And yet here you are a demand homosexuals to keep their sexuality a secret, keep it away from the public eye because it upsets you with your faith.
Nobody makes you go kiss a boy (assuming you're male yourself here) but nobody stops you from holding your girlfriends hand in public either. Nobody tells you you can't get married in the legal sense because you're straight and no kid gets bullied in school because they're into the other gender.
You talk about beliefs and lifestyles and in that you disrespect gay people, force your belief onto them. It's not a lifestyle, it is who they are, at the very core of their existence, like being straight is not a lifestyle for you. Your refusal to acknowledge this is nothing but deminishing their very identity.
If homosexuality was a lifestyle, so would be heterosexuality. Lifestyles are not natural attributes given by the gods, lifestyle is choice. Do us a favour, choose neither of them, become asexual. It's the best proof, the Pope will agree.

In the end you won't be able to let go of this because christianity has always been obsessed with sexuality, especially that of other people. So eager to control masturbationary habits (Don't be Onan, fight the urge!), women's sexual freedom (Contraception is for whores!) and the queer (Worse abominations than seafood!) and therefore blind to see that this nonsense crusade against everybodys desires drives the masses away from their oh-so-important message of salvation. That's why you loose the fight, mankind is becoming more tolerant and we refuse to beat down the minorities for you any longer.
You can't have it both ways, you can't preach god is love and then hand us a list of people we're supposed to hate and expect us to nod in silent obedience. Times have changed, the minorities get more and more allies.
Honestly, that's what I admire about the Westboro Baptist Church, they're idiotic haters but at least they're consistent with their ideologies and brave enough to stand up for them.

You can sign me up @bareboards2. If there were some broad agreement on terminology I would switch to gender neutral language instantly. Fucking sick of it.

Coincidentally I was thinking about this just this afternoon, because luckily I have nothing better to do at work than stand around contemplating gender politics; pleased and proud as I am of genderqueer crusaders trying to wrestle pronouns into shape, I've been generally unwilling to join them. For fuck's sake, I spend enough time every day arguing about the excess syllable in the number sev, I can't afford to multiply that by every sentence with a person in it.

Singularising plural pronouns is offensive to me on a practical and aesthetic level, Spivak's no damn good, you've got your zes and your hirs and your hens, it's a pain in the ass but as soon as we get some consensus and momentum it's going to be cool.

Can't see that feminism really has anything to do with all this, well, I have trouble seeing that feminism has anything to do with anything. Not to go all Trancecoach here with male world problems but they're similarly told that to be professional they have to knot a piece of cloth around their neck for no reason or slice the hair off their face every day for no fucking reason. The situation is that we have a bullshit tribal culture with endless absurd customs and arbitrary rituals which is perpetuated by morons.

So we should always be rationalising - language, culture, behaviour, expectations.

Gender neutrality is obviously the way to go. If you get shoved in a box you don't become the champion of the box and work to make your box the best box it can be; you break out and start beating your captors over the head with box fragments.

I don't give a fuck about women's problems; I don't give a fuck about women, but I'm glad to consider anyone who stops wearing makeup a part of my team because I don't wear makeup for the same reason I don't shave my stupid face.

Anyway that was my choggie impression for the day. Too much caffeine, not enough sleep, not enough time spent bathing in the blood of my enemies.

Bill Maher just lying right out, like Christians haven't been fanatical or some shit?

Cmon, oh maybe it was some hundred years ago, but you know it's not the church fault they've stopped burning and crusading, it's the society and people that got fed up and got educated and stopped their bullshit - not the religion.

I find it interesting how people are conflating the whole "was he in his right to not answer" issue and "was he a dick" issue into the same thing.. They are very much two separate things and if you can't see that, you've lost perspective.

Once again, we have another situation where people are being dicks to to their fellow citizens over a rule that neither of them came up with. You're just driving? Well they're just doing their job.

If you got a problem with the checkpoint, take it up with the mayor, councilperson, governor or whoever came up with the law. and your personal crusade to be a top uploader on Youtube isn't relevant.

I'm getting sick of this building up of this antagonism between our fellow citizens when the person who actually responsible with the rule gets much less grief or no grief.

