As a gay leftie I’m so going to hell…oh wait, I’m an atheist, too.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor claims that the rise of secularism has led to a liberal society, hostile to Christian morals and values, in which religious belief is viewed as “a private eccentricity” and the voice of faith groups is marginalised.

The cardinal warns that Britain shows signs of degenerating into a country free of morals, because of its rejection of traditional values and its new emphasis on the rights of the individual.

There are now “serious tensions” between Christians and secularist society, he says, in which atheists are becoming more “vocal and aggressive”.

(Note: “vocal and aggressive” means we refuse to sit down and shut up like we used to)

Writing in a book on multiculturalism, to be published on Monday, the Cardinal argues that immigrants have a duty to adjust to British life, but expresses concern that they are faced with a culture that is increasingly repressive and intolerant. He says that while the country has become more diverse and pluralistic, the Christian values which have shaped its identity should not be abandoned.

The book, called Faith in the Nation, is published by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), with the backing of the Prime Minister. In it the cardinal says: “Religious belief of any kind tends now to be treated more as a private eccentricity than as the central and formative element in British society that it is.

“Although the tone of public discussion is sceptical or dismissive rather than antireligious, atheism has become more vocal and aggressive.”

Britain’s most senior Catholic leader says that the “unfriendly climate for people of all faiths” has united the country’s three major faiths, Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

(Note: people do tend to congregate in one place on a sinking ship)

However, he claims that Catholicism has borne the brunt of “liberal hostility” in its battles to fight for values it considers to be “fundamental pillars of a rightly ordered society”.

“The vocal minority who argue that religion has no role in modern British society portray Catholic teaching on the family as prejudiced and intolerant to those pursuing alternatives,” he says.

In particular, the cardinal highlights the Church’s opposition to liberal laws on abortion and homosexuality, its defence of faith schools and its support for marriage.

He led the Church’s unsuccessful attempt to block the controversial embryo Bill, which allows for saviour siblings and babies to be born without fathers.

The campaign raised questions over the role of religion in influencing public policy, but the cardinal argues that moves to silence the faith communities must be resisted.

“There is a current dislike of absolutes in any area of human activity, including morality,” he says.

(Note: bullshit, sir. Where are your absolute moralities when it comes to condoning the killing of gays for being gay? Morality has always been conditional, even theists ignore their own moral beliefs when it’s convenient)

“The intolerance of liberal sceptics can be as repressive as the intolerance of religious believers.”

(Note: the old “they’re as bad as us” defense. We are intolerant of superstitions being paraded as reality, of using that type of nonsense to oppress people and deny them their right to life, as the church has done for centuries)

 ”Catholics are not alone in watching with dismay as the liberal society shows signs of degenerating into the libertine society.”

He blames the culture of individual rights, encouraged by the Human Rights Act, as responsible for creating a society that claims to be tolerant, but in fact denies the rights of religious groups to act according to their conscience and beliefs.

“British society champions tolerance and freedom, but that freedom is dependent on responsibility,” he says.

“A simplistic belief that right or wrong is an individualistic construct denies our responsibilities to neighbour and wider society.”

(Note: this person doesn’t even know who he’s talking about. Not all humanists are atheists and not all atheists are humanists. His argument is against humanism which the church rightly sees as an enemy of their power and negative influence in the world)

Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, said: “Secularists and atheists are finding it necessary to express their views more vocally because of the increasing demands made by Christians and minority faiths.

“The position of bishops and the Vatican on moral issues such as abortion and contraception is at odds with the views of poeple in the pews and in the country as a whole. We support the right of everyone to express their religion and their views in public but we have a problem with religion having a privileged place, as it does with bishops in the House of Lords.” (The Telegraph)

Religion demands a privileged position in society, one free of criticism and responsibility for their actions. Society has long granted them an exemption from skepticism, but this is coming to an end. Even this religious leader has to acknowledge that his beliefs are outdated and irrelevant in our modern world.

There is real panic among the rich and powerful religious, the ministers and priests who live off the sweat of their followers. Once religious superstition is seen for what it really is, these guys (and a few gals) will have to find a real job and actually work for a living. That thought is what truly scares them. Their actions give lie to the idea they have any concern at all for humanity.

In the 1950s there were the angry young men.

Angry Young Men is a journalistic catchphrase applied to a number of British playwrights and novelists from the mid-1950s. The phrase was originally used by British newspapers after the success of the play Look Back in Anger to describe young British writers, though it was derived from the autobiography of Leslie Paul, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, whose “Angry Young Man” was published in 1951.

It has been used more generically, to refer to a young person who strongly criticizes political and social institutions.(Wikipedia)

In the 60s we had the Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, the Yippies and the Weathermen. There were a lot of angry young men, and women. Angry at the Nixon White House, angry about the war in Vietnam, angry about the apparent decline of Western society. I was one of them, a campus leftist radical who sometimes felt the only way change would ever come about was to (figuratively) burn the whole rotten edifice to the ground and rebuild it in the spirit of the founding fathers.

