Here’s a tip:  If even Pat Buchanan (yes, the same crazy geezer who called Hitler “an individual of great courage” and said America was built by white folks) thinks you “went too far” with your comments on any given subject, chances are you did.  The comments that sparked the disapproving words? Last week, Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich called the backers of the Cordoba House “Ground Zero Mosque”, “radical Islamists” and helpfully offered: “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the holocaust museum in Washington.”

Despite Pat Buchanan’s rebuke, Gingrich hasn’t completely won the prize for “Most Ridiculous Republican” in the Ground Zero Mosque debate. Sarah Palin has done her level best in pontificating on the question of whether the moderate Iman, Feisal Abdul Rauf, should be allowed to proceed with plans to build the community center (which includes meeting rooms, a pool, a fitness center, a basketball court, a restaurant and culinary school, a library, a 500-seat auditorium, a mosque and a Sept. 11 memorial.)  Wordsmith that she is, Palin fired off a flock of tweets on July 16th, starting with a call, directed specifically at the “peaceful Muslims” to “refudiate” the Ground Zero Mosque efforts.  Her use of the (admittedly helpful) non-existent word must have touched a raw nerve with someone on Team Palin who still had not gotten over her demand that the Obamas “refudiate” the NAACP for claims that the Tea Party is racist.  The tweet was deleted and this time, the “Peaceful New Yorkers” of the twitosphere were awkwardly exhorted to “refute” the construction project.  As if this wasn’t enough punishment, we were all then treated to this tweet: “Refudiate,” “misunderestimate,” “wee-wee’d up.” English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!”  The tipping point had been reached and the flood of tweets that ensued sent #ShakesPalin to Twitter’s trending topics and created a brand new Twitter account, @ShakesPalin.

And the Republican bluster didn’t stop there.  Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty who has a significant Muslim population in his state, would not back down from this claim that the building of the Ground Zero Mosque would “degrade and disrespect” Ground Zero. Mitt Romney chimed in via a spokesperson about “the wishes of the families of the deceased and the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda” in opposing it.  Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee threw in his two cents with this question:  ”Is it just that we can offend Americans and Christians, but not foreigners and Muslims?”

I never thought I would miss Bush but, to his credit, he always stressed that Islam was a religion of peace.  In fact, following Obama’s defending the rights of the backers of the disputed construction to the right to “build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances,” former Bush aides were some of the only visible Republicans to support him in the midst of huge conservative criticism.  To replace Bush-era Republican courting of Muslims, we now have conservative leaders like Gingrich who also said: “There should be no mosque near ground zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.”

If the current Republican leadership wants to abandon the party’s formerly peaceful stance and continue stoking anti-Islamic sentiment among their ranks, perhaps they could turn against their own sensitivities and take a lesson from a Frenchman. Far right politician Jean-Marie Le Penn has peddled his on-crack Islamophobia in France for years. Gingrich could arrange for an American version of Le Penn’s propaganda on handy posters like this one (created by Le Penn’s National Front party) that features a fully-veiled woman standing next to a map of France with the pattern of the Algerian flag on it and the words: “Non à “l’Islamisme” (No to Islamism).  The posters have drawn furious debate in France and the Algerian government has voiced its displeasure.
But then, the lippy contingent in American conservativism has never needed the French to draw international haters.  ”We are handing al Qaeda a propaganda coup, an absolute propaganda coup,” with the Islamic-center controversy, said Evan Kohlmann, an independent terrorism consultant at Flashpoint Partners who monitors jihadist websites. (The Wall Street Journal).  The article claims that Islamic radicals are justifying their violent threats by citing the American anti-Muslim rhetoric over the Cordoba Project and, other anti-Islamic rhetoric that has been building stateside.  A prime example is Pastor Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Center (a mega-church in Gainesville, Fla.) who is planning a Sept. 11 “International Burn a Koran Day” where he plans to defy even his local fire department (who refused to issue him a permit for his event) in the act of intolerant stupidity that has elicited comments like this one on radical Islamic sites:

“Now, I wish to bomb myself in this church as revenge for the sake of Allah’s talk. And here I register my name here that I want to be an intended-martyr.”

Stay tuned for more of these friendly messages as American conservative leaders continue the downward spiral of anti-Islamic rhetoric stateside.

