Month: May 2015

The Duggars and Conservative America’s Obsession with the “Perfect” Family

JarretR 11 Comments
Americans love to project extreme versions of themselves onto heaviliy-filtered media depictions of the family.

Americans love to project extreme versions of themselves onto heavily filtered media depictions of the family.

There really is nothing more important in life than family. But just because you have what appears to be a “perfect” family doesn’t mean that your family isn’t dysfunctional like everyone else’s — maybe even VERY dysfunctional. So the news that Josh Duggar — eldest son of the Duggar clan that stars on TLC’s popular “reality” show 19 Kids and Counting — had molested underage girls when he was a young teenager wasn’t entirely surprising. These revelations led Josh Duggar to resign from his advocacy role with the Family Research Council, a homophobic hate group through which he consistently — and hypocritically — equated gay people to child molesters.

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Obamacare and the American Cult of Individualism

JarretR 8 Comments
South Carolina resident Luis Lang is the classic example of the perils of taking ideology too far.

South Carolina resident Luis Lang is the classic example of the perils of taking ideology too far.

Few things in this world are more dangerous than the true believer. If you’re thoroughly convinced that the world should be ordered in accordance with your predetermined ideology, then reality can slap you until your mug is redder than a beefsteak tomato at Uncle Bernie’s Memorial Day cookout and you still won’t change your mind. But every once in a while, the true believer is faced with the ultimate test of his belief: believe or die, or at least believe or get horribly maimed. In some of these instances, the true believer must open his maw wide and swallow that quarter-inch-wide, grainy pill known as pride without so much as a sip of water until that pill tumbles down his gullet and activates his gut’s underutilized reality-check nerve.

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The Confederate Flag: America’s Most Loaded Generic Symbol of Rebellion

JarretR 35 Comments
Privleged, white, rebels without a clue in Colorado.

Rebels without a clue in Colorado.

The Confederate flag is an American symbol like no other. The reasons for this aren’t complicated: the Rebel flag is both distinctly American and functionally anti-American at the same time. It’s American in the sense that it once stood for a rebellion started by Americans, but anti-American in the sense that those American rebels waged a treasonous war against, you know, the United States. Yes-sir-ee-Bob, the stars and bars represents the most chaotic moment in U.S. history, when the land of the free went to war over the fact that millions of its residents were decidedly unfree, and plenty of (white) Americans wanted to maintain that status quo.

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