Iranian, ESPN, and Collegiate Fruitcakes

Iranian, ESPN, and Collegiate Fruitcakes

The humorist Will Rogers is famous for saying, among other things, ”I never met a man I didn’t like.”

I feel certain Rogers was speaking generally and wasn’t excluding the fair sex when he said that, just as sure as I am that he had never met certain Iranian Muslims, ESPN producers, and Goshen College President John Brenneman, all of whom are eminently dislikable for various reasons and all of whom are certifiable fruitcakes, dependent, of course, on one’s definition of a “fruitcake.”

I’m not attempting here to further demean almost universally-despised, Christmas fruitcakes. I’m referring to loonies, people who have earned universal disapprobation via violent hypocrisy, (Iranian Muslims), racial agitation, (ESPN), or downright stupidity, (Brenneman).

The Iranians sort of have an excuse for being fruitcakes, sort of, since their duly-elected leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, virtually defines the term. Nevertheless, Islamic Iranian clerics have now outdone themselves in outlandish fruitcakery by seizing and burning every bible in their sorry land or, at least, every bible they can get their grubby hands on.

Still not recovered from the Crusades, which ended 720 years ago, Iran’s Mohabut News is reporting that Iran’s Ayatollah Hadi Jahangosha is worried about “the spread of Christianity among our youth” as disseminated by Christian satellite television and books, principally that nastiest of all books, the Bible.

Ayatollah Jahangosha doesn’t seem concerned a whit over Iran’s nuke program or his nation’s rogue status in the world or supplying weapons to every Muslim nut in the Mideast or promoting worldwide war or eradicating Israel but Christians are a problem. Reflecting his paranoia, the Islamic Republic of Iran is seizing and burning every Bible they can. (http://bit.ly/nSJnZs)

Someone should remind the good cleric of how upset Muslims were over an American pastor burning a few holy Korans last year. Maybe Pastor Jones didn’t burn enough of them?

Quite a few people are upset over ESPN’s coloring NFL quarterback Michael Vick white.

Vick was convicted and jailed for staging and engaging in dog-fighting, a bloody “sport” in which man’s best friends were trained to maim and kill other best friend’s for man’s entertainment.

Whether to mitigate Vick’s offenses, to stir the racial pot, or just to get viewers to tune in, ESPN created a digital mock-up of the African-American Vick as a white man . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5301)

Of Bibles and Condoms

Of Bibles and Condoms

The Bible versus the condom. Pick just one.

One of those two is not like the other, one of those two is not the same. Indeed, both of those two are not like the other.

One, the Bible, ist verboten in Florida’s Collier County School District–and, no doubt in many other public school districts in America–and the other, the condom, in the Provincetown, Massachusetts–and in many other mostly inner city schools–was offered as a free treat to students.

P-Town’s innovation, as discussed here in ”Of Condoms, Teens, and Porn Part One,” http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1756, was to make condoms available to one and all, including elementary school kids. National shock and derision forced the school fathers in Provincetown to re-think that one.

In any event, the proposal has been shelved, for now. It could still become policy if P-Town can determine a way to get into the free-condoms-for-elementary-students business without nationwide scrutiny.

Consider the thought processes that inspired the idea. Someone or a number of someones in P-Town must have figured that so many fourth, fifth, and sixth graders were “doing it” that it was incumbent upon their school system to make prophylactics available to everyone.

Now, take Collier County: . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1770)