You wonder why some cops are in a bad mood? maybe its because they catch all kinds of hell for rules that maybe even they think are stupid too.

YEAH MAAAAAN! Cops are worthless HUH!? I love watching videos of them use force cause it's like a problem MMMAAAANNNN. A MUCH bigger problem than the huge rise in blacks ganging up and jumping whites in the name of racial hatred! We don't need to post and comment on THOSE videos cause it's not the blacks' fault! They're products of an unfair system MAAAANNN!

Wow... Most of y'all just love getting outraged over "police brutality" like you really care about the victim when in reality all you care about is pointing the finger at the MAAAANNNN! Be outraged about all of it. Be brave enough to speak HONESTLY about ALL unfair brutality. Or don't speak about it at all.

Freakin guilty whites... No common sense or honesty. NONE. Keep pointing the figure at one group and not the other OBVIOUS problem when it comes to unfair brutality. Avoid an honest conversation about race and culture in this country and just keep pointing the finger at the MMMAAAANNN like you're some kind of crusader or the slightest bit edgy.

This goes for the media too. Too damn scared and guilty to mention this racially motivated attacks by blacks on whites. If they do mention it they leave out the race and make excuses for the true motivations. Sickening and unfortunately predictable.

It is perfectly open, you are free to create your own sub-reddit and manage it however you please.

Open doesn't mean that every part of the site needs to cater to you, the point is people have the opportunity to do what they want, it doesn't mean there are no consequences.

The core of Linux is open source, you can do just about anything you want on your fork of Linux but it doesn't mean you can do whatever you want in the Ubuntu fork of Linux, that one is heavily moderated and that's their chosen path.

People know exactly what Reddit is, we simply didn't get butthurt over some likely trivial matter to set us on a crusade against it. If you want to not sound petty, feel free to share with us what you were trying to post and where you trying to post it. Then we can form an opinion of our own, as right now, we're just taking your bias word that you were wronged.

@dag - What I like best about your comment is that you present constructive criticism, while the rest of the media, government and public are preparing the tar and feathers.

I'm frustrated by the way we focus on personality and ignore the systemic nature of these kinds of issues. Once we tar and feather Obama, the next president will find herself/himself in need of effective national security measures and will likely go along with whatever the NSA thinks is best. Hillary is Stalin! Rand Paul is Hitler! Rinse and repeat. This is part of the reason why nothing ever seems to get done.

As an aside, I've certainly been on the offensive side of these crusades with Bush, McCain, Hillary and Romney, so this newish perspective is something of an epiphany. Not to say I didn't voice legitimate gripes, but I took cheap shots aplenty.

In short, I'm probably feeling what the rest of the world has long known, that Americans are immature, aggressive and completely unproductive in the way we manage their civic affairs, and it's not going to stop till we wise up.

(So just give up)


Anyway.....

Er you mean the CRUSADE? Begun by a born again Christian? With biblical chapters etched into our gunsights? Where we 'don't do bodycounts?'

The excuses are secular (OIL THEFT) but how do you think half a million radicalized angry orphans see it? I guess our kids will find out..

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Sure , but expressing interest in something doesn't assume philosophical support. I find The Crusades, Pogroms and the Vietnam war interesting too. It's healthy to take an interest in things.

I'm even interested in self-righteous drive-by commenters who like to dissect phrases to to generate angst.

Actually, no I take that back, I'm no longer interested in that. It's a topic that's been too thoroughly explored. ;-|

Saying that Hitler's or Stalin's actions are extreme but logical conclusions of an Atheistic worldview is as dumb as me saying that the Spanish Inquisition or the crusades are a similar indictments against Christianity. Personally, I won't stoop so low.

In pointing out that Christians have had wildly varying interperetations of morality, I am just arguing that your method does not yield particularly impressive results in a broad sense. Which is only relevant because the whole talk seems to spend a lot of time concentrating on horrific results that are supposedly a logical conclusion of atheism, and then it argues that it has a better idea.

