Daily Links #125: Oklahoma bans same-sex adoption

• Oklahoma officially allows religious adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex parents. It’s the Christian way.

• The fallout from SESTA/FOSTA continues: Cops realize it’s making their jobs harder, whilst sex traffickers are having a field day. It’s not like anyone predicted this would happen or anything …

• PZ Myers says all I have to say on the “Intellectual Dark Web” of regressives who whinge about how they can’t spout bigotry and play footsie with fascists without suffering social consequences.

• Andrew Shirvell, who rose to fame as the homophobic former Michigan Assistant Attorney General who obsessively harassed a gay college student, has been permanently disbarred.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Finally: in Creativitas news, I’ve recently revised and updated three of my orchestral songs, “Inhuman Suite”, “Setting Out” and “Softer Dreams”. I plan to revisit some of my older songs – some of which I haven’t touched in the better part of a decade, back when I was just starting to write music – and give them the overhaul they deserve, so stay tuned.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Fischer: The First Amendment only applies to Christianity

Bryan Fischer

I give you Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association:

The blunt, simple, direct, straightforward answer is that Wiccans do not have First Amendment rights, nor do Muslims, nor do Jews, nor do Native Americans, nor do Rastafarians, nor do any practitioners of any other religion other than Christianity.

Whatever the First Amendment is about, whatever protections it extends in the federal Constitution, those were just for Christianity. Christianity has First Amendment rights under the federal Constitution, no other religion does.

But whatever you do, don’t call them Christian-fascists. That’s just anti-Christian bigotry.

(via Joe.My.God.)

Daily Links #123: Bill Cosby found guilty

Bill Cosby

• Bill Cosby ^[pictured]: Guilty on all counts of sexual assault. At his age, it’s effectively a life sentence. Good riddance.

• In totally unsurprising news, the Toronto van murderer is affiliated with women-hating incels.

• Here’s an TV show idea: Disgraced accused sexual predator Charlie Rose interviews other disgraced sexual predators like Matt Lauer and Louis CK about #MeToo. I’m sorry to say that’s not a joke.

• Not a repeat: Right-wingers triggered by NRA boycott destroy their own expensive property to own the libs, clearly need more safe spaces.

• Finally, NRA dude is sad that the unarmed hero who stopped the Waffle House shooter didn’t have a gun to shoot the gunman dead with instead.
  (via @fark)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #119: SC cops shoot at man 57 times over $100 pot sale

Julian Betton

• South Carolina cops shot at a man ^[pictured] 57 times, hitting him nine times and paralyzing him, during a drug raid over a $100 pot sale. They claimed they’d announced themselves and that he fired at them first, and an “oversight” agency claimed the shooting was justified; his surveillance camera proved they lied about everything. The shooters and prosecutors have now given him a $2.75 million settlement.
  

• Slate exposes the junk science and blatant lies behind Trump’s trans military ban, including the fact that Defense Secretary Mattis was overruled by Mike Pence who, aided by fellow bigots like Tony Perkins, helped sway Trump to ignore the testimony from actual experts who say the ban accomplishes nothing good.
  (via @fark)

• Trump’s EPA continues to attack and lie about science at every turn.
  (via @BadAstronomer)

• You know someone has a bad case of Christian persecution complex when they complain that Sweet Jesus ice cream shop’s name is “offensive”.

• Finally, coal baron Bob Murray apparently thought it would be a good idea to send a complaint letter to the judge who dismissed his bogus defamation suit against John Oliver. The ACLU is amused. The judge is not.
  (via @adamsteinbaugh; retweet by @Popehat)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Trump admin. enacts new trans military ban

The Pentagon had until tonight to institute Trump’s policy to ban trans servicemembers, and characteristically, Trump signed the order at the last minute. Months of legal challenges later, the trans military ban is now in place:

Following a Pentagon policy review after a tweet by President Donald Trump last year, the White House said the policy will say "transgender persons with a history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria -- individuals who the policies state may require substantial medical treatment, including medications and surgery -- are disqualified from military service except under certain limited circumstances."

[…]

According to a Pentagon memo about the policy, exceptions to the ban include people who have been "stable for 36 consecutive months in their biological sex prior to accession," servicemembers who "do not require a change of gender" and troops who started serving under the Obama administration's policy prior to the new memo.

