Salt City Sinner

posted on 6/25/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist recently wrote about one particularly hateful character, Cheryl K. Chumley. Ms. Chumley boasts the hilarious title of “online opinion editor” at the Washington Times, where she wrote this :   Nothing shows cultural degradation like a nation that was forged by Christian faithfuls on a quest for religious freedom and built by Judeo-Christian principles being torn asunder and cast into judicial, legislative and cultural confusion by the likes of group that hails Satan during a prayer moment at a government get-together. … The First Amendment is being twisted and turned inward and used as a weapon of cultural and political destruction against America by cockroaches that, just a few short years ago, were constrained to dark corners. And they were constrained to dark corners because the moral majority wouldn’t tolerate it otherwise. Mehta does a great job of taking apart Chumley’s idiotic argu...

get ready for it to get even worse posted on 5/17/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Localism! It’s a form of lesser magick that everyone loves, except when they don’t. Where should we vest certain authorities – the authority to tax, to regulate, to run a geographic area’s affairs? Here in Utah, the balance of power that creates the most heat and friction is undoubtedly the question of federal lands. Protected land is a perennial source of fist-pounding, foot-stomping rage to (mostly white) rural Utahns, some of whom would like the unrestricted right to go yee-hawing around on their toys, others of whom have a more material interest in resource extraction and the decimation of national monuments.   You could argue, were you so disposed, that this constitutes a breach of rural sovereignty by a bunch of supposedly-enlightened liberal soy boys and city-dwellers. That’s a discussion I’d be willing to have; one in which I would be very quick to point out that it’s perha...

posted on 4/28/2018 by the Salt City Sinner Jim Dabakis, former State Senator and co-founder of the Utah Pride Center and Equality Utah, is running for Salt Lake City mayor. He’s got plenty of company; there’s a whole baseball team ’s worth of candidates running. I was very interested to read the following from Jim recently, via his Facebook page : I Am So Sorry, I Must Return Your Generous Campaign Contribution…  Dear XXXXXXX, I am returning your generous campaign contribution. With thanks. You have done nothing illegal or immoral. As a matter of fact, recently on an airport inspection visit, I was dazzled by the great work and progress being made by you and so many others who are building Salt Lake's future. However, I have made it a habit in my years of public service to not knowingly take money from people or companies where there might be future conflicts.  Sincerely, Jim Dabakis  (The contribution came from an out of state major contractor con...

posted on 4/24/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Because of my unconventional religious beliefs, I expect to be misrepresented and unfairly pilloried. Anyone who stakes out a controversial position that pushes the envelope of free speech or the free exercise of religion can expect some pushback, whether their cause be just (as is the case with the Satanic Temple or ACLU), unjust (conservative Evangelicals writ large, trolls like Roger Stone), or legally-protected but unconscionable (the alt-right, the Westboro Baptist Church). When right wing figures squawk, whine, and weep about how persecuted they are when people quite predictably hate what they have to say, I don’t think it’s the least bit in good faith, because as a Satanist – and, thus, someone whose speech is also often unpopular – I expect to have to deal with the social consequences of my beliefs. Now, on the other hand, the correction of lies and misrepresentations – I think that’s both fair and a productive use of ...

posted on 4/7/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Based on the content of Joseph Farah’s columns, repeated entreaties for donations from readers, weird and shifting business models, and the scuttlebutt in their comments section, I’ve had my suspicions about WND and Joseph Farah for some time now. The Washington Post doesn’t need to speculate or imply or have suspicions, though. Saturnalia arrived early this year in the form of a lengthy article , based on on-the-record information from former WND staff and internal emails. It establishes that WND is in dire straits indeed: “[Farah’s] realm is being sucked into a tornado of unpaid bills, pink-slipped employees, chaotic accounting, declining revenue and diminishing readership, according to interviews with more than 25 former employees, shareholders, company insiders and authors associated with the firm's flailing publishing units, as well as a review of hundreds of internal documents, including emails and financial stateme...

posted on 3/5/2019 by the Salt City Sinner: this post originally appeared at Madness Heart Press If there has ever been a better real-life example of idle hands being the devil’s plaything than Archie Comics , I would be amused and delighted to hear about it. (No, really: at me .) From 1942 through 2014, Archie may have received the occasional update or fine-tuning, but he stayed the same basic Archie: redheaded, beloved of Betty and Veronica, safe as milk. Then, recently, Archie and the gang were delivered from the idle hands of his former curators and into the hot little mitts of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, where the devil got delightfully mixed up in things. Aguirre-Sacasa, you see, rebooted the entire franchise from the ground up, giving it an occult twist. This included a reboot of the character Sabrina Spellman, a teenage witch who first appeared in Archie in 1962 and originally had a tween-oriented TV show that premiered in 1996 and ran for an inexplicable seven seaso...

posted on 2/14/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Love! The stuff of legends; of fleets launched, genocides committed or averted, friends betrayed and loyalties upheld. It’s also the stuff of commerce, serving as a high-fructose additive to movies, music, and other entertainment that might otherwise be too intellectually nutrient-dense for folks to stomach. As such, even those of us sworn to darkness can’t seem to avoid it this time of year. Consider pink glitter to be an appropriate synecdoche; “romance” winds up getting into everything, unavoidably and infuriatingly cluttering up, jamming, and grinding to a halt the everyday enjoyment of life. Now, I’m not here to cast aspersions on pair-bonding, necessarily. There are certainly advantages to such a lifestyle choice, and the vast, vast majority of humans live their lives that way. I’ve even heard rumors (too unspeakable to repeat here) that coupling up is in some way related to the perpetuation of the human species, although,...