Israeli gay pride event sparks Armageddon

July 5, 2008

Guest Post by Morbo

On Monday the Carpetbagger mentioned One News Now and an amusing problem the fundamentalist “news” service had when it replaced “gay” with “homosexual” in a sports story.

What he neglected to mention is that One News Now is a great source for kooky right wing news that you can’t find anywhere else. I’m a huge fan and usually check in at least once a day. It’s almost as entertaining as “The Onion,” and if I didn’t know better, I’d think it was a clever parody.

But no, it’s real; they mean it. Consider a story that ran this week about how a gay pride parade in Israel will probably bring about the end of the world. No, seriously. Turns out it’s not that French atom smasher we have to worry about after all. It’s those pesky gays determined to usher in the four horsemen of the apocalypse!

The article quotes Jim Hutchens, a “Christian Zionist” who is infuriated that Israel’s supreme court said gays have a right to march in Jerusalem.

“There is a judgment that God brings worldwide and on Israel, as a matter of fact,” Hutchens said. “And I think those are the events that lead up to what we refer to as Armageddon, the apocalyptic besieging of Jerusalem.”

You see, you could scour The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN and MSNBC all day, and you’re just not going to get high-quality reporting like this.

And for even more entertainment, I recommend you read some of the comments below the article from loyal One News Now fans. After you’ve read them, you might want to go curl up under a desk for a while as you contemplate the sobering reality that each of these individuals will probably be voting in November.

Is there a difference between those people posting there and what you can find at Freeperville or Little Green Snotballs?

Further proof that Mencken was right. These rubes would be right at home in 1924.

  • I thought that they wanted the end of days to come? Maybe they should be supporting gay rights (at least in Israel).

  • Those comments are out there. It never ceases to amaze me the levels of delusion some people have. It’s frightening.

  • NARAL is sticking by Obama no matter what he says, just as you guys are. To quote:

    “In a statement, NARAL Pro-Choice said Obama’s [Relevant] magazine interview is consistent with Roe v. Wade.

    “Sen. Obama has consistently said he supports the tenets set forth by Roe, and has made strong statements against President Bush’s Federal Abortion Ban, which does not have an exception to protect a woman’s health,” the organization’s statement said.

    A leading abortion opponent, however, said Obama’s rhetoric does not match his voting record and his previously stated views on abortion rights.

    David N. O’Steen, the executive director of National Right to Life, said Obama’s remarks to the magazine “are either quite disingenuous or they reflect that Obama does not know what he is talking about.”

    —————

    Here is an example of Obama trying to be all things to all people by equivocating and splitting hairs. One cannot claim a health exemption while defining mental health as separate from “physical” health. Body and mind are not that distinct. One cannot support Roe v Wade while agreeing that governments should have the right to interfere, at any stage of pregnancy, in a woman’s health decisions (what happened to his state’s rights beliefs on this issue?). One cannot support the sanctity of life while admitting that any trimester is less a matter of life than another.

    Obama is willing to compromise on women’s health in order to get elected. Now we understand what all those “present” votes really meant. If Obama won’t stand up for women on this issue, what makes you think he will stand up on any issue you care about?

    It is not too late to dump this guy at the convention.

  • To quote Obama referring to FISA:

    “…In a dangerous world, government must have the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people…”

    He goes on to say that this new bill is much better than the Patriot Act he voted against.

    Here is a man who does not understand that the government itself can be a danger to the freedom of the American people and that part of protecting the American people is protecting our freedoms from government abuse.

    While you are all busy laughing at the wingnuts, Obama is selling us down the river. What’s wrong here? First, Obama does not appreciate that terrorist plots are routinely prevented by normal police work, within the constraints of protection for civil liberties. Second, he does not appreciate and thus does not worry that when government is given unlimited power to snoop, that power is invariably abused, for political purposes, for commercial purposes, and ultimately to support tyranny.

