A girl who’s not mature enough to marry, vote, drive, drink or smoke shouldn’t be expected to raise a baby either. A good cartoon.
While it varies state by state, it is legal for people under a certain age to have sex with others under that age. Thus, it is only proper that they be able to exercise caution and minimize risks associated with said behavior.
A good cartoon.
Another teen mom Ferrah Abraham prevented!
A good cartoon
If only she had some sort of sex education(other than abstinence only) or access to birth control there wouldn’t even be a need for plan b.
Also Plan B is not an abortion pill!
It’s not about abortion/birth control itself. It’s about control. It’s about Christians trying to enforce their values on all others through the political process.
In other words, it’s the much dreaded Sharia Law, only here it’s Christians trying to do it.
Fitzsimmons walks right up to actually saying something, and then he says “Nope. Not today.”
Also, what is this?
Speak of the devil, and he will appear.
And to answer your question, Bob, let me ask a question: which has killed more people?
shutupandenjoythehomosexuality:
killthebloodyredprinceofdeath:
we ran out of plates
this can possibly be the greatest photo on tumblr.
This can possibly be the most disrespectful photo on Tumblr. I am not saying that you have to agree with what the bible says, but to utilize that book ‘as a plate’ knowing what it means to people, is just plain disrespectful.
It’s sad that people are so full of anger when it comes to religion, that they would rather post photos like this than deal with their hostilities in a more appropriate way.
i’m sorry, i cant hear you over the sound of nOT BEING ABLE TO GET MARRIED BECAUSE OF THAT BOOK.
best comment ^
just for that comment
i honestly started clapping for that comment
Bible should help people, shouldn’t it?
It’s not because of the Bible, it’s because of people’s interpretation of the Bible’s message. Really, you can’t get married because of people who believe that their view point is the only view point.
I’d like to draw your attention to the final bit of this thread, because we can start off by refuting this obviously wrong statement:
I can tell you’re saying: ‘Gee, Philip, we already knew this. Why are you bothering to post this just to inform us of that?’
And I answer ‘Because it’s part of a larger, currently ongoing movement that I want to draw your attention to.’ The person I’m reblogging this from is not the only one to make the claim “The Bible isn’t anti-gay. Just certain Christians are.” Here’s a couple more (warning on the latter link: the background is an annoying gif, click at your own risk). And I’m sure I could find a lot more if I went looking.
It’s a common response from younger, more progressive Christians: “Oh, no! Not all Christians are homophobic, there are plenty of us with gay friends and who support gay marriage!” Taking it a step further and trying to claim the Bible doesn’t forbid gay marriage is just insulting, but I want to focus on that first part, the ‘There are gay-friendly Christians out there.’
I’m not an expert on the history of religion, or the history of Christianity, or - as is relevant to this post - the history of Christianity and its social influence in America. But I do know how this story has played out before:
-The abolitionist movement met significant opposition from Christians who used genuine, fully in context quotes of the Bible to justify slavery (in addition to all the parts of the Bible where God commands Israel to take slaves or Paul commands slaves to obey their masters, you can Google ‘Curse of Ham’ for insight into this line of thinking). Slavery was eventually abolished (yay), and the generations after that have tried to claim that the abolitionist movement was solely the work of Christians. Now, yes, there were Christian abolitionists (this was a time when religious affiliation was taken for granted and a place where Christianity was the dominant religion), but the pro-slavery movement was founded on/supported by religion as much as anything.
-The women’s rights movement met significant opposition from Christians who pointed out that the Bible teaches women are inferior to men. There undoubtedly were pro-suffrage Christians, but the millennia of ‘women are less than men’ thinking that necessitated the women’s rights movement in the first place came from religion. Eventually the 19th Amendment was passed and there have been strides made to put women on equal footing with men. Today it’s not impossible to find people who argue that the Bible teaches women should be subservient to their husbands (and of course they believe women should be married), but most Christians take it as a given that women deserve the right to vote, choose their own spouse, work, drive, do whatever men do. They ignore the parts of the Bible that imply/advocate gender inequality.
