I’m Not Sayin’ (I’m Just Sayin’)

The following nugget was buried at the bottom of a follow-up CP report on how CIDA helped fund the Ugandan aid work of the virulently anti-gay Crossroads Christian Communications (in full PR damage control mode now that its homobigoted Evangelical slip is showing) to the tune of half a million dollars last year:

Francois Audet, director of the Montreal-based Canadian Research Institute on Humanitarian Crisis and Aid, said he believes Crossroads is far from the only group with controversial opinions that receives CIDA money.

“There is, for sure, other hidden treasures, other organizations who do ideological propaganda with public funding from Canadian aid — and what is worrying is that CIDA does not check this,” Audet said in an interview.

Audet said that his own research on how CIDA allocates its funds shows that between 2005 and 2010, funding for religious non-government organizations increased 42 per cent, while secular groups saw an increase of just five per cent.

“I have the clear impression — and I am not the only one in the scientific community — that behind this, there is a deliberate strategy to finance the groups ideologically close to the actual Conservative government,” he said.

Hey, careful now — publicly musing about hidden Harpercon agendas is almost guaranteed to give the Queensway set the serious vapours. The last thing we need on a Tuesday (or any other day for that matter) is an especially vapourous Canadian punditocracy. Their regular pinheaded emissions are gaseous enough as it is.

I highly doubt Ottawa’s atmosphere can handle any more pollution.

Related: To be fair, not all Jesus-friendly NGOs are on board the CIDA gravy train:

In the past few years [KAIROS],  the Mennonite Central Committee and the Catholic Organization for Development and Peace have all seen CIDA funding cut:

CIDA’s shift away from working with long-time and often church-based development partners to financing private sector projects such as those of the mining companies has been in the works for several years.

In November 2009, CIDA cut off funding to the ecumenical social justice group KAIROS, which had been a long-time partner in development. Neither CIDA nor its minister Bev Oda would provide any explanation beyond saying that CIDA’s priorities had changed and KAIROS did not meet them.

Then in February 2012, CIDA turned down a proposal by the well-respected Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) for $2.9 million for each of three years to provide food, water and income generation assistance for people in India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Haiti, Bolivia, Mozambique and Ethiopia.

In March 2012, it became apparent that CIDA had also cut off the Catholic organization Development and Peace (D&P). CIDA, which had provided the organization with $44.6 million in the years 2006-11, chopped that amount by two-thirds, to a total of $14.5 million over the next five years.

Teh Pill Kills teh Baybees (and Jesus Sometimes Kills teh Brain Cells).

by matttbastard

(image via Cara)

Oh, right — today is “Protest the Pill Day”, aka, ‘Take Your Common Ground and Shove It Day’ (as Kate Harding put it) or, as I call it, ‘Anti-Choice Unmasking Day:’

This is the true face of the anti-choice movement: blatant lies, scare tactics, and hyperbolic accusations of “murder”.

And this is the face that the anti-choice movement often tries to hide behind a mask of mainstream “moderation”. Amanda Marcotte at RH Reality Check recently discovered an anti-choice activist handbook that gives tips on how to debate people on this issue without sounding as crazy as they really are.

For example, check out how they recommend dealing with the issue of birth control:

In the section titled “Why Don’t You Pass Out Condoms and Promote Birth Control?,” the authors tacitly admit that sensible people might be put off by the anti-choice movement’s willingness to increase the abortion rate by standing as firmly against contraception, especially the birth control pill, as they do legal abortion. So instead of allowing members to admit their hostility to all forms of contraception, they instruct them to conceal their beliefs until a target has been softened up to hear about their true message–sexual abstinence for all not trying to procreate–through a series of dodgy, misleading arguments, including misinformation about how the birth control pill works.

This tactic is a mainstay of the anti-choice movement: it shows one face to the initiated, and another to the public, especially on the topic of contraception. Once you realize this, the movement’s half-hearted denunciations of Dr. Tiller’s murder, coupled with the enthusiastic return to calling Dr. Tiller a monster, become all the more chilling.

Chilling indeed. Because the true face of this movement not only considers Dr. George Tiller a genocidal murderer… they consider the millions of women around the country who take birth control as murderers, too.

Y’know, if these zygotist yahoos were really concerned about mass genocide on a microscopic level, they’d have picketers marching outside the bedrooms of every Kleenex-hoarding teenage boy in North America. Seriously. We’re talking SUBURBAN DEATH MILLS here, people.

Anyway, In honour of this year’s annual mobilization of dipshittery by the malicious anti-choice analogue to moon-landing hoaxers, we at bastard.logic encourage all our fellow pro-choice peeps to make a donation, whether monetary or otherwise, to your local Planned Parenthood office.  Make sure to tell ’em you are doing so on behalf of the fine folks at the American Life League–and because you obviously hate teh innocent widdle babies. Duh.

Recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers

Time to Get Kenny Loggins Out of Retirement.

by matttbastard

First they came for the “queers” [sic], then they came for the (apparently heterosexual) Baptist kid trying to take his freakin’ girlfriend to her freakin’ prom:

A student at a fundamentalist Baptist school that forbids dancing, rock music, hand-holding and kissing will be suspended if he takes his girlfriend to her public high school prom, his principal said.

