Many of the evangelical pastors who denounce Pride flags in classrooms and Ms. Rachel are celebrating the possibility of a government-sponsored snuff film
I have read about people in the Reconstructionist and Dominionest movements who called for roughly half the people in America to be put to death because it would be so pleasing to their loving Jesus. Churches did not stop burning people alive because they realized it was wrong. They stopped when the rise in secular government forced them to. America's evangelical churches are no place to go in search of human decency.
This isn't just red meat for a bunch of right-wing Christian assholes. It is prime recruiting material for every Islamic group that hates the United States, wants to point to us, and say this is what the supposedly advanced country is doing. On top of everything else, it clearly makes Nadal Malik Hasan a martyr, and that is plenty of grist for their mill as it is.
It would be lovely if Trump would recognize the potential blowback and consequences of live streaming an execution. Unfortunately, I'm not certain he's that smart.
I would wager that some of them want to make Hasan into a martyr. That would give them an excuse to expand the Iran war into the larger Middle East. They want to do it soon, too, while their guy has his finger on the nuclear trigger.
I’m leaving on a trip today, so I don’t have much time to write.. so I will post what I posted a few days ago over at endless urgency. So I will see you all in a few days when I am happily settled in a country where you need two tickets to get on an excellent train system, some of the time, but not all of the time, but they won’t tell you which. Otherwise you need no tickets, but you do have to have a special card that you can’t get until you get to the country, unless you can, but maybe not.
——————-
Hegseth is an evangelical Christian. Start there. Now, before anybody gets their cassock in a bunch, I’m going to say that I don’t believe All evangelicals are power hungry, money hungry, bloodlusty jackals. But I think there is a significant proportion of them that qualify..
I’m an old gay man. I was a young gay man in the 80s when AIDS hit. What I heard consistently while I was watching my friends die horrible deaths—beautiful young men with good souls and good hearts— including the men I loved and a good many of my friends…
What I heard coming from evangelicals was that they were disgusting, horrible people, who were getting exactly what they deserved. they seemed positively gleeful at the suffering, and that their God of love was causing it. I remember certain evangelical’s posting pictures of dying men, their bodies wasted by disease— saying it was God’s judgment for their sinful lifestyle and the disgusting things that they did, which those same evangelicals love to describe in loving, embroidered detail. You’d almost think they were getting off on it.
When my partner was dying for AIDS, his loving Baptist family was nowhere to be seen. After he died, his sister told me that he got what he deserved. She told me, “you better leave that lifestyle before the same thing happens to you.” knowing quite a bit of her history from my partner, I replied that if God was busy handing out venereal diseases as a punishment for sins, she and her daughter both would be first in line at the VD clinic the next morning.
For the 55 years that I’ve been out, I have listened to evangelicals and conservative Catholics blame gay men for the sexual abuse crisis in the churches, and the rampant sexual abuse in our pure society— abuse we gay men were not doing. I have heard them call good people threats to everything good and holy: families, children, morality, heterosexuality, faith, freedom, marriage, and western civilization itself, such as it is…
All the while excusing and covering up the sexual abuse that was rampant in the churches – for years, decades, and in the case of the Catholic Church, centuries.
For the last 10 years, I have listened to them demonize transgender people and gender dysphoric people with the worst sorts of lies, reviling, and slander. I’ve listened to the president of the United States say stupid crap like “transgender for everyone”, indoctrinating children into a transgender lifestyle, and saying idiotic things like children go to school in the morning and come back the opposite sex in the afternoon.
And those good moral evangelicals just eat it up, and continue to support the most immoral, corrupt, adulterous, fornicating, self proclaimed sexual assaulter and adjudicated rapist. They are virtually silent on the murder of Palestinians, Iranian schoolgirls and fisherman. And all the while, they tell us that they represent the forces of morality and goodness.
So, as I said, Hegseth is an evangelical. I’ve seen the bloodlust of God’s gentle people, furious about abortion but overwhelmingly supporting capital punishment. I’ve seen them justify the murder of American citizens. Hegseth’s pastor wants the state to murder gay people. He has said as much. As far as I can tell, the further right they are, the more into dominance, domination, and bloodlust.
So why would you expect anything different from Hegseth?
