Resistance is... imperative.

I should know better by now.  Whenever I post something that has the subtext, "Isn't this ridiculous?  I mean, really.  Can you think of anything more idiotic than this?" -- as I did in yesterday's post, wherein I described an ultrareligious website's claim that the Rapture has actually already happened -- it just acts as an impetus for someone in my readership to send me something even stupider.

So when I got an email from a loyal reader that said, "First the Rapture, and now this," I paused for a moment before clicking the link.

I should have paused for a lot longer.  And gotten myself a glass of scotch.  Because the link was to a story about an evangelical pastor and a talk-radio host...

... who think that the gays are forming an army of super-soldiers.

*brief pause to allow you to go get something to fortify yourself with before reading on*

I wish I was kidding about this, I really do.  But according to an article over at Raw Story, Reverend Jeff Allen of Indiana was interviewed a couple of days ago by TruNews radio host and fundamentalist wingnut Rick Wiles, and they were in total agreement that the gays are trying to create a master race of super soldiers.

Fig. 1: Super Soldier.  Not sure if he's gay, but we should assume the worst.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Wiles and Allen ignore, of course, the fact that being gay, the super soldiers will have a little trouble reproducing their Master Race unless they enlist some help.  But as I mentioned yesterday, facts seem to be very much beside the point with this crowd.

"Hitler was trying to create a race of super gay male soldiers," Wiles said.  "It’s not an exaggeration to say ‘homofascist,’ because the German Nazi Party was homosexual.  Hitler was a homosexual.  The top Nazi leadership, all of them were homosexuals."

Which would have undoubtedly come as a surprise to Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda, who had six children; Joachim von Ribbentrop and his wife Anna, who had five children; Ernst Kaltenbrunner and his wife Elisabeth, who had three children; etc.  Not to mention the thousands of homosexuals who were rounded up during the Holocaust and sent to concentration camps, where many lost their lives.

Oh, but do go on, Mr. Wiles, don't let me distract you with actual facts.

"They were creating a homosexual special race," Wiles continued.  "That’s what it was all about.  It wasn’t this thing about an Aryan race of white people, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, white people, Hitler was trying to create a race of super gay male soldiers.  If it’s not stopped, it will end up in America just like it was in Germany but it won’t be the Jews that will be slaughtered, it will be the Christians."

Then Reverend Allen chimed in, but not with what any sane person would have said, which would have been, "Are you fucking crazy?"  No, Allen acted as if what Wiles was saying made perfect sense.

"Right," he said, his voice carrying that intensity that you only hear in people who have utterly and completely lost their minds.  "We haven’t gotten, fortunately, to the slaughtering part, but we’re getting to the point of the marginalizing part.  Marginalized, get us to the edge, remove us from any influence in society."

Marginalized even though Christians still account for nearly three-quarters of the population in the United States.  Righty-o.

But never mind that, Allen said.  "Gays are Nazi thought police and they’re going to be the worst kind of tyrants we’ve ever seen.  They’re going to hunt you down and they’re going to persecute you.  That is the spirit that is alive in this country right now and is being embraced by political leaders in both parties, it is the new Nazism."

And if that isn't enough, add it to what appeared on Herman Cain's website a few days ago -- an article written by Dan Calabrese, editor-in-chief of The Best of Cain, who compared gays to the Borg on Star Trek.  "This movement is evil," Calabrese writes, "not because homosexuality is a 'worse sin' than other sins, but because its champions are trying to not only silence but in many cases destroy those who disagree with them.  The gay movement understands something.  They understand that in order for their movement to ultimately succeed, they need to turn the entire culture into a mindless army of obedient adherents like the Borg on Star Trek.  You will be assimilated.  Resistance is futile."

You know, the only hopeful thing I can see in all of this is that the lengths to which some people are going to deny LGBT individuals the right to marry -- and, honestly, the right to have a voice, to stand up and be counted, to be who they are without fear of repercussions or violence -- may be an indication that the bigots realize that they're losing.  LGBT individuals and their allies won't be silenced, just as in an earlier generation the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement refused to give up.  Christians themselves are beginning to repudiate people like Allen, Wiles, and Calabrese, recognizing that the teachings of Jesus had way more to do with "do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you" than they did with "make sure that an entire segment of society is discriminated against, even if it means telling blatant lies to do so."  Because the truth is, the bigots have no better arguments; denying LGBT individuals the rights that heterosexuals have always enjoyed cannot be defended logically (can someone please explain to me why allowing two gay men to marry would have any impact on my marriage at all?), so off into the stratosphere they go with ridiculous talk of gay super soldiers and Borg drones.

And, you know, narrow-minded loons like Wiles and Allen and Calabrese will end up on the wrong side of history, just as George Wallace and Eugene "Bull" Connor did a generation ago.  It's only a matter of time.  

So maybe there's something to what Calabrese said, after all, only not the way he meant it.  If your position is ethically right, and the opposition is making a last-ditch crazy stand, maybe it's time to push even harder, and topple the bigots from their positions of power once and for all.

In the case of LGBT people and their allies, resistance isn't futile; resistance may well be a moral imperative.

Space cubes

I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that we survived (1) the Rapture, (2) the Mayan apocalypse, and (3) the 2012 Christmas shopping season.  The bad news is that the Borg are on their way.  [Source]

At least, that is the claim of such pinnacles of rationality as David Icke and Alex Collier, both of whose names you may have seen once or twice in Skeptophilia before.  Icke, you may recall, is the one who believes that American public schools are being run by aliens; Collier, on the other hand, claims that there was a giant alien/human war back in the 1930s, which none of us have heard about because the war propelled us through a rip in the space-time continuum into an alternate timeline, and now we have to try to get back into our correct timeline, without even being able to consult Geordi LaForge for advice.

Now, because two minds of this caliber are clearly better than one, Icke and Collier have teamed up to analyze the data coming in from NASA's SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory), and have come to the terrifying conclusion that the Borg cube has arrived, and is hovering menacingly just inside the corona of the sun.

So, let's just take a look at some of the photographs in question, whatchasay?

Spokespeople for NASA say that these images aren't of a giant cubical spacecraft; they're basically just blank spots where there's missing data.  Icke and Collier aren't convinced, however.  They take the evidence from the photograph, which consists solely of a couple of blank squares, and come to the only conclusion you could draw from this:

The cube is a "GOD" (Galactic Obliteration Device) launched by an evil alien race, which is coming to Earth to destroy it as per the Book of Revelation Chapter 21, wherein we find out that the "City of God" that is supposed to descend during the End Times is square in shape, and since squares are kind of like cubes, this thing is going to come to Earth and the Borg are then going to annihilate the human race in the Battle of Armageddon, which fulfills the scriptural prophecy even though I've read the Book of Revelation and I don't remember any mention of the Second Coming of Locutus.

Apparently, this idea didn't originate with Icke and Collier, but was the brainchild of the LLF (Luciferian Liberation Front).  Which gives it ever so much more credibility, given that this is the same group of wingnuts who believe that the biblical story is literally true, except that Jesus was actually a superpowerful cyborg from another planet.

Of course, Icke, Collier, and the LLF aren't the only ones who have weighed in on the anomalous squares in the SOHO photographs.  Scott Waring, of UFO Sightings Daily, thinks that the cube is a giant spacecraft, but that it doesn't have anything to do with either the Borg or the Book of Revelation.  No, Waring said, don't be a loon.  There are two other, much more likely, possibilities: "Such huge objects are present either because the sun is hollow or because energy is being harvested from the sun."

Oh.  Okay.  That makes all kinds of sense.

My own personal opinion is that NASA should hire someone whose sole job is to scan their photographs, looking for ones with glitches, dead pixels, missing data, and so on, and make sure that those flawed photographs never make it online.  We rationalist skeptics have enough trouble keeping everyone's eye on the ball without goofed-up pics from NASA making it worse.

Of course, if NASA did hire someone to do this, Icke, Collier et al. would eventually find out about it, and then there's be allegations of a conspiracy and coverup designed to keep all of us from finding out about the impending alien invasion.  Accusations would be leveled.  The word "sheeple" would be used.

You can't win.