eli! privacy is treated like money by the r’s… its ok for me but not for thee

Suz! My original title for this post was actually Privacy For Me But Not For Thee, I shit you not.

laughing

Shorter former Idaho Senator Larry Craig: “Pssst…it’s the best place for privacy. And it’s only a quarter!”

@ Suz and Eli – Great minds and all that… *g*

As an aside that didn’t really fit into the post – back in the 80s, my dad and stepmom were very close friends with this other couple… until one of them said something about AIDS being God’s punishment for the gays.

My dad and stepmom cut them off dead and never saw them or spoke to them again.

…the KKK killing Freedom Riders.

*heh* Nice analogy, Eli…! ;-)

my mom had to do the same thing around the same time period with a buddy of hers. some ugly is just too ugly to have around was the gist of her explanation to me about it.

Isn’t it funny how conservatives are suddenly all about privacy now? They don’t believe in any kind of right to privacy when it comes to abortion or gay sex or warrantless wiretapping, but God forbid that anyone should ever want to see what they’re up to.

They certainly had no objections to J. Edgar Hoover’s fascination with broadcasting Dr. King’s sex life to all and sundry.

Thanks, I wish I could take credit for it. I might have exaggerated a little, but not much.

Yeah, it probably didn’t help that my little sister’s godfather was a gay man who died of AIDS. Needless to say, he was much beloved.

They’re fighting back against the constant victimization of traditional values people, the few, the powerless, the cowardly.

Wish we had had the tubes then. We could have broadcast Hoover’s sex life. Bet he looked good in a tutu.

Just a tad…! It did make me click on the link, tho…! ;-)

I’m Jewish, so I have a hard time even comprehending all the struggles and persecutions the Christian people have had to suffer through in this country.

These are the same people who are shrieking “I want my country back!” that are demanding this privacy.

Weird!

Zing!

Victimizers are always overly fond of feeling victimized. Not being victimized, of course, just feeling it. Projection?

Well Obrahma and Biden weren’t afraid to go public with their position on gay marriage during the 2008 campaign.. They’re against it.

Hey there Hag – you’re in Chicago, n’est-ce pas?

It’s in my territory now and would love to meet up for cocktails. I’ll drop a note on yer blog.

I wonder if anyone has compiled a list of all the times Republicans or conservatives have inappropriately compared something to the Holocaust. It seems to happen at least once or twice a month.

The Defense-Intervenors in the Prop 8 case may indeed be the chickenshits they say they are and really are afraid of anyone seeing them argue against gay marriage for fear of whatever potential retaliation they say they are afraid of—which can’t be anything near as bad as what real GLBT people have actually been subject to.

However, after reading this week’s absolutely terrific liveblogging by Teddy and Marcy, I am starting to think there are 2 other possible motivations: one is that they have such lame defense that they don’t want it to be shown and the other is that they don’t want the world to see how powerful and moving the arguments for equal treatment are. The testimony on the loving relationships of the plaintiffs and the horrible treatment of GLBT people in American history are heartrending. Basically they don’t want the world to see their stupidass arguments against love.

That sounds reasonable (although no less damning), although I’m not sure they have that much self-awareness or intellectual honesty.

On the other hand, if they were completely un-self-aware, they’d be the ones pushing to have everything televised to Expose The Gay Menace and whatnot.

And I suspect that the Prop 8 folks have violent thoughts/fantasies toward gays, minorities, women, etc. Figuring that all people think alike they are scared and whiney.

Or maybe they are just scared of themselves.

I sure as hell would be.

they don’t want their inner ugly to be seen by everyone who watched

Yeah. I wonder what evidence there is—or if they even had to present any to argue to suppress the video—that they could reasonably expect harmful retaliation. IIRC, someone in the comments mentioned something about photos of picketing businesses, but that seems like pretty weak tea.

I don’t want to see their global ugly.

…It seems to happen at least once or twice a month.

