Agendas -- With Feet!

by hilzoy

Pam at Pandagon linked to this bizarre article from WorldNetDaily, published at Free Republic. After describing the New Jersey decision on gay marriage, the author gives this amazing explanation for it:

"But why? What's the real goal of the activists, the judges and the radicals who seek to subvert a moral worldview?

The answer is simple: No longer satisfied with practicing the unspeakable perverse sexual pleasures that their hearts seek in private bedrooms, they wish to be able to do so in public. They are also suffering from such immense guilt over their sexual behaviors, because they know inherently that the actions they perform are in fact unhealthy, that they will go to any means necessary to try and shut down the voices in their heads that tell them it is wrong.

They wrongfully believe that the guilty voice within them is an echo of a prudish state that seeks to limit their freedoms. They wrongfully believe that the judgment they feel is emanating from "Bible thumpers." And what they fail to admit is that the voice that condemns them the loudest is never a human voice – but in fact the voice of their own conscience informed by the truth of the God who created them."

It had never occurred to me that the real reason the justices of the New Jersey Supreme Court decided the case as they did was that they wanted to practice "unspeakable perverse sexual pleasures" in public. Live and learn.

However, the real reason I posted this -- it's really an open thread -- was this comment:

"The homosexual agenda has shot themselves in the foot with gay marriage."

Think about it. An agenda, intermittently singular and plural, with feet! Since it can shoot itself, it probably has (have?) hands too. And what does it shoot itself with? Why: gay marriage, of course!

Still, the article's author would probably say: better for an agenda to be shooting itself in the foot than to be "depositing the seed of life in, shall we say, non-life-giving cavities". (For someone who finds this sort of thing "unspeakable", he certainly spends a lot of time describing it.)

***

For some reason, I am entranced by the idea of an agenda with feet. (I'm easily pleased.) I can't make up my mind what it reminds me of most: Coleridge's "Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs/ Upon the slimy sea", or this from Sir John Suckling:

Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out

or Herrick:

"Her pretty feet, like snails, did creep
A little out, and then,
As if they played at bo-peep,
Did soon draw in again."

***

Consider this an open thread. In some sense, it already is.

Comments

[stickler]

What an awful observation. These people need help. Oh, if only the catalogue of English literature contained a phrase to mock them with utmost efficacy?

"Methinks he doth protest too much."

Hey, that might just do.

[stickler]

On review, that message was rather condensed. I am mocking moral scolds and not Hilzoy.

Perhaps I should find a snifter and fill it.

[Jesurgislac]

"The homosexual agenda"

I wish I had a copy of this. The homosexual mafia passes out copies at each meeting, but the place/time of the next meeting is the last item on the agenda, so I never manage to get to a meeting.

It's quite annoying.

[Slartibartfast]

runaway blockquote!

[cleek]

it's fun to read that clownHall passage in the voice of a stereotypical Austrian psychiatrist (ex, Peter Sellers, in Lolita).

[liberal japonicus]

Just for chuckles, I googled the author and got his blog, wherein he touts a 'musclehead revolution'. Take a stroll thru the posts, tons of funny stuff. My fave is when he writes this

So again - the people of a northeastern liberal state have had a court impose its will upon the people of the state using the faulty argument of the "equal protection" clause...

Small problem with antecedents, methinks

He also has a blog at 'Crosswalk.com, the intersection between faith and life' where he has this

I know there is a lot of controversy about the MySpace universe, but I made the decision to go there and be a source of truth in the midst of 93,000,000 users. At the bottom of this post you can join my MySpace friend's list, so feel free.

[russell]

Maybe we should give these folks a place of their own, where they can set up god's little kingdom and live out their lives with self-righteous glee. That way the rest of us could get on with the project of learning how to get along with each other.

I know it's been tried before, without much success. I'd be willing to give it another chance, just to get some peace and quiet.

If Jesus wanted to start a nation, that's what he would have done. He didn't. What makes these folks smarter than Jesus?

Thanks -

[CharleyCarp]

I may have this wrong -- and I'd like a correction if I do -- but didn't the NJ court take pretty much exactly the position that candidate Bush took in 2004? CU ok, marriage not (unless a state wants it). Pointedly avoiding a 're-definition of marriage.'

[Jon H]

Would an agenda with feet use a shoehorn with teeth?

[Andrew]

Charley,

The court stated that it did not currently see a requirement to provide the title 'marriage' to same-sex couples in New Jersey, while leaving it up to the plantiffs to bring a new suit if the legislature chose to call them civil unions rather than marriage. Given the court's split was 4-3, with the three dissenting judges arguing that they should impose gay marriage in name as well as in fact, I suspect that all this decision did was push that move down the road a year or two.

