Island Med Student

Please do check out this article on Wired’s blog about Mike Huckabee’s endorsement of GodTube, a Christian version of YouTube. I really didn’t think much of it until I watched one of the videos (below), which pretty much made me want to vomit. Here’s a recommendation though, don’t watch this video first thing in the morning like I did. It might just ruin your day.

PS: I could write a lengthy rant about why this video disturbs me, but I have too much studying to do today. In summary, I’ll say this: I am certainly not “against” any religion. In fact, I think religion serves an important purpose in many peoples’ lives. I am, however, against scare tactics in general. And especially scare tactics used to get people to believe in a certain religion, or anything else, for that matter. Using fear to make people believe in your cause is a form of propaganda. Naziism anyone?

“Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.”

““ Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda And Persuasion

“By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise.”

- Adolf Hitler

I have admittedly not been keeping up with the news until recently. I barely knew who was even running in the upcoming presidential election. So, I’ve been trying to catch up in the past few days.

There’s one thing I know for sure: I hate Huckabee. I have to admit up front that I’ve barely skimmed the surface of his position on issues. It only took listening to these two answers about evolution and medical marijuana, however, for me to have a pretty good hunch that I don’t like this guy. Also, am I the only one who thinks he looks like Richard Nixon?

Here’s his first response on evolution:

Okay, I’ll admit that he did a great job answering the question. However, he represents what pisses me off about many people who don’t believe in evolution–he obviously does not even understand what it is. He said that we’re not “descended from primates.” Well, that’s absolutely correct. But no one is claiming that we descended from primates. We are, in fact, primates. Also, some anti-evolutionists will say “humans didn’t descend from monkeys.” Well, that’s correct as well. We did, however, share a common ancestor. I could rant on this for a while, but I shall not.

My second favorite Huckabee response of the day is this answer he gave to a woman who wanted to know if he was for legalizing marijuana.

There are a million reasons why this video upsets me, but I’ll stick to the main one. Bascially, Huckabee suggested that narcotics could be a viable alternative to marijuana for relieving chronic pain. I could write a book on why this is a terrible argument, and he never actually said “legal” narcotics, but let’s assume that’s what he meant. Okay, so he’s saying that morphine, for example, is an alternative to marijuana. Well, that’s great because morphine is legal, and marijuana is not. That works out so well! And everyone knows that legal drugs like alcohol and cigarettes are way better for you and less addictive than the scary illegal ones like marijuana. And everyone knows that morphine is way less addictive than marijuana. And that people rob banks all the time to get more marijuana. And that…..okay, I’ll stop now.

On another note, I’m sick as hell. I don’t know if it was the travelling, or change of climate, or stress of the season, but I have a pretty bad cold. I have gotten up only to go to the bathroom for the past 3 days. I hope I start feeling better soon. Googling Huckabee is certainly not making me want to stay for very long in this country.

Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter Mary recently announced that she’s having a baby with her partner. Many conservatives are very concerned about how these two people who are living in sin will end up harming their poor child. An article that just appeared in Slate Magazine really hit the nail on the head with its comparison of the search for evidence that gay parents are destructive with the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I mean, aren’t lesbian parents just as destructive as WMDs? How could having two loving mothers ever be good for a child? You can look at examples such as Micheal Jackson’s loving heterosexual parents, or perhaps Charles Manson’s supportive parents, (Manson had an alcoholic prostitute mother who allegedly sold Charlie for a pitcher of beer) to see that it takes both a man and a woman to raise children. Having two loving fathers or mothers is simply not enough. Even though the American Psychological Association has compiled abstracts of 67 studies, which all seem to find that gay parents are just as effective, and even potentially more so than heterosexual parents, they must have been poorly designed studies. Gay people are inherently evil, and there is no way they could ever love a child as fully as holy heterosexuals. I’m sure that the proof that gay and lesbian couples make horrible parents is out there somewhere waiting to be discovered, just like the WMDs.