Republican Moral Values

Remember when you were a kid and someone would declare it was "opposite day"?

Well, sometimes I feel like we're living in the "opposite decade."

Exhibit A: Republicans as the party of "moral values."

We've heard a lot from Republicans in recent years about how they are the upholders of moral values, and about how religion is vital to American life in upholding moral values. Well, I've come to the conclusion that religion is vital to THEM, because they are so emotionally stunted, so mentally ill, so perverted, that without religion, they might all act out the fantasies that some of the most high-profile Republicans put into the steamy novels they feel compelled to write. We all know about Lynne Cheney's steamy novel about girl-on-girl action in the Old West. But this week we found out that Scooter Libby gets off on the idea of bears raping 10-year-old girls and men wondering if they should fuck deer.

ShakesSis has the sorry tale:

Anyway, The New Yorker introduces a 1996 novel called The Apprentice by none other than recently indicted scumbag, Scooter Libby, as another in a series of questionable novels by prominent conservatives, and notes:

Like his predecessors, Libby does not shy from the scatological. The narrative makes generous mention of lice, snot, drunkenness, bad breath, torture, urine, “turds,” armpits, arm hair, neck hair, pubic hair, pus, boils, and blood (regular and menstrual). One passage goes, “At length he walked around to the deer’s head and, reaching into his pants, struggled for a moment and then pulled out his penis. He began to piss in the snow just in front of the deer’s nostrils.”

Eugh. And it gets worse. The passage “He asked if they should fuck the deer.” is quoted, to which, The New Yorker notes, “The answer, reader, is yes.” And then there are the old stand-bys of conservative fiction writers:

Homoeroticism and incest also figure as themes. The main female character, Yukiko, draws hair on the “mound” of a little girl. The brothers of a dead samurai have sex with his daughter. Many things glisten (mouths, hair, evergreens), quiver (a “pink underlip,” arm muscles, legs), and are sniffed (floorboards, sheets, fingers).

Perhaps the most disturbing, however, is this passage:

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.

Then we have Bill O'Reilly's 1998 potboiler Those Who Trespass, which features a character who is a serial killer and also a news broadcaster who sounds alarmingly like O'Reilly himself gagging a woman named Hilary with pantyhose and tossing her off a balcony and in which a middle-aged man is fellated by a fifteen-year-old crackhead.

Do you need any further proof that the right-wing call for mandatory Christianity and bans on gay marriage and abortion are coming from the dark places in their own psyches?

Like many people, I too have a novel in progress, and yes, there is some sexuality involved. Sex is extremely difficult to write, and even more difficult to write well, even when the topic is garden-variety, hetersexual, in-out, in-out. But what kind of a mind does it take to come up with this kind of thing? Bestiality. Houses of prostitution in which 10-year-old girls are sexually assaulted by bears. Men encountering a deer in the snow and wondering if they should fuck it. Never in my LIFE have I EVER come up with these things, and I am a nonreligious Godless heathen liberal who hasn't set foot in a house of worship since 1982.

People like Scooter Libby and Bill O'Reilly may need restrictive religion in order to keep these dark sides in check. And they can't understand that many of us don't even HAVE these dark sides, so we really don't need a punishment model of God in order to keep us in line, because we are mentally healthy enough that we usually DO choose the "right path" -- to be faithful to our partners, to pay for what's in our shopping carts, to recognize that the cute high school kid is a kid and it means hands off, to not embezzle money from our employers, to pay our taxes.

But now we know where all the "moral values" drumbeat comes from -- it comes from untreated sexual perverts and psychopaths who are rightly terrified of themselves. We should fear them too.

Meanwhile, at the same time as they preach moral values while fantasizing about their infant daughters being copulated by the family dog, another facet of their moral depravity comes to the fore this week, in the form of cutting off poor children from school lunches, and tossing low-income college students out of college, so that perverts like themselves can try to assuage their self-loathing (no doubt due to their sexual perversity) with more and more cash:

House Republicans are pushing to cut tens of thousands of legal immigrants off food stamps, partially reversing President Bush's efforts to win Latino votes by restoring similar cuts made in the 1990s.

The food stamp measure is just one of several provisions in an expansive congressional budget-cutting package that critics say unfairly targets the poor and disadvantaged, especially poor children.

The food stamp cuts in the House measure would knock nearly 300,000 people off nutritional assistance programs, including 70,000 legal immigrants, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Those immigrants would lose their benefits because the House measure would require legal immigrants to live in the United States for seven years before becoming eligible to receive food stamps, rather than the current five years.

About 40,000 children would lose eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches, the CBO estimated.

The food stamp cuts, if approved, will especially affect 11 states, including Maryland, that used the changes in the food stamp law -- approved with Bush's support in 2002 -- to expand eligibility and to simplify the application process. Under the House measure, eligibility for food stamps would be tightened to exclude some recipients who qualify for nutritional support simply because they qualify for other anti-poverty programs funded by the federal welfare program, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

Maybe they're hoping that these desperately poor families will take their daughters to brothels like the one described in Scooter Libby's book, where they can be raped by bears for the amusement of sexually-repressed Republican male politicians.