In an interview on The Colbert Report shortly before he died, Where the Wild Things author Maurice Sendak dismisses one of Colbert's children's book ideas as "so bad that it not only will sell, it will make pots and pots of money." Like Colbert's fictional counterpart, Mike ...read more
House Republicans have all but killed a bill this week that would prohibit child marriages in the state of Tennessee, citing a dubious legal theory that passing the bill could deter a radical Christian lawyer's case against the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage. The ...read more
As independent Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders stumps for votes in California, he has become mired in a feud with HIV/AIDS activists who are insufficiently grateful for all he’s done for them. Although Sanders’ campaign website still maintains ...read more
Marco Rubio is supposed to be the sane one. He's positioned himself as face of young-ish conservatism, a Spanish-fluent son of Cuban exiles who tries not to come off as a rabid ideologue and who claims to love hip-hop in general and Wu-Tang in particular (even though he couldn't ...read more
Behold Murica, this is what freedom looks like: What could be more Christian than discriminating against gays, breaking the law and spending time in prison? Kim Davies is a true American/Christian hero! And those tears - a martyr too! Kim Davies is just like Jesus. Except without ...read more
Topics from our Thursday show -- Fudge and Nuts: Fox and Friends Tell Gay People to Get Their Cakes from a Nonexistent Cake Shop; Fox News A-hole Keith Ablow on Gender Equality; Ted Nugent Weighs in on the Confederate Flag; Subway Guy Questioned About Child Porn; Diff'rent ...read more
On last night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart laid into Justice Antonin Scalia for his pissy dissent over the Supreme Court's gay marriage ruling. “I think we found Scalia’s tell,” said Stewart. “The crankiness of Scalia’s insults runs inverse to his intellectual consistency.” Scalia, ...read more
Everyone's favorite batshit crazy grandpa Pat Robertson clearly hasn't taken the Supreme Court's gay marriage ruling well. In a vintage screed against the gay terrorists taking over America, Robertson warned his viewers on "The 700 Club" about the homosexual agenda, and their ...read more
Wading through conservative reactions to the Supreme Court Gay Marriage, one cannot help but feel an extreme sense of schadenfreude. For those who have invested much of their time and energy suppressing the rights of their fellow citizens, the rapid disintegration of their ...read more
The rabidly anti-gay Westboro Bapist Church appears to have gone into complete meltdown mode after the Supreme Court gay marriage ruling passed this morning. In a series of increasingly deranged tweets, the Church is warning America that the end is nigh and the country is well on ...read more
While America might be the land of guns, mass incarceration, right wing paranoia and idiotic foreign policy, it sometimes gets things so right that it deserves its reputation as the freest nation on the planet. In a historic ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today that it ...read more
Lindsey Graham, the GOP's favorite Mint Julep Sippin' Southerner wants to be President of the United States. Having declared his candidacy yesterday, Graham will be running as a military hawk, telling an audience in South Carolina:I’ve got one simple message. I have more ...read more
The world truly is turning a corner when it comes to accepting homosexuality as a completely normal and healthy facet of human existence. In a remarkable social shift, Ireland has voted to legalize gay marriage by popular vote. The traditionally Catholic country only ...read more
I was on the Thom Hartmann show last night going at it with conservatives on the riots in Baltimore and gay marriage. My co guests were Hughey Newsome of Project 21 and Jennifer Kerns, contributor at The Washington Times and The Blaze. Interestingly, there were many points of ...read more
Arguably the most ludicrous book to emerge during the George W. Bush era was hilariously titled, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, by National Review Online editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg. Yes, somehow Goldberg ...read more
Photo by David McNew/Getty Images On Monday, we discussed how Pastor Robert Jeffress said that legal same-sex marriage would lead to legal polygamy, legal child marriages and the End Times. Question: if same-sex marriage will lead to the End Times, does it really matter what else ...read more
Over the weekend, the New Hampshire #FITN Republican Leadership Summit wound down to the tune of reporters asking this season's crop of Republican presidential hopefuls the hive-minded question, "Would you personally attend a gay wedding?" The question was asked of at least four ...read more
Almost a year ago, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got into a contentious exchange with NPR's Terry Gross over her own "evolution" on the issue of marriage equality, and settling on the then-preferred view that gay marriage was progressing nicely on a state-by-state ...read more
The political outrage of the day for Wednesday centers around remarks that brain surgeon and Republican presidential exploratorer Dr. Ben Carson made about homosexuality, or to put it another way, today is a day. On CNN's New Day, Dr. Carson patiently explained to Chris Cuomo ...read more
Former senior Obama adviser and current book-promoter David Axelