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