This Week in WTF: People Suck

The news has been pretty same-old-same-old lately. You could turn on the 24-hours news networks and expect to hear something like “Blah blah blah, Romney campaigning, blah, blah blah, Obama explaining, blah blah blah, no knows what the fuck is going to happen with the economy.” OK, maybe no one came right out and admitted that the economy is a mystery but they totally should, don’t you think?

Then this week we got hit with a trifecta of crazy ass shit. Which is good for bloggers like me but is probably evidence that humanity is doomed.

First, it turns out that FOXNews’ Sean Hannity has a crazy friend. Not the good kind of crazy friend who will call you from their car, parked in your driveway, saying “Out of the house, bitch! Saks is having a shoe sale and we’re gonna go get drunk and try on Jimmy Choos and post pictures on Twitter!”. No, Mr. Hannity associates with a pastor who does not think women should have ever been given the right to vote.

I’ll let that sink in…OK, now please take a deep breath before your head explodes on the screen.

Apparently Jesse Lee Peterson, a conservative pastor and regular guest on Sean Hannity’s show, said this in a sermon recently:

“I think that one of the greatest mistakes America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote,” Peterson said to his congregants in the 12-minute video. “We should have never turned that over to women. There are more women out there voting than men now … and these women are voting in the wrong people. They are voting in people who are evil, who agree with them, who are going to take us down this pathway of destruction.”

I certainly hope if Mr. Hannity ever runs for office, his opponents make as big a deal out of this as Obama’s detractors made of Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

For my own sanity, I’m going to assume that Reverend Peterson is an outlier and there isn’t a cadre of would-be 19th Amendment Repealers out there. If it turns out that he’s part of a vanguard of assholes who wants to deny women Constitutional rights, I will be first in line to shut that shit down.

Next, we have one of those rare moments where I find myself nostalgic for John McCain. Remember when a lady at one of his events said Obama wasn’t American and McCain corrected her? That was honorable and honest. Mitt Romney exhibited none of that honor or honesty recently when a woman at one of his rallies said Obama should be tried for treason.

“We have a president right now that is operating outside the structure of our Constitution,” the audience member said to applause. “And I want to know — yeah, I do agree he should be tried for treason — but I want to know what you would be able to do to restore balance between the three branches of government and what you are going to be able to do to restore our Constitution in this country.”

Mr. Romney answered with some pablum about the Constitution and later brushed it off when questioned on the rope line by a New York Times reporter, saying he didn’t agree about the treason stuff.

Me? I disagree about the letting-the-accusations-of-treason-go stuff. This happened with Bush and Cheney too and it pissed me off then as well. Here’s the deal: treason is taking action to overthrown the government and is a capital offense. Presidents have not been doing that. They have been doing something else, instead. It’s called Doing Shit That You Might Not Like Much. That’s not illegal. Accusations of treason are needlessly inflammatory and usually just demonstrate the speaker’s utter ignorance about how government works, not to mention a failure to learn basic vocabulary because they clearly have no idea what treason actually is.

In the future, if anyone ever hears someone accuse a politician of treason, the immediate response should be to ask them to define treason. If they can’t do it, the conversation is over.

Finally, last night, North Carolinians passed an amendment to their state constitution defining marriage as between one man and one women. The amendment dulpicates existing law also refuses recognition of other non-marital unions, even between straight people.

This makes me want to cry. What could drive a person to affirm, in the strongest possible way, that there is a segment of the population that they feel is lesser than they are and therefore, they are willing – nay, eager – to block them from a legally recognized marriage? It’s senseless bigotry born of a voyeuristic interest in they way others have sex and it’s, frankly, disgusting. Anti-gay forces can quote the Bible and ramble about sins until they’re blue in the face but until the day they start crusading to withhold rights from other sinners like adulterers, thieves, murderers, fornicators, and people who covet their neighbor’s goods, I’m calling bullshit. They hate the idea of gay sex and they’re not mature enough to deal with their feelings so they’re punishing gay people.

If you’re gay, and live in North Carolina, I would like to formally invite you to relocate to Maryland. It’s lovely here, the schools are very good, we have world-class arts and cultural attractions, and we made same sex marriage legal recently. This is a nice place to settle, raise a family, maybe start a business if that’s your thing, and live your life without a constitution that says your relationships don’t matter.

Now I certainly hope this spate of crazy is over because I simply can’t take more douchebaggery right now. To counteract all of this, I’m going to do a little good in the world by joining my pals at Rants from Mommyland in putting together Mothers Day packages for women in local shelters. If you want to find out more about this or their project to collect clean birth kits for moms in developing nations, check out the Mother Pucker Project.