Thanks. I’m only there for two weeks, and the first day or so is going to be challenging. But I’m traveling while I can because I’m not getting any younger.
So they see no hypocrisy in demanding women carry pregnancies to term in the name of life while starting and cheering on wars, encouraging the State to murder people, refusing refugees, cutting medical and food assistance to the poor, and sending immigrants to places where they will face violence, torture, and death.
Because it's power. Power to control others. Power to dominate. Power to coerce others to obedience.
They love the idea of Hell for the same reason. They are small, weak men posturing as alpha dogs and doing everything they can to avoid losing power and having to face their own smallness, weakness, and irrelevancy.
I don't know if the Jesus of the gospels is anything like what Jesus of Nazareth would have been like, but I cannot imagine that a man whose life was cut short publicly by an unjust execution because he wanted his people to be free of domination would cheer on the public execution of others by the same kind of Imperial system.
They’ve never been pro-life, but pro that they get to decide who lives and who dies. They would never cheer on a public execution of someone who looks like Timothy McVeigh.
PS: I also don’t believe in the death penalty more broadly so…what a sick society we live in. It’s so far gone.
Further Thought: A little something I wrote not long after Nidal Malik Hasan's trial:
Not quite four years ago, I learned of the incident with Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood. I naturally wondered at the time how an Army officer could turn against his own and what motivated Hasan to do what he did. As the discovery process and the trial unfolded, I learned, about Anwar al-Awlaki and Hasan’s communications with him, about Hasan’s radicalization, at least in part from that association and his decision to become a jihadi agent against his own country.
Initially I was somewhat surprised at Hasan’s behavior during the trial: representing himself, his near lack of any meaningful opening statement, a total absence of defense and closing statement. Then it became clear – Hasan was falling on his sword. He wanted to lose the trial, wanted to be found guilty, and while the decision hasn’t been reached yet, there is no doubt in my mind but that he wants the death penalty levied against him. Nidal Malik Hasan wants to be a martyr.
He may get his wish, too. The evidence against him is overwhelming, I seriously doubt he’s shown the least bit of remorse or contrition, and those in the US Army, the wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters of the victims will very likely demand the death penalty for Hasan, on the basis of their losses and the heinousness of the crime. They want blood for blood and they are hardly to be blamed. The problem is that they’re playing directly into his hands. They are giving him precisely what he wants: to be a martyr for his cause.
It is for that reason that under no circumstances should Nidal Malik Hasan get the death penalty. His punishment should be life imprisonment, with absolutely no chance of parole. Rather than having his way, rather than being able to take the easy way out, the coward’s way out, he should be forced to live out his life, confronted each day with the people he plotted against, placed in a situation where he is utterly impotent and powerless against them, and forced to live a long life in that confrontation. For Hasan, living is a far worse punishment than death, and it is the utter antithesis of his aspiration to die the martyr’s death.
I realize this goes against the instinct of those who have had to face the dreadful harm Hasan has brought – those who lost loved ones, comrades and companions. I fully understand and respect their desire to see the same fate meted out to him as he arrogantly delivered to those they lost. In this case, though, there is a fate worse than death – the fate of having to live with what you’ve done and face that day after day, helplessly, and in the very hands of those he sought to undo.
Do not give Nidal Malik Hasan what he wants. Give him what he deserves.
Kind of ironic that they are doing this at a time when some really incredible candidates running for office (who happen to be Muslim) are extremely popular and beloved by the people.
Plus, there's plenty of people who'd rather die than spend a lifetime in prison (In a sense, the death penalty isn't even a "penalty," at least for some people).
And, perhaps most ironic of all, the so-called "big-business party" — the one that's always screaming about how fiscally irresponsible things like child care and homeless shelters are — blithely ignores the fact that it costs the state governments 4-5 times as much for each execution as it would have for life imprisonment.
And, further irony, these are usually the same people always bitching about how you can't trust the government to get anything right, so sure, let's have it do something completely irreversible when it comes to justice.
Thirty-five years (and change) ago, I was deployed to Desert Storm. At one point early in the war, a few of us were on a buying mission in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (computer repair parts and such). We were invited by one of the vendors we visited to attend a public execution. We, of course, politely declined - couldn't have US servicemembers in uniform attending such a thing as it would look like the US government supported such actions.