    It has been standard for Democratic candidates to understand the importance of protecting civil liberties. Obama neither understands nor supports these issues, more important on the 4th of July than worrying about what wingnuts think about gay rights in Israel.

    It is still possible to dump this guy at the convention.

  • “Israeli gay pride event sparks Armageddon”

    “Armageddon” must be the big post parade circuit party.

  • I’ve tried to understand, logically, how gay people are a bigger threat to mankind than, say, 5500 nuclear weapons, or the widening gap between rich and poor, or the loss of a few civil rights, or climate change… and for years I’ve brushed off the wingers as merely over-involved, obsessed members of a club. I wish they would stick to raising money for flood victims, where their organization actually does something good for people.

  • Mary, are you serious?
    1. You are wayyyy off topic for this thread.
    2. Do you truly not understand the difference in a first trimester and a third trimester for a pregnant woman?
    By the third trimester the fetus is much closer to being a newborn and if born prematurely has good chance of surviving outside the womb on it’s own. An abortion at this point would be dangerous for both the baby (yes, now it’s a baby) and the mother.
    But you aren’t really concerned about the health of the woman in this situation, are you? You probably already know why late term abortions are not desireable, don’t you? For anything other than health reasons why would someone wait for so long to have an abortion? The longer you wait the more dangerous it becomes for your own physical well-being.
    The only thing that matters to you is that Obama is against them so you have to be for them.

  • jhm said: “I thought that they wanted the end of days to come?”

    They do—but they’re also beginning to realize that they’re not powerful enough, by themselves, to control the outcome of an election—something about “40% of evangelicals throwing their support to Obama” and all, you know. This has got to have Ahmadinejad quaking in his boots—the very idea that a gay Israeli might be the one to launch the specific nuclear weapon that incinerates him. The horror! The horror!!!

  • ktb, do you really not understand that this should be a medical matter between a woman and her doctor, not something the government should be legislating? I happen to believe that abortions are never desirable. They are sometimes necessary in specific, unfortunate circumstances. The kind of abortions Obama wants to legislate against are so rare that this is political grandstanding, a wedge issue to start limiting other, more frequently occurring kinds of abortions. Obama seems glad to go along with that, happy to substitute his medical expertise and moral judgment for that of women, their doctors, and their families all over the nation. But then, he is also happy to bring religion into government in other ways too.

  • How can a people who claim they are Gods Chosen and God gave them Israel by birthright, permit the burlesquing of homosexuality in the streets, in what they call “The Holy Land” and expect those who don’t believe in thier religion to find this acceptable? No religion on Earth, even Judaism, can be reconciled with homosexuality. Sorry guys. No way out. Unless Jesus is coming back in drag w/a blonde wig, to participate in the festivities.

  • I’ve tried to understand, logically, how gay people are a bigger threat to mankind…

    Well, good luck with that one. You’ll do better to try to understand why gay people are a threat to people who think they’re a bigger threat than nuclear warheads. It’s because such people aren’t jealous of nuclear warheads. It’s no coincidence that so many of them are convinced that sexual orientation is a choice — I’m think it’s because they themselves made a choice that they’re bitterly unhappy with. And they resent the hell out of anyone who makes a choice to accept themselves.

    Why do they see it as a threat? Because they’re terrified of it as an option.

  • Mary said…”…One cannot support Roe v Wade while agreeing that governments should have the right to interfere, at any stage of pregnancy, in a woman’s health decisions (what happened to his state’s rights beliefs on this issue?). One cannot support the sanctity of life while admitting that any trimester is less a matter of life than another….”

    Disagree, Once the third trimester is reached and the fetus is viable outside the womb, an abortion should only be performed when there is considerable danger to the mother’s health. At this stage you can still support government regulation and call yourself pro choice. Besides 3rd trimester late term abortions are such a rarity as to be relatively meaningless in this discussion, but the argument is used often by opponents of R v W as pure dram to heighten their stand.

