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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She is a contender for “Most Infuriating American on the Planet”. After George W. Bush’s departure, the world needed a figurehead on which to direct frustrations with the ignorant American.  The beauty of the gift that arrived was that not only was she innocent of any real background in world affairs, gun-loving and prone to delightfully unfortunate colloquialisms in her adorable Alaskan accent, she was also incestuously aligned with pro-life evangelicals, the worst of studied, American scientific know-nothings and small town, hell-raising future Tea Partiers.  More importantly, she had the most photogenic gossip fodder for family since the Kennedys.  The world had found the new American it could love to hate, the very personification of all that was wrong with America.  AND she was hot.

Most of the international reaction to Palin was predictable.  Her (albeit downplayed) evangelical allegiance was bound to draw sneers from left-leaning journalists the world over. On April 9, 2008, French weekly Le Point called Palin “the fanatic of the American heartland”.  Her literalistic approach to religious narrative was enough to push some Europeans over the edge: “Who literally believes that Jonah made his home in a whale’s abdomen? Nobody really, apart from the US president – and the woman who was recently added to the 2008 Republican ticket.” said John Gibbons of the Irish Times in the heat of the 2008 election.

Unlike countless Americans with knickers-a-twist about Bristol Palin’s very obvious pre-marital knocking-up or Palin’s sister’s messy divorce, much of the world barely shrugged at these moral inconsistencies in candidate Palin’s family.  A Huffington Post piece on Buenos Aires residents’ reactions to the Palin nomination contained this reaction from architect Augusto Stigol, “I just wouldn’t consider the personal situation of a candidate. That’s related to his or her private life.”  This sentiment echoed the views of many continental Europeans that are almost disappointed if their leaders are not at least tangentially implicated in a saucy bedroom romp.

But while many were forgiving of and indeed, grateful for the soap opera drama that Palin et family brought to world political gossip, the less pardonable sin the world community pinned on the Alaskan had to do with one of the reasons she was so popular with much of the red-state electorate: her folksy, small-town, conservative, hopelessly-insular-yet-oh-so-patriotic-straight-shooting.  As reassuring as her dialect was to millions of Americans, she was jaw-droppingly alienating to much of the world community.

Take the East Asian commentary that erupted after Palin’s trip to Hong Kong to speak to those gathered for the annual investment forum for the Hong Kong-based investment bank, CLSA.  The Asia Sentinel rants that the standing-room-only crowd was treated to “90 minutes of boredom which had half the audience fiddling endlessly with their Blackberries. Ninety percent of her speech could have been – and probably was – written for a domestic US audience receptive to her ‘mom and pop’ populism.”  The speech was mostly an assault on US politicians she disagreed with, Obama’s health care overhaul and “the very notion of income redistribution” (Asia Sentinel).

The narrowness of Palin’s heartland rhetoric and her overall lack of world knowledge was annoying but hardly surprising. Palin’s 2008 vice-presidential run had unearthed precious gems such as her infamous claim to knowledge of Russia because you can see it from Alaska.  Fox News Chief Political Correspondent Carl Cameron claimed that Palin thought that Africa was a country and she didn’t know which countries were in NAFTA.  Her international travel was practically non-existent as she got her first passport ever in 2006.

Yet paired with global amazement at her lack of international savvy was fearful admiration of Palin’s political potential and raw popularity that, in more recent days, have cemented her undeniable status as Republican kingmaker. Conservative candidates are scrambling for her endorsement ahead of mid-term elections in the US.

As blogger Sarah Britten in South Africa’s Thought Leader put it, Palin is “a huntin’, shootin’, fishin’, Creationist, anti-abortion hockey mom who — to make that mouthful even more distasteful to Prius-driving pinko-liberal Obama-supporters — also has sex appeal and the apparent ability to connect with ordinary middle Americans”.

Palin is recognized worldwide as a force to be reckoned with.  And there are those that don’t share the left-leaning tendencies of much of world thought leaders.  “There are few sights more bloodcurdling than the liberal pack in full cry,” writes Janet Daley in an article titled “Sarah Palin gets the spiteful Margaret Thatcher treatment” in Britain’s Telegraph.

The viciousness of the attacks on Sarah Palin is a testimony to the degree of panic … in Leftist circles… She is a renegade, the gender equivalent of an Uncle Tom…. Like Margaret Thatcher before her, Mrs Palin is coming in for both barrels of Left-wing contempt: misogyny and snobbery. Where Lady Thatcher was dismissed as a “grocer’s daughter” by people who called themselves egalitarian, Mrs Palin is regarded as a small-town nobody by those who claim to represent “ordinary people”.

What the metropolitan sophisticates failed to understand in the 1980s when Thatcher won election after election is even more the case in the US: most (and I do mean most) ordinary people actually believe in the basic decencies, the “small-town values”, of family, marital fidelity, and personal responsibility. They believe in and honour them – even if they do not manage to uphold them.

The life of small-town USA is based on the principles of those Protestant colonial settlers who founded the nation: hard work, self-improvement, personal faith and family devotion. Mrs Palin speaks to and for them in a way that patronising “liberal” elitists find infuriating.