A former TV personality who's way more into appearances and acquiescence than ability, achievement, and appropriate conduct — yup, the perfect guy to head up a military machine that's more powerful than the next 8 armies in the world combined.
Jeffress is the poster child of cognitive dissonance: The buy-bull commands public executions to show the sanctity of life. Which only goes to show that none of us should be taking moral lessons from Iron Age cretins and their modern counterparts.
The buy-bull has been used to prop up every atrocity ever committed by man. If you want morality, throw that thing away.
The firing squad is being televised to make gunshot death look not so bad. If his heart is hit his blood pressure will drop to zero and the bleeding will be minimal. just holes. He is Middle Eastern looking. But probably not Muslim or they would broadcast that. Probably a natural born US citizen or they would broadcast that he's an immigrant. If he was atheist they would broadcast that.
They are normalizing killing your neighbor by making it look less messy than TV and Hollywood make it. Just fill them full of holes and they fall down. Turn their other cheeks, not your own. They would never do this if he was a typical looking white American male.
Further confirmation (as if we needed any) that they aren't really pro-life like they say. They are pro-conformity, pro-control, and pro white supremacy.
I get the feeling that the execution is far more about Hasan's religious beliefs and level of melanin than about the crime he was convicted of. Someone should ask them that if Timothy McVeigh's execution could have been livestreamed, would they have pushed for it?
I have read about people in the Reconstructionist and Dominionest movements who called for roughly half the people in America to be put to death because it would be so pleasing to their loving Jesus. Churches did not stop burning people alive because they realized it was wrong. They stopped when the rise in secular government forced them to. America's evangelical churches are no place to go in search of human decency.
This isn't just red meat for a bunch of right-wing Christian assholes. It is prime recruiting material for every Islamic group that hates the United States, wants to point to us, and say this is what the supposedly advanced country is doing. On top of everything else, it clearly makes Nadal Malik Hasan a martyr, and that is plenty of grist for their mill as it is.
It would be lovely if Trump would recognize the potential blowback and consequences of live streaming an execution. Unfortunately, I'm not certain he's that smart.
I am certain he is NOT that smart. that's why THEY put him there.
I would wager that some of them want to make Hasan into a martyr. That would give them an excuse to expand the Iran war into the larger Middle East. They want to do it soon, too, while their guy has his finger on the nuclear trigger.
They want terrorists to increase so they can increase the budget for the dept of war. It's kind of like a fundraising event for the warwhore hegseth.
Don't forget at least some of the evangelicals want to bring on the End Times™ so Jebus can come and destroy all the people they hate.
Yep, they are all “end times” fascists. The Christian Nationalists, the Tech-bros..
Slavery is in the bible so, therefore, we should still have slavery,
I only need two. And I promise I'll be a kind, benevolent slave-driver.
I’m leaving on a trip today, so I don’t have much time to write.. so I will post what I posted a few days ago over at endless urgency. So I will see you all in a few days when I am happily settled in a country where you need two tickets to get on an excellent train system, some of the time, but not all of the time, but they won’t tell you which. Otherwise you need no tickets, but you do have to have a special card that you can’t get until you get to the country, unless you can, but maybe not.
——————-
Hegseth is an evangelical Christian. Start there. Now, before anybody gets their cassock in a bunch, I’m going to say that I don’t believe All evangelicals are power hungry, money hungry, bloodlusty jackals. But I think there is a significant proportion of them that qualify..
I’m an old gay man. I was a young gay man in the 80s when AIDS hit. What I heard consistently while I was watching my friends die horrible deaths—beautiful young men with good souls and good hearts— including the men I loved and a good many of my friends…
What I heard coming from evangelicals was that they were disgusting, horrible people, who were getting exactly what they deserved. they seemed positively gleeful at the suffering, and that their God of love was causing it. I remember certain evangelical’s posting pictures of dying men, their bodies wasted by disease— saying it was God’s judgment for their sinful lifestyle and the disgusting things that they did, which those same evangelicals love to describe in loving, embroidered detail. You’d almost think they were getting off on it.