Despite the warning, 17-year-old Tyler Frost, who has never been to a dance before, said he plans to attend Findlay High School’s prom Saturday.

Frost, a senior at Heritage Christian School in northwest Ohio, agreed to the school’s rules when he signed a statement of cooperation at the beginning of the year, principal Tim England said.

The teen, who is scheduled to receive his diploma May 24, would be suspended from classes and receive an “incomplete” on remaining assignments, England said. Frost also would not be permitted to attend graduation but would get a diploma once he completes final exams. If Frost is involved with alcohol or sex at the prom, he will be expelled, England said.

Frost’s stepfather Stephan Johnson said the school’s rules should not apply outside the classroom.

“He deserves to wear that cap and gown,” Johnson said.

Sez P.Z. Meyers:

I also think the school has stepped way out of bounds when it tries to control activities well outside the domain of the school itself. But sure, go ahead and act like repressive tyrants — Mr Frost may well go looking for a more tolerant religion, or will perhaps leave that body of superstition altogether.

Oh, and just in case you thought this couldn’t get any more like a bad Footloose remake:

The handbook for the 84-student Christian school says rock music “is part of the counterculture which seeks to implant seeds of rebellion in young people’s hearts and minds.”

Speaking as an apostate survivor of a rigid private Baptist high school (c’mon, don’t act so shocked), I can attest from personal experience that these sorts of rock-hatin’, boogie-fearin’ true believers really DO hate us for our sweaty, high-decibel freedoms–and ‘us’ constitutes an increasingly expansive category.

Regardless, whatever you do, always remember the following words of incitement from anti-authoritarian negro hedonist George Clinton: “Free your mind and your ass will follow.”

For srs — just ask iconic Midwestern dance floor rebel Kevin Bacon:

Recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers

Gee, Thanks.

by matttbastard

Bill Berkowitz reports:

In one of those better-late-than-never moments that came one week before Thanksgiving, Bob Jones University of Greenville, South Carolina, issued a belated, but seemingly heartfelt, online statement apologizing for “allow[ing] institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that [segregationist] ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures.” In 2000, Bob Jones III, then president of the university that was founded in 1927 as a private Christian institution, admitted that the university had been wrong for not admitting African American students until 1971. At the same time, “he announced the lifting of the University’s policy against interracial dating.”

Apparently someone in Greenville didn’t get the memo that white guilt is, like, so 2007.

Recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers

Sarah Palin a “Complete Fiction” – David Talbot

by matttbastard

ForaTv:

Author and Salon.com Founder David Talbot dismisses Republican Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin as a “complete fiction” created by Republican Party strategists.

Full video here.

Recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers

Gordon Robertson Warns of Outlaw of Christmas

by matttbastard

The Nizkor Project:

The Slippery Slope is a fallacy in which a person asserts that some event must inevitably follow from another without any argument for the inevitability of the event in question. In most cases, there are a series of steps or gradations between one event and the one in question and no reason is given as to why the intervening steps or gradations will simply be bypassed. This “argument” has the following form:

Event X has occurred (or will or might occur).

Therefore event Y will inevitably happen.

This sort of “reasoning” is fallacious because there is no reason to believe that one event must inevitably follow from another without an argument for such a claim. This is especially clear in cases in which there is a significant number of steps or gradations between one event and another.

Recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers

CNN: McCain Officially Rejects Hagee Endorsement

by matttbastard

Yeah, but did Johnny McMaverick denounce and reject everybody’s favourite frothing antisemite Christian Zionist (who, btw, is damn lucky to be a conservative white Republican, or else his charges of mischaracterization and media bias would be arbitrarily dismissed out of hand)? [Update: Ok, so JSM did follow the entire D & R routine To. The. Letter.  Frankly, I’m surprised no candidate has resorted to seppuku on The Situation Room (probably saving it for the general).  Sweet Jesus, I hate this election.]

Related:

McCain: A “respectful disagreement?”

On Ellen Degeneres’ show John McCain said he has a respectful disagreement with her over the issue of gay marriage. But two of his supporters, John Hagee and Rod Parsley (whom McCain has referred to as a “spiritual advisor”), are two of the most outspoken agents of intolerance in America, spouting vicious homophobic rants on a weekly basis. And make no mistake: McCain actively sought their endorsements.

John McCain’s embrace of these men does not indicate a “respectful disagreement.”

Recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers

Quote of the Day: Paradise Lost

by matttbastard

There’s an old saying. You can never go home again. In a sense, I have always beleived it to mean that “home” will never be the same as you remember it. Home is the time in which you live. This is our time.

We have pretty much fucked up the environment, along with the generations that came before. There are some who want to regress the social advances we have made.

They want to return to a time where wimmens “knew their place” (dictated by men, of course) and have no control over thier own bodies. Where we shut down immigration to only those they “approve” of. The rich would get richer, while the middle class dissapears and the poor become poorer and more beholden to those who have complete power over them. Where they own all of us.

Its pretty obvious just by reading history that no matter how much control the Church has exerted over people, people pretty much still do what people will do.

Who wants to go back there with them?

– pale, You can never go home again

RTWDT (Read The Whole Damn Thing) rules apply.

Recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers