This speaks for itself really. How can anyone who claims to stand for freedom, democracy and human rights, veto a democratically passed law that would have prevented innocent people from being tortured? I think we all know the answer.

The guy makes my skin crawl.

The Telegraph has an interesting article about how Tony Blair didn’t feel free to express his religion in public for fear of being seen as a “nutter”:

Mr Blair complained that he had been unable to follow the example of US politicians, such as President
George W. Bush, in being open about his faith because people in Britain regarded religion with suspicion.

“It’s difficult if you talk about religious faith in our political system,” Mr Blair said. “If you are in the
American political system or others then you can talk about religious faith and people say ‘yes,
that’s fair enough’ and it is something they respond to quite naturally.

“You talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter. I mean … you may go
off and sit in the corner and … commune with the man upstairs and then come back and say ‘right, I’ve
been told the answer and that’s it’.”

Well, fair enough. I can see why you’d want to avoid people thinking you made hugely important decisions about national security and international policy based on messages from ceilingcat God. I mean, that really would be insane.

The White House has indicated that the president is likely to use his veto to block legislation outlawing employment discrimination based on sexual preference, because – get this – it would infringe the religious freedoms of employers, and thus be unconstitutional.

If you’re thinking that argument sounds familiar, it is. It’s the exact same argument used by many religious people to oppose similar modifications to the UK’s Provision of Goods and Services Act late last year. Of course, that was a group of religious protesters that no-one took particularly seriously, whereas this is the most powerful man in the world, and while they held a torch-light vigil and prayed a lot (with predictably negligible result,) the president actually has the power to prevent the law passing.

It’s depressing.

Linked from Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

I have been called a lot of things, but never a great Satan. I wish the Iranian people well and only hope their experience with an inept, rigid ideologue president goes better than ours.

- Oliver Stone