Please Join Me in Encouraging Tom Coburn to Get Up Off His Inexplicably Anchored Ass

Lesson one: nobody gets shit done like Oprah. She has mobilized her hundreds of thousands of viewers to push the Senate to bring SB 1738 (the Protect Our Children Act) to a floor vote, where enough bipartisan support is already lined up to pass it and provide a billion dollars of funding for law enforcement dedicated to prosecuting the subhuman assholes who rape little kids and circulate the resulting video and photos around on the internet. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? I mean, who could be against protecting children from the most hideous abuse you can imagine?

Oh. Tom Coburn (R-Hell) can. Coburn has put a hold on this legislation, hoping to string it out until the Senate recesses on September 30 so it will die without seeing the floor. Mr. Family Values hisself thinks it's less important to stop people who would anally rape an infant and then post the video along with how-to instructions in a chat room than to stop discretionary spending that hasn't been pre-sourced down to the penny. He doesn't like the fact that it will cost a billion dollars.

Yo, Tom: bring the guys home from Iraq a day and a half earlier than planned and voila, there's your billion right there.

Fucking asshole.

I know far too many women who were raped as children by their male family members. Full stop. So I get enraged to the point of murder when I hear someone brushing off the issue of child rape, particularly when it's a person who's in a position of power to make a difference. This is not a time when it's okay to do some partisan grandstanding for your own profit. If you live in Oklahoma, please call Senator Coburn's office and politely ask him to get his head out of his ass and let the Senate proceed on their first, best duty, which is ensuring the well-being of the American people. Promise to talk to them about the abortion thing later, if you must, but for now, remind the senator that it's really a good thing to protect the most defenseless among us who have had the sad fate to have already been born into a family where they are treated as disposable sex toys rather than as children. If you don't live in Oklahoma, call your senators and ask them to turn the screws on Coburn if they're Republicans, or on Harry Reid if they're Dems. Ask them to act like goddamn adults for once and do the right thing. And do it quickly.

Thank you.

Photos Guaranteed to Put You off Your Feed for a Week

Going back to the Texas FLDS child-rape cult for a moment, if I may. I caught the ooo-weeeee exclusive closeup with an FLDS family report on the execrable Situation Room on CNN a few weeks back (available here) and was struck at the time by Wolf Blitzer's reaction of "Wow, great reporting," which I suppose was accurate if what he meant by that was wow, great reporting of exactly what the family in question told you, with no probing followup questions or, apparently, any critical thought at all.

The reporter, Gary Tuchman, marveled at the "children who seem very happy, even joyous... they were polite, smiling..." over footage of a half-dozen blond kidlets bouncing on the trampoline and eating dinner. The father, Chris Wyler (who was 16 when he married; the mother was 17), scoffs wonderingly at allegations of abuse.

"People here are taught that we're never ever supposed to yell at our children. When the children do something wrong, we're supposed to not, you know, even raise our voice any more than this... and there's no way anybody I know would ever abuse their wife."

Well, then, glad that's settled. That's the convenient thing about defining your own terms, I suppose; if abuse only equals spanking and yelling, then heaven no, there's no abuse here. At least not in this family, and at least not while the camera is rolling. The reporter might have inquired whether Mr. Wyler considers forcing an underage girl into sex toy/brood mare status constitutes abuse. Amazingly, he didn't take that opportunity.

Tuchman: If he married another woman, and she was right for the family, would that be okay with you?
Lydia: [silent]
Chris, jumping in: Well, it's part of our culture.
Lydia, snapping back to awareness and shrugging: Well, it's what we believe.

No word on what Chris and Lydia's reaction would be if their eldest daughter, who appears to be in the prime 12-to-14-year-old marrying range, were given to some older guy on orders of the prophet. And with that we're back to scenes of the happy family intercut with shots of Warren Jeffs, who Lydia is certain has been unjustly convicted. Asked what she thinks of him, she smiles her vague smile and says, "I know he's our prophet."