It doesn’t matter what excuse or rationale they bring up to bolster this move; it won’t hide the fact that this is no more than a gift to Trump’s regressive base, the same that has a conniption at the thought of trans people using the right bathrooms. The facts were already clear when Trump first tweeted the policy change last August and they’ve only been hammered home since: Thousands of trans troops are already in the US armed forces, they serve every bit as competently and professionally as their cisgender comrades, and throwing them out would only weaken the military, not strengthen it. (It’s never been made clear just how throwing out thousands of dedicated soldiers, trans or otherwise, is supposed to strengthen the military’s combat readiness.) This is discrimination in its plainest form.

The lawsuits are guaranteed to keep coming, so it’s anyone’s guess how it’ll turn out. But I’m not holding onto hope; in the end, the executive branch has the power to implement whatever conditions for enlistment it wants, barring anything blatantly unconstitutional. Trans people were already banned up to 2016; there’s little reason things couldn’t go back to that.

Daily Links #118: US bishops praise LGBTQ discrimination bill

• US Conference of Catholic Bishops praises a Senate bill that would legalize anti-LGBTQ discrimination nationwide, because of course they do.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• A Buffalo, NY bishop names 42 priests accused of child sexual abuse, many of whom were previously unidentified, because … wait, that’s actually surprising.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Meanwhile, Michigan police raided the Saginaw Catholic Diocese and a bishop’s home, citing their lack of cooperation in a sexual abuse investigation.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• ICE contractor says it doesn’t use solitary confinement, and also, please ignore the testimony and photos of its isolation cells that prove they use solitary confinement.

• The sun continues to set on the northern white rhinoceros as Sudan, the species’ last living male, dies. Two females survive, which conservationists hope to impregnate using IVF.

• Security theater: The Parkland, Florida high school where the February shooting occurred now requires that students wear clear backpacks, which I’m sure will make it impossible to bring guns into schools and would totally have prevented those shootings carried out with rifles that don’t fit in backpacks anyway.
  (via @adamconover)

• Finally, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature passes a bill, sure to be signed by Gov. Bill Haslam (R), requiring public schools to display “In God We Trust” in a “prominent location”, which is guaranteed to fix every problem forever.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

John Oliver examines (and expertly trolls) Mike Pence

If you aren’t watching Last Week Tonight with John Oliver every Sunday night, you should be – or at least catch the full segments his team puts on YouTube shortly after the show airs. Last night’s episode centered around Mike Pence, that creepy religious-regressive former governor of Indiana who’s now the one official in the White House Trump cannot fire. Oliver covers Pence’s views on everything from his contempt for women in the military to his support of “conversion therapy” (a fancier way of saying “pray the gay away”), along with his affiliation with the Christian-patriarchal group Focus on the Family.

Pence is the reason efforts to get rid of Trump before the next election are shortsighted – Trump is terrible in large part because he’s clueless and incompetent at everything, but that’s also been a saving grace as he keeps sabotaging his own worse moves. Mike Pence, on the other hand, is smart and politically experienced. Impeaching or otherwise removing Trump would mean replacing him with his next-in-command, and if Trump is the frying pan of stupid, Pence is the fire of pure religious zealotry.

The best thing voters can do is castrate them both in the November midterms, and then toss them out for good in 2020.

*

Apropos of nothing, I got this in the mail earlier:

T’was a nice little bit of reading.

Daily Links #115: Homeland Security separates refugee families

Whoops – I’m so out of it today I almost forgot to give y’all your links.

• Last year, Homeland Security threatened to punish families that cross the border illegally by separating them. They’re now doing just that to refugees fleeing violence – only now they deny it’s meant as punishment. Because there must be a perfectly reasonable basis for wrenching a crying child out of their parents’ arms and detaining them in different states.
  (via @hiattf; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Baton Rouge, Louisiana officer goes 94 MPH on a 50 MPH road and plows into a woman’s car, killing her 1-year-old infant. So naturally, police arrest the mother and charge her with “negligent homicide”.

• Death meets Stephen Hawking at the edge of the Dark Desert over half a century later than expected.

• My guess is Trump heard about the sci-fi trope of space marines and decided, “I want that.” Includes a name only Trump (or a child) could come up with.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Finally: Jesus jailed for saying he’d bomb the gays. (I’m so sorry.)
  (via Joe.My.God.)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #111: House passes bad anti-sex-trafficking bill

• US House of Representatives passes an anti-sex-trafficking bill that would restrict online speech, endanger sex workers, and do absolutely nothing to fight sex trafficking.