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It was one of those victories that nobody could make any real sense of.  Twenty-four-year-old Rima Fakih from Dearborn, Mich. won the 2010 Miss USA Pageant on May 16 in Vegas and automatically, the blogosphere erupted with the combined firepower of ideologues on various sides of the US culture wars spouting pronouncements and journalists in the Middle East suddenly interested in an event that ordinarily would have been ignored as trivial, carnal and Western.  Why the fuss?  Fakih comes from an immigrant Shiite family with roots in Lebanon, specifically, the southern village of Srifa, near the port-city of Tyre.

One of the loudest voices was the blogger Debbie Schlussel who immediately dubbed the Michigander, “Miss Hezbollah” and started her article by trying to write off the win as affirmative action by PC judges: “It’s a sad day in America but a very predictable one, given the politically correct, Islamo-pandering climate in which we’re mired.”  It was hard to know what was more delightful about Schlussel’s statements: the predictability of her claim that the win was predictable, or the crazed, jumping-up-and-down desperate, “I-said-it-first” garbage she blurted out next: “The Hezbollah-supporting Shi’ite Muslim, Miss Michigan Rima Fakih –- whose bid for the pageant was financed by an Islamic terrorist and immigration fraud perpetrator –- won the Miss USA contest. I was on top of this story before anyone, telling you about who Fakih is and her extremist and deadly ties.”

What were these extremist, deadly ties?  Well, apparently her last name, Fakih, is shared with Hezbollah members and, according to Schlussel, this makes the Midwesterner a “Lebanese Muslim Hezbollah supporter with relatives who are top terrorists and ‘martyrs’ in the group.”  Schlussel helpfully offers:  “If you don’t have relatives that have died killing some Jews and relatives who’ve murdered hundreds of Americans, you really don’t deserve to be Miss USA.”

Hmmm….  If we want to find out about what Hezbollah thinks of Fakih, why not go to the actual source.  Here’s a statement from a Hezbollah spokesperson, Hassan Fadlallah: “The criteria through which we evaluate women are different from those of the West.” What an endorsement.  She’s got to be working for them.

Beirut Online quotes Swedish political scientist Magnus Ranstorp who calls the suggestion of terrorist ties “ludicrous” says, “She would be flogged if she showed up in any of Hizbullah’s neighborhoods in Beirut.”

“My family comes from a Muslim background, and we’re not defined by religion,” said Fakih in an interview with HLN’s “The Joy Behar Show”. “I would like to say we’re a spiritual liberal family.”  What does she mean?  In an article titled “The Not-So-Radical Roots of Miss USA“, Foreign Policy‘s Hanin Ghaddar says that in Lebanon, claims that Fakih has connections to Hezbollah are seen as slander.  Both her American family and Lebanese relatives celebrate Christian and Muslim holidays, right next to each other.  In the entrance of her relative’s home in Lebanon, a Quran and the Bible are placed next to each other and the family is riddled with marriages between Christians and Muslims.  So far things are sounding very extremist.  It gets better:  “Their house is distinguished from the neighbor’s by a big U.S. flag hung from its balcony, surrounded by ribbons and flowers … Fakih’s 62-year-old aunt, Afifa Fakih — the only woman in the household wearing a veil — explained, ‘We love America … without the USA, Rima wouldn’t have fulfilled her dreams. She made us all proud, and for that, we thank the Americans.’ ”

Although there is certainly discontent about her bikini and pictures that surfaced of her fully-clothed in a Detroit pole dancing competition, many Lebanese are proud of Fakih’s win.   The Lebanese President Michel Sleiman congratulated Fakih on his Facebook page. “This is none of their business,” said Aunt Afifa about the Hezbollah snub, “Who cares about what Hezbollah thinks? She is our daughter, not theirs, and Lebanon is proud of her.” (Foreign Policy)

Before her Miss USA win, Fakih said in an interview with Global Arab Network that she hoped a win “would prove that Arabs don’t always try to separate themselves, but instead are integrated into American culture … There are Arabs that are caring, that are good people, and who love the country they live in. I think it would make the Arab image a more positive one.”

And that is perhaps the best outcome possible for the Miss USA pageant that both liberals and conservatives love to hate: a case has been made for looking at Arab culture outside of the context of religious extremism.  Just as Fakih’s family transcends sectarianism and embraces both Muslim and Christian traditions, wins of this nature speak to a more human side of us.  It proves that whether we are from Dearborn or Beirut, we can all come together in praise of superficial beauty and tacky tiaras.

