Cat's blog

Planned Parenthood has always attracted its fair (or perhaps unfair) share of protesters hell bent on doing the right thing regardless of who they hurt. This, needless to say, can be quite annoying, especially considering that pro-life protesters have a habit of using grotesque pictures to make their point. Well some Planned Parenthood locations got tired of it and decided to try to turn lemons into lemonade. Pledge-a-picket was their answer, it is a program where you can pledge to pay your local Planned Parenthood money based on how many picketers show up to protest abortion. At present the Planned Parenthood featured in the story has raised $1200 through this method.

Needless to say, the protesters are rather miffed by the idea that their effort is funding the very organization they seek to protest. This leaves them in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between stopping protesting to stop the funds or continue protesting knowing that they are, in effect, giving money to Planned Parenthood. It's enough to make a young atheist girl cry (from laughter).

Neighboring businesses, particularly restaurants whose patrons are often turned off by pictures of chopped up babies, are happy at the prospect that the picketers days may be numbered. Similarly anyone who stands a chance of being harassed by protesters as they go into or come out of a Planned Parenthood building will be glad to know the picketers now have incentive to back off.

Now this is what I call stupid. A man brutally attacked a peacock in a Staten Island Burger King and the poor bird had to be euthanized due to its injuries.

Although it's not clear what would cause a man to mistake a peacock for a vampire the common guesses are drugs or mental disorder. In either case the man should be shot but will probably only get a fine or a little time in prison.

As I was thumbing through the latest U.S.News magazine I noticed an article pertaining to why America has become less knowledgeable on religion in recent years. The article, found here, has a few insights into this phenomenon which is all too often blamed on Atheists and people supporting Church-state separation (you know, immoral people who don't have any interest in the good of the people).

More below the fold...

Animal behavior: for those who believe that human behavior comes from sort of soul the inclusion of this as a way to explain human behavior may seem odd. Fortunately what little religious background I absorbed from the media includes the idea that Yes animals do have souls and so No you can't claim that makes humanity special. This leads us back to Animal Behavior, humans are animals, deal with it, so a lot of the behavior patterns that have evolved over billions of years to allow species to make the most efficient use of their resources do in fact exist within us as well.

But this post isn't about animal behavior, it's about how it applies to homophobia. When examining homophobia it becomes apparent that there are three primary mechanisms behind it, all of which have been useful in the preservation of the species. These mechanisms are Empathy, removal of aberrant individuals (or blue monkey reaction), and repulsion from inefficient sexual practices. It should be noted that I am horrible at names and as such I can't remember the technical terms for all these behavior patterns. So, lets see how these normally beneficial mechanisms work together to produce something harmful.

For a long time our friends in the religious right felt that there was no real need to worry about global warming. After all, no matter what happens Santa will continue to deliver Christmas presents to all the good little boys and girls who still believe in him, right? Not any more. It turns out that Santa’s long time abode (a little house cleverly hidden away in a secret crevice in the ice around the North Pole) is being threatened in an unprecedented way.
It’s those thrice-shat upon atheists? You might ask. Is it scientists insisting that no matter how many core samples they take they’ve never brought up pieces of unfortunate elves who couldn’t get out of the way fast enough? Even though we all know what brutal elf-haters these scientists are it isn’t them.

Recently the Vatican announced that it would allow Catholics to use condoms if it was to prevent the spread of HIV between partners. All I can say is, it's about time. AIDS has only been an epidemic, as oppose to "gay cancer" aka "god's punishment to sinners", for about two decades now. It's about time that the Vatican got with the program.

They are reluctant to take this oh so bold move because they fear that this could open the door for condoms to be used to prevent pregnancy. Imagine! Using condoms for what they were made for! Condoms at least get around the excuse that you're killing babies by not allowing those babies to be created in the first place, however this just isn't good enough for the reproduction-obsessed folks in the Vatican. All I can say is, man are they in the wrong line of work.

Well, unless it's Christianity. A while ago a small article was published about a pair of soldiers who had been killed in Iraq. What's special about these soldiers is that they happened to be Wiccans, and as such their wives requested that a pentagram be placed on their tombstones. A reasonable request, after all Christians are allowed crosses on their tombstones, part of Church-state separation is that no one is allowed to tell anyone what they can't have on their tombstone after all. Well it looks like the government didn't see it that way (surprise, surprise) and has been dragging its heels in an attempt to keep the tombstones pentagram free. The excuse is that the pentagram isn't among the symbols allowed on military headstones.

So, what happens if your symbol isn't on this list and you've given your life to the service of our supposedly free nation? It would stand to reason wouldn't it that if one simply asked for their religion's symbol to be included the Department of Veteran's Affairs would be more than happy to oblige. Well it turns out that (big surprise) they haven't and now the widows of those two soldiers are having to sue the Department in the hopes that this at least will get their husbands' religion properly represented. Will they succeed? The government is notoriously difficult to sue, but hopefully they will be successful.

Naturally I became curious and decided to look up just which symbols are allowed. As it turns out there are symbols allowed for just about every denomination of Christianity (gee, one would think a simple cross would suffice, possibly a crucified half-naked dead guy), atheists (apparently our "religious" symbol is the atom with an A in it), Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Native Americans, various Japanese and a few I've never even heard of. It should be noted that the Native American symbol is just a teepee with three feathers, not any of the many religious symbols of various Native American tribes (the Thunderbird, the kokopelli, the sun, various animal symbols such as crow and bear, etc.)

This shouldn't surprise me, and I'm sad to say it doesn't. You've all seen Brent's post on The Military Commissions Act, about how it allows the government to suspend habeus corpus for enemy combatants. What newspapers have never mentioned is that another part of this law states that Bush and his cabinet now have full immunity for any and all violations of the US War Crimes Act.

What annoys me is not just that such a law could even be passed in the United States but that I found out about it, not through the New York Times or another American newspaper, but from the Canadian Globe and Mail. I am not too surprised, Canadian reporters are safe from the wrath of Bush, both because they are outside the US and because Canadian law prohibits the incarceration of reporters for doing their job. American reporters, on the other hand, have been jailed for reporting things that the administration does not want to be known, supposedly because revealing these facts constitutes a breach of national security.

You may already have heard about the massacre in a Lancaster school house earlier today, so before I start my rant I would first like to offer my condolences to the families of the victims.

Recently CBS news has added a new segment, titled "Free Talk" to their nightly news. This segment allows someone to express their opinions on current events. Sometimes the speaker has some interesting insites, sometimes they don't. Today's speaker was chosen specifically because he was the father of one of the kids killed during the infamous Columbine Massacre, in order to share his feelings on why the number of school massacres has increased. This person basically said that massacres in public schools are on the rise because we have kicked God out of our schools. Because we refuse to teach creationism and instead teach evolution our public schools are operating in a moral vacuum. He made the usual argument about how atheists have no respect for human life and how abortion has cheapened life.

This was about the point when I hit the ceiling, you see I was bullied in high school and have a pretty good idea of what goes through a kid's mind when he/she is being picked on constantly and when no one seems to come to his/her defense, the difference is that I was never desperate enough to throw everything away. By now probably everyone knows that the gunman had some sort of grudge against young girls in general, ever since he went to that school house 20 years ago. I have no idea what his reasons might have been, nor do I know why he apparently held this grudge for 20 years. However I do know that flying off the handle and killing people is not related to a lack of religion in schools. Using the deaths of innocent girls as a platform for pushing your religion is beyond tactless, it's down right despicable.