Friday, April 3, 2015
Back Homo Again in Indiana
Indiana Bureau Chief Hoosier Daddy says things have really become Insane in Indianapolis ever since Republican Governor Mike Pence signed a Homophobic Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) into law that protects people who live their daily lives according to their faith against government discrimination. Hysterical Hypocrites on the Left began their unwarranted and ill-informed attacks on Indiana and Religious Freedom. Obama Supporters in the Press put an Indiana Pizzeria out of business when they received death threats after its owners said they would serve anybody who came in to their shop but they would not cater gay weddings because of their religious beliefs, and now those Liberal Whackos are even demanding that Michigan State University, Duke University, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Wisconsin boycott the Final Four if Indiana doesn’t fix this law by Saturday. Now everybody’s waiting to see Governor Pence change the official Indiana State Song to “Back Homo Again in Indiana” so Joe Sixpack can be watching hoops come Saturday night.
So Now Let’s Meet Today’s Guest Editor:
It’s none other than Whistleblower Senior Spoiled Sports Editor Andy FurBall, once called a “Go-getting anything-for-some-ink publicity man” who’s been hyping sports stories for at least as long as we’ve known him.
Andy says, the University of Connecticut men’s basketball head coach Kevin Ollie, who went from winning the final game of last year’s NCAA tournament to losing in the opening round of the NIT, was the first to boycotts the Final Four in Indianapolis this weekend, even though The Blower reported the State of Connecticut passed its own Homophobic Religious Freedom Restoration Act, after DemocRAT President Bill Clinton signed the Federal Homophobic Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993, and Obama voted for the Illinois Homophobic Religious Freedom Reformation Act In 1998.
That’s why The Blower, which takes pride in ridiculing Hypocritical Hypsters of all races, creeds, colors, and sexual perversions, is pleased to permit our old friend FurBall, (who would gladly ignore all of his own principles and devour an entire penis-shaped wedding cake at a gay bar if he only could just see Kentucky get beat this weekend) to be our Playoff Guest Editor and choose three Indiana Religious Freedom items plus an Indiana Religious Freedom Quickie for today’s E-dition from our Current Cadre of Conservative Columnists and Contributors.
The Left wages total war and then plays victim By Timothy P. Carney
On one side is the CEO of the world’s largest company, the president of the United States and a growing chunk of the Fortune 500. On the other side is a solo wedding photographer in New Mexico, a 70-year-old grandma florist in Washington and a few bakers.
One side wants the state to conscript the religious businesswomen and men into participating in ceremonies that violate their beliefs. The other side wants to make it possible for religious people to live their own lives according to their consciences.
Yet somehow, the Left and most of the mainstream press paint the current skirmishes over religious liberty as conservative offensives. When Indiana decided to follow the Clinton administration and 19 states in passing a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Left let loose a cacophonous chorus of cries about a dangerous flood of homophobia spreading out from the Hoosier state.
It is important to understand just how important religious freedom has been in America’s legal history.
The misrepresentation would be laughable if not for the awesome power wielded by the anti-religious freedom side.
Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple, the largest corporation in the world. He opposes religious freedom laws, and paints them as a growing scourge. “There’s something very dangerous happening in states across the country,” his Washington Post op-ed darkly began, warning of “A wave of legislation” to protect religious liberty.
This is hokum. Religious Freedom Restoration Acts have existed on the state and federal level for decades. What’s new here — the “wave” that’s actually sweeping over the country — is an emboldened and litigious cultural Left, unsated by its recent culture war victories, trying now to conscript the defeated soldiers at gunpoint.
The Left’s tirades against Indiana’s RFRA rely largely on paranoid predictions of what religious liberty might yield. RFRA “could be used as a cudgel by corporations to justify discrimination,” warns Judd Legum at the liberal Think Progress. We heard these same terrified warnings amidst the Hobby Lobby case: Unless we force Christian employers to pay their workers in the form of contraception, we’ll soon have Exxon Mobil declaring itself as Christian Scientist in order to axe all healthcare. Who knows? Maybe Comcast will come out as Salafist and all female employees will have to don the hijab.
Slippery-slope arguments are often valid — but not coming from the cultural Left, about marriage in the United States, in 2015.
After millennia of marriage being uncontroversially a union between one man and one woman, and after a decade of electorates in most states (and President Obama in 2008) upholding that traditional definition, the Left has used the courts to redefine the institution. People are fired for having taken the losing side. On college campuses, the current fights are about banning even the articulation of traditional views.
