in which the pond spends some quality Monday time with barking mad Oz fundamentalists organising a jihad to howl at the moon ...

It's a tough gig for the average secularist atheist these days, whenever some mug punter draws the short straw and heads off to read the reptiles of Oz ...

It's not that the average secularist atheist would want to scribble a passionate defence of Islamics, especially those of the fundamentalist kind ...

At the same time it's hard to recall a time when the reptiles of Oz raged with indignation about the assorted crusades which resulted in Islamics having the shit bombed out of them in Iraq, Afghanistan and sundry other places ... 

Why even in Vietnam it was the godless commies who were the baddies, while the profoundly corrupt Catholics got a free pass to heaven ...

That's why it's impossible to read any given Oreo rant on any given day and not reel back without some sign of startled bemusement ...

Well actually no, at least if you're an actual Christian, who has actually read Christ's teachings, it isn't morally reprehensible to allow all god's children to seek shelter ...

What's morally reprehensible is that your average secularist atheist seems to have a better grasp on the bible and Christ's teachings than the Oreo, but there you go ...

It's not as if the average secularist atheist is alone in this ... others get it, and show signs of having read the actual bible ...

Presumably there are some Islamics that return the favour ...

But somewhere along the line, the moderates and the peace lovers get drowned out by the shrieking, howling, wailing and bigotry of the fundamentalists of the Oreo reptile kind ...most interested in lathering up a clash of civilisations, rather than sitting down to a decent serve of tandoor halal chook ...

It doesn't leave much room for your average secularist atheist who happens to have a fair number of gay friends ...

You see, this day, the fundamentalist Xians were offered space in the reptile Oz to further their domestic form of prejudice, bigotry and homophobia ...

The pond has no idea how Tess manages to come out with a line about a "stern defence of basic human rights" unless it involved some form of projectile vomit ... and that was just the header ...

Now don't get the pond wrong. There are some actual Christians who don't seem to be obsessed with people who are in a loving relationship and understand the real meaning of hell ...

But you won't find any of that in the lizard Oz - instead, it's just a litany, a form of devotion routinely parroted over and over again, about the persecution of the Xians ... and the need for the empire to strike back ...

The pond is so tired reading this daily drip of venom and hate ... but there's much more to come ... cue the second gobbet of the Oreo ...

This sort of fundamentalist discrimination is what the average atheist secularist would consider extreme, obscene and offensive ... and profoundly against the stated approach of Christ to worldly as well as spiritual affairs ...

But in the Oreo world, the parable of the Samaritan and its talk of mercy to neighbours (no religious qualifications or exemptions mentioned) is just socialist Jesus being silly ...

There are any number of mentions of showing hospitality to strangers on the chance of entertaining angels - the UCC has organised a list here - but the pond most enjoyed this apocalyptic notion in relation to the Oreo ...

You can render "from his right" into a non-sexist "deprive the foreigners among you of justice" or similar, but the pond most likes the notion of judgment and smoting and smiting of the Oreo ...

What's always disturbing is the way the fundamentalist rhetoric of one religion is invariably matched by fundamentalists in another ...

Your average Xian gay basher really is just your average Islamic gay basher with a different text as an excuse ... yet somehow in Livingstone's peculiar world, the Xian fundamentalists end up as the underpinning of democracy ... as if secularism, the enlightenment and a dose of sensible atheism had nothing to do with the modern state or even the American constitution and bill of rights ...

Even worse, they have the fucking cheek and the arrogance to accuse the young of not knowing their history, when here the Xians are shamelessly filching what the Romans, the Greeks and their many splendidly pagan gods set in motion ...

But then that's how the Vatican got built, isn't it? They stole all the marble from the Colosseum and used it as the facade for St Peter's Basilica, and metaphorically, they've been doing the same ever since, as the stole the words and concepts of the classical writers and used them to feather their own nest ...

For any mug punter that made it this far - the pond feels your pain - here's a link to a piece by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker about the use of history by the courts, luckily outside the paywall for the moment...

It's only tangential to the discussion, but it's an interesting tangent ...