However since you can just endlessly cherry pick which individuals and even which specific actions do or do not reflect this "ultimate truth," then I'll just limit myself to your God and ask the following question:

Do you believe that there has ever been a case where slavery has been justified, and do you believe that there has ever been a good reason for anyone to butcher a toddler with a sword?

When an atheist/agnostic is wrong, they learn.

When a creationist is wrong, they declare a jihad, they have a crusade, they excommunicate.

and they may take up to 600 years to issue an apology when they are wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apologies_made_by_Pope_John_Paul_II

Science is just a tad bit quicker to admit when they're incorrect.

And +1 to the idea that agnosticism or non-theist is a more accurate stance to take than atheism. But yeah, it's hard to dismiss that a term that was once considered negative often gets turned around into a positive one and that's the term that gets used due to the fluidity of language.

Nerd is hardly an accurate term to describe someone, but Nerd is a previously derogatory term that has been turned around into a positive one.

I disagree with Dawkins though. Atheists/agnostics have to be the better people, that's why I've never appealed to the idea of militant atheism. Certain people, IMO, merely want revenge against religion because of the atrocities inflicted by religion and there is a fine line between justice and revenge.

I don't want revenge. Freedom of religion is a good thing, but then again, so is separation of church and state. People can believe whatever they want to, but when it comes to governance, we *have* to govern based on reproduce-able facts, not faith.

This is just bleeding heart propaganda. Malala Yousafzai a 14 year old school girl in Pakistan. Her school bus was stopped by the Taliban, they climbed on board and shot her in the head. They proudly declared they shot her for promoting the idea that girls be educated and she was their intended target.

Terrorists like the Taliban are the stated and intended targets of America's drone strikes. American president's(both Bush and Obama) do NOT proudly declare any children killed in their proximity as legitimate and intended targets. They declare them regrettable tragedies.

Yes, it is justified on the basis that the targets of the drone strikes intend and continue to murder civilians and in particular, students. To come out and try to use a tragedy like the recent school shooting in a crusade against American drone strikes in Pakistan is beyond pathetic, it is abhorrent. The drone strikes are actively targeting the people in Pakistan who are going into schools and shooting the students there. Seems to me it is at least some what consistent to condemn the shooting in America, while defending the drone strikes over in Pakistan that are targeting similar killers.

This woman seems to be on some sort of crusade... A good number of her "references" for her statistics are based on her own works and her own "pink cross" foundation.
Bad things happening to people is well, bad... but this seems to be some bizzaro hobbled together series of clips of people crying or freaking out etc etc.
The segment at :58 seems pretty clearly to be an emotional response to the acting in the set (where planned choking was occurring), not physical abuse based on her relative composure in the following explanation.
The clip at 1:30 sounds like the other individual is acknowledging and attempting to accomodate the girl
Clip at 1:48 same thing, crew acknowledges a refusal
1:56 could be having a manic episode for all we know without context, and what we hear from the crew seems more empathetic than anything...

This really just seems like a bad attempt to rile a viewers for the goal of supporting a cause, but people here seem to be taking the bait.

Violence is violence... Porn starts would be legally protected like anyone else from being assaulted/abused in any way they did not agree to. Hate to say it, but this is like a coal miner suing for exposure to coal dust.
Industry regulations are well and good and it is very possible more are necessary, but this villian she is trying to create called "PORNNNN INDUSTRYYY" just doesn't hold up IMO.

I thought the following factoid was cool as shit~

"Bill Finger and I created the Joker. Bill was the writer. Jerry Robinson came to me with a playing card of the Joker. That's the way I sum it up. [The Joker] looks like Conrad Veidt — you know, the actor in The Man Who Laughs, [the 1928 movie based on the novel] by Victor Hugo. [...] Bill Finger had a book with a photograph of Conrad Veidt and showed it to me and said, 'Here's the Joker'. Jerry Robinson had absolutely nothing to do with it, but he'll always say he created it till he dies. He brought in a playing card, which we used for a couple of issues for him [the Joker] to use as his playing card" ~ Bob Kane Interviewed by Frank Lovece for Entertainment Weekly, 1994. Perkowski grabbed the footage from that very flick to create his joker character for this nod to the caped crusader.

Better than Batman Returns and Forever combined iffn ya axe me!