Hasta La Gadget!

At first glance, one can be forgiven for thinking that a floral arrangement for a gay wedding doesn’t carry much significance for the essential national security of the United States of America. With perilously increasing military tensions spanning the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, one can be absolved for making such an assumption. However, the military implications of this week’s historic decision in Washington State by Benton County Superior Court Judge Ekstrom simply canNOT be understated.

Ekstrom’s watershed decision came about when a case was brought before the Benton County Superior Court when the ownership of a small flower shop, Arlene’s Flowers, refused to provide services on the professed basis of their Southern Baptist, Christian fundamentalist zeal to a frequent customer who sought arrangements for his same-sex wedding ceremony. Judge Ekstrom struck down this reprehensibly unlawful and unconstitutional behavior when he stated, “While religious beliefs are protected by the First Amendment, actions based on those beliefs aren’t necessarily protected.” Indeed, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is NOT a license for private business owners to sanctimoniously bully, marginalize, and violate civil rights as they see fit because of their alleged “relationship with Jesus Christ” (or Allah, Jehovah, Yaweh, Odin, Shiva, Spiderman etc.). Indeed, just as it isn’t a license for anyone else to engage in whatever extremist, unlawful practice they might imagine their chosen deity to prefer.

For those of us who have been leading the civil rights fight of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), the only organization devoted solely to fighting the scourge of extremist Christianity within the U.S. Armed Forces, the story is a common one. Since the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), we saw that various Dominionist bigots within the military were pathetically prostituting the flimsy gauze of “free speech” as a means towards turning back this historic victory for sex and gender minorities (and by implication, all Americans) within the U.S. armed forces. Squealing like stuck pigs, disingenuously, that DADT’s repeal represented a grave offense against their so-called “religious liberty”, these reprehensibly homophobic Christian extremist predators created a virtual media cyclone of misinformation, disinformation, and bald-faced lies. As they say, “haters gonna hate.”

However, when the Religious Right echo chambers are filled with hot air, fire, and brimstone concerning some fictitious and utterly specious “War on Christianity,” monsters tend to proliferate, and sometimes we even find them in the hallowed halls of Congress. The Constitutionally-derelict Congressman John Fleming (R-LA) is one especially odious fundamentalist Christian monstrosity. Fleming, and other members of Congressman Randy Forbes’ (R-VA) “Congressional Prayer Caucus,” have repeatedly attempted to warp the meaning of “freedom to worship” via their grossly misnamed “Religious Liberty Amendments” to the recent years’ drafts of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) commonly referred to as “The Pentagon Funding Bill.” Fleming and Co.’s “Religious Bigotry Amendments” would have torn asunder the unit cohesion, military readiness, morale, good order, and discipline of U.S. servicemembers, adding any type of “actions and speech” (including anti-gay, theologically racist, or sectarian hate speech) to the roster of protected religious freedoms of American service members. Further still, it would offer essentially an invulnerable shield of protection for anyone who seeks to use such actions or speech to “actually harm” (i.e. grievously injure) the aforementioned compelling governmental interest of insuring maximum military unit cohesion, good order and discipline et al. At this very same time, we at MRFF stated that if these amendments were allowed to go forward, they would result in a “thoroughly dreadful nightmare of civil rights desecration wrought by a tsunami of unabated fundamentalist Christian supremacy, exceptionalism, and tyranny.”

Thankfully, the law remains the law (oh, and take a good look at the confirming, 1974 Supreme Court case of Parker vs. Levy) and the Fleming amendments failed, just like the attempts in court by Arlene’s Flowers to justify their hideously bigoted treatment of LGBTQ customers. Individuals’ religious beliefs may be protected by the First Amendment; however, those same individual’s ACTIONS, based upon those very same religious beliefs, are not necessarily likewise protected. Discerning Americans can see clearly that the actual goal of these fundamentalist Christian jackals isn’t at ALL the protection of their twisted “right to worship”. Quite on the contrary, their real intention is to furiously cast stones upon the “apostates”, the “disbelievers”, and those “aberrant” elements who diverge from the “flock” being shepherded by such vile “Good News Gospel” scoundrels as the Rev. Pat Robertson, Rev. Franklin Graham, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Boykin, Tony Perkins, and the rest of the Dominionist rogues’ gallery.

The allowance of such limitless religious oppression and villainy inside the U.S. military would be a national security threat of unparalleled dimension and magnitude.

However, the courageous decision by Washington state Judge Ekstrom was a decisive deathblow to the dastardly designs and craven mendacity of the embittered Religious Right. Perhaps it would be appropriate to send a floral arrangement as a gesture of our sincerest condolences?

Hey, I like it: Perhaps a dozen black roses to celebrate the demise of their dreams of fundamentalist religious domination of our United States Constitution?

Despite being offered the opportunity of his dreams, President Barack Obama’s former top adviser David Axelrod says he turned down working on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign because he “knew it would destroy [his] family.”

While discussing his new memoir Believer: My Forty Years in Politics on HuffPost Live, Axelrod said he feels a “sense of guilt for devoting so much time to politics” and not always being there for his wife and children. He said turning down Clinton in the early 1990s wasn’t easy, but he knew taking the job would have a negative impact on his family.

“I knew it would destroy my family. I would have to leave Chicago and have to leave my wife for an extended period of time,” Axelrod said.

The former Chicago Tribune political writer said the suicide of his father ended his career in journalism, and his daughter Lauren’s battle with epilepsy was “formative” in his life. He recalled a time that his wife found their daughter “blue and limp in the crib” and they “thought she had died.”

Axelrod told HuffPost Live the start of his career “was a painful learning process” for him and his family, and that his relationship with his wife, Susan Landau, was “very fragile at that time.” He credited his wife for her “willingness to give [him] a chance” to learn how to balance work and family life.

Watch Axelrod’s comments above, and click herefor his full HuffPost Live conversation.

The Montana state House came closer to abolishing the death penalty Monday than it has ever before, ultimately failing to pass the measure by just one vote.

According to the Montana Lee Newspapers, the House ended up deadlocked 50-50, which means the measure is likely dead for the 2015 legislative session. Although the state Senate has passed legislation ending the death penalty, the House never has.

There are currently two inmates on death row in Montana. Seventy-four people have been executed by the state in total.

State Rep. David “Doc” Moore (R), sponsor of House Bill 370, said the people on death row should instead spend their lives in prison without parole.

“And to me, personally, I couldn’t imagine a worse fate than being locked up on prison for the rest of my life,” he said, according to Montana Television Network.

Last week, outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder said he would support a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty pending a Supreme Court decision this year on the use of lethal injection drugs in Oklahoma.

“Our system of justice is the best in the world. It is comprised of men and women who do the best they can, get it right more often than not, substantially more right than wrong,” Holder said. “There’s always the possibility that mistakes will be made. … It’s for that reason that I am opposed to the death penalty.”

If you followed the Kickstarter launch of Pebble Time, you probably noticed that the smartwatch got funding very quickly. It met its $500,000 goal in just 17 minutes, and hit the magical $1 million mark in about half an hour. But are any of those rec…

As long as the internet has existed – and indeed before – there’ve been viruses. Malware – malicious software – has been a plague on the digital universe since inception, and Google hopes to help to put and end to it. With a new red flag set in place this month, Google Chrome will warn you when you’re about to … Continue reading