Days like this, and posts like this garbage extolling the virtues of astrology, really make me glad I abandoned the reeking cauldron of stupid and poor management that, unfortunately, is the FDL community blog section (formerly called the Seminal, now called MyFDL or some other nonsense).

I mean, just look at this utterly delusional garbage:

Even though I have a strong background in science and firmly believe in the scientific method and the scientific tradition, I am a professional astrologer. Yup. Don’t ask me why it works; it just does, and I have studied and used the ancient art to good effect throughout my life. I make no apology for my interest, so if you hate astrology, please scroll on by.

‘professional astrologist’, haha, what a great euphemism for ‘con man or idiot’.

He later clarifies that he considers himself a professional but doesn’t charge in the comments. Which is… an odd definition of professional, but hey, that word has no business within a mile of astrology. Or any other form of religious hokum, for that matter.

I mean, seriously:

You will likely feel like you’re making a fresh start emotionally as the New Moon (16 degrees 5 minutes in Capricorn), which symbolizes your emotional self, is separating from the Sun (13 degrees 53 minutes in Capricorn), which is your source of creative energy. The only potential problem is that you may have trouble choosing in which direction to go, as the ideas and possibilities are likely to seem somewhat overwhelming. Fortunately, however, the Moon and Sun tend to be grounded and practical in Capricorn.

*snort* hahahaha… oh priceless. Seriously priceless. The relative position of the Moon and the Sun to an IMAGINARY SHAPE IN THE SKY will affect your brain. Somehow.

It’s maaaaaaaaaaagic.

Rayne pops up in comments there defending both the author’s smug dismissal of reality and critics based in reality. Funny how I couldn’t get a response from her for weeks, hell, months on FDL’s misuse of my content, but she can appear as if by magic when some asshat clown starts telling people that imaginary mystical forces will change their brain chemistry or alter their fate. Somehow.

I can’t get so much as an answer on my intellectual property, let alone a response to documented moderator abuse, but astrology needs defending? Quick, someone flick the Rayne-signal.

Priceless.

Next up, an FDL community blog series on why you should skip vaccinating your kids in favor of blood-letting.

I mean, is there ANY limit to what people can post there?

So long as they don’t personally annoy an anonymous moderator, I mean.

There’s been a lot of hubbub in the last few weeks over DADT. Central District of California Judge Virginia Phillips issued an injunction against the policy worldwide, probably overstepping her authority to do so; recently she denied a stay of her ruling, forcing the Defense Department into an awkward position, which they are dealing with by admirably complying with the ruling and accepting, for the moment, the openly gay applicants that they should have taken all along.

Legally a messy situation, but policy wise, a real step forward.

Naturally, being the enemies of sound policy, the Obama Administration has appealed to the 9th Circuit, and their appeal is a humdinger too. Instead of merely arguing over the technical merits of Phillips’ worldwide injunction, they mounted a spirited defense of the constitutionality of DADT, an inherently discriminatory policy that turns gay Americans into second-class citizens:

What is very troubling, however, is that the Administration, by and through the DOJ never – never – indicates that it considers DADT to be unconstitutional on its face. Every objection by team Obama is in favor simply of study and legislative repeal; and, in fact, they doggedly protect the constitutionality of DADT. There is a HUGE difference between the two concepts of saying it is simply something that should be fixed by Congress (increasingly unlikely, it should be added, in light of the massive gains conservative Republicans are poised to make) and saying the Administration fully believes the policy unconstitutional and invidiously discriminatory (the position Obama blatantly refuses to make).

It should also be noted that a refusal to acknowledge the fundamental constitutionally discriminatory nature of DADT is also entirely consistent with the recent history of Obama Administration conduct and statements on the issue. Whether it be Obama himself, official spokesman Robert Gibbs or Valerie Jarrett, every time the direct question on constitutionality of DADT is raised, it is deflected with a flimsy response framed in terms of Congressional repeal. At this point, you have to wonder if Barack Obama and his Administration even consider the blatant discrimination of DADT to be of a Constitutional level at all; the evidence certainly is lacking of any such commitment.

This comes a week after top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett referred to being gay as a ‘lifestyle choice’… while discussing the tragic suicide of a bullied teenager no less.

Keep in mind that President Obama is a steadfast opponent of equality for gay Americans in other arenas as well, consistently opposing gay marriage on religious grounds:

In his bestseller, The Audacity of Hope, Obama, now a U.S. senator, explains his support for civil unions, again mentioning religion and noting the strategic problems that the push for gay marriage poses:

For many practicing Christians, the inability to compromise may apply to gay marriage. I find such a position troublesome, particularly in a society in which Christian men and women have been known to engage in adultery or other violations of their faith without civil penalty. I believe that American society can choose to carve out a special place for the union of a man and a woman as the unit of child rearing most common to every culture. I am not willing to have the state deny American citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights no such basic matters as hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people they love are of the same sex–nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount. …The heightened focus on marriage is a distraction from other, attainable measures to prevent discrimination and gays and lesbians. (pp. 222-3)

Well, since running for higher office, anyway. When he was a younger man, and a less ambitious politician, he at least claimed to hold diametrically opposed views, favoring gay marriage.

Let’s call this what it is. If President Obama opposes equal rights for gays and lesbians because of his religious delusions, then he is a bigot and a closet theocrat. If he’s opposing their equal rights out of mere political expediency, then he is a hypocrite, a liar and a coward, giving comfort to bigots.