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Had it up to your ears with the holier-than-thou morality bombs that cultural conservatives lob over their protectionist fortresses in the culture wars?  Turns out the red states have one less leg to stand on:  new research surfaces stats that show a much stronger tendency for divorce in the states with the highest tendency to dictate correct “family values” to everyone else.

In Which Is the Party of Family Values?, Slate states, “The right likes to portray itself as the guardian of American families, but the reality is that stable-two parent families are more common in ‘the liberal bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate,’ than they are in what Sarah Palin would call the ‘real America’ “.

Turns out those crazy Massachusetts liberals have the lowest divorce rate in the country and six of the seven states with the highest divorce rate in the country voted Dubya/his boss in 2004 and oldie/hottie in 2008.  Seems like marital disaster follows the most preachy.  In their undying quest to focus on the family as early as they can reproduce, red state traditionalists have created the perfect storm.

As Jonathan Rauch in National Journal Magazine puts it, “In red America, families form adults; in blue America, adults form families”.  To unpack that statement, he looks at the ideas put forward by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone (family law professors at George Washington University and the University of Missouri (Kansas City) respectively) in their book Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture.

The crux of the thinking is this: Conservative cultural and religious crusaders on the right link sex, marriage and procreation in one troublesome lump.  As soon as you emerge from childhood your mentors start making suggestions regarding (obviously) opposite-sex partners which you are encouraged to court for an appropriately short time before tying the knot, banging like goats and producing spawn that, fed the right steak, potatoes and corn bread, will hopefully repeat the cycle.

This all sounds like a great idea as you pass the turkey at Thanksgiving but it makes for a horrible reality when you look at the results of applying cultural standards from a long-gone era to the complexity of the modern cultural landscape.  Liberal or conservative, kids freak; and, in a conservative culture that stresses abstinence over protection, pregnancies occur, especially when you are on the Right side of Roe v. Wade. Back in the day you could afford to get married in-or-right-after-high-school-young because of butterfly love or because someone had gotten knocked up.  Today that is a terrible idea because it is much less possible to bring home bread for two (much less three or four) people on a high school diploma. But tradition rules in red states, early marriages abound and the combined stresses of youth, poverty and offspring often result in divorce.

On the other side of the culture wars are those pesky leftists with their irresponsible sexual mores, over-the-hill singles and baby-killer doctors.  The right sees them as the bane of family stability and values-based living.  Rather than stress sexual abstinence before marriage, the message from these bleeding heart liberals, is: “Have all the nookie you want but whatever you do, stay sheathed and don’t get pregnant and certainly don’t have a child until after college and a stable income.”  Although it flies in the face of traditional morality, according to Cahn and Carbone, this kind of life advice is statistically more likely to achieve the ideal of a stable, two-parent household.

So what to make of all this?  Cahn and Carbone’s statistics seem to say that moral traditionalism has failed in producing stable families.  Should pre-marital sexual abstinence and other conservative values be discarded? Should blue states now take the moral high ground and should Hollywood be allowed to dictate its own morals more than it already does?  As convenient as that would be, Rauch admits, “Whether Cahn and Carbone are right will take time and subsequent scholarship to learn”.  In the meantime a nonpartisan and fairer approach might be to abandon attempts to establish a hierarchy of cultures and instead focus on common ground.  Sexual morality is open to a variety of interpretations but surely protection is a good thing to stress across the board.  Life preparation over early marriage is another idea that makes as much sense in Oklahoma as it does in New York.  And before children come into the picture, invest in a college fund.

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“I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!”

Why run?  “Social justice” codes for Nazism and communism says conservative commentator, Glenn Beck.  And he does not care if this pisses you off.  If anything, his notoriety is helpful.  “I could give a flying crap about the political process … We’re an entertainment company,” he said in a Forbes magazine cover-page article this month. In the 12 months leading up to March 1, 2010, his company Mercury Radio Arts brought in $32 million in revenue.  Five million daily viewers are in love with his Fox News show.  His wildly irresponsible statements are helpfully cataloged with a generous profile on Dickipedia – a wiki of dicks.  Here are some highlights:

“I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it.” (2005)

“When I see a 9/11 victim family on television, or whatever, I’m just like, ‘Oh shut up.’ I’m so sick of them because they’re always complaining.” (2005)

“The only [Katrina victims] we’re seeing on television are the scumbags.” (2005)

Not listed but equally ridiculous:  “This President, I think, has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture” (2009).

