You Are Dumb - Utah

Family Overfriendly

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:08:33 -0600

Wingnuts, 29 January 2008

Memo to Daniel Thompson: YOU ARE DUMB.

At this point, it's moved beyond comedy correlation. It's moved beyond comedy rule. If you are promoting what is traditionally referred to as "family values", you are doing something in secret that you don't want us to know about. Something filthy and dirty and odds are, illegal. Period.

So champion one married man and one married woman, neither of whom had ever seen another person's genitals until their wedding night, who then proceed to make babies with an absolute minimum of pleasure for the rest of their intimate lives. Go nuts. Hold rallies. Make signs. Picket porn shops and gay weddings. To your heart's content. But don't get upset when we assume you've got a dungeon in your basement full of sex toys, underage prostitutes, and farm animals. Because you do, and we both fucking know it, don't we?

Daniel Thompson was already semi-famous for a classic bit of wingnut, family-values stupidity. Remember the big to-do from a few years ago when certain video stores were taking it upon themselves to edit down R-rated and PG-13 movies for their humble, Godly clientèle? Religious hicks from Utah and elsewhere who wanted to be part of pop-culture without seeing a nipple? Well, Daniel Thompson was big into that. He ran various shops in Orem, Utah - "CleanFlicks" and "Flix Club", depending on when you look - that sold and rented the movies.

Those things have always pissed me off anyway. You don't get to decry the crudeness and depravity of culture on the one hand, and get to talk about how "Mr. Woodcock" ended around the water cooler on the other hand. You can be a prude and isolate yourself OR join the rest of us in our media-obsessed everyday lives. Thompson was letting them eat their cake and have it too. And speaking of eating it and having it...

Things were rough enough after legal rulings in favor of the Directors' Guild effectively outlawed the practice. In December, Flix Club shut down after almost two years of trying to pretend they were an "educational" business. And then Thompson had to go and get arrested on charges of getting blowjobs from fourteen-year-old girls. Oh, sure, He said he thought they were 18, but "they" always say they thought they were 18. "They" also say they love listening to Hannah Montana and eating candy in their van.

Oh, and then, as part of the investigation into the incident, which allegedly saw Thompson and a compatriot paying for the Oral in Orem from a pair of enterprising young teens who were looking to raise the money to leave home, the police searched the Flix Club store, and found what they allege is an underground pornography ring, with cameras and computers and multiple copies of various titles. And it's not like they can claim these were just the hardcore anal sex scenes they cut out of copies of Superbad and Delta Farce. OK, maybe Delta Farce.

It's classic. And the worst part about it is that you've gotta wonder if the name itself, with its equally classic LI combination that makes for a double-taking all-caps sign (FLIX CLUB) wasn't Thompson thumbing his fake blue nose at all the supposedly real bluenoses coming for their fix of good clean fun. Laughing as they never noticed the typographical entendre, then retiring to his back room to get his hardcore porn on, the clean, morally upstanding folk of Orem none the wiser.

But it's just as likely that every single one of his customers, coming in to get tittie-free copies of Titanic, or cleaned-up copies of Pirates 3, went home, plopped their spawn in front of the DVD player, then snuck downstairs to get their freak on with goats and latex. All a carefully orchestrated surface veneer of holier-than-thou, concealing all the things the family values crowd wants to stop us from seeing and doing, plus much, much worse.

Jingleheimer Shit

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 22:47:12 -0500

Republicans, 28 June 2006

Memo to John Jacob: GET SATAN BEHIND THEE.

Of course, I suppose you have by now. Right now, you know whether or not Satan succeeded. But since I'm writing this before the polls close in Utah, I'm not sure whether the Dark Lord has triumphed in his evil plot to keep you from winning the Republican primary in Utah's Third District.

Unlike many in the so-called "mainstream media", I will not openly mock you for your statement that your troubled campaign was beset by demonic forces. In fact, so the record is perfectly clear, and not twisted by godless liberal pundits, let me engrave into the permanent record your lucid words. John Jacob, I give you ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"There's another force that wants to keep us from going to Washington, D.C. It's the devil is what it is. I don't want you to print that, but it feels like that's what it is. I don't know who else it would be if it wasn't him. Now when that gets out in the paper, I'm going to be one of the screw-loose people."

Now, see, that's the part I don't understand. Why wouldn't you want the paper to print that? Why do you think you'd be considered one of the "screw-loose" people just for thinking Satan has his cloven hoof dipped into the Third District Congressional race? I have it on good authority that Utah is practically a ninth-ring suburb of Hell. It's only natural Lucifer might take an interest.