Amidst this culture-war dynamic, the Hobby Lobby decision and Indiana’s RFRA don’t represent any slide down a slope towards religiosity or individual liberty. Instead, our culture is speeding down the icy Left slope of the cultural mountain, and a few conservatives are now dragging their hands on the ice to slow the acceleration — and the Left is crying that this will send us catapulting back uphill.
Religious liberty is the terms of surrender the Right is requesting in the culture war. It is conservative America saying to the cultural and political elites, you have your gay marriage, your no-fault divorce, your obscene music and television, your indoctrinating public schools and your abortion-on-demand. May we please be allowed to not participate in these?
But no. Tolerance isn’t the goal. Religious conservatives must atone for their heretical views with acts of contrition: Bake me a cake, photograph my wedding, pay for my abortion and my contraception.
In Georgia, a Catholic school employed a gay teacher. When he announced he was marrying a man, the school said this violated the expectations of public behavior they demand of their teachers. They fired him. Now the Obama administration is coming after the school.
Even in abortion, the Left is tired of long-observed truces. The Hyde Amendment, which for decades has restricted federal funding of abortion providers while never intruding on the freedom of women to abort their children, is no longer tolerated by the abortion lobby, which even killed a human trafficking bill over it.
As stunning as their ambitions of total victory is their continued pretense to be fighting a defensive war. It should be obvious to all that the Left long ago dropped its love of pluralism and tolerance — if that ever was their goal.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday on washingtonexaminer.com.
Scott Walker: Indiana Law Outrage From People “Chronically Looking For Ways To Be Upset About Things”
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said Wednesday much of the outrage over Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act comes from “people who are chronically looking for ways to be upset about things.”
Walker was participating in “Insight 2015,” a program put on by Wisconsin conservative radio host Charlie Sykes.
“We don’t need to, in Wisconsin, we have it in the constitution. That’s the remarkable thing for all of the hype, particularly in media here in Wisconsin. We have it in the constitution,” Walker said when asked if he would have signed the bill passed in Indiana.
The law, which prohibits the government from infringing on individual religious freedom unless certain standards are met, has triggered a wave of national attention for the state from critics who argue it could allow LGBT discrimination.
“It’s even more entrenched than anything that can be in the state statues and we don’t have the kind of hype and hysteria that the national media is creating on this,” Walker said. “Remember, it’s not because what we have here, President Clinton signed something very similar to this nationally back in ‘93. President Obama voted for something like this in the neighboring state of Illinois when he was a state senator.”
Walker said the outrage for the law was coming from people who hadn’t really looked at what the law really is and were just looking for a reason to be upset.
“I just think this is people who are chronically looking for ways to be upset about things instead of really looking what it is. I believe in protecting religious freedoms. It’s inherent in our state’s constitution. Heck, it’s inherent in our U.S. Constitution, and again, Wisconsin, we’ve done it, and we’re stronger for it.”
Asked about what would happen to a baker who did not want to provide services to a same-sex wedding in the state, Walker didn’t address the scenario, but said Wisconsin’s law strikes “a healthy balance.”
“Again, if you look at the constitution there is both a combination of religious freedoms protecting the constitution and back in the ’80s, long, long ago when I was still a kid, there were also provisions there that would protect against discrimination including a gay or lesbian individual out there,” he said. “So there is a healthy balance of someone can’t be discriminated, say, in the workplace and that — but for someone who has a conscientious objection, based on their religious beliefs no matter what it might be, the constitution is pretty clear in the state.”
Let’s Face It, Republicans Are Cowards On Religious Liberty (But Voters Aren’t) By David Harsanyi
The GOP’s capitulation on religious liberty was as swift as it was predictable.
Republicans have talent for courting just enough controversy to generate prodigious amounts of negative press but at the same time not doing enough to accomplish anything meaningful. And few things in this world rattle your run-of-the-mill Republican more than some ginned-up outrage over “discrimination” or “bigotry.” The media’s deliberate distortion of the intention, reach, and history of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—not to mention pressure from corporations like Apple and Walmart—was more than enough to do the trick.
What excuse does Mike Pence have for flubbing a simple question about discrimination on national television last Sunday? What’s his excuse for pledging to “fix” a law that’s already straightforward, innocuous, and ubiquitous? He’s not alone, of course. When Arkansas legislators passed the same bill by a wide margin (what the media calls “controversial”), Gov. Asa Hutchinson threw it back to lawmakers and asked them to rework it to guarantee that the make-believe concerns of his MoveOn.org-mimicking son could be “fixed.”
I hope you’ll excuse me, my faithful friends, but if this is your leadership, you are screwed. By claiming that RFRA bills can be “fixed,” Republicans are only corroborating the false impression that these bills allow wanton discrimination against gay patrons. By claiming that you can fix this, you are only pretending that there is a compromise available that would make it OK for Christian business owners to refuse participation in gay weddings. None exists. You will be hounded until you are made to coexist.
So, politicians can make cogent and compelling arguments for why RFRAs—the most rational and genuine comprise available—are needed and why preserving religious liberty is itself an exercise in tolerance, or they can surrender. I bet on the latter. Even though surrender would be premature.
After all, are all Americans who are comfortable with gay marriage (as I am) also going to be comfortable with mobs bullying local pizzeria owners into obedience? Perhaps not. Perhaps there will be those who accept gay marriage but don’t accept the tyrannical instinct that demands philosophical lockstep be enforced by the state. And I realize the mass media acts as if its histrionics about RFRAs reflect a national consensus. But there is little evidence that it’s true.
In a poll predating the Indiana bill, Pew found that the public was evenly divided on the question of whether businesses should be required to provide services to same-sex couples despite religious objections to same-sex marriage. Forty-nine percent said that wedding-related businesses should be required to provide services to same-sex couples just as they would to all other customers, while 47 percent say that these businesses should be allowed to refuse services to same-sex couples for religious reasons.
The Pew poll doesn’t exactly frame the issue impartially, either. A more accurate poll question would go something like: Should government force religious people to participate in events that conflict with their sincerely held religious values?
And the Associated Press did a better job earlier this year, finding that 57 percent of Americans agreed with the idea that “wedding-related businesses with religious objections should be allowed to refuse service to same-sex couples.” Only 39 percent said that businesses should not be allowed “to refuse service.”
In March, a Marist poll found that 54 percent of Americans agreed that “allowing First Amendment religious liberty protection or exemptions for faith based organizations and individuals even when it conflicts with government laws.” Even Democrats, by a two-point margin, agreed with this traditionally uncontroversial proposition.
The other day, White House press secretary Josh Earnest—speaking for a president that only a few years ago lied about gay marriage to further his career—answered a question about religious freedom bills in Indiana and Arkansas like so:
I do think that, in the mind of the president, the thought that we would have state legislatures in the 21st century in the United States of America passing laws that would use religion to try to justify discriminating against people because of who they love, is unthinkable.
This is a giant but potent lie. I’m not sure modern-day Republicans are up to task of fighting rhetoric that wraps illiberal ideas in bogus tolerance. If they are not, millions of citizens with sincerely held beliefs and genuine grievances will be left to fend for themselves against an alliance of powerful business, political, and media interests. And considering the ineffectiveness and cowardice of the GOP so far, they might be better off.
David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.
And a Quickie
Conservative Curmudgeon Stu Mahlin asks, “What’s the difference between protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and protests in Indianapolis, Indiana?” Nothing whatsoever. Both are examples of lawless mob rule. America’s Constitutional Republic, with its freedoms with order under the Rule of Law, has been flushed down the toilet.
These items are perfect to forward to all of your Internet Buddies and Facebook Friends with too much time on their hands.
TODAY’S “LIBERAL LIAR” AWARD GOES TO
Concord High School Girl’s Lesbian Golf Coach Jess Dooley, who was suspended from coaching (no doubt with pay) for a Tweet she allegedly posted Tuesday evening.
The Tweet under @dooley_11 said “Who’s going to Walkerton, IN to burn down #memoriespizza w me? Agree with #FreedomofReligion bill? “That’s a lifestyle they CHOOSE” Ignorant”
The account has since been deleted.
Plagiarism Count: Unattributed material was filched from a mere 243 different websites for the production of today’s Blower.
Indiana Religious Freedom Stories We’re Working On
Religious Liberty Under Attack In Indiana
Gay Marriage Movement “Has Moved From Tolerance To Totalitarianism”
LGBT Call For Closing Down Churches
Portman’s Continued Attack On Marriage, Family And State’s Rights
Angie’s List Sides Against Christians In Indiana
Lib Rag Salon Says Indiana Pizzeria Forced To Close Over Death Threats From Diversity Mob Is “Getting What It Deserves”
Gofundme Campaign For Indiana Pizzeria Under Fire By Moonbat Leftists Tops $200,000 Raised!
Whistleblower Good Friday-Passover Web Poll
This week, here’s how the first 17,648 Whistleblower Readers Poll respondents said most Christians and Jews would be celebrating today’s Good Friday-Passover Holiday today:
(A) Fostering a new Judeo-Christian Tradition: 2%
(B) Good Friday Services at St. Peter in Chains Cathedral: 1%
(C) Passover Seder across the street at Isaac M. Wise Temple: 1%
(D) Suffering more unwarranted and ill-informed attacks from Left Wing Fanatics for not including Muslim Transexuals: 96%
Note: Everything we write doesn’t have to be so damn cynical and mean-spirited, it’s just so much more fun that way!
Weekly Whistleblower Limerick Contest
Taxed to the Max
This week, everybody who thinks the tax code would be a lot simpler if over-paid Congressmen were forced to fill out every one of their constituents’ tax forms for free, e-mailed his entry to the Whistleblower Limerick Contest.
The winner is noted anti-taxer Scofflaw Tadwell, who says, “Why should you send your hard-earned money to the government, they’ll only spend it.” Scofflaw wins a handy list of 1,001 sure-fire deductions the IRS never disputes, a box of bogus receipts for charitable contributions, and the name of a good tax attorney, in case the first and second prizes don’t work. His winning limerick is:
The Best Part About Paying Your Taxes
Is getting Big Brother off our backses.
But dumbass liberals always want to pay more
To the welfare state they so mindlessly adore.
No wonder the country is being run by quackses!
Here’s a Dishonorable Mention from “In Russ We Trust” Jackson
The best part about paying your taxes
Is the disappearance of paperwork stackses.
But if you think that Big Brother’s confiscation
Is going to take an overdue vacation
Then you must be smoking some serious crackses.
Bobby Leach says this is nostalgic
The best part about paying your taxes
Is getting Big Brother off our backses.
But Obama the Kenyan-born Lefty
Has an appetite insatiably hefty –
So hide your remaining cash and cover your trackses!
E Rob Sanders denies he sent this in
The best part about paying your taxes,
From what we can assume from your faxes,
Is that it would really be great,
To have one low flat rate,
With simple forms so we can all relaxes.
Rick “The Bat Boy” Robinson plans to include this in his next book
The best part about paying your taxes
(After they steal even your slacks) is
You can appeal what they say
But you won’t get your way
Regardless of what the facts is.
Bill Hemmer will do anything to get some local publicity
The best part about paying your taxes
Is how creative your accountant waxes.
He’ll itemize your deductions
With such inventive reductions
That he’ll shrink your tax bill to the maxes.
Roger Ach says “Paying taxes is for fools!”
The best part about paying your taxes
Is that it pays for the government’s praxis*
But you better remember
Since Obama won last November
Your money now belongs to the Barrackses!
James “The Rock” Bogen doesn’t like paying taxes either
The best part about paying your taxes,
It buys saunas and bikini waxes.
Not for you, of course;
You still work like a horse
But Barack goes to a spa and relaxes!
And from the Anderson Laureate (who hasn’t even started working on his taxes):
The best part of paying your taxes
They’ll be well-spent, that’s what the facts is
The President can afford a vacation
And the Cabinet will each have a libation
And Congress can buy themselves bikini waxes
The best part about paying your taxes
Is that Michelle can now pay for bikini waxes
But for God’s sake, don’t look
Your eyeballs will cook
And the world will stop spinning on its axis.
The best part about paying your taxes
It that the hold on your wallet relaxes.
The government’s all thieves
No matter what Obama believes
And that’s just the truth about what the facts is.
Finally, here’s one from Robin in Ludlow where the last line doesn’t quite rhyme, but the sentiments are so endearing:
The Best Part About Paying Your Taxes
Is demonstrating just what the fact is
We work hard for our money
But that Bi-Racial Dummy
Will endlessly piss it away!
The first line of next week’s limerick is:
“This year on the Reds’ Opening Day”
Remember: We never print all the bad stuff we know and certain people ought to be damn glad we don’t, especially, Liberal Fanatics.
MORE LIBERAL INTOLERANCE HOT LINE
E-mail your Left-Wing Lunacy today.
Some Liberal Whacko Bashing items in today’s Blower
were sent in by our equally Liberal Whacko Bashing subscribers
Whistleblower Video of the Day
Indiana’s Religious Freedom Czar Defends Its Anti-Gay Law – CONAN on TBS
(Sent in by Citizens for Community Morals President Phil Burr-Ass [325 Friends, 19 Mutual Friends], still a recovering Gay-Basher)
Note: We guarantee iPhone subscribers who don’t go home and see links and pictures on their computers are not going to appreciate all of this good stuff today.