Bueller...Bueller...

In a political climate filled with aged rhetoric and boisterous hyperbole, it's difficult to get any real dialogue started. It seems to be either "You believe in what I believe in, let's just spend an hour agreeing with each other," and if you're not in a verbal circle jerk, it's "You don't believe in what I believe, you're an idiot lefty libtard/backwards conservative racist."

I see it every day on my Facebook friends feed: a friend's mom posts stupid shit like this:

I'm not agreeing, by the way...

Well, North Korea is an isolationist dictatorship who is on the verge of collapse and is the technological equivalent of 1982; where people who speak out against the government are also given hard labor. Afghanistan is a country with a fairly strict religion-based legal system and if you were to dress how you do here (jeans, sweater, nothing racy, mind you), you could easily be imprisoned. Yet, these are the two choices you offer for options on how to deal with illegal immigration?

This is, of course, ignoring the idea that once someone enters (or stays in) the US illegally, they are handed a packet including their new address, some food stamps, an insurance card and a diploma. It's all so fucking ridiculous, but the constant spreading of this kind of inane garbage detracts from starting any kind of real dialogue because it sets up a false idea of what's actually going on and now instead of "So, how can we deal with the issue of people entering the country illegally," we are now greeted with "How do we stop the illegals from taking my money!"

Then there are my lefty friends, so assured that their intelligence is above everyone else, and so easily amused at their own superiority. There's an industry colleague, one I respect a great deal, who is one of the worst offenders in replacing "idiot" with "Republican" any chance he can, posting things like this:

So, in Political News... Republicans admit to the existence of meteors.

In Religious News... Christians believe God is behind those meteors.

In Real Life... People shake their heads.

I don't know of anyone, Republican or otherwise, that has denied the existence of meteors. Christians, well, any religious members who believe in a single deity, believe that God is behind everything, so that's not news, either. The last line stood out to me because of the innuendo that if your are Republican or Christian, you do not live in the real world. Granted, the bravado of most highly-conservative Republican politicians can be astoundingly ridiculous, that does not mean that nearly 50% of the country is not living in the real world.

Now, I am also not religious at all, but I think that ridiculing those who find solace in religion is rude, just as it's rude to utilize a religion to further an agenda or validate some dick move like voting against gay marriage. "Well, Jesus once told Noah that queers ain't allowed to get married because my fifth marriage won't be as sacrosanct." (Looking at you, Rush Limbaugh.)

Allowing gay marriage, I've always thought, should be a Republican attitude, in line with the "smaller government" style the party advocates, though it has been the opposite, with many Republican figures saying that they can't handle the thought of a gay couple getting the same rights as them. So imagine my surprise when I find out that a group of 75 influential Republican political figures sends the Supreme Court a letter saying "You know what, if it helps, we thing gays should get married because it's none of our Goddamned business who gets married." This is significant for several reasons, one: the world didn't explode. Two: it is a letter from Republicans that is solely based on government, separating the church from the state themselves. This was a group of people, including (GASP!) a gay Republican who stood together and said, rightly so, that it's not the government's job to get between two people in love. I am sure that some of them have deep qualms about gay marriage, and wouldn't want one to happen at their church, but that's the freedom of religion for you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/us/politics/prominent-republicans-sign-brief-in-support-of-gay-marriage.html?pagewanted=all&_r=3&

How no one is talking about this was beyond me, until I started thinking about it. No one wants to admit that the other side can do a damned thing right. Obama makes the final call about offing Osama Bin Laden, the cause of one of the greatest military actions this country's undertaken, and a lot of conservatives say "Well, Obama didn't do it, it was the Navy Seals." Well, of course the Seals carried out the mission, and good for them. But, an innocent kid is killed in a drone strike and it's "GODDAMMIT, OBAMA," as if Obama himself sat there with his XBox headseat and sweet joystick controller, operating the drone himself like he was playing a videogame.

Well, fuck you, this is one of the coolest things I've seen out of the Republican Party, and I'm glad that the people who signed this letter have done so. They've done this right, and good for them.

In Which Common Sense Exits Stage Right.

Is your embryo registered?

One of my biggest pet peeves is hypocrisy, i.e. someone who posts on Facebook about how stupid someone else is, maximizing the spelling/grammar errors or the Catholic Church being a beacon of moral fortitude when they hide child sex abuse cases. Well, here's a bit of hypocrisy from some Arizona Republican Senators: they want to track your embryos. Ladies and gentlemen, think about that for a second: THEY. WANT. TO. TRACK. YOUR. EMBRYOS. That's right, your unborn child. The miracle of life that may be INSIDE you, INSIDE of your wife, INSIDE your girlfriend, INSIDE your sister, INSIDE your mother. You've got to be fucking kidding me. But, here it is:

The proposed legislation, (SB 1376), was written by the Center for Arizona Policy (CAP), which bills itself as “Arizona’s leading pro-life, pro-family organization.” CAP pushes anti-choice legislation (including legislation to confer the full rights of personhood on fertilized eggs), opposes gay marriage, and seeks to promote “religious freedom.”

I don't think that they understand that you CAN NOT promote "religious freedom" when, in denying marriage to a group of people on, let's face it, religious views, you are denying someone's religious freedoms. If you want to be pro-life, great, don't get an abortion. Awesome for you. Don't push that shit on anyone else. How do you have the time to care so much about what someone else wants to do with their fucking lives, especially when they are lived in a way that doesn't fucking concern you?

CAP also opposes the practice of assisted reproductive technology for couples or individuals struggling with infertility, and so their answer is to pry into the lives of those seeking such assistance and making all details of their medical treatment public. Similar to portions of SB 1361, another bill from the 2012 legislative session, this newer bill seeks to capture and make publicly available information on the disposition of every embryo created in the process of in-vitro fertilization, and the results of every treatment involving ART.  The information required is largely redundant to the statistics and information submitted to the CDC, most of which is publicly available.

So, the idea here is to track fertilized eggs and the resulting embryos to make sure that no one is getting an abortion, specifically those created through in-vitro or other Assisted Reproductive Technology. Lord help the woman who has a miscarriage, who now not only has to deal with the heartbreak of losing a child that they wanted, but now some asshat calls her up and says "Hey, could I get the doctor's note that says it was a miscarriage, otherwise we're gonna think you had an abortion and are going to charge you and the doctor as the little fucking criminals that you are." Awesome.

Now, on top of this lunacy, I have to wonder how the nine Republican senators who are co-sponsoring this bill claim to want less government interference in people's lives when they are introducing a bill that literally puts the government inside a woman's womb. HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE?! Right, it doesn't. It make no fucking sense. Look:

"I'm an asshat at CAP, and I am pro-life. I worry about abortions. Who should I target to make sure that they don't get abortions? Is it high schoolers, students whom we could hit with education on how to protect themselves from STDs and unwanted pregnancies? No, that's too logical. Is it low-income, poorly educated individuals whose multiple children are often the result of lack of access to birth control and then are often recipients of the government aid I hate so much? Nope, I'd have nothing left to bitch about. I GOT IT! Let me target the women who want a baby so badly that they see a medical specialist. Women who have had problems conceiving, who are at higher risks of miscarriage, but are determined to have a baby. I'll fuck with them for a little bit, get their fetus all regulated-like. THAT WILL SHOW GOD HOW MUCH I LOVE BABIES!"

It makes no fucking sense.
 Original Article (with title changed for emphasis): AZ Conservatives are fucking insane.