When my partner was dying for AIDS, his loving Baptist family was nowhere to be seen. After he died, his sister told me that he got what he deserved. She told me, “you better leave that lifestyle before the same thing happens to you.” knowing quite a bit of her history from my partner, I replied that if God was busy handing out venereal diseases as a punishment for sins, she and her daughter both would be first in line at the VD clinic the next morning.
For the 55 years that I’ve been out, I have listened to evangelicals and conservative Catholics blame gay men for the sexual abuse crisis in the churches, and the rampant sexual abuse in our pure society— abuse we gay men were not doing. I have heard them call good people threats to everything good and holy: families, children, morality, heterosexuality, faith, freedom, marriage, and western civilization itself, such as it is…
All the while excusing and covering up the sexual abuse that was rampant in the churches – for years, decades, and in the case of the Catholic Church, centuries.
For the last 10 years, I have listened to them demonize transgender people and gender dysphoric people with the worst sorts of lies, reviling, and slander. I’ve listened to the president of the United States say stupid crap like “transgender for everyone”, indoctrinating children into a transgender lifestyle, and saying idiotic things like children go to school in the morning and come back the opposite sex in the afternoon.
And those good moral evangelicals just eat it up, and continue to support the most immoral, corrupt, adulterous, fornicating, self proclaimed sexual assaulter and adjudicated rapist. They are virtually silent on the murder of Palestinians, Iranian schoolgirls and fisherman. And all the while, they tell us that they represent the forces of morality and goodness.
So, as I said, Hegseth is an evangelical. I’ve seen the bloodlust of God’s gentle people, furious about abortion but overwhelmingly supporting capital punishment. I’ve seen them justify the murder of American citizens. Hegseth’s pastor wants the state to murder gay people. He has said as much. As far as I can tell, the further right they are, the more into dominance, domination, and bloodlust.
So why would you expect anything different from Hegseth?
Thanks for your insights, Ben. I hope that happiness awaits you in your new locale.
Thanks. I’m only there for two weeks, and the first day or so is going to be challenging. But I’m traveling while I can because I’m not getting any younger.
Safe travels!
Very well stated! You take care, and thank you.
What they worship is power.
So they see no hypocrisy in demanding women carry pregnancies to term in the name of life while starting and cheering on wars, encouraging the State to murder people, refusing refugees, cutting medical and food assistance to the poor, and sending immigrants to places where they will face violence, torture, and death.
Because it's power. Power to control others. Power to dominate. Power to coerce others to obedience.
They love the idea of Hell for the same reason. They are small, weak men posturing as alpha dogs and doing everything they can to avoid losing power and having to face their own smallness, weakness, and irrelevancy.
I don't know if the Jesus of the gospels is anything like what Jesus of Nazareth would have been like, but I cannot imagine that a man whose life was cut short publicly by an unjust execution because he wanted his people to be free of domination would cheer on the public execution of others by the same kind of Imperial system.
Power and money.
All the crap in the bible was written by man.
They’ve never been pro-life, but pro that they get to decide who lives and who dies. They would never cheer on a public execution of someone who looks like Timothy McVeigh.
PS: I also don’t believe in the death penalty more broadly so…what a sick society we live in. It’s so far gone.
Further Thought: A little something I wrote not long after Nidal Malik Hasan's trial:
Not quite four years ago, I learned of the incident with Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood. I naturally wondered at the time how an Army officer could turn against his own and what motivated Hasan to do what he did. As the discovery process and the trial unfolded, I learned, about Anwar al-Awlaki and Hasan’s communications with him, about Hasan’s radicalization, at least in part from that association and his decision to become a jihadi agent against his own country.
Initially I was somewhat surprised at Hasan’s behavior during the trial: representing himself, his near lack of any meaningful opening statement, a total absence of defense and closing statement. Then it became clear – Hasan was falling on his sword. He wanted to lose the trial, wanted to be found guilty, and while the decision hasn’t been reached yet, there is no doubt in my mind but that he wants the death penalty levied against him. Nidal Malik Hasan wants to be a martyr.
He may get his wish, too. The evidence against him is overwhelming, I seriously doubt he’s shown the least bit of remorse or contrition, and those in the US Army, the wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters of the victims will very likely demand the death penalty for Hasan, on the basis of their losses and the heinousness of the crime. They want blood for blood and they are hardly to be blamed. The problem is that they’re playing directly into his hands. They are giving him precisely what he wants: to be a martyr for his cause.