Where are the angry young men today?

In the 40 years since I’ve become quite disillusioned and have found my radicalism to largely be a wasted effort. Obviously America was not ready to change its ways. We needed war to stimulate the economy and keep the military/industrial complex rich and powerful. We didn’t seem to be able to elect a decent president. Americans eschewed the voting booth in favor of daytime soap operas. Americans had become placated, mindless, unquestioning sheep, afraid to challenge the government and unwilling to risk their comfortable lifestyles.

The only favor done to this country by Bush and the fundamental religious-right has been to reignite the radicalism many of us have been repressing for four decades. After eight years of what I can only characterize as the worst presidency of the 20th century people are beginning to wake up to the failure of the American dream.

Ordinary Americans have lost their jobs, their homes and their hope. Their children may not be attending college. They can longer afford to retire. All they’ve worked for, all their goals, have been reduced to ash by greedy shysters and corrupt businessmen. They watch their tax dollars being used to bail out inefficient companies led by unscrupulous charlatans while their small businesses fail and their taxes rise. Americans are becoming mad as hell, and well they should be. They’ve only now woken up to the fact that they’ve been played as suckers. They’ve been stuck with the bill for a party they didn’t even attend.

These conditions incite radicalism. When people have been beaten down as far as they can be, they finally begin to resist, to ask the questions they should have been asking 40 years ago. They start to oppose “business as usual”, they refuse to accept the life handed to them by those who posses the wealth and the power, the same people responsible for their plight. When the shit hits the fan, and there’s no end of shit in sight, at least turn off the fan. People are beginning to demand that we turn off the fan. Then we can start to reduce the pile of shit.

A common radical expression was “Power to the People”. Folks dismissed the idea as too radical for the 60s. Maybe they’ve finally come to understand what we were saying and to agree with those sentiments. We need to reclaim our power as citizens. We need to be reminded that we are the government, we own the government, they work for us. We are the United States of America. We say where the country is headed, we determine the priorities. We expect demand that our representatives actually represent our needs. We didn’t hire them to do what they want but what we want. The Supreme Court’s there to make sure we don’t want something contrary to the Constitution and that’s a good thing. If we subvert the Constitution we deserve to lose our country.

So to all you wealthy preachers preying on those who trust you, to all you bankers and mortgage investors who lent money in bad faith to those most desperately trying to live the dream, to all you auto company executives too stupid to drive the cars you manufacture to a meeting where you beg for our money so you can keep doing the crappy job you’ve been doing while getting filthy rich, instead choosing to fly in your private jets as a further slap in the face of your customers and investors; FUCK YOU.

We need to become radical again. We need radical ideas, radical approaches to the problems we face. We need to face the fact that we cannot go back. The old ways no longer work. The rest of the world has changed. We must adapt or we will perish.

My philosophical hero, Henry Rollins, America Under Attack:

This argument, seen over and over again during the lead up to the last election, seems to suggest that the most important factor in a marriage, the one absolute condition that defines the whole practice, is that your mate be of the opposite sex. That degree of legalism is asinine.

Do straights ever contemplate marriage as a bonding with the person you love most outside your own family, a lifelong commitment to your best friend, a pairing based on affection? Of course they do, yet they insist on not sharing those conditions with anyone whose choice of partner is the same sex they are.

Every argument I’ve read against same-sex marriage is legalistic, devoid of any compassion, empathy or humanism. When definitions and words mean more than other human beings we’re headed down a dangerous path. It’s the old argument between the “spirit” of the law and the “letter” of the law.

California’s Prop. 8 and the other gay-unfriendly propositions in various states didn’t pass by any percentage that ought to give prohibitionists any reason to celebrate. Across the country each contest was very close to a 50-50 split. Acceptance is gaining ground, however slowly. Eventually Americans will look at this latest crop of rights restrictions with the same contempt we now hold for Prohibition and Jim Crow Laws.

Gays know full well how dangerous it can be to offend the sensibilities of the godly. Racist and homophobic bigotry should have passed into history, only recalled with shame and embarrassment, a long time ago; it would have were not racial, gender and sexual bigotry endorsed and encouraged by the churches.

As a humanist I won’t excuse any group of humans for treating any other group of humans as anything but equal as it concerns what they are by nature. Gays are no more able to determine their sexuality than are straights. No one ever got to choose their race, genetics, gender, left or right-handedness, hair color or eye color. A few people are born with the ability to be both left and right-handed. A very few people are born with eyes of different color. And a very few people are born with an unconscious, innate attraction to either gender or exclusively to what others consider the inappropriate gender. A very few are aroused by non-human species or young of their own, not capable of consent. Among consenting adults there are generally four choices for the object of your desires; a member of the opposite sex or a member of your own, both or neither. The same limitations apply to handedness. Left, right, both, neither.

