I've been waiting for a really good story to grab me before getting around to writing another of my rants about The American Taliban, and this morning The Huffington Post finally provided the link I needed.This week's leader of American Taliban is Donald E Wildmon, chairman of the Tupelo, Mississippi based American Family Association which boasts a membership that is 2,213,284 pinheads strong and claims to be "America's Pro-Family Action Web Site." Evidently what Donald Wildmon thinks is pro-family is threatened by the organization Girls, Inc. which has partnered with American Girl to sell some more of those ubiquitous wristsbands, this time with 70 cents of each purchase going to support the programs of Girls, Inc.
Girls Incorporated started out in 1864 and is probably best known as Girl's Clubs (back when Boy's and Girl's Clubs were separate entities). Their website has a Girls' Bill of Rights that I suppose makes Wildmon and his group apoplectic with the idea that girls might actually learn how to grow up to be strong, independent and self-fulfilled women. Wildmon's group insists that Girls, Inc. "promotes abortion and lesbianism" which, it would seem, are two of the devil's darkest, strongest and most egregious tactics. Wending one's way through this idiotic use of bandwidth it becomes rather obvious why the uber-conservatives are having a problem with Harriet Miers (MY problem with Harriet Miers is for another post). An unmarried woman who has made it 60 years on her own without the help of a husband is clearly a threat to the paternalistic, misogynist Wildmon with his deep fears of the devil's powerful ways. If these guys could make it happen, the little girls at Girls Incorporated would be covered head to toe in muslin and never leave the doors of their fathers' homes until they were carted off to be married in a ceremony officiated by Wildmon himself.
The AFA website even offers a comic version of the New Testament for youth who, having been home schooled with the AFA's resources, are evidently incapable of reading a bible with actual WORDS in it, or possessing the critical thinking abilities to allow them to come to their own conclusions about what those words might actually mean for people in 2005. The AFA website also has articles and links to such relevant contemporary issues as a Constitutional Amendment to ban courts from ruling on The Pledge of Allegiance, a Tenessee Republican legislator taking on his state's Black Caucus for racism, a link to a petition against gay marriage, and a diatribe against Target stores for selling sex merchandise by Elexa.
Evidently, for Wildmon its important that sex be for procreation only and that nobody have any fun in the process. Wildmon and his idiotic minions seem to have missed one rather significant segment of the Bible they are so sure they believe in; a section that is much closer to the poetry of modern lovers than it is the dried up, joyless and ugly diatribes from these puritanical grumps.I haven't fully investigated Wildmon's home schooling curriculum, but I'm making a wide ranging guess that it doesn't include Freud's views on human sexual behavior and I imagine Alfred Kinsey is considered a sort of perverse sexual antichrist.
I want to say that numb nuts religious zealots like this should simply be ignored, but I'm afraid that ignoring them will not make them go away. Instead, we need to listen to the words of Tupelo's favorite son and get to work. Those who believe that United States of America really DOES stand for freedom - ALL FREEDOM - and that such a belief is not just a slogan - or a dumb ass lyric in an insipid country song - need to get up off our butts and say so. We need to make our voices heard on the same issues that these dimwits spout off about, we need to donate to organizations like Girls Inc., we need to celebrate goodness, lightness, connection, and yes damnit... even (or perhaps especially) sex.
Beyond all that... we need to make it clear that there are MORE of us than there are of them and that the last time anyone checked, the majority was at least supposed to rule in this country, even if it doesn't always work out that way.