History, in one fashion or another, has a place in most constitutional arguments, as it does in most arguments of any kind, even those about whose turn it is to wash the dishes. Generally, appeals to tradition provide little relief for people who, historically, have been treated unfairly by the law. You can’t fight segregation, say, by an appeal to tradition; segregation was an entrenched American tradition. In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson, essentially reprising Dred, cited the “established usages, customs, and traditions of the people” in affirming the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws. In 1954, to challenge such laws, Brown v. Board of Education disavowed historical analysis and cited, instead, social science: empirical data...

History’s place in American jurisprudence took a turn in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, when the Court dusted off its incunabula and looked into what “history reveals about man’s attitudes toward the abortion procedure over the centuries,” as Justice Harry Blackmun explained. Abortion had not been a crime in Britain’s North American colonies, nor was it a crime in most parts of the United States until after the Civil War. “It perhaps is not generally appreciated that the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of States today are of relatively recent vintage,” Blackmun wrote. In turning back the hands of time, he didn’t stop there. “We are told that, at the time of the Persian Empire, abortifacients were known, and that criminal abortions were severely punished. We are also told, however, that abortion was practiced in Greek times as well as in the Roman Era, and that ‘it was resorted to without scruple.’ ” Roe overturned laws passed by state legislatures by appealing to ancient history. ..

 Lately, the field of argument, if not always of battle, in many fundamental-rights cases has moved from the parchment pages of the Constitution to the clay of Mesopotamia. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that overturned state bans on same-sex marriage, Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, reached back almost to the earliest written records of human societies. “From their beginning to their most recent page, the annals of human history reveal the transcendent importance of marriage,” he said. “Since the dawn of history, marriage has transformed strangers into relatives, binding families and societies together.” He cited Confucius. He quoted Cicero. The states that wanted to ban same-sex marriage described its practice as a betrayal of that history, but Kennedy saw it as a continuation, a testament to “the enduring importance of marriage.” Marriage is an institution with “ancient origins,” Kennedy said, but that doesn’t mean it’s changeless. Scalia, in a heated dissent, called Kennedy’s opinion “silly” and “pretentious.” As a matter of historical analysis, Scalia mostly confined himself to the past century and a half. “When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, every State limited marriage to one man and one woman, and no one doubted the constitutionality of doing so,” he said. “That resolves these cases.”

Liberal legal scholars disagree, and Stone’s “Sex and the Constitution” is an attempt to pull together all their evidence, for the sake of court battles to come. Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Jews believed that sex was natural and didn’t have a lot of rules about it, Stone argues. Early Christians, influenced by Augustine of Hippo, who in the fifth century decided that Adam and Eve had been thrown out of the Garden of Eden because of lust, decided that sex was a sin, and condemned all sorts of things, including masturbation. Stone speculates that the medieval church’s condemnation of same-sex sex, a concern that emerged in the eleventh century and that became pronounced in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, was a consequence of a new requirement: clerical celibacy. According to Stone, Aquinas argued that the sins of mutual masturbation, oral sex, and anal sex were worse if they involved two members of the same sex, a position that became church dogma in the sixteenth century.

The pond deeply apologises for introducing intelligence, insight and actual talk of actual history into the discussion. The pond acknowledges its brief is to reproduce the fuck-witted stupidities of the reptiles of Oz ...

If if intelligence and insight and the historical record must be ruled out, and misleading originalists just lie and lie, this creates something of a dilemma ...

What can your average secularist atheist do under this sustained assault of bigotry, homophobia, and shameless peddling of lies, distortions and misrepresentations ... remembering that Islamics are just as willing to play the game?

Well the pond recommends a hearty serve of Oreos, and the good news is that they've got rid of the nasty black bits, and now all that's left is a rich serve of creamy white goodness ...

Go on tuck in, think of them as racially approved wafers, blessed by god (the gluten intolerant can go to hell because the soul is embedded in the wheat) ... and don't you worry about Jesus. He was blonde and blue-eyed, and blessed by a decent amount of time in a tanning parlour  ...