-The Civil Rights movement met significant opposition from Christians and churches who argued that God had placed the different ethnicities in different parts of the world because miscegenation and a general mingling of races went against His wishes. Yes, there were Christian civil rights leaders (we all know Martin Luther King Jr. made his religious belief perhaps the most significant facet of his public persona), but those opposed to racial equality fell back on Biblical verses as much as they did rank bigotry. Eventually gains for ethnic minorities were made, but today conservative Christians who would have denounced Dr. King as a socialist in the ‘60’s try to claim the Civil Rights movement got its entire strength and momentum from Christians and Biblical teachings, and conveniently ignore the Bible-backed racism that gave the movement such a headache.
See the pattern here?
Now what’s happened/happening with the gay rights movement? They’ve met significant opposition from Christians who quote the Bible forbidding homosexuality (check), support for gay marriage is in the majority and we’re on the verge of it becoming either backed by the Supreme Court or perhaps Congress will (sooner or later) pass a bill recognizing gay marriage (check).
And what comes next? That’s right; Christians will try to claim the gay rights movement got its power from the church and attempt to whitewash all the bigotry and hatred against gays and lesbians that came out of religious belief. In 20 or 25 years, when we have people entering adulthood who have lived their entire lives in a world where gay marriage was accepted and legally recognized, there will be Christians trying to claim “Of course Christians support gay marriage. We’ve always supported gay marriage, and the first steps to recognizing gay rights came from the churches and other religious organizations.”
First they deny the rights, then they fight against granting the rights, then they claim they supported granting the rights all along. We’re already seeing that with the above post, trying to outright lie about the Bible’s explicit views on gay rights.
I already mentioned the standard response to this: “Not all Christians are homophobic, you can’t judge all of us based on the views or actions of a few.”
But the things is, I’m not judging any gay-friendly Christians on the views/actions of homophobic Christians. I’m judging them on their actions; namely their silence.
In my post about my views on guns I mentioned that when the majority of rational gun owners are silent they allow the fringe to dominate the conversation. What good does it do to say “The majority of gun owners practice safety and don’t fetishize their weapons and don’t believe conspiracy theories about the United Nations coming to take their guns away” when they’re standing away from the conversation? Rational gun owners can speak for themselves, and if they don’t then you or someone else shouldn’t be speaking for them.
So it is with Christians and gay rights. What good does it do to say “There are plenty of gay-friendly Christians” when so many of them are/have been silent for so long, taking no part in the gay rights movement? When gay-friendly Christians stand aside they allow the homophobic Christians to frame the debate. If Pat Robertson and Tony Perkins are the only Christians taking part in the gay rights debate, then guess what: Christians as a whole will be defined by their homophobia.
To gay-friendly Christians offended by the above picture and conversation: Don’t get in my or anyone else’s face when people say “Christianity is homophobic” because your silence is a reason itself for this view. You don’t confront the church leaders and public figures, but then you’re upset when something like this happens?
Bluntly: fuck you. You don’t get to be offended by people having a view of Christianity (or religion in general) that you haven’t worked to challenge or undo.
I think it’s important to mention that the opposite of love isn’t hatred. It’s apathy. Silent, gay-friendly Christians are apathetic, and through that they’ve allowed the outright hatred to take its place at the debate.
Now I understand when it comes to gay marriage/gay rights you’re facing an uphill battle trying to change Christianity’s public image, because, as I said, the Bible is explicitly homophobic. No amount of lying or creative interpretation will change this. If you are honest you need to face the choice between taking the Bible as totally, completely literal truth, or taking the Bible as some truth and some archaic views that need to be rejected as society progresses. But you don’t get to claim what is or is not in the Bible to begin with. Leviticus 18:22 is there. It’s in every version. You can’t white it out, and you don’t get to be angry at the people who point out it’s there and they or their friends and loved ones are denied rights because of it.