Only religious superstition has deemed one to be a terrible evil and the other totally benign, ignoring that at one time the churches considered left-handedness to be a sign of the devil. Why did they quit believing that?

HONORARY CO-CHAIRS
Sergey Brin, Founder, Google, Inc.
Bill Campbell, Chairman, Intuit Inc.
David Filo, Founder, Yahoo! Inc.
Chuck Geschke, Founder & Chairman, Adobe Systems, Inc.
John Morgridge, Former CEO & Chairman, Cisco Systems, Inc.
Pierre Omidyar, Founder and Chairman, eBay Inc., Founding Partner, Omidyar Network
Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook
Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google, Inc.
Jerry Yang, Founder, Yahoo! Inc.

LEADERS (partial list)
Deborah Barber, Principal, Jackson Hole Group
John Battelle, Chairman & CEO, Federated Media
Larry Birenbaum, Former Senior Vice President, Cisco Systems, Inc.
Lorna Borenstein, President, Move, Inc.
Larry Brilliant, Executive Director, Google.org
Owen Byrd, President, Byrd Development
John Chisholm, Chairman & CEO, CustomerSat, Inc.
Barry Cinnamon, CEO, Akeena Solar
Tod Cohen, Director of Government Affairs, eBay Inc.
LaDoris Cordell, Administrator, Stanford University
Sue Decker, President, Yahoo! Inc.
Jack Dorsey, Chairman, Twitter
David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development & Chief Legal Officer, Google, Inc.
Donna Dubinsky, CEO, Numenta, Inc.
Alan Eustace, SVP, Engineering and Research, Google, Inc.
Naomi Fine, President & CEO, Pro-Tec Data, Inc.
Rachel Glaser COO/CFO, Reunion.com
Carl Guardino, President & CEO, Silicon Valley Leadership Group
Andre Haddad, CEO, Shopping.com
Jeff Hawkins, co-Founder Palm, Handspring, and Numenta
David Karnstedt, Investor
Scott Kaspick, Managing Director, Kaspick & Co.
Steve Kirsch, Serial Entrepreneur
John Koza, CEO, Third Millennium
Ross LaJeunesse, Head of State Policy Western US, Google, Inc.
Gary Lauder, Managing Partner, Lauder Partners Venture Capital
Laura Lauder, General Partner, Lauder Partners Venture Capital
Len Lehman, Investor
John Luongo, Former CEO, Vantive Corporation
Roger McNamee, Managing Director & co-Founder, Elevation Partners
Ken McNeely, President, AT&T California
Michael Moritz, Partner, Sequoia Capital
Susan Packard Orr, CEO, Telosa Software, Inc.
Randy Pond, Executive Vice President, Cisco Systems, Inc.
Amy Rao, Founder & CEO, Integrated Archive Systems
Jana Rich, Managing Director, Russell Reynolds
Miriam Rivera, Former Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Google, Inc.
Dan Rosensweig, Investor
Dan Rubin, Partner, Alloy Ventures
Hilary Schneider, Executive Vice President US Region, Yahoo! Inc.
Len Shustek, Chairman, Computer History Museum
Jeff Skoll, Former President, eBay Inc.
Stephanie Tilenius, SVP, eBay North America
Joy Weiss, President & CEO, Dust Networks
Steve Westly, former California State Controller & former SVP eBay Inc.
Evan Williams, CEO, Twitter

(Hat Tip to TechCrunch for both the above and their opposition to Prop.

People who care about people oppose 8. People who value tradition more than people support it.

Finally, a sporting event I can truly get behind (so to speak).

Sex Olympia 2009 is comprised of the following events. Full event details and judging criterium will be provided to athletes after entry registration.

Participants are judged on technique, creativity and statistical measurements where relevant.

Sex Olympia 2009 will also involve a variety of entertainment events including heaps of demonstration sports including Air Sex (like Air Guitar), Sex Chess, Pole Dancing, Hypnotic Sex and many more. The Opening and Closing Ceremonies will defintely be highlights worth waiting for! Details to follow!

The list of events is well worth reading.

This is the only presidential campaign ad I’ll run. It’s a comprehensive yet brief look at what Obama plans to do to start healing this country. In this video, Obama doesn’t go into depth about his agenda. He leaves some questions unanswered. But I think the overall path he wants to follow is sound. I believe he has a firmer grasp on not only the reality of the issues facing us but a more realistic plan for moving us forward.

Vote Obama/Biden to start healing the U.S. and No on Proposition 8 to assure equal rights in California.

He may be dead, but Carlin will always live on in every deviant, every oddball, every outsider who is aware of their otherness. Here’s a good example of why that is; Carlin and the equally outlandish Chris Rock.

Happy Coming Out Day all my fellow deviants.

May this day be bright for you, and the rest of your life enjoyable and long.