“I don’t necessarily believe that [what Beck says] is reflective of his own personal politics — I don’t even know if he has personal politics,” says Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers, a trade magazine devoted to talk radio. “I see him as a performer.”

Performer he may be, but for much of the American religious world, the social justice slam was the last straw.  All hell broke loose; many in the American religious establishment turned their firepower on Beck.  From Scott Trotter, a spokesman for Beck’s own Latter-day Saint community:  “Public figures who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints represent their own views and do not speak for the church.”  Evangelical leader Jim Wallis, on his blog GOD’S politics, said, “the Catholic Church, the Black Churches, the Mainline Protestant churches, and more and more Evangelical and Pentecostal churches including Hispanic and Asian-American congregations all consider social justice central to biblical faith.” He then called for Christians to boycott Beck’s show.  Beck qualified his comments by denying them: “No, no, no. Didn’t say that [tell people to leave their churches if they talked about social justice]. I said if they are basing their religion on social justice. Social justice and economic justice are code words. Look for those code words, and then ask your church, ‘What do you mean by that? What is that?’ Because they’re code words. And don’t be sucked into that.”

In an April 6 Huffington Post article, Hollywood Seventh-day Adventist Church pastor Ryan Bell talked about meeting with filmmakers at his church to create PSAs responding to Beck: “Our goal is to help people understand what social justice is and its place at the center of Christian faith.”  Here is the first of these that can be viewed at socialjusticechristian.com

If anything good came of Beck’s comments, its this: American Christianity proved that it was up to the challenge of fighting back against conservative attempts to shape its narrative and quell the struggle for social justice.  Religion is fundamentally not right wing or left wing.   And faith has no quarrel with social justice.

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YES, BEFORE YOU COMMENT, I TOO, HATE THE PLACEMENT OF THE PLAY BUTTON.  THANK YOU YOUTUBE:)

In this second episode of CultureMutterings I cover some of the ideas, fights and questions that have come up over the last few posts.  Hot topics: gay people in the military; the Icelandic sex industry; Joe the Plumber venting about how he wants to torture people and FOX News on the Congressional Budget Office.

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It’s the social conservative’s wet dream: Last week we learned that legislation had passed in Iceland banning all strip clubs.  Not only can you no longer run a strip club, but no business can profit from employee nudity in any way. So topless waitresses are out too.  There are signs that this momentum will result in a banning of the sex industry entirely. The legislation that passed on Wednesday last week is not the work of enterprising evangelicals or straight-laced rightists. Quite the contrary.  It is one of the most unique legislative milestones for the administration of Johanna Sigurdardottir, the first openly lesbian Prime Minister in the world.

This legislation that doubtless would win the approval of American “values” voters, was not inspired by religionists or indeed by any traditionalist undercurrent.  Though the Focus on the Family James Dobsons of the world would be delighted with this kind of an outcome,  this is the achievement of a small, hugely secular, socially progressive, Nordic state that England’s Guardian newspaper, calls “the world’s most feminist country”.

“It is pleasing how fresh the breeze of equality is at Althingi [the Icelandic parliament] these days,” said Siv Fridleifsdótttir of the Progressive Party, the bill’s first presenter (Icelandic newspaper Fréttabladid via Iceland Review Online).

Cut to the United States.  It’s been an interesting few weeks for gay rights.  On March 18, openly gay US infantry officer, Dan Choi, along with an outed officer, Capt. Jim Pietrangelo, chained themselves to the White House fence.  They did so in protest of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” (DADT), the US military policy that restricts the military from efforts to out service members or applicants that are gay, lesbian or bisexual, while still barring those that do come out from further service.  After coming out as gay on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show about a year ago, Dan Choi was issued a discharge letter from the military.  Choi has appealed the decision, and a final call has not yet been made.

On March 19, retired senior US military officer and NATO commander John Sheehan shocked the world with his logic in support of DADT.  Sheehan said that part of the reason for the 1995 massacre of 5,000 Muslim men in Srebrenica was the fact that there were gay soldiers among the Dutch UN peacekeeping troops that were protecting the Bosnian Muslim enclave. Sheehan made his statement before a Senate hearing on DADT.  The comments sparked Dutch outrage of biblical proportions, as well as worldwide criticism and disbelief.