It is for that reason that under no circumstances should Nidal Malik Hasan get the death penalty. His punishment should be life imprisonment, with absolutely no chance of parole. Rather than having his way, rather than being able to take the easy way out, the coward’s way out, he should be forced to live out his life, confronted each day with the people he plotted against, placed in a situation where he is utterly impotent and powerless against them, and forced to live a long life in that confrontation. For Hasan, living is a far worse punishment than death, and it is the utter antithesis of his aspiration to die the martyr’s death.
I realize this goes against the instinct of those who have had to face the dreadful harm Hasan has brought – those who lost loved ones, comrades and companions. I fully understand and respect their desire to see the same fate meted out to him as he arrogantly delivered to those they lost. In this case, though, there is a fate worse than death – the fate of having to live with what you’ve done and face that day after day, helplessly, and in the very hands of those he sought to undo.
Do not give Nidal Malik Hasan what he wants. Give him what he deserves.
Kind of ironic that they are doing this at a time when some really incredible candidates running for office (who happen to be Muslim) are extremely popular and beloved by the people.
A very simple question must be asked: Why do we kill people who kill people to prove that killing people is wrong?
The death penalty is anathema.
Plus, there's plenty of people who'd rather die than spend a lifetime in prison (In a sense, the death penalty isn't even a "penalty," at least for some people).
And, perhaps most ironic of all, the so-called "big-business party" — the one that's always screaming about how fiscally irresponsible things like child care and homeless shelters are — blithely ignores the fact that it costs the state governments 4-5 times as much for each execution as it would have for life imprisonment.
And, further irony, these are usually the same people always bitching about how you can't trust the government to get anything right, so sure, let's have it do something completely irreversible when it comes to justice.
It's also been demonstrably proven that it is not a deterrent. Unfortunately, the death penalty is a little more than catering to public bloodlust.
Thirty-five years (and change) ago, I was deployed to Desert Storm. At one point early in the war, a few of us were on a buying mission in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (computer repair parts and such). We were invited by one of the vendors we visited to attend a public execution. We, of course, politely declined - couldn't have US servicemembers in uniform attending such a thing as it would look like the US government supported such actions.
How far we've fallen............
I was just reading that Saudi Arabia no longer executes people in public, since 2022.
A former TV personality who's way more into appearances and acquiescence than ability, achievement, and appropriate conduct — yup, the perfect guy to head up a military machine that's more powerful than the next 8 armies in the world combined.
FOX News isn’t sending us their best (if that’s even possible for them).
An even scarier thot is that he IS their best!
Jeffress is the poster child of cognitive dissonance: The buy-bull commands public executions to show the sanctity of life. Which only goes to show that none of us should be taking moral lessons from Iron Age cretins and their modern counterparts.
The buy-bull has been used to prop up every atrocity ever committed by man. If you want morality, throw that thing away.
The firing squad is being televised to make gunshot death look not so bad. If his heart is hit his blood pressure will drop to zero and the bleeding will be minimal. just holes. He is Middle Eastern looking. But probably not Muslim or they would broadcast that. Probably a natural born US citizen or they would broadcast that he's an immigrant. If he was atheist they would broadcast that.
They are normalizing killing your neighbor by making it look less messy than TV and Hollywood make it. Just fill them full of holes and they fall down. Turn their other cheeks, not your own. They would never do this if he was a typical looking white American male.
Kill murderers? Okay. Whisky Pete should be next then.
𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑒𝑣𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑑𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑒𝑙𝑠 𝑏𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑣𝑖𝑜𝑙𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒, 𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑠𝑡 𝑎 𝑏𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑛 𝑔𝑢𝑦 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑎 𝑀𝑢𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑚 𝑛𝑎𝑚𝑒.
Further confirmation (as if we needed any) that they aren't really pro-life like they say. They are pro-conformity, pro-control, and pro white supremacy.
I get the feeling that the execution is far more about Hasan's religious beliefs and level of melanin than about the crime he was convicted of. Someone should ask them that if Timothy McVeigh's execution could have been livestreamed, would they have pushed for it?