The right wing wants a religious war

My mother apparently gets a lot of emails sent to her from Texas redneck relatives/coworkers/acquaintances. Occasionally, she forwards them on to me, in what I assume is so far a futile attempt to make my head explode. (Kidding, Mom.) The latest one is an email purportedly by Jeff Foxworthy listing his opinions of Muslims. It's quite offensive, and quite racist. Highlights:

• You have more wives than teeth.
  You may be a Muslim [Or a Mormon.]
• You wipe your butt with your bare hand, but consider bacon unclean.
  You may be a Muslim
• You think vests come in two styles: bullet-proof and suicide.
  You may be a Muslim

... etc.

Not long after I got this, Snopes labeled it false. But here's what I find interesting:

This collection of one-liners is an updating of a earlier version of a list which is several years old (dating back at least as far as October 2007), was originally about the Taliban specifically (rather than Muslims in general), and was not in its original incarnation attributed to Jeff Foxworthy (or anyone else)..."

I've found the list in all sorts of places. It's on a community site for US Marines, a gun enthusiast forum, another gun enthusiast forum, and some weird discussion forum for some weird Christian combat-training company.

What I find so interesting is that the list was originally about the Taliban, but some clever conservative reworked it to apply to all Muslims and it started circulating. Google returns about ten times as many hits for the "You may be a Muslim" version than the "You may be a Taliban version". Making fun of the Taliban is certainly understandable; they basically are our enemy in at least one of the wars we're currently fighting. But the right wing has expanded the definition to include anyone any racial or religious characteristic with them.

Conservatives pundits and politicians in this country are now openly calling for racial profiling. Rep. Pete Hoekstra of the House Select Committee on Intelligence says that profiling "make sense." Sean Hannity and disgraced former-NPR bigot Juan Williams have also both called for racial profiling. In their minds, Muslim, Middle Eastern, and terrorist are all synonymous.

I'm told that one of the things to George W. Bush's credit is that he made it clear that the wars he started were not wars against religion, but against extremists. "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam."

No longer are conservatives happy with that statement. It seems that once, we were at war against people that attacked us. But anger and bigotry need an enemy, and now that those wars are winding down (or at least no longer visible in the 24-hour news cycle), they are turning against anyone that shares even superficial characteristics with Middle Eastern terrorists.

American Family Association calls for sectarian cleansing of the military

Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association is calling for a sectarian cleansing of the military. In a hate-filled post on the AFA website titled No More Muslims in the U.S. Military, he says:

It's time we all got over the nonsense that all cultures and religions are equally valid or worthy. They most certainly are not. While Christianity is a religion of peace, founded by the Prince of Peace, Islam is a religion of war and violence, founded by a man who routinely chopped the heads off his enemies, had sex with nine-year old girls, and made his wealth plundering merchant caravans.

Did you know there was another mass shooting at a US military installation earlier this year? Back in May, Army Sgt. John M. Russell took a gun off another soldier in Iraq, drove to a clinic, and shot five people. It was, up to now, the most deadly soldier-on-soldier killing since the start of the Iraq War in 2003. Here's a picture of Russell.

Funny, I don't see the AFA calling for the removal of all the white, Christian (I'm assuming) guys from the military.

(I don't know if it's fitting or horrifying that I'm writing about this on Veteran's Day.)

Anti-gay news OK, pro-gay news not OK

Ex-Gay Watch reports that Florida's Palm Beach County School District is blocking access to a number of gay websites like the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, while simultaneously allowing access to anti-gay sites like National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality and Focus on the Family.

The district uses Blue Coat Systems's WebFilter software to filter out websites. It seems that Blue Coat lumps any site having anything to do with being gay as part of their "Sexuality/Alternative Lifestyles" which consists of:

Sites that provide information, promote, or cater to gays, lesbians, swingers, other sexual orientations or practices, or a particular fetish.

So being gay is now the same as having a fetish.

A 365Gay.com article says that "[The District's] computer security manager, Bob LaRocca, says the filtering software being used comply with the Child Online Protection Act and the Children Internet Protection Act." That makes no sense. COPA was blocked by the courts in 1998, ruled likely to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and went back under trial in October, 2006. CIPA, which has been found constitutional, is very specific about protecting children from porn, not GLAAD. Therefore, the district is applying this web filtering software to comply with laws that aren't relevant.

Blue Coat has a page where you can check on the filtering category for a website. I plugged a few in. Any pro-gay site falls under Sexuality/Alternative Lifestyles. Focus on the Family falls under Religion, Education, and Health. The vehemently anti-gay Illinois Family Institute, run by Porno Pete, is classified only as "Education."

Most objectionably, Love in Action is classified as Health. You may recall from a year or so ago when a teenager named Zach was forced his parents to attend their program, which claims to turn gay teens straight. The head of the program has said that, "I would rather you commit suicide than have you leave Love In Action wanting to return to the gay lifestyle." After Tennessee sued LIA, claiming they restricted LIA's patients captives access to their own medication, LIA countersued, claiming religious discrimination. The suit was settled. LIA, whose slogan is "Finding freedom in Jesus Christ," continues their anti-gay programs, but does not need a license as a mental health facility. Clearly, their classification as a Health website by Blue Coat is inaccurate.