What such statements reveal about the moth-eaten mindset of those that back the discrimination and deception inherent in DADT, is telling. Sheehan and like-minded antediluvians are so steeped in their anti-gay dogma that they are willing to make the issue one of life and death.  This is the antiquated language of DADT:  ”The prohibition against homosexual conduct is a longstanding element of military law that continues to be necessary in the unique circumstances of military service. … The presence in the armed forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.”

So basically, according to the military, gay people are bad for morale and order.  And according to religious conservatives, gays are a threat to the institution of marriage, the physical and psychological health of children and the moral condition of society as a whole.  What is wrong with these dinosaurs? It would behoove them to take a protracted soak in an Icelandic hot spring.  Has society fallen apart in Iceland with an openly gay person wielding the highest powers afforded to a citizen?  Has morale plummeted and chaos reigned?  Are children permanently scarred and is society taking a moral plunge? No, no and NO. Instead we have witnessed the kind of successful attack on the sex industry that most anti-gay, pro-DADT American leaders salivate just thinking about.

It is time for real equality in America.  We may differ in our views on homosexuality but surely, it is time to judge each person on their individual merits and potential, not their sexual orientation.  We are close to the finish line.  President Obama ran on a campaign promise to repeal DADT.  In his first State of the Union he again promised to do it.  May the tides of change hasten and may the insult to basic human equality that is DADT, become a thing of the past.

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Here goes the first video post.  The idea behind it is a beginning for what I am calling CultureMutterings – basically a video post about recent news, recent CultureMutt posts and reactions/rebuttals to some of the comments made on the posts.  This is my first stab at this and I am obviously highly camera trained…. enjoy

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It‘s been a battle between two of the best things about America:  Individual liberty on the one hand and shared responsibility on the other.   In the debate on health care we can’t resort to Dubya-style prattle that framed political dramas as a battle between good and evil.  It’s just not that simple.  There are good ideas and good people on both sides of this debate.  I don’t often speak in the first person on CultureMutt but I have no problem making this exception because of the extreme importance of what is at stake here.  I want to address this on as personal a level as possible.

Health care in America is an embarrassment, it is woefully inadequate and completely unacceptable in the world’s richest and most powerful country.  How is it that in America, the world’s sole superpower, we have huge slabs of the population that are one illness away from bankruptcy and devastating, personal failure?  How is it that insurance companies are able to deny people coverage based on pre-existing conditions?  This is cruel, this is heartless, this is fundamentally un-American.

I will admit that as a Swede, I often compare America to what I have in my country of birth.  Yes, Sweden has socialized medicine and yes, this does bias me in favor of providing health care as a right for all.  But I made a very conscious decision ten years ago to move to the United States.  The reason?  I still believe with all that is in me, that America is the land of opportunity.  I still believe that things – very good things – can be done in this country that cannot be done anywhere else.  I am proud of my adopted country and I defend it whenever I travel.  This is where I want to live and this is the country I am committed to on a level that makes me feel deeply invested in doing all I can to improve this country for all that live here.

What is special and what is unique in America is an unwavering belief in the possibilities of what we can achieve as individuals and what we can achieve together.  No other country on earth can claim the kind of environment that America offers to all that live here: superior opportunities to thrive and prosper.  I will admit that I came to America because I personally wanted to thrive and prosper and be supported in my drive to do so as an individual.  But having lived in America for 10 years now, I can say that the American promise has proved to be about more than just individual success: it is about our shared destiny as a people.  The good news about America is that this is a country where we give a damn.  This is a country of compassion.  This is a country where we care about other people; where we pick up our fallen in battle; where we work TOGETHER in the hope of improving our collective existence and that of future generations.  No matter how controversial, infuriating or deeply disappointing the path, we CANNOT allow the firestorm that is the health care debate to allow us to forget about this fundamental truth.  There is a better way than this.

Let’s not pretend that the health care reform bill that will be voted upon tomorrow in the House is without fault.  It certainly has weaknesses and compromises.  I am tempted to get on my soapbox as usual and pontificate on what the bill REALLY should look like but this time I won’t.  This moment is too important.  The bottom line is that our current health care has failed.  People are hurting, people are vulnerable and the time for change has come.  Just as it took courage and overlooking imperfections and potential political ramifications to vote in Medicare for seniors and Medicaid for the poor decades ago, it will take courage to bring health care reform today.  The time for stalling is over.  This country is better than this.  We are better than this.  And the America health care reform will bring is better than this. May the House prove it by voting for Health Care Reform tomorrow.  In the words of President Obama this afternoon, “Let’s get this done!”.

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