Cheap shots and graven images

Nobody but me

FreedomWorks obstetrician and wouldbe "servant-citizen" Greg Bannon, running in North Carolina's Republican Senate primary:

"There's nobody in this race that understands the Constitution like I do. The only guy that's even close to me is Ted Cruz," he told National Journal.

And if you think his Constitution is special wait till you see his Funky Funky Broadway.

Statue of the Ten Commandments illegally and unconstitutionally installed by Chief Justice Roy Moore in the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court  in July 2001 and illegally kept there until August 2003, after which Judge Moore was dismissed from office by unanimous opinion of the Alabama Court of the Judiciary, which held that because of his unshakable defiance of the Alabama Canons of Judicial Ethics "there is no penalty short of removal from office that would resolve this issue." Notwithstanding which, he was re-elected to the post nine years later in November 2012. Image from Wikipedia.

Mooned in Alabama

In First Amendment news, it looks like hard-core antidisestablishmentarian Judge Roy Moore has discovered there's a missing syllable: the clause should read "Congress shall make no law disrespecting an establishment of religion..."

Speaking at the Pastor for Life Luncheon, which was sponsored by Pro-Life Mississippi, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment only applies to Christians because “Buddha didn’t create us, Mohammed didn’t create us, it was the God of the Holy Scriptures” who created us.

“They didn’t bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship,” he continued. “Let’s get real, let’s go back and learn our history. Let’s stop playing games.”...

Commentary on these remarks has focused understandably on the fact that Judge Moore is completely wrong about what the Constitution says, from beginning to end, but I just wanted to add that he is also wrong about everything else: Buddhists and Muslims do not believe that Lord Buddha or Prophet Muhammad respectively created us, and Muslims explicitly hold that the Creator was the God of the Holy Scriptures, which is why they are referred to alongside Jews and Christians as "People of the Book". Such a confusion on the part of a Buddhist would be stupid, and for a Muslim to think of such a thing would be a really dangerous heresy; since unlike the authors of the Hebrew Second Commandment (First for Christians), who plainly made room for the existence of other gods besides YHWH ("thou shalt have no other gods before me"), and Christians with their Trinitarian obfuscations, Muslims are really strict on the point that there is no God but God and Mohammad is not Him.

Since the passengers on the Mayflower were very strongly opposed to idol worship, they had much more theologically in common with Islam than with the Decalogolatrous justice, who worked so hard to make everyone in his courtroom bow down to a literally graven image.

Via Amy McCarthy for Bustle.

Pinkish-peach freshman

From the musings of Master Tal Fortgang as printed in the Princeton Tory (really, that's its name! conservative students at Princeton openly identify with the traitorous opposition to the American Revolution):

There is a phrase that floats around college campuses, Princeton being no exception, that threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them. “Check your privilege,” the saying goes, and I have been reprimanded by it several times this year. The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung. “Check your privilege,” they tell me in a command that teeters between an imposition to actually explore how I got where I am, and a reminder that I ought to feel personally apologetic because white males seem to pull most of the strings in the world.

Tal wants you to know that he doesn't actually mind checking his privilege, he just objects to tipping the privilege-check girl. I mean, he's paying an exorbitant fee to be a member of this club, and isn't she getting paid, for heaven's sake, and why shouldn't he just drape his privilege elegantly over the back of his chair?

Sally Eller, Ben Lyon, and Ginger Rogers as the Bad Girl in Hat-Check Girl (1932) Via.