Weekly, when it’s conservatives in Israel…! 8-(

I think their “inner ugly” is something they don’t even understand. I have met so many people who say that they don’t know anyone who is gay and, of course, they do and don’t know it. I have asked them if they liked _____ and they always say yes, they liked them very much and the people I have asked about are gay.
So their hearts and minds are in a different place and they are so unaware.

I think there was a restaurant or bar in LA with a predominantly gay clientele that went under or almost went under when it came out (so to speak) that the owner had donated a grand to Prop 8. But that seems like an eminently fair outcome to me.

Of course they don’t want people to know who they are. What do you think the sheets and hoods are for?
/half snark

People were paid to get folks to sign those petitions. Everyone should read petitions before they sign them, but most don’t. The people getting paid to could have described it any way they thought would get somebody to sign. I bet if the names became public, lots of people would deny that they signed it at all, or that they thought they were signing something else. This effort to suppress the names may motivated by not by privacy concerns but by the desire to conceal fraud. Would the right want to see the names if we hired ACORN to collect enough signatures for a referendum?

“But apparently the risk of facing intolerance of one’s own intolerance is too steep a price to pay for defending The Most Important Institution Evar.”

Okay – I gave up reading the mythological writing in the bible about the time I discovered Frank Herbert (I’m sorry, the Herbert story was told better and had a better plot – plus I always wanted to be a Bene Gesserit!). Anyway…someone more up on the bible: Isn’t there some place in there that commands them to stand up for their beliefs even unto the point of persecution and death? If not, it certainly is taught in the catechism!

You’re thinking of “El Coyote” I do believe.

Lisa Derrick wrote it up

I guess in this case the acronym should be INOKIYAR.

They’re afraid of change, they’re afraid of anything that’s different, and they can’t understand why, or even that, other people aren’t afraid of everything.
And they project all of their fears and their feelings onto everyone else, either because of that, or because they really don’t have any idea what other people think and feel.

I almost feel sorry for them. (I wonder if their distant ancestors were the last ones to move out of the cave, because they were afraid of those new-fangled huts.)

unto the point of persecution and death

I think they only remembered that part and it is unto the point of persecution and death of the other guy.

Yep, that’s the one.

They have a Fear-Hate relation with life.

But everyone who signs a petition is subject to this kind of risk, and my understanding is that petition signatures are not typically sealed. So why should Referendum 71 signers get special protection?

Plus, again, just how much harassment are they really going to be subject to?

I never sign anything anymore unless I read it. All. That makes the people standing outside of Trader Joes with the clip boards antsy. They really hate it when I read the whole thing and then say Nope.

LOL – I do the same thing, same reactions.

In the cross-examination the defense attorney kept quoting 30- to 40-year-old studies and accepting their conclusions in order to question the results of newer studies. To me that represents the essence of conservative outlook: all black and white, nothing changes, and if once it was accepted as true it must always be accepted as true. No room for new information or a change in circumstances. And certainly no ability to recognize that the data supports exactly the opposite of your point. In fact a couple of times, I thought he (I think it was a he) hammered really hard on points that actually argued more strongly for gay marriage than against it apparently without realizing it.

Evolution doesn’t apply to scientific knowledge either.

evolution is a 4 letter word dood

It always strikes me as intensely ironic that homophobes are completely obsessed with gay sex. It’s okay to form any type of bond or business relationship with a person of the same gender but the moment you touch them in that special place you and the rest of the country are going to Hell.

EVOL!

They’re afraid we’re going to do to them what they’ve done to us.

The conservatives’ two greatest fears are terrorism and being gay.

If Osama announced he had created a bomb or a virus that would turn people gay, they would all expire from fear right on the spot.

Part of the trouble is that Creationists tend to be illiterate. They labor under the mistaken notion that the word is “Evil-ution.”

Theirs is a creationist approach to scientific knowledge – they just pull it out of thin air and/or their butts.

I agree. My point is what if Prop 8 people are just using privacy as an excuse, and what they really want to conceal is that a large number of those signatures are fake, or were collected under false pretences?

Do you recall news stories a few years back that our side (the good guys) were supposedly trying to develop a weapon along the lines of a “gay ray,” the theory evidently being that enemy combatants would drop their weapons and start disco dancing on the field of battle?