[Ara]

Hilzoy: Embrace the agenda with feet! Imagine the descriptive possibilities that open up. Now we can speak breathlessly fleet-footed agendas running up the aisles of congress and complain bitterly of our party's bow-legged agenda or write scholarly articles about pigeon-toed agendas or pity the pain of the agenda that stubbed its big toe. What remains unspecified is just how many feet agendas have, so there might be a quadruped agenda or a millipede agenda. Or an agenda with two left feet. Or, my favorite: the discalced agenda!

[rilkefan]

"The homosexual agenda has shot themselves in the foot with gay marriage"

Maybe the key insight isn't hexapodia.

[Ugh]

Brad Delong is shrill.

[John Thullen]

When guns are outlawed, only agendas will have guns.

"non life-giving cavities"

I wonder how long the guy thought about that before he wrote it down. Don't let George Allen know.

Sir Suckling? I'd better never hear of a Cambodian reading him in America.

[Jesurgislac]

There's almost a pattern to it, though it's not a consistent pattern.

One side proposes same-sex marriage (or civil unions).

T'other side goes nuts, raving and screaming that such a thing will destroy marriage and family life.

A court (or a legislature) decides that it's only justice for same-sex couples to have the same rights as mixed-sex couples, and creates civil unions.

Hundreds and hundreds of same-sex couples, many of whom have been together for decades, register their relationship. Heartwarming stories of elderly couples who say they'd been wanting this for years find their way into the media. Mixed-sex marriages remain intact. Family life across the nation seems to be doing just fine. T'other side carries on screaming. People pay less and less attention.

A year or two or three later, with no widespread objections except from t'other side, still bouncing and screaming in slightly-exhausted hysteria and demanding to know why no one is listening to them, the legislature opens marriage to same-sex couples as well as mixed-sex couples.

The problem t'other side have is that they claimed the sky would fall and shatter the hearts of happy married couples everywhere if same-sex couples were given the same legal rights as married couples. And, when sensible people can see for themselves that the sky is not falling and hearts are not shattered, t'other side are left looking rather silly, waving big banners going DOOM! DOOM! while everyone else is strolling past in sunshine with fluffy bunny rabbits nibbling the grass in connubial glory.

A bit like right-wing pundits hoped would happen to the reality-based community with regard to Iraq, now I think about it.

[cleek]

in order to maintain "balance", Bizarro World™ gets to be on a blogger panel on CNN on election night, to give us play-by-play as the treasonous gay-agenda traitors gain seats in Congress.

why? beats me

[Urinated State of America]

"It had never occurred to me that the real reason the justices of the New Jersey Supreme Court decided the case as they did was that they wanted to practice "unspeakable perverse pleasures" in public. Live and learn."

How do we know the justices aren't doing so already? You could fit a lot of box turtles under those robes.

[gwangung]

Maybe they were thinking about this:

http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/08/absurd_sentence_for_the_penis.php

(Not work or dignity safe....)

[Andrew]

This one's for Jes. :)

[liberal japonicus]

You could fit a lot of box turtles under those robes.

That brings to mind the Dave Barry column where one of the Supremos (Stevens?) writes a letter to him talking about an anti-flatulence product called Beano, which had him write some speculation about the robes.

[Step2]

"The homosexual agenda has shot themselves in the foot with gay marriage."

Dick Cheney must have been involved. No, wait, that would be shooting somebody else's foot.

[KCinDC]

Would an agenda with feet use a shoehorn with teeth?

Are you suggesting that Freepers think people should get beat up for statin' their beliefs?

[dutchmarbel]

Since this is an open thread - I remember people saying that they could only see TDS in the 'international' version (a half hour summery of the week). But on the CC site they provide the full show themselves now.

[Donald Johnson]

What we need today, it being Halloween and all, is an open thread devoted to ghost stories and the like. Nothing really scary, like the Republicans winning all the close elections, just the usual creepy Stephen King/Neil Gaiman type material.

Nothing to add on my own. Never saw anything remotely resembling a ghost. I have a couple of friends who claim otherwise, but I don't remember the details well enough, except for the case where absolutely nothing happened. (A former acquaintenance of mine spent a night in a reportedly haunted house and after telling about how scared she was in a recounting that lasted 15 or 20 minutes, the simple truth of the matter was that absolutely nothing happened at all.)