In which the pond has a relaxing Sunday with the grand Polonial inquisitor and IPA shill Dame Slap ...

 

 

 

 

What a relief to turn to prattling Polonius for a little light Catholic comedy relief as a Sunday meditation. All that lengthy talk of the Donald and the virus and karma and irony and folly yesterday unsettled the pond, when what was needed was to burn a few liberal secularists at the stake, like they did in the good old days ...

Good old Polonius is always up for a burning, especially when the heretics can be found on the ABC. Polonius spends most of his time listening to the ABC, like a Torquemada-loving grand Inquisitor who's got a little list for the Inquisition (or even the Islamic religious thought police), always wanting to sniff out heresy like a pig hunting for truffles ...

 

 

 

Now this is a clever piece of pedantic distraction by the Grand Inquisitor. In common parlance, Barrett is indeed the Catholic church's preferred choice for the Supreme Court. They've been slobbering at the mouth in a most unseemly way at the prospect of their preferred candidate, their pick, putting an end to abortion, and perhaps overturning gay marriage and gay rights while she's at it ... and it's a two way street in terms of such likes, because Barrett is a most devout fundamentalist Catholic...

Of course you won't find Polonius rabbiting on about the deeply weird fundamentalism of People of Praise, what with him being something of a fundamentalist himself, but still, a reminder ...

The group has roughly 1,800 adult members nationwide, with branches and schools in 22 cities across the United States, Canada and the Caribbean. All members are encouraged to continue to attend church at their own parishes.
After a period of religious study and instruction that lasts from three to six years, people involved in People of Praise can choose to make a lifelong covenant pledging love and service to fellow community members and to God, which includes tithing at least 5% of their gross income to support the group’s activities and charitable initiatives, according to a statement on the group’s website.
People of Praise’s more than 1,500-word covenant, a copy of which was reviewed by the AP, includes a passage where members promise to follow the teachings and instructions of the group’s pastors, teachers and evangelists.
“We agree to obey the direction of the Holy Spirit manifested in and through these ministries in full harmony with the church,” the covenant says.
It’s unclear whether Barrett took the covenant. But members of the organization and descriptions of its hierarchy show that members almost invariably join the covenant after three to six years of religious study or they leave, so it would be very unusual for Barrett to continue to be involved for so many years without having done so.
A 2006 article in the group’s magazine includes a photo of her attending a People of Praise Leaders’ Conference for Women. The magazine also includes regular notices when members are “released from the covenant” and leave the group. The AP’s review found no such notice of Barrett’s or her husband’s departure. (More at AP here).

But back to Polonius, who can't wait to see Barrett get a go at the wicked, heretical secularists ...

 

 

 

Born again? Of course Polonius, with his almost infinite humour, jests, because very few secularists report hearing imaginary friends whispering into their ears that they are cleansed and born again. 

Jesting aside, the pond found itself a little jaded and worn out by Polonius's relentless bigotry when it comes to harmless secularists and ex-Catholics who decided that Catholicism wasn't for them, especially if it meant keeping the company of loons like the onion muncher and Polonius.

So the pond decided to cheat, and headed off to Jill Filipovic at the Graudian here ...

 

Well yes, and so on and so forth, and you'll have to head off to the Graudian for the hot links ...but speaking, as we were of a reactionary brand of conservatism, back to reactionary Polonius ...

 

 

 

Actually the truth is that Polonius, in classic Jesuitical fashion, is a bald-faced dissembler, and quite possibly a liar. The US has never been able to work out what belongs to Caesar and what to God, whichever God that might be, and this is just the latest example of the issue in play ...

 

 

 

 

Oh okay, maybe it's confusing for some. What the fuck is that bloody book and what the heck is it banging on about? Still it might win a few votes ...

 

The bromancer memorably suggested that an attack on Barrett was an attempt to ban the gospel, which is about as confusing and as conflationary as you can get, suggesting that the reptiles down under also have the same problem... 

 

Again to borrow from Filipovic, because the pond can't be bothered arguing ...

