Gayle Sulik addresses why our current breast cancer culture is failing women. Health care reform is threatened in federal court, and anti-gay hate groups don’t like being called hate groups. But they still say hateful things!

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Links in this episode:

Colbert praises Cantor for his artistic censorship

Health care reform threatened?

Rachel Maddow and Dahlia Lithwick on health care reform

Cuccinelli grandstands

How one becomes a hate group

FRC engages in hate speech while claiming not a hate group

Seriously, they’re hate groups

Here’s some truth

And more

Choral version of the “Bed Intruder” song

On this episode of Reality Cast, Gayle Sulik will be on to discuss the problems with the sea of pink ribbons that are supposed to save us all from breast cancer.  Also, health care reform starts to hit some hurdles, and right wing groups that are labeled as hate groups revolt.  But the evidence shows they are hate groups.

Last week I discussed an assault on AIDS-related art at the Smithsonian.  Some conservative politicians are grand-standing on the issue, and Stephen Colbert made fun of them.

• Colbert *

He goes on at length, and the best part is that it all actually makes sense.

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Anyone who thought that health care reform was a done deal is someone who pays no attention to American politics, where even child labor laws can be contested in grumpy tones, and where you occasionally hear conservatives grousing about women having the right to vote. Oh yeah, and Social Security is always being threatened.  Few things are ever put completely beyond the wall of not being up for discussion.  And so the health care bill may have passed in to law, but the battle has just begun in many ways.

There was a recent and interesting set back, albeit one that was quite expected.

• health 1 *

Calm down, Diane Sawyer!  It’s not nearly as exciting as she’s making it out to sound.  The attorney general of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, deliberately sought out Judge Henry Hudson, because he’s super conservative and a reliable right winger.  On top of that, the only aspect of the vast bill that’s under scrutiny is the individual mandate, which requires you to buy insurance or pay a tax penalty to the IRS.  That part could be overturned, leaving the rest of health care reform intact. 

Rachel Maddow brought Dahlia Lithwick on to talk about the implications. 

• health 2 *

I don’t want to be a Pollyanna about this.  There’s always a possibility that this could be curtains for health care reform.  But my feeling right now is that this lawsuit and ruling are going to mostly be symbolic, a way for health care opponents to suggest their arguments are legitimate.  And the important thing for them is to be able to grouse more than actually change the law, especially since the law has goodies for voters and insurance companies. Specifically, I think that Cuccinelli is about 99% in this to grand stand, even though it’s not going to come to much.  

• health 3 *

This entire speech is just silly.  For one thing, the individual mandate actually isn’t the use of force.   You cannot go to jail for not having health insurance, unlike car insurance, which you can go to jail for not owning.  It’s just a tax penalty, and you’re well within your rights to say that you’d rather pay more in taxes than pay for insurance.  Second of all, there’s the slippery slope fallacy.  Individual mandates are common in other countries with universal health care, and no one requires you to buy asparagus.  But I do like the Cuccinelli’s idea of a horrible world is one where people eat their greens.

This is just one example of how the new Republican majority is going to grand stand on health care reform.  Rep. Steve King was on about attacking it from the legislative stance.

• health 4 *

So in other words, they’re going to spend time basically grandstanding some more.  And they’ll probably do this for a few more years, until health care reform really starts to become an integral part of people’s lives.  And then campaigning heavily against it will start to make people dislike you.  So they’ll back off this talk of repeal and instead have their think tanks work on ways to reframe repeal so that people think it’s not going to be repeal.  You know, like they did with Social Security.  Hopefully, like with Social Security, health care reform will only grow stronger with time and gain inertia that makes repeal impossible.

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insert interview

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So there’s an interesting controversy of sorts broiling, now that the Southern Poverty Law Center has declared many anti-gay groups to be hate groups.  Since overt anti-gay bigotry is mainstream in a way that overt racism isn’t, this has caused some confusion.  People have trouble believing, for instance, that you can be in a hate group and testify in front of Congress.  But this is true of Tony Perkins of the Family Research Institute.  We shouldn’t be surprised, actually.  In the 1920s, it was common for Ku Klux Klan members to be in mainstream politics.  We just haven’t, as a society, gotten to the point where anti-gay bigotry is universally condemned to the point where it goes completely underground.

Mark Potok of SPLC went on the David Pakman show to explain why the Family Research Institute is a hate group.  I think their definition is very conservative, in the sense that you have to be pretty overtly hateful to get on it.  Burying your hate, as anti-choicers do, under rhetoric that sounds nicer is often enough to get you off the list.

• hate 1 *

Right Wing Watch has been monitoring the reaction to this announcement very carefully.  As you can imagine, pro-homobigtory activists are not happy with the SPLC’s decision.  But what’s funny is that Tony Perkins and Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council talk about gay people in exactly the same way that you’d find anti-Semitic groups talking about Jews.

• hate 2 *

The notion that there’s a secret cabal of people that are infiltrating and taking over society in an organized fashion?  That’s the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, right there.  The funniest part is that these two were screeching about how unfair it is to be called a hate group on this very same episode, but they prove the accuracy of the designation right there.  They’re also rebundling the same old lies about gay people that the bigots have always trotted out. 

• hate 3 *

Did you catch that?  The evidence for his assertion that there’s a connection between homosexuality and pedophilia is a bunch of so-called peer reviewed research.  And by “peer”,  he means he made a bunch of stuff up and then had his friends read it.  It’s not the actual peer review you or I would understand as peer review. And just the other day I noted on Twitter that Tony Perkins spends his free time kicking puppies.  My friends read that, so now it’s a peer-reviewed fact.  See how that works?

But what they’re really doing here is basically repackaging the old assertion that gays recruit children, and trying to dress it up in language that says that without saying it.  Also, they only seem to think sexual assault of children is a problem insofar as dudes are seeing wieners, as Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality makes clear.

• hate 4 *

It’s truly fascinating that he feels that the level of boys being molested is the real problem, but seems just fine with the level of girls being molested, as long as they’re being molested by men.  Or maybe he’s implying that child molestation tends to have more male than female victims, so he can pin this one on gay men.  In reality, pre-pubescent girls are twice as likely as pre-pubescent boys to be sexually assaulted.  Also, research into the sexual orientation of people who assault children has shown that most are oriented solely towards children, but the second highest group were people who had heterosexual relationships with adults.  Bisexuals came next, and homosexuals were the tiniest fraction of people who molested children.  In the post-pubescent minor population, again girls are far more likely to be victims.  In fact, girls 16-19 are four more times likely to be sexually assaulted than the general population.

My feeling on this is that these folks are indeed professional bigots and should be classified as such.  Their accusations about gay men are lies, and they seem to be especially obsessed with gay men, probably because what really offends them is the idea that someone male might actually be treated like a sex object, something they would reserve only for women and girls.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, now things have gotten really grotesque edition.  Choir singers for the conservative Christian Liberty University decided it would be just awesome to do a choral version of  the Antoine Dodson video that was turned into a song that spread like wildfire because people thought it was just so hilarious that this man was agitated because someone tried to rape his sister.

• wtf *

The one good aspect is that conservative enthusiasm for making fun of a man who saved his sister from being raped has clarified why there’s something deeply screwed up about the popularity of this video.