Salt City Sinner

posted on 5/27/2015 by the Salt City Sinner It's a beautiful day outside! Spring is blossoming on the brink of summer, the warm air is laden with birdsong and sweet, golden pollen, and you've decided to join a cult. This is not a wholly unusual life choice, and although your friends, family, coworkers, and various psychiatric professionals may be dismayed by your decision, or even tell you that you're making a horrible mistake that will destroy your life, this modest bloggue is a judgement-free zone and staunch defender of your political and religious liberty and your right to live according to your Sincerely Held Beliefs™, no matter how unusual they may be. You may think that this means that your decision-making days are over. This is, unfortunately, not true YET. After all, planet Earth in the year 2015 offers you a magnificent array of options in terms of cults that are eager to have you on board. To help determine which cult might be a good fit for you, we h...

posted on 5/22/2015 by the Salt City Sinner “And these you shall detest among the birds; they shall not be eaten; they are detestable: the eagle, the bearded vulture, the black vulture, the kite, the falcon of any kind, every raven of any kind, the ostrich, the nighthawk, the sea gull, the hawk of any kind, the little owl, the cormorant, the short-eared owl...” – Leviticus 11 : 13 – 20 Frater Xango Mangosteen hunches over the dead seagull, its entrails spread before him in an ugly, glittering bouquet. Though his augury usually provides only the general outlines of things to come, shrouded in possibilities and uncertainties, today's sacrifice at the crossroads of the salt trade routes has, upon having its belly slit open, provided a revelation that is as clear and as sharp as an icicle thrust through the eye socket. The time is here; the Holy Sovereign Nation of Deseret will shrug off the shackles of the Eagle, the iron collar of Rome, the deathly somnolence of peace. He ...

posted on 5/20/2015 by the Salt City Sinner When Ronald Reagan tore down the Berlin Wall in late 1989 with his bare hands, Real Americans™ breathed a sigh of relief that proved as premature as a red-blooded American man's ejaculation during procreative missionary-position coitus. You see, in spite of the fact that the Soviet Union first banned the Communist Party and then formally dissolved in 1991, launching a two decade period of capitalist reforms and foreign investment, and despite the fact that only five Communist nations still exist (China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and North Korea), Communism is still apparently a vibrant and powerful force in the world today. Sleeper cells and hidden agendas riddle every sector of American society, using progressives, liberals, and the hated Democrat Party as either useful idiots or willing accomplices. The One True God of Christendom has been driven from our schools, our government, and our culture, leaving a vacuum into which the demoni...

posted on 5/18/2015 by the Salt City Sinner Assholes! Almost everybody has one, and some people can't help but be one! They walk among us, occupying various perches from the lowliest of street-sweepers to the lofty ivory towers of academia to the hungry glowing rictuses of cable news to the hushed reverence of museums, monasteries, and mansions. Fun fact: statisticians have estimated that approximately 100% of elected officials in the United States are assholes, making them our body politic's most well-represented demographic, just ahead of white Christian males. A person's status as an asshole is like religious belief or sexual orientation – while some visual cues may give hints as to what it might be, it is impossible in most cases to detect accurately with the naked eye. For this reason, I hope you find the following field guide helpful. It is by no means exhaustive, but it may prove useful as a set of preliminary parameters in conversation both online and off. He...

posted on 5/16/2015 by the Salt City Sinner I'm going to do the full disclosure thing right out of the gate: I'm a proponent of legalizing drugs. Not just “decriminalizing” “soft” drugs like marijuana – I mean that I favor completely legal heroin, methamphetamine, PCP, the whole shebang. I favor ending prohibition and regulation for both philosophical and practical reasons. On the philosophical side, I believe that people have the right to make informed decisions about the destiny of their own bodies, even if I might personally disagree with some of their choices. This is actually a fairly popular position when it comes to things like alcohol, caffeine, tobacco and, yes, marijuana – once you venture outside of the average person's comfort zone by mentioning meth, cocaine, or heroin, support for fully ending drug prohibition erodes, but the “social harm” argument against full legalization is so applicable to things like alcohol and tobacco (not to mention trans fats ...

posted on 5/11/2015 by the Salt City Sinner One year that I attended college in Arkansas, my girlfriend at the time and I used to hang out in Little Rock with friends of hers, including one friend we'll call “Rob.” Rob was ex-military, and politically on the conservative side, so needless to say he and I spent a good deal of time arguing about politics. We also spent a a not-insignificant amount of time arguing about religion, because Rob was definitely a God person, whereas I, since the last time I attended mass as a tween, have decidedly not been a God person. Our political arguments were often heated but there was a certain amount of mutual respect. When Rob talked about Jesus, on the other hand,his lips would curl into a gloating little smile and his voice would take on a condescending timbre as he said, for the hundredth or three hundredth time, “you'd understand if you'd ever been in the military or seen combat. There are no atheists in foxholes.” This wou...

posted on 5/6/2015 by the Salt City Sinner Utah! A land of virtue, where steeples tower, firmly erect, in every churchyard, and fertile folds dot the foothills. A land of fecundity, leading the nation in average number of offspring per family with children (and, according to my wildly unscientific estimate, in lowest number of adult virgins per comic book convention). Utah is also one of several states that exclusively offers abstinence-only sex education, a form of sex ed that teaches kids that they should abstain from sex until marriage -- and often offers no more information than that. Abstinence-only sex ed is subsidized by the federal government under section 510 of the Social Security Act , despite the fact that studies have shown that this approach does not decrease rates of unwanted teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections (STIs). It should come as no surprise then that Utah, a staunchly religious state where any form of public or charter school sex ed curric...

image from truthwinsout.org posted on 5/2/2015 by the Salt City Sinner Opponents of marriage equality (and LGBTQ rights in general) like to play pretend a lot. They pretend, for example, that gay or trans* people are out to “recruit,” and usually engage in cheap-shot slander by pretending that proponents of equality are recruiting children in particular. They pretend that LGBTQ identity is something that is mutable, all the while justifying discrimination and hate as a form of religious belief, when religious belief is one of the most mutable characteristics imaginable. The most hilariously illogical game of “let's pretend” that the homophobia industry plays, however, relates to the effect that marriage equality will somehow supposedly have on “traditional” (straight) marriage – that somehow, marriage is a zero-sum game , and that every same-sex couple that is allowed to marry will mean one less opposite-sex couple that can. How is this the case? Despite the fact that this...