But I don’t believe anyone who identifies as Christian must follow an explicitly literal interpretation of the Bible, cover to cover. There are plenty of Christians who reject a literal reading of Genesis and accept the evidence supporting the theory of evolution, and neither I nor anyone else has the right or power to say they aren’t Real, True Christians. It’s something I’ve noticed among certain circles of atheism, the idea that “real” believers need to be of the most fundamentalist, literal-minded stock, and progressives are just wishy-washy frauds. Maybe it’s because, as I mentioned, the most fundamentalist are often the most vocal and thus get the most attention, or maybe it’s just because some atheists find it easier to dismiss religion when it’s at its most obstinate and base.
But atheists don’t get to declare who is or is not a Real, True Christian, any more than any Christian gets to. Religions, like all complex memes, change over time the way complex organisms do. This doesn’t mean the pro-slavery, racist, sexist, or homophobic aspects of a religion retroactively disappear when a religion moves on from its Iron Age views - again, progressive Christians don’t get to lie and claim the Bible is not homophobic - but Christians don’t have to be bound by such vestigial views.
BUT THEY DO NEED TO CHALLENGE AND EXPLICITLY REJECT THE VIEWS IF THEY WANT TO DISTANCE THEMSELVES FROM THEM!
I’m not writing all this because I expect to change anyone’s mind about anything. Many progressive Christians will continue to claim offense whenever they see something like this picture, whining “Not all Christians are homophobic!” while ignoring that they’ve stood by and allowed the bigotry and homophobia to be spewed forth for so long.
But I wanted to say this because, as I said above, it’s not so much a prediction as a sure outcome that in another generation the dominant Christian argument will be “Christianity has always supported gay marriage,” and I want to be able to say ‘I told you so.’
Right. There are asshats everywhere. And then there are people who have compassion for everybody - crime victims and criminals, wrongly accused and rightfully accused, people who think the accused must be guilty because they were accused and people who realize the broken court system has totally inverted “innocent until proven guilty,” who still somehow manage to have compassion for everybody involved. I literally have not heard of the Steubenville case until this cartoon, and I’ve only done two minutes’ research, but can I say the accused were guilty or innocent? No, either way. Maybe they’re guilty as hell - although if they’re not, they’re certainly not the first people, nor the last, to be falsely accused of rape and convicted. If the girl had been raped and murdered, they wouldn’t be the first nor the last to be falsely accused of murder. But even if they were guilty, they were kids. Compassion for kids is never a bad thing, even if they do something horrible.
And I should add, whether or not they were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt - and I don’t know until I examine the evidence myself - if the girl truly was raped by somebody, be it these two boys or someone else, having compassion for the criminals in no way diminishes my compassion for her. Compassion is not a finite commodity.The fuck is wrong with you? 16 years olds are not kids, and rape is not something like shoplifting or spraypainting graffiti. It’s the worst thing you can do to someone, violating them and leaving them with feelings of shame and victimhood that persist long after the initial crime. And this incident is even worse considering what happened went far beyond a single instance of rape.
And the reason this cartoon exists is because Candy Crowley and another talking head ignored the impact this would have on the victim, instead lamenting that the “promising football careers” of the two degenerates has been stalled.
Honestly, how the fuck can you hear about a group of fuckwads repeatedly violating a passed out woman and bragging about it on Twitter and Facebook and your reaction is “Well, maybe they were falsely accused” or “Well, we should still have compassion for everyone involved”?
No, we shouldn’t. There is no equivalence between what happened to the woman and what happened to her attackers. One was violated and had her life ruined, the others were brought to justice and will pay for what they did (not nearly enough, but it’s something I guess).
Oh, and 16-year-olds aren’t kids? Really. REALLY? That’s not a valid defense in court against statutory rape or contributing to the delinquency of a minor charges. Nor should it be. Their brains haven’t even developed impulse control yet. 16-year-olds sure as shit are kids.
Yes, really. 16 year olds aren’t kids. They’re old enough to legally operate cars, they meet most age of consent laws, they can be legally employed. There are limits on those privileges, yes, but a 16 year old is not a child, regardless of how much our society coddles teenagers.