    Don’t assume Mary that the commenters on this site support Obama’s FISA capitulation or that because of that we will not support Obama anyway. Our disappointment does not translate into a vote for McCain. The reality is that Obama will be the nominee but we will not “blindly” support bad decisions he makes. He’s 100Xs better than McCain and a dem in the WH is infinitely better than the alternative. We will keep the pressure up on Obama over FISA to change his position…with McCain there would be no point because he loves anything that would give him dictatorial powers. (FYI-www.glenngreewald@salon.com answers Obama’s spin point by point on FISA giving Obama no justification for his capitulation) A site I wholeheartedly recommend for truth and fairness on this issue.

    When you can’t replace the candidate then you work to change their policies. I wish you would focus on changing Obama’s political stands you disagree with rather than trying to eliminate him as the nominee because that is just a wasted effort. Since he will be the next president it’s important that he knows what we expect from him.

  • Roddy: Some very good points there, but I’d like to take them a little farther.

    First though, I want to avoid another controversy — which I take a less than popular position on — by stating that by using the word ‘choice’ here, I am not denying the possibility of a strong, even a determining, biological basis for the ‘choice.’ I am not equating it with the ‘choice’ between my going out to the kitchen and deciding whether to fix fish cakes or sausage patties.

    I think the reason that the RRers are so hysterical about gayness is that they, even more than others, have bought into the idea that ‘you have to choose between being gay and being straight’. And, in the same way as, during the segregation days, ‘black blood trumps white’ and someone who was one-sixteenth black was ‘legally black,’ so ‘gay trumps straight’ and if you have — even purely experimental — sex with a guy, you are a ‘faggot’ and that’s all there is to it. Or, if you find yourself even slightly attracted, sexually, to another guy, again, that’s it, you might just as well move to San Francisco or apply for a job as a tv weatherman. (I am stressing males here because I don’t think the push towards ‘making a choice’ is as strong for women and girls.)

    Now if you DO ‘choose’ or are biologically determined to ‘choose’ one sex over the other, fine, great, and more power to you. If you just don’t find one sex physically attractive, or emotionally attractive, or find certain physical sexual practices distasteful — fine. My point is the idea that, once you hit puberty you have to line up with one team or another. And that’s what I see as the problem.

    And of course there are many subsidiary myths that fortify the main one — one which, sadly but understandably, is supported by gays as well as straights. “No woman would ever want to have sex with you if they knew you had sex with a guy.” (Actually, I have known quite a few women who prefer bisexual lovers because, as a rule, they are less selfish and more considerate — and maybe, by admitting their bisexuality are probably more honest. In fact, while as someone *ahem* rather lacking in attractiveness I have gotten more than my share of turn-downs in a fairly active sexual life, including the old standard “What? Me? With YOU? Ya gotta’ be kidding, right?” I think only twice in my life have I specifically been turned doen on the basis of my bisexuality — which I am almost obnoxiously open about.) Or the ‘you only think you enjoyed sex with a woman when what you were REALLY doing was trying to prove your own heterosexuality to yourself.’

    Now if this ‘you have to choose’ myth is predominant in (male) soicety in general, how much stronger is it is the conservative religious world. And how many adolescent boys do find themselves ‘stirring’ in response to a good-looking or better equipped classmate in the locker room or shower? Or how many of them have had a pubertal experimenting session with a male friend that got a little more ‘experimental’ than either had planned? And how must they look upon themselves given the religious training they’ve had and the ideas they’ve been force-fed in church as well as from their contemporaries? (Remember, ‘gay trumps straight’ so that one momentary erection in the shower room ‘cancels out’ the five hours they had spent, the night before, masurbating to pictures of naked women on the Internet while their parents thought they were studying extra-hard for a test.)

    No wonder that the idea that ‘being gay’ should be acceptable in society scares the sh*t out of them, because then they’ll have to confront the fact of that one experimental session, accept they liked it, and consider themselves gay, gay, and nothing but gay for all times — unless those ex-gay guys’ ideas really work. And in their ideas, society may accept it, but their GOD does not.