Something else she should know is that he, and all the people who follow him unquestioningly, are pedophile fucktards. Click over to The Smoking Gun for some of Warren Jeffs' myriad wedding photos, if you have the stomach, and then try to tell me with a straight face that this group's religious beliefs really ought to be respected and accommodated.

I would really have loved for CNN to have included even one of those snapshots in its breathtaking coverage of the Wyler family. Had one of the details been flipped, say making FLDS a cult centered on the rape of young boys by creepy older guys, would the network have gone to such pains to portray the "normalcy" of the family and marvel about the kids' good dispositions and flawless manners? I rather think not.

Things That Trouble Me Friday

Little bites from interviews that have given me pause in the past 24 hours...

From the latest update on the Texas branch of the FLDS child-fucking church:

"We are aware that this group is capable of" sexually abusing girls, Sheriff David Doran said. "But there again, this is the United States. We are going to respect them. We're not going to violate their civil rights until we get an outcry."

No, no, I know that's not what he meant, and while it infuriates me that it took four whole years worth of child rape for law enforcement to get their ducks unimpeachably in order on this one, I'm gratified that it appears to be an ironclad bust that leaves zero wiggle room for these fucktards to slither out on a technicality. And it's reassuring to hear a Texas sheriff put it out there that his department isn't going after a particular group of people simply because he thinks they're capable of sexual abuse. I just wish he had chosen words that didn't have the slight ring of conflating "respect for religious beliefs" with "required to ignore the abuse of children until other people notice and raise a ruckus."

Let's check the Boltgirl scorecard on religion this morning. Religious beliefs require you to feed the hungry and clothe the poor? Awesome. Religious beliefs require you to fast and flagellate yourself? Totally not my scene, but if it does it for you and no one else suffers in the process, well, go for it. Religious beliefs require you to enslave women and impregnate as many freshly pubescent girls as possible? While your fellow geezers stand around and watch? Drop dead, asshole.

Meanwhile, what is the already overtaxed Texas CPS going to do with 400+ kids who have never set foot outside the compound and have had the belief drilled into them that the outside world is a hostile one-way express elevator to hell? Maybe some nice non-polygamous Mormon families would like to adopt them. Uh-huh. Nobody wins in this one.

From Barack Obama's interview with The Advocate:

Somebody else who influenced me, I actually had a professor at Occidental -- now, this is embarrassing because I might screw up his last name -- Lawrence Golden, I think it was. He was a wonderful guy. He was the first openly gay professor that I had ever come in contact with, or openly gay person of authority that I had come in contact with. And he was just a terrific guy. He wasn’t proselytizing all the time, but just his comfort in his own skin and the friendship we developed helped to educate me on a number of these issues.

Oh, no, girlfriend. No. You. Di'n't.

Wow. Just wow. He wasn't proselytizing all the time, you know, like gay people normally do. Wait. Seriously? You seriously give an interview to The Advocate and then you let that fall out of your mouth? Barack Obama. Just a terrific guy. Not blasting Fiddy on a boombox all the time. See how that works? Obama praising a gay man for his lack of "proselytizing" in an interview with a gay magazine is not far off from Bill O'Reilly being amazed that black people at a soul food restaurant in Harlem used forks and knives and didn't sit there screaming "more iced tea, motherfucker!" It's Huckleberry Finn being amazed to see that the escaped slave Jim bleeds blood that is red, just like his own. It's Joe Biden praising Obama for being "articulate and bright and clean." Come on, Barack. Are you fucking kidding me?

Yes, I voted for him in the primary, and I've already foamed at the mouth about Clinton's gee, aren't we lucky that the states are addressing gay marriage on their own statements, and I recognize that Obama was the first politician to call out black churches on their homophobia, but I'm sick of having to wade through puddles of crap from both candidates so I can get to the other side and say, well, at least the shit isn't quite as high up above my knees as it would be with McCain. Step it up, people!