the snake attacks again.

And ... if he's bitten and paramedics rush to the church, he'll send them away ... just like his dad Jamie Coots did.

Cody tells TMZ, "I will lay right there and say to everyone, it's God's will. It's good enough to live by, and good enough to die by."

You know it is going to be increasing hard for these simple minded yokels to deny the teachings of Charles Darwin if they are going to keep receiving his awards.

You know you have to admire a Christian faith that has its own expiration date baked right into its religious practices. Perhaps the only thing that would be faster is a faith based on the belief that God will negate the laws of gravity for the true believers, and whose congregation meets on the edge of a cliff every Sunday.

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Courtesy of Mother Jones:

Kansas set off a national firestorm last week when the GOP-controlled House passed a bill that would have allowed anyone to refuse to do business with same-sex couples by citing religious beliefs. The bill, which covered both private businesses and individuals, including government employees, would have barred same-sex couples from suing anyone who denies them food service, hotel rooms, social services, adoption rights, or employment—as long as the person denying the service said he or she had a religious objection to homosexuality. As of this week, the legislation was dead in the Senate. But the Kansas bill is not a one-off effort.

Republicans lawmakers and a network of conservative religious groups has been pushing similar bills in other states, essentially forging a national campaign that, critics say, would legalize discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Republicans in Idaho, Oregon, South Dakota, and Tennessee recently introduced provisions that mimic the Kansas legislation. And Arizona, Hawaii, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Mississippi have introduced broader "religious freedom" bills with a unique provision that would also allow people to deny services or employment to LGBT Americans, legal experts say.

"This is a concerted campaign that the religious Right has been hinting at for a couple of years now," says Evan Hurst, associate director of Truth Wins Out, a Chicago-based nonprofit that promotes gay rights. "The fact that they're doing it Jim Crow-style is remarkable, considering the fact that one would think the GOP would like to be electable among people under 50 sometime in the near future."

The article goes on to give examples from Idaho, to South Dakota, to Tennessee of states that have introduced bills that would allow businesses to refuse service to anybody whose lifestyle insulted their religious beliefs.

Which by the way was one of the arguments used during the Jim Crow era to refuse service to blacks and to prevent interracial marriages.

So let me address the elephant in the room.

I get quite a lot of negative feedback for my promotion of secular ideals and my attacks on religion. And I understand why it might upset certain people.

However what everybody has to recognize is that ALL of these recent attacks on our human rights and personal freedoms are the result of religion.

What other reason is ever given for denying women access to abortion? The belief that it is against God's wishes.

What other reason is given for keeping gays from getting married? That it is against the teachings of the Bible.

What other reason is given for the attacks on science that we have seen lately? The fact that Evolution disproves the Genesis account of creation and the evidence that man can destroy the climate on the planet that religious people believe God provided to his people.

That is pretty much it in a nutshell.

So please tell me how to fight against all of this WITHOUT attacking it at its source.

Religion played a very important part in the development of mankind on this planet, there is no real argument against that. However today, in my opinion, that benefit is greatly reduced, and the negative impact seems to be growing exponentially.

So forgive me if I step on a few of your toes, but the battle is bigger than you.

And what we are fighting for is bigger than any one religion, or any one religion's god.

We are fighting for our very futures. And the future of our children. And our children's children.

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