As much as liberal commentators may find comparisons between Palin and Margaret Thatcher laughable, they are not completely unfounded.  Before the bulk of the Thatcher/Palin talk – way back in December 2008 – long-time Thatcher Aide, John O’Sullivan wrote a Wall Street Journal article titled Conservative Snobs Are Wrong About Palin / I know Maggie Thatcher. The two women have a lot in common. O’Sullivan speculates about the future:

She has plenty of time, probably eight years, to analyze America’s problems, recruit her own expert advice, and develop conservative solutions to them. She has obvious intelligence, drive, serious moral character, and a Reaganesque likability… she shares with Mrs. Thatcher a very rare charisma. As Ronnie Millar, the latter’s speechwriter and a successful playwright, used to say in theatrical tones: She may be depressed, ill-dressed and having a bad hair day, but when the curtain rises, out onto the stage she steps looking like a billion dollars. That’s the mark of a star, dear boy. They rise to the big occasions.

And that is why this folksy fighter can’t be written off.  She may turn off the urban elite along with huge swaths of the blue states.  But this scrappy pit bull always comes back, usually connects and never forgets her lipstick.  Under the liberal sneer of disdain lies fear and trembling.

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Remember John McCain’s “Obama fame” epiphany during the 2008 presidential elections? His negative ad pegged Obama as out of touch and the “world’s biggest celebrity”, pejoratively splicing in clips of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton with crowd shots of Obama rallies as the Democratic contender drew record numbers both at home and internationally.  Reactions abounded. Paris Hilton struck back with this parody ad about the “wrinkly white haired guy”, the “oldest celebrity in the world”.  The media was abuzz as, at least temporarily, the message of Obama’s supposedly counterproductive celebrity seemed to stick with some voters. But ultimately the roadblock proved incapable of doing any real damage and the young Democrat rode his wave of popularity all the way to a very decisive November 4th win.  The raw celebratory energy worldwide was palpable.  Gone was the bumbling, trigger-happy Texan who had infuriated world citizenry with his failure of a foreign policy and the near-sighted disaster of an economic policy that had brought the world to its knees. Impossibly high expectations and desperate hopes for something far better were pinned on the new guy. Conservatives prayed for the bubble to burst while liberals crossed themselves, willing global patience with the new administration.

Skip to the present.  As fickle as the American electorate can be, and despite his substantial drop in domestic popularity, Obama’s international celebrity and popularity have remained high.  While American memory of the blunders of his predecessor may be fading, international scars are still keenly felt and there’s still much hope in the new president.  Cracks are appearing though.  Take recent daggers thrown in the UK over the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.  Conservative UK commentator, Norman Tebbit, recently called Obama’s approach to the BP disaster a “crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan political presidential petulance.”

The source of UK anger against Obama stems from what is seen as an overly aggressive stance against BP.  Tebbit’s rant finds at least partial backing in some of Obama’s BP-related posturing:

“crude” = “I don’t sit around talking to experts because this is a college seminar… we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.” (Obama’s June 8 NBC interview)

“bigoted” = The relentless attacks on Obama’s attacks on BP as the disaster spirals completely out of control and Obama plays into British accusations of of “‘buck passing’ and ‘beating up’ the British-based company” (Daily Mail) instead of problem-solving.

“xenophobic” – Obama’s occasional use of the name “British Petroleum” that BP dropped years ago and therefore (it can be argued), playing this up as an issue with Britain when really this is the mistake of a multinational, a large stake of which is American.

“Winding up a hate campaign against the British is not a terribly smart policy. It may win Mr. Obama political support amongst the less well-informed voters right now, but the long-term effects are less sure. BP is also a major US company. Busting it might not be a very smart idea and not just on economic grounds. The message that non-US companies are likely to be treated as political punchbags would be a profoundly political message, too.”  (Tebbit)

Joining the ranks of political malcontents, Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, said that he was concerned about “anti-British rhetoric” and “name-calling” from American leaders.   And it’s not just a few oversensitive conservative politicos that are pissy: the UK’s Sunday Times quoted a survey that stated 64% of Brits and 47% of US residents claim Obama’s handling of the BP crisis hurt the relationship between the two countries and that in both countries, 22% of respondents went as far as calling Obama anti-British.

As exciting as this rift-rhetoric can be, much of the Anglo-American hand-wringing about it took place before a June 12 conversation in which Obama tried to soften the perceived attack on Britain over the disaster by saying that his unhappiness with BP had nothing to do with its British identity. Following the conversation, The Times‘s journalist Giles Whittel wrote: “The notion that American attacks on BP are anti-British is embarrassing. It is a fiction incubated by the thin-skinned, solipsistic and broadly anti- American world view that bubbles up like warm bitter in the best-kept villages of Little England whenever anyone in Washington has the temerity to break with the tradition of referring to the Old Country and its pretensions with anything other than awed admiration.”

Further evidence that Obama wanted to make peace?  He put beer on the table.  The trick worked a year ago when Obama invited black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and white Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley to the White House for a beer after causing an uproar by saying the police had “acted stupidly” in arresting Gates, Jr. for disorderly conduct. This time around, Obama and Cameron wagered a beer over who would win the June 12 US/England World Cup game.  When the teams tied, the politicos presented each other with their respective beers and gushed about the special relationship between the two countries.

There’s even a chance that the Anglo-American relationship will improve after the BP fiasco.  The evidence? Obama’s gift-giving is improving.  A beer far outshines his last gift to a British PM.  In exchange for an ornate pen holder from former PM Gordon Brown, Obama presented the British leader with a set of DVDs that don’t even work in British players.

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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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“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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