As for impulse control, actual children - five year olds - understand the concept of delayed gratification, and by 13 they’ve developed delaying strategies that last through adulthood.
But you aren’t seriously arguing that the rapists in this case deserved some sort of leniency because of their age, are you?
Right. There are asshats everywhere. And then there are people who have compassion for everybody - crime victims and criminals, wrongly accused and rightfully accused, people who think the accused must be guilty because they were accused and people who realize the broken court system has totally inverted “innocent until proven guilty,” who still somehow manage to have compassion for everybody involved. I literally have not heard of the Steubenville case until this cartoon, and I’ve only done two minutes’ research, but can I say the accused were guilty or innocent? No, either way. Maybe they’re guilty as hell - although if they’re not, they’re certainly not the first people, nor the last, to be falsely accused of rape and convicted. If the girl had been raped and murdered, they wouldn’t be the first nor the last to be falsely accused of murder. But even if they were guilty, they were kids. Compassion for kids is never a bad thing, even if they do something horrible.
And I should add, whether or not they were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt - and I don’t know until I examine the evidence myself - if the girl truly was raped by somebody, be it these two boys or someone else, having compassion for the criminals in no way diminishes my compassion for her. Compassion is not a finite commodity.
The fuck is wrong with you? 16 years olds are not kids, and rape is not something like shoplifting or spraypainting graffiti. It’s the worst thing you can do to someone, violating them and leaving them with feelings of shame and victimhood that persist long after the initial crime. And this incident is even worse considering what happened went far beyond a single instance of rape.
And the reason this cartoon exists is because Candy Crowley and another talking head ignored the impact this would have on the victim, instead lamenting that the “promising football careers” of the two degenerates has been stalled.
Honestly, how the fuck can you hear about a group of fuckwads repeatedly violating a passed out woman and bragging about it on Twitter and Facebook and your reaction is “Well, maybe they were falsely accused” or “Well, we should still have compassion for everyone involved”?
No, we shouldn’t. There is no equivalence between what happened to the woman and what happened to her attackers. One was violated and had her life ruined, the others were brought to justice and will pay for what they did (not nearly enough, but it’s something I guess).
Wow. Is Chuck Asay really trying to contrast free birth control with domestic violence? Because that’s what comes to mind when I look at the first panel. Women who have been beaten or threatened and they need somewhere private to hide.
Why is Asay bringing safe houses into this conversation? What the fuck is wrong with him? It’s been ridiculous enough to see conservatives get up in arms about Democrats et al wanting to provide free birth control, but at least there was something resembling logic as it’s usually been on the grounds that they think it somehow violates religious liberty or will encourage teenagers to go out and have sex (as if teens need encouragement to have sex).
But this? What the fuck is Asay thinking? Why… Where…. What is going through his mind that he sees the issue of birth control and his response is ‘Women who have been beaten by their spouses”?
I know this is old, but I’ve been getting caught up on your awesome Tumblr, and I just had to say something: Has Asay never, uh, TALKED to anybody who ran or worked at a safe house before? Because they are OVERWHELMINGLY of the opposite opinion on literally everything he believes. I mean seriously overwhelmingly. Like, if demographic research sliced down that narrowly, probably the only groups more likely to vote for Democrats are: A.) single black Catholic lesbian mothers on welfare who are members of unions and living in urban areas, and B.) half-Kenyan lawyers who have been elected president.
Considering how conservatives like to invoke Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus (a guy who told the rich to sell all their possessions and give the money away), I think their concern is simply connecting themselves with figures/institutions universally seen as good, regardless of the cognitive dissonance like you highlight here.
The realization of just how often Asay makes cartoons only tangentially-related to current issues makes me wonder what the actual breakdown is. What’s the ratio of cartoons clearly about a current event vs. those that are more general? The problem with trying to determine this is that a lot of the cartoons that seem related to a current event turn out like this one. Obama playing golf with Tiger Woods was a specific event, but in Asay’s hands it’s just a chance to beat the Benghazi drum once again*. As was this one. The story is supposed to be White House tours being canceled because of the sequester (why that is being treated as such an important story I don’t know), but Asay just has to turn it around to make it about Benghazi.