    [And if you think I am exaggerating the idea of the ‘ya gotta choose’ myth, I’ll give two examples of it from here — and from the pages of almost every liberal blog and the MSM. Larry Craig and Ted Haggard. Now they both were, obviously participants in gay sex — in Craig’s case, if the policeman’s description was accurate, Craig gets a ’10’ for style points, a truly perfect classical performance in an activity I have both watched and participated in. But how many of us, in our comments, therefore decided they were ‘gay, gay, and nothing but gay’ and assumed that their heterosexual married life was a sham and a fraud.

    [In fact, how many of us were gleeful in condemning them not for their hypocrisy, but for their gayness itself? How many people have used the type of argument and phraseology that we would condemn a Republican for using had a closet Democrat similarly been ‘involuntarily outed’? It has seemed, in discussions about Republicans in gay sex scandals, that some of us have finally found a safe way to ‘release our inner homophobe.’ And, like the “Ann Coulter is a man’ jokes, the unlikeability of the target does not excuse the rhetoric.]

  • Oh, for God’s sake.

    Mary, wrong thread. Seriously, now. Just stop. Hillary is not going to be crowned Queen Nominee at the convention. You can shake your tiny fists and stomp your feet all you like, and that won’t change.

    To educate and clarify on an abortion issue, since Mary can’t articulate through her anti-Obama hysteria, the issues that doctors have with laws regulating late-term abortions have nothing to do with ZOMG SOMEONE WANTS A LATE-TERM ABORTION! The issues are that Congress attempts to play M.D. by outlawing procedures that could actually be safest. Though, as ktb stated, the longer you wait, the more difficult it becomes to have a safe abortion. The political term “partial-birth abortion” is properly called “dilation and extraction” or “D&X” by doctors and is sometimes the safest way to end a dangerous pregnancy. Thankfully, as Mary correctly pointed out, third-trimester abortions are rare indeed.

    A third-trimester abortion is not a matter of an unwanted pregnancy, it’s a pregnancy gone horribly, horribly wrong. Some dear friends of mine went through this personal hell – they had tried for years to have a child, only to find out at the beginning of the third-trimester that their longed-for baby was enencephalic, did not have enough of a brain to be considered “alive”, and could cause great damage to its mother in the birth process. Staunch Catholics, it was a terrible decision for them. After a lot of discussion with both doctor and priest, they opted for a late-term abortion. Come to find out they had to travel to another state to obtain it because the laws regulating which procedures could be performed prohibited the procedure that would have been safest for the mother – yep, dilation and extraction.

    As for “no abortions being desireable”, I’ll thank Mary to head over to http://www.imnotsorry.net and read all the stories of women who chose abortion and don’t feel one ounce of regret. For every hysterical, placard-waving, clinic-picketing Jesus freak regretting her abortion, there are two women across the street, silent, afraid to speak up about their choice.

  • Mary,

    I did not research the article you cited, and given your past comments, I just don’t care enough to bother. However, if Obama said he supports Roe v Wade, then that’s completely fine. What is not okay is that it seems you haven’t ever really studied Roe itself. You seem to believe that Roe v Wade basically gave the okay to have an abortion for any reason at any time. This is not what Roe determined.

    I haven’t studied Roe and subsequent court decisions interpreting its limits since college, but Roe itself set guidelines about the limits of abortion based on trimesters. In other words, “government interference” was allowed under Roe to different extents depending on trimester. If you’re arguing that the government shouldn’t be allowed to interfere at all at any time, ironically, you would need to argue to repeal Roe for something else, say, a new federal law authorizing unconditional, unrestricted abortion.

  • Mary, are you serious?
    1. You are wayyyy off topic for this thread. — ktb, @9

    Mary goes off her hate-controlling meds on weekends and gets confused more than usual. Ignore her.

    • Comments are closed.