wah eeh?

[acroyear]

Pharyngula: Say what?:

Speaking of incessant, grating whines…here's another Minnesota pest, Michele Bachmann. She spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (by invitation…how deranged have the Republicans become, anyway?) and offered this jewel of logic:

I just wondered that if our founders thought taxation without representation was bad, what would they think of representation WITH taxation?

Don't even try to comprehend the strange thoughts that flit through that tiny brain.

Meanwhile in other "conservative" states...

Pharyngula: Who is buying all that porn?:

An analysis of the consumption of internet pornography found that there are only small differences between states, but that there are some patterns. The patterns will not surprise anyone.

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.

…

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election - Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

So Republican states gobbled up more nekkid pitchers than Democratic states… but of course, one could argue that it was just the few Democrats in Utah who were slavering most obsessively over porn, while the Republican Mormons were being upright (no, wait, maybe that's the wrong word…) Montana is a conservative state, too, but maybe the ready availability of all those cows helps slake their forbidden lusts.*

What about those good Christians?

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."

Heh. Now we all know what "values" is a code word for.

I sometimes wonder if the only reason the Religious Right keeps trying to make certain behaviors illegal (like porn, sexual practices and preferences, alcohol consumption, good tv, gambling, and of course fiscal discipline and minority voting) is because they really can't help themselves.  Everything about the Gospels is all about taking control of your own life and your own choices, and since they can't do it, they keep trying to fall back on the nanny-state to do it for them, just like their interpretation of the old testament says it should.  They want to have THE LAW make the rules for them rather than actually live to the code they espouse by choice.

Well, hate to break it to you, but THE LAW did nothing to stop drinking during prohibition and did nothing to stop adultery among puritans and did nothing to stop "teh gay" from being about 7-10 percent of the population at any particular moment in the history of mankind.

Comments

[katrinb.livejournal.com]

But "old-fashioned values about family and marriage" include porn, prostitutes and adultery, just restricted exclusively to men. Men are understood, in old-fashioned moral codes (at least European ones) to be sex maniacs who cannot possibly restrict themselves to one woman, whereas "good women" are sexually frigid and only have sex to please their men and make babies. Thus, men must have "bad women" to indulge themselves with so that they do not make undue demands on "good women" or in any way damage the purity of "good women" who belong to other men either as daughters or wives. Homosexuality between men is horrifying, because it puts one man in the despised position of a woman - lesbianism is kind of naughty, but mostly either ignored as unimportant or viewed as something to be used to titillate men.
This is true old-fashioned morality. Any Victorian would tell you as much.
It's modern love marriage that's supposed to be emotional and sexual bliss for both parties, forever and ever, with neither expected to want or need satisfaction outside the marriage. (That may be too optimistic for many couples, but at least it's less sexist.)

[katrinb.livejournal.com]

By "European" moral codes, I mean those imported from Europe to America as well - I certainly don't mean to exclude American "old-fashioned morality" from my commentary.

[mandrakan.livejournal.com]

I would have had more faith in this study 15 years ago. All it shows now is that conservative states are more likely to PAY for it.