So yeah, he comments on current stories. But he only uses them to reinforce his basic views that Obama acts like a king, Obamacare is going to kill us all, taxes and spending are out of control, the Second Amendment is under attack, gay marriage is wrong, and abortion is evil. Like Tom Cruise’s acting career, the outfits and dialogue may change, but it’s the same character every time.
The obvious counter-question is: if a person has a set range of views (such as Asay does with gay marriage, abortion, government spending, etc.) how important is it that they talk about current events all the time? If the economy is in the news we know Asay believes the solution is tax cuts for the rich and businesses, and that the government needs to reduce its spending.
My answer, my view, is there’s a difference between simply restating your opinions (as Asay does) and expressing your views in relation to what is currently going on in the world. For one, following the latter course allows the possibility that one might change their views in light of new facts. Or at least present arguments related to reality.
In my previous post I included links showing that tax rates aren’t going up, spending is slower under Obama than anyone going back to Eisenhower, and abortion rates are down. But Asay has his worldview, his belief system, and even though “Gay marriage will lead to polygamy and bestiality” is a thoroughly stupid argument, Asay can not or will not reassess what he believes and says. He has dug his feet into the ground, and nothing will move him.
And his work suffers for that. His need to repeat himself leads to a repetition of analogies and visual ideas. I’ve mentioned before his love of the Ant and Grasshopper parable, but it’s more common for him to use even baser ideas. Back when Sesame Street was a topic during the last election he produced this cartoon.
A check-out lane at a grocery store. A generic image he used three months later.
Meanwhile, Matt Bors (who is as liberal as Asay is conservative) made this. In terms of originality, wit, and acknowledging current events, there’s no comparison.
Or how about Asay’s many ‘abortion kills innocent children and liberals just love that’ cartoons vs. Bors’ ‘the abortion issue does not exist in a vacuum’ cartoons?
Or Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comments. To Asay it’s just a sign of how the media (and in this case, Republican leaders) is trying to bring down a Republican candidate, while to Bors it’s indicative of just how out of touch Republicans are on women’s rights and science.
One of these cartoonists is applying their views to the world as it is, to current events and trends and stories that overlap one another in the larger scheme of things. The other is Chuck Asay.
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(Oh, and I was wrong. He did mention Hugo Chavez’s passing. But in relation to something else.)
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*On that note, why is Asay so hard on about Benghazi? Is it because the original claim about the attack being caused by the anti-Islam video was mistaken? News flash, Chuckie: sometimes people leap to conclusions based on partial information (or, in Rice’s case, they’re given the wrong information). And besides, Susan Rice already took the fall for her comments.
What else does Asay want? Does he not think people were sufficiently saddened by the four deaths, or that the story didn’t receive enough media attention? Does he want Obama impeached? Part of me thinks he has some conspiracy in mind, that some grave truth is being covered up and the reality (Rice’s initial comments were based on the best intelligence available at the time, and when more information came to light the original ‘it’s because of a video’ story was dropped) is a smokescreen.
But damned if I have any idea what it is, because, as I’ve been saying, Asay’s cartoons are so light on specifics.
Another conservative cartoonist trying to pass the blame for the Republicans’ 2012 loss onto the media, when it was the party themselves who wrote and delivered the post-mortem and declared that they lost because they’re out of touch with the mainstream and have a pronounced image problem.
I guess it’s easier to blame others for your failings than yourself. But when your job (in this case, winning elections) depends on others seeing you as mature, reasonable and responsible, playing the victim like this is probably not the way to go.
So keep it up, conservatives! Blame the media for accurately reporting on the GOP’s odious views on women’s rights, gay rights, income inequality, the environment, immigration, and whatever else. I’m fine with you losing more elections.
But you can’t ignore the truth. Those knives in the elephant may have been plunged in by the media, but where did they get them? They didn’t pull them out of the ether, ex nihilo. They were supplied by ideas like ‘legitimate rape’ and the ‘47 percent’ comments.