I know is sounds like the Weekly World News but it actually circulated briefly in the mainstream media.

Ah, I gotcha. Yeah, that certainly could be. I’d certainly like to think that a lot of them were collected under false pretenses, rather than all those people saying, “Take away gays’ civil unions? That sounds awesome!”

(Mea culpa – I said the petitions were to repeal gay marriage, but actually it was domestic partnerships)

Ah yes. The revered PDOOMA method!

I think I vaguely do remember that. Of course, the enemy troops would continue fighting just as they were before, they’d just be gay.

Although if the enemy’s military had a strict anti-gay policy, they’d be forced to surrender immediately.

I don’t remember the gay part, but I do remember the dancing part.

Dancin’ foo-ooo-oool…

I do remember that. I also remember the interview with a gay man who said “what do they think we are going to do? Sneak into their homes while they are at work and redecorate their houses?”

IIRC it supposedly would have increased their sex drive to such a level that they had to drop whatever they were doing and hump something. AQ in Iraq would have been like a dog on Uncle Sam’s leg. Irritating but you can live with it if you have to.

See, that’s where the plan goes off the rails. People have to have a job and a home to benefit from all that redecorating.

Heh. Yeah, I guess a libido bomb could cause some problems. Depends on level of discipline, I suppose – I’m pretty sure that if people were shooting at me I’d be pretty focused on that no matter how horny I was.

The hard part about that weapon is getting all the combatants into the same night club with the techno music and XTC in the air conditioning.

But other than that, it’d prolly work.

Or it might be like mustard gas in WWI, the wind shifts and your own soldiers go down.

Er, so to speak.

Isn’t that what the helicopters are for? Play the music and drop the fog?

Dayam, Skippy…! ;-)

I’d be ducking and returning fire…! Most rickety-tick, I would…! ;-)

Plus the light show; gotta have the light show!

And Donna!

Right! The song would HAVE to be “Love to Love You Baby”

We could use drone aircraft to drop invitations. They’d need a trendier name and perhaps a new paint job, they already have an appealing shape.

have to play this gun’s for hire for the contractors

Yeah, pink! In various shades, of course

Just on the end, don’t want to overdo it.

…perhaps a new paint job…

Pink…? ;-)

color matters — even on bike seats

Made me laugh so hard I startled Bob!

LOL! All it needs is those “truck balls” and she’d be good to go!

I try to avoid the people standing outside my local TJ’s, whether with clipboards or donation cans. TJ’s has made it clear that they’d like the collectors to go away, also.
(Last weekend it was a Greenpeace warm-body, who was perfectly willing to stop and talk to someone driving through the parking lot, even if it meant blocking traffic. Idjit.)

Right, what was true before still must be true. And the older it is, the truer it must be. /s
How the heck did they get out of grade school?

“shouldn’t they be proud?”

I think that you get to the heart of the matter in this remark. Harassment is just a smokescreen.

One can understand their problem. Even to its practitioners, wingnuttery sounds well, dumb, when you say it out loud. And kind of crazy. At the very least, it never sounds as good or as reasonable as it did when you were dicussing it with the voices in your head.

So, by keeping everyone but fellow wingnutters out of this little tea, they come closest to recreating the comforting intimacy of their own skulls.

The state does verify that the signatures are at least the names of real voters – or it’s supposed to. (I suspect they mostly just sample the signatures.)

I’ll buy the false pretenses, though: there’s a history of signature collectors not giving people correct information, or hiding the top part of the petitions on the second and lower petitions in the stack. The paid collectors are a problem because they don’t really care about the legalities, they just want a lot of signatures so they get paid more.

Jane Hamsher has Late Night…
Writing About Politics Is Hard

Which I suppose means that the Earth really is flat and sits on the back of some big turtles. Or was it rhinoceroses?

They weren’t all that thrilled when they discovered Hoover’s own sexual peccadilloes with Cohen – prancing about in his tutu.

the scariest place on Earth for a republican/conservative is standing in front of a mirror.