Gay Christian Dating Service

While I applaud their efforts, I just think it’s kinda sad any time you see a group of people clinging to a club that not only doesn’t want them as members but is actively working against their interests. Gay Christian is like Black Klansman. It’s just probably not the best identity to embrace.

Steve Harvey: Anti-atheist bigot

Watch starting at the 5:57 mark:

And the transcript:

You need to get into some personal stuff: What’s his relationship with his mom? How does he feel about children? Does he have a relationship with God?

You sitting up there talking to a dude and he tells you he’s an atheist, you need to pack it up and go home. You talking to a person who don’t believe in God… what’s his moral barometer? Where’s it at? It’s nowhere. You gotta get into this stuff.

What a fucktard! He is actually saying that 15% of America has no morals at all. What’s amazing to me is that this kind of blatant bigotry is so acceptable in our society. Stating that a whole group of people has no morals is, by my standards, a far greater insult than if someone had called him a nigger or called a gay man a faggot. This ignorant fool has no understanding of human psychology at all and yet presumes to call himself a “relationship experts.” What a joke.

California schools’ risks rise as vaccinations drop

Thanks again to Jenny McCarthy and her merry band of irresponsible quacks, California’s children are at great risk:

The rise in unvaccinated children appears to be driven by affluent parents choosing not to immunize. Many do so because they fear the shots could trigger autism, a concern widely discredited in medical research.

But with autism rates rising, some parents find that fear more worrisome than the chance that their child could contract diseases that, while now very rare in this country, can still be deadly.

Last year, a 7-year-old boy triggered a measles outbreak in San Diego after he returned, infected, from a family trip to Switzerland. His parents had chosen not to vaccinate him or his siblings.

“The more children we have in our communities that are not immunized, the more likely we are going to have massive outbreaks,” said Dr. Gil Chavez, deputy director of the California Department of Public Health’s Center for Infectious Diseases.

In all, more than 10,000 kindergartners started school last fall with vaccine exemptions, up from about 8,300 the previous school year. In 1997, when enrollment was higher, the number of exempted kindergartners was 4,318.

Many children have already been greatly harmed because of such negligence. The timing of this news is just perfect considering Jenny McCarthy is releasing a new book and is about to pop up on every credulous TV show willing to have her.

Catholic Church to screen out the gays?

In yet another example of the Catholic Church making stupid decisions to avoid real life solutions to problems, the Vatican is considering testing to screen out gays in their ministry to end all the sex scandals. The Church in Australia is really considering it:

Melbourne’s Catholic Church has embraced a Vatican suggestion to test potential priests for sexual orientation. Those who “appear” gay will be banned.

The head of the Vatican committee that made the recommendations has made it clear celibate gays should also be banned because homosexuality is ”a type of deviation”.

I wonder what the test will be like.

Of course it doesn’t seem to matter that boys and girls are being raped by priests in equal number, and that being gay is no more a criteria for determining pedophilia than whether or not you happen to be bald.

Matthew Nisbet not happy with how he’s being ‘framed’

I first heard of Matthew Nisbet when he was a guest on, I think, the Point of Inquiry podcast. Like Randy Olson, Nisbet is constantly insisting that in order to challenge creationism, science must deceptiv–err, I mean “frame” its arguments to ensure not to  alienate or offend anyone, not like those contempable “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins who has the audacity to criticize the irrational and unscientific positions of religion without first consulting with a focus group or kissing anyone’s ass. Yet according to him, while Dawkins is too “angry”, the fictional Dr. House meets with his approval. Ya got me.

Nisbet is a very controversial figure among the atheist and skeptical communities because he preaches for a watered down approach to challenging religion that seems to involve not telling the religious they’re wrong when they are in fact wrong and instead telling them simply that science and religion are compatible regardless of what is true just because it doesn’t offend anyone. Well now Russel Blackford has written an ironic blog that “praises” Nisbet for his science by focus group position. Nisbet has himself responded on the comments section of that blog and Jerry Coyne’s blog. Blackford has already written a comment response to Nisbet’s that is definitely worth reading.

Just when you thought the Bible couldn’t get any more scandalous

The famously subversive US cartoonist Robert Crumb is publishing his own version of The Book of Genesis.

The acclaimed satirist revealed on his personal website that he had finished the project, which is out this autumn, and which his UK publisher is predicting will “provoke the religious right”. Four years in the making, Crumb worked from the King James Bible and Robert Alter’s translation to reinterpret the Book of Genesis, from the Creation via Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to Noah boarding his ark.

Anything that provokes the religious right has got to be good. Here’s how the publisher described it:

According to his publisher, Jonathan Cape, Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis is a “scandalous satire” which “presents a complex, even subversive, narrative that calls for a significant re-examination of both the Bible’s content and its role in our culture”. It will be published simultaneously in the US and the UK on 19 October.

Amen.

Spanking ‘brings couples together’

According to 2 different studies of hormonal changes linked with sadomasochistic activities such as spanking, bondage and flogging, spanking may bring a couple closer together. My favorite Quirkologist, Richard Wiseman, commented on the findings:

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, adds that almost any shared activity is likely to promote interpersonal closeness. “It doesn’t have to be tying up your partner or placing clamps on their nipples, it could be something as simple as cooking a meal together or even doing the housework as a duo,” he says.

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, adds that almost any shared activity is likely to promote interpersonal closeness. “It doesn’t have to be tying up your partner or placing clamps on their nipples, it could be something as simple as cooking a meal together or even doing the housework as a duo,” he says.

Religion will unmake the world

While talking with a fellow global warming denier and religious lunatic, Illinois Rep. John Shimkus actually stated that increased man-made carbon emissions can only be a good thing, since they provide food for plants. And in the following clip, he illustrates why religious people should never be elected into office.

PETA goes from being offensive to mammals to “an offense against human dignity” Ouch.

Ugh! Here we go again. The masters of sensational, over the top hyperbole are at it again. Unfortunately, this time they made the mistake of invoking the very sensitive subject of the Holocaust in Germany, a country that doesn’t much care for free speech when it comes to provocative statements relating to the Holocaust:

Germany’s supreme court has ruled that a series of PETA ads comparing factory farming to the Holocaust are “an offense against human dignity” and not protected speech. The ads show pictures of concentration camps next to pictures of animal farms and bear the slogan “The Holocaust on your plate”.

As a passionate defender of free speech, I’ve never supported Germany in these cases, even when they usually involve those whose messages I too find distasteful. So unfortunately I got to stand with PETA on this one, despite the overall idiocy of their message and their foolishness in thinking they could get away with this kind of crap in Germany. Though maybe this is exactly what they wanted to have happen and this was just a less transparent version of the tactic they pulled with their recent Superbowl commercial.

There are no vampires in Boston. Vampires hate the Sox

I don’t want to alarm any of the students at Boston Latin School, but there may be a vampire or vampires on the premises. Or maybe not.

“The headmaster believes that the outrageous rumors had reached a point where she had to say something to families to ensure that all students felt safe and respected,” said Chris Horan, School Department spokesman.

. . .

Two law enforcement officials with knowledge of the incident said a group of girls at the school had been bullying at least one other student who likes to dress in Goth-style, a vampirish look popularized by musician Marilyn Manson. The officials said the girls began spreading a rumor that the student was a vampire who had cut someone’s neck and sucked the blood.

When Boston police went to the school Wednesday on an unrelated matter, their presence fueled yet another rumor: that a vampire was being arrested, according to one of the law enforcement sources.