 

Liberals generally want a robust separation of church and state, where people are free to practice their own religions without interference or discrimination, but are not free to impose their religion on anyone else, or use their religious views as a pretext to violate the law or harm others. Many conservatives insist that the United States is a Christian country (or, in the more updated jargon, a “Judeo-Christian” country), that Christianity should in fact dictate political and legal decisions, and that religious freedom means the freedom to discriminate and violate generally applicable laws as long as you have a religious justification.
Amy Coney Barrett has made clear that she believes abortion is morally wrong. When she has ruled on abortion-related cases, she has ruled to restrict abortion access. She has made clear that she does not adhere to a basic ethos of gender equality, that men and women should have equal rights, opportunities, authority, and power; she instead is a voluntarily member of an organization that formally opposes gender equality, and has signaled her view that men and women are “complementary” – men in charge as leaders, women submitting to their authority.
It’s entirely reasonable for people who are concerned about gender equality to ask how that view would shape Barrett’s jurisprudence, much the same way we know that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s commitment to gender equality shaped her time on the court. What will Barrett’s apparent view that women have particular gender-defined roles (being maternal, having and raising children, submitting to their husbands) mean for, say, a pregnancy discrimination case? Or a gender discrimination case more generally? Can gender discrimination as a concept even exist if the starting view is that men and women are fundamentally different and should occupy fundamentally different roles?
These are real questions raised not by Barrett’s Catholic faith generally, but by her statements, associations, and actions specifically.

 

In short, the Sydney Anglicans would love this complimentary woman.

 

But belonging, as he does, to a cult, Polonius can't see any harm in another, deeply fundamentalist and reactionary, member of his cult being given enormous powers, because up against the power that Barrett will get to wield, the ABC seem like a harmless exercise in basket-weaving ...

 

And so to Dame Slap, who provides the pond's ballast for the day, crushed stones of the kind they seem to drop on the inner west rail lines at least once a week so that Sydney-siders can revert to City Bus ...

 

But at least there's a bonus to the ballast - sometimes the reptile editors show a wicked sense of humour, or at least a passing connection with irony ... 

 

Who thought of juxtaposing that thugby league story with Dame Slap pretending to be an old-school feminist of the Reddy roar kind? It was too rich, too much for the pond to take ...

 

 

 

Even better was Dame Slap's attempted slap at whiners, when Dame Slap herself is routinely the Queen of the Whiners. She usually has a litany of whines, which she ticks off in assorted columns. 

 

Many of them these days are IPA whines, but Dame Slap also has her own preferences ... anything to avoid scribbling about her devotion to the pussy-grabbing Donald in days gone past ... and so today she must whine at some length about uppity women wanting to get ahead in the law ...

 

 

 

Um, could it perhaps be that women are under-represented as barristers, and so under-represented when it comes to choices and selection?

For some reason the pond was reminded of a cartoon it's already run, but why not run again?

 

 

 

 

For some peculiar reason, the pond got confused, and thought of Dame Slap as ACB ... she's certainly no RBG, and what a pity that RGB, whom Dame Slap purported to like for a nanosecond, isn't around to tear shreds off Dame Slap's wonky arguments ...

 

The pond cannot begin to enumerate the many incompetent men in positions of power it has encountered during its working life. But let's not get personal, let's take the lizard Oz as an example. It has many incompetent men employed as scribblers, but the number of incompetent women at work in the Catholic Boys' Daily is small by comparison. Yes, there's the singularly incompetent Dame Slap, and every so often the incompetent Angelic one turns up, and then there's the incompetent recovering, reformed feminist, the Oreo, but couldn't the reptiles find more incompetent women, equal to the task of matching the many incompetent men in its stable?

 

Of course the whole point is not to tick a diversity box when it comes to skill, the point is to make sure that minorities of all kinds are not disadvantaged when it comes to acquiring skills. Then if they get skilled up enough, who knows what they might do or what they might accomplish. Why some might even be hired to scribble fantasies of the Dame Slap kind for the lizard Oz ... (well not everyone can aspire to peak skill sets, sometimes we have to settle for moronic climate science denialism of the Dame Slap kind).

 

Let us hope that the day never comes when people are judged by their ability to indulge in climate science denialism, don the pussy-grabber's MAGA cap and act as a shill and a front for the IPA ... because if that were to happen, Dame Slap would be out of a job, and it might be possible to find a sneering liberal secularist scribbling away gaily for the lizard Oz ...

It'll never happen of course, not while the rag remains a front as the Catholic Boys' Daily, a church incidentally that routinely judges people by their chromosomes ...

And so to end with an apology. The pond has been very light on cartoons this day, so why not catch up with a few recent Wilcox outings, to remind the pond there's more to life than Polonius's chromosome -laden ramblings and Dame Slap's faux IPA feminism ... and with a reminder that Wilcox has her own site here, with attached shop ...