Posts You Must Read #3

Morbo guest posted on The Carpetbagger Report, starting off strong right up front by using an underappreciated vocabulary word in the title of Border Ruffians: The Minutemen come to Vermont:

If you’re like me, you probably lose a lot of sleep at night over fears that crazed residents of Quebec are going to swoop down into the country and steal your job, abduct your children and run off with your significant other.

Slacktivist makes a point I’ve often thought about. Why is it that some fundamentalist and other Christians (and similar folks in other religions) spend so much time trying to get the government to protect them from any ideas that aren’t identical to theirs? Think about banning books from school libraries. Appropriately, his post is called Hothouse Flowers:

It almost certainly would be easier for fundamentalist believers to practice their religion freely in a homogenous society in which everyone believed — or was forced to act as though they believed — the same thing. But this logic is anathema to the whole idea of religious freedom.It also presumes that the faith of the fundamentalist hegemonists is extremely fragile. Worse than that, it nurtures and reinforces this fragility — ensuring that their faith is a flimsy hothouse flower that cannot survive in the outdoor climate of a pluralist society.

I have to start reading more foreign and military policy, obviously. Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns, and Money has a post called The MacGyver Paradigm that also references an earlier work by a fellow named Anthony Cordesman called The Buffy Paradigm. Huzzah! Also, it’s an interesting piece on military preparedness.

Hope of Appalachia Alumni Association posted a rant from Craigslist that she found via TBOGG.

The original post says “Re-post this if you believe love makes a marriage,” so here we go:

10 reasons why gay marriage should be illegal

1. Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
2. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
3. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
4. Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can’t marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.
5. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
6. Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren’t full yet, and the world needs more children.
7. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
8. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
9. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.
10. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

Hope you’re enjoying your weekend.