Salt City Sinner

Posted on 9/21/2019 by the Salt City Sinner By the pricking of my thumbs… something wicked this way comes. Or, at any rate, it might if we’re lucky! The Satanic Temple – an organization of which I am a proud member and about which I have written in the past – is holding something of a contest, you see. We’re raising money for the Temple’s Reproductive Religious Rights campaign. The state that raises the most money by midnight on Halloween will get to host the 2020 Reproductive Religious Rights Rally. Given recent attempts by some Utahns to restrict women’s access to legal abortion, the time to support bodily autonomy is now. I cannot think of a better place than Salt Lake City (with the possible exception of Vatican City) to hold the Satanic Temple’s rally. If you’d like to help make that happen, you can donate to Salt Lake’s efforts here , or you can attend our Unholy Congregation this October: It will be a family-friendly event, held at Crone’s Hollow (the ow...

posted on 4/9/2015 by the Salt City Sinner Joseph Farah, the Grand Wizard of Christian white nationalist web tabloid WND, is many things. A braggart , a hypocritical and paranoid conspiracy theorist, a self-proclaimed prophet , a “former left-wing radical,” take your pick. Like many on the left and the right, he also fails what a friend of mine calls “the ideological Turing test,” which said friend describes as a measure of the ability of a person to accurately describe the arguments and stances of someone they strongly disagree with on their opponent's terms. There's something about Farah I haven't figured out. He turns a tidy profit at WND through a publishing imprint, a magazine, DVDs (mostly Christian end-times gobbledegook), advertising at WND.com (mostly survivalist supplies and assorted weirdness), a truly impressive email list, which he regularly rents to the Republican Party for outreach purposes, and now even an end-times oriented 'Holy Land Cruise....

The "reproductive rights" debate, which is a sort of catch-all phrase for smaller, more complex and awful debates surrounding issues of public health, contraception, religious belief, and abortion, is one that I honestly hoped had been, to some extent, shelved. Much like the Democrats wisely abandoned the gun control debate in the 00's, it seemed - for a little while, recently - that Republicans had come to the same conclusion: public opinion had more or less gelled around a fairly non-controversial compromise on the issue, and they should just shut up. Not so! From a bombastic radio host who stuck his fat foot in a big bucket of shit on the issue recently to the resurgence of a Republican primary contender who almost justifies Markos Moulitsas' unforgivable "American Taliban" book - the culture war is alive again! One of the most instructive, horrible, and anti-woman laws imaginable passed in (where else) Texas recently (from a debate over the issue by t...