This is Dubya's America! If God can tell the President to invade Iraq, certainly Satan can whisper in ears about your love of sweet, sweet gambling. Certainly Beelzebub could make you overestimate by an order of magnitude the percentage of illegal immigrants in Utah prisons. The devil is a powerful force in the world. He could even make you admit in front of a reporter that you think Satan's out to get you.

Sure, coming out so strongly against the ultimate force of evil in the universe was a risky political move, but it just makes you seem like some kind of befuddled nutjob when, the next day, you try to ineptly cover for it. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"What I was trying to say, and obviously didn't do it very well, is that over the last eight months I've had more adversity in my life than I've had in the last 10 years. There are some things you keep to yourself. I shouldn't talk about it, including now."

But that's where you're wrong, John Jacob! I encourage all politicians of any party who feel strongly that Satanic influence is behind their difficult primary or election campaign to speak out. The devil gains power from your silence, you know. Televangelists don't expel Satan from their audience by tiptoeing and whispering. No, they shout and cavort and hit people in the head! And that's what you should do.

To behave otherwise would, frankly, cast into doubt your commitment to fighting the forces of evil.

It's just a shame that Joe Lieberman's religion doesn't have a devil. He'll have to go on blaming left-wing jihadists for his troubles.

Utah On My Mind

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 16:58:00 -0500

Utah, 27 June 2006

Memo to Kanab, Utah: YOU ARE NATURALLY DUMB.

I must have Utah on the brain. Offhand reference to Provo yesterday. The wannabe congressman who... ah, but that's a story for another day. And, of course, Kanab.

Kanab, Utah. 3,500 people. Pronounced "knob", as far as I'm concerned. Very Utah. A town so red in a state so red remote controls don't work there for all the interference. The perfect place, you would think, for the "Natural Family" concept to take hold. You remember the Natural Family concept, as presented by my arch-nemeses the Howard Foundation, right?.

The short version: One man, one woman, lots of kids, and set anything that varies from this on fire and piss on the ashes. Long version here and here.

So anyway, the Kanabheads were sitting around, with nothing better to do, when the City Council decided to pass a resolution. And while there is no direct connection between the Howard Foundation and the Kanab City Council, the language in "The Natural Family: A Vision for the City of Kanab" has a very familiar ring to it. ACTUAL RESOLUTION TIME!

"We envision a local culture that upholds the marriage of a woman to a man, and a man to a woman, as ordained of God. This culture affirms marriage as the best path to health, security, fulfillment, and joy. It casts the home built on marriage as the source of true political sovereignty and ordered liberty. It also holds the household framed by marriage to be the primary economic unit, a place marked by rich activity, material abundance, and broad self-reliance. This culture treasures private property in family hands as the rampart of independence and liberty. It celebrates the marital sexual union as the unique source of new human life. We see our homes as open to a full quiver of children, the source of family continuity and social growth. We envision young women growing into wives, homemakers, and mothers; and we see young men growing into husbands, home-builders, and fathers."

The resolution is old ground, but there are two areas I need to touch on. First, only in Utah could marriage be defined using the Freudian slip of "a woman to a man and a man to a woman". How very Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice of them. And second, A FULL QUIVER OF CHILDREN? Was the town founded by Bizarro William Tell, who grew to fame by shooting an arrow off the top of his apple's head?

But as funny as it is, the resolution is actually beside the point. Because you would think there would be no more fertile ground for social and sexual regression, for turning back the clock to the '50's (19- or 18-), than Kanab Fucking Utah. This is a town that went 80-20 for Bush in 2004. EIGHYY-TWENTY. And that's after seeing what the man was capable of. They don't drink the Kool-Aid in Kanab. It flows through their veins. The RNC probably drains them every couple of months so that they can keep Arkansas supplies healthy.

And even these fucks have been arguing over it for the entire four months since the resolution was adopted in February.

Angry letters! Vituperation! Yelling! Both the hoot and the nanny in full effect! Mayor criticized by teen! Teen lashed out at by mayor! They threw a reconciliation party and nobody came! Even the locals who support the proposal are grumpy about all the negative attention it's brought to their town. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"The majority of Kanab residents, whether they are for or against this, just want the issue to go away." - Head Kanab, Mayor Kim Lawson, who's got a girl's name, by the way.

Yet they don't seem to realize why it's not going away - the "Natural Family" is unnatural. It's societally unnatural. It's culturally unnatural. Even Kanabs from Utah are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the present, whether they like it or not. If you can't turn back the clock in Kanab, you can't turn it back anywhere. All you can do is make life unpleasant for everyone else until you die off and someone with more sense takes over.