Either way, he’s a disgusting excuse for a public figure.

It is preposterous beyond words to sit back and allow him to pass himself off as some sort of moderate while he uses religious fanaticism to publicly justify depriving gay Americans of their equal rights, and refuses to take simple actions entirely at his discretion to stop persecution of American citizens based on their sexual orientation. It is sycophantic beyond belief to point at the minority party in the Senate and act as if it was their nefarious schemes that prevented Obama from stopping DADT, or somehow forced him to make bigoted statements about gay marriage based on his hokey sky-god religion. Obama got into this mess on his own, by reversing his earlier position and by pushing delay after delay instead of acting to defend the Constitutional rights of his own citizens.

He could end DADT today, at least in terms of implementation. He does not, contra his repeated assertions, have to enforce a law that is unconstitutional on its face, and he certainly doesn’t have to vigorously appeal to protect the assertion of its Constitutionality. He could stop trying to insert religion into the public sphere on gay marriage.

He could also hire some advisors who aren’t so gobsmackingly stupid as to defame a dead teenager for his ‘lifestyle choice’ while he’s at it.

So the question becomes: does Obama really believe that gay Americans deserve to live as second-class citizens because of some badly translated Iron Age superstition? Or does he believe that they should live that way to serve his political ends?

Or, perhaps, both?

This controversy is so stupid, and so obvious, I’m actually surprised to see how many online liberals are falling for Conway’s scam.

Quick background: A GQ piece floating around recently details that Rand Paul, being a deeply bizarre individual, was up to some strange things in college. He was part of a secret society of, essentially, atheists and irreligious types, who published an underground anti-religious zine and pulled stupid pranks on the hyper-religious Baylor University he was attending at the time.

Libertarians have a long history of flirtation with Atheism, albeit of the ‘I don’t believe in God but gee I think the Free Market is magic’ variety, so this should come as a surprise to precisely nobody; yet of course, it does, because Paul is running as a Republican, though from the Tea Party wing.

There’s a much darker side to that GQ story too: in another incident from his secret society days, Paul and another member supposedly bound and abducted a woman, attempted to force her to smoke pot, and when that failed, forced her to worship ‘Aqua Buddha’ in a creek.

The strangest episode of Paul’s time at Baylor occurred one afternoon in 1983 (although memories about all of these events are understandably a bit hazy, so the date might be slightly off), when he and a NoZe brother paid a visit to a female student who was one of Paul’s teammates on the Baylor swim team. According to this woman, who requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, “He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.” After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. “They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him,” the woman recalls. “They blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’ At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no.”

Naturally, his opponent, Jack Conway, putatively a Democrat, made an ad about this story. What outraged Jack most?

Well, it sure wasn’t the alleged kidnapping. Here, watch for yourself.

Transcript:
“Why was Rand Paul a member of a secret society that called the Holy Bible a ‘hoax’? That was banned from mocking Christianity and Christ? Why did Rand Paul once tie a woman up, tell her to bow down before a ‘false idol’ and tell her his god was ‘Aqua Buddha’? Why does Rand Paul now want to end all federal faith based initiatives, and even end the deduction for religious charities? Why are there so many questions about Rand Paul?”

Get that? He ‘tied a woman up’, but that is clearly far less serious than the fact that Paul wasn’t a devout Christian, that he mocked ‘Christ’ and the ‘Holy’ Bible and that he made his abductee ‘worship a false idol’. Oh, and Paul wants to end faith-based initiative bailouts, which Conway asserts is a very bad thing indeed.

Quick question, Conway: how can you proclaim an idol ‘false’? Here’s a clue: your God’s fake, he never existed, and Jesus? He may have existed, or not; there is absolutely no hard archaeological evidence that the man ever existed. None. Period.

All stories and accounts about Jesus begin to appear in writing about a half-century after his supposed death. There is far more hard evidence for Atlantis than Jesus.

Yet here we have a DEMOCRAT plainly asserting that an alleged kidnapping is far less important than that Rand Paul didn’t always believe in Jesus. That he prayed to a ‘false idol,’ whatever that means, is more important than binding and kidnapping a college co-ed.

Bonus: Jack Conway is the current Attorney General of Kentucky; a man who thinks that saying bad things about a fictional character trumps kidnapping.

Such is the monstrous perversity of religion.

The perversity of liberal politics, however, means that this incredibly self-indulgent theocratic insanity is actually attracting praise, sometimes from commentators who have long warned against conservatives pushing theocracy!

Digby thinks this is just the sort of advertising we need.

Sarah Posner thinks the ad should have been even more about religion and less about, you know, an alleged felony.

Markos Moulitsas misses the point, but that’s nothing new. Extra special stupid bonus: he thinks it’s just fine that as an Atheist he himself is unelectable in much of America. Well, ok, more like virtually all of America.

So glad to see an Atheist willing to settle for second-class citizenship. Moron.

America continues to disgust me, but the Democrats always find new ways to make it worse.

Update: Conway’s whole campaign seems to be fucking nuts; the religious issue is always more important to them:

“Values matter. Rand Paul chose to join a secret society the university banned,” said Allison Haley, a spokesman for the Conway campaign. “Tying up a woman, no matter what the reason, is nothing to laugh at.”