• As Trump ^[pictured] makes noises about violent video games causing mass shootings, remember that endless studies have proven him completely and utterly wrong.
  (via @mccanner; retweet by @Popehat)

• New York man wins $1 million lawsuit after an NYPD officer tried to frame him for drunk driving to cover up how the cop blew through a stop sign and crashed into his car.
  (via @natemcdermott; retweet by @KFILE)

• Pamela Gellar’s daughters did not fall far from the bigoted tree.

• Finally, your headline of the day (and an uncomfortably informative article):
  (via @radleybalko)

Source: The Hill

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #105: Pennsylvania governor rejects Republicans’ gerrymandered new district map

Gov. Tom Wolf (D-PA)

Sadness is when the Netflix show you’re binging ends on a bad note. Joy is when you learn there’s a whole new season out that isn’t on Netflix yet. #BrooklynNineNine

• As expected, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) ^[pictured] has rejected state Republicans’ gerrymandered new district map that was meant to replace their old gerrymandered district map. The State Supreme Court will now bring in an independent expert to draw a non-partisan map, which Republicans will likely challenge.
  (via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)

• Undocumented immigrant living in the US for 14 years calls 911 to report a possible crime, gets arrested and taken to ICE for deportation.
  (via retweet by @radleybalko)

• Two Wyoming Republicans present a (doomed) bill that would ban all non-heterosexual “parody marriages” that don’t “check out with the human design”.

• It’s (US) Presidents Day! Celebrate by reading about just how rat-fucking crazy the bunch of them were.

• And finally, LeBron James has much smarter things to say than that angry Fox News lady who thinks athletes like him should “shut up and dribble”:
  (via retweet by @KFILE)

'The best thing she did was help me create more awareness' — LeBron on Fox News' Laura Ingraham's comments https://t.co/hp5ATRyXUH pic.twitter.com/DrRUxu38Is

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) February 17, 2018

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Daily Links #104: Education Dept. to ignore trans student bathroom complaints

Education Sec. Betsy DeVos

• The Department of Education ^{[secretary pictured]} will no longer investigate civil rights complaints from trans students blocked from using their rightful bathrooms.

• In better news, a second federal judge has blocked Trump from ending DACA.

• Vermont state police demonstrate cops’ knack for turning would-be suicide victims into murder victims.
  (via @fark)

• Alabama prosecutor and sheriff declare that reforming civil asset forfeiture will force police to arrest more people to keep the money flowing, except when they’ll have to arrest fewer people because busts won’t be profitable anymore. How refreshing of them to admit they’re in it for the money.
  (via @RickHorowitz; retweet @Popehat)

• Parents of the year here sue their transgender son to bar him from undergoing hormone therapy because it would violate their religious beliefs, also tell him to kill himself because he’s “going to hell anyway”.

• As a chaser, here’s a funny (to me) piece about Creationists Intelligent Design advocates getting angry at Wikipedia for “censoring” ID – by calling it a “religious argument” and “pseudoscience”.

• Evidence is mounting that the dinosaur-killing asteroid may have been helped by massive volcanic activity in India.

• I was going to write up a post about this inane Tucker Carlson diatribe before I realized I’m not nearly that bored and masochistic.

• Finally, good kitties:
  (via Joe.My.God.)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #103: Judge requests OK woman get sterilized

Judge Stephen Friot

• Oklahoma woman who used a counterfeit cheque receives a reduced sentence after getting sterilized at the request of a federal judge, who says the Supreme Court “has yet to recognize a constitutional right to bring crack- or methamphetamine-addicted babies into this world”. I have no words.
  (via @RoryFleming8A; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Utah “family values” Republican Rep. Jon Stanard, who believes in “traditional marriage” and voted for tougher anti-prostitution laws, resigns after using taxpayer money to – you know how this ends.
  (via @fark)

• This case of a Spanish man who’s fined almost $600 for hurting “religious feelings” after he Photoshopped his face onto an image of Jesus as a joke illustrates why religious feelings do not deserve respect.

• Fox News pulls column written by its own executive vice president attacking the US’s historically diverse Olympic team for being “darker, gayer, different”.
  (via @KFILE)

• Finally: Dumbed-Down Security Briefings Still Too Difficult for Trump to Read.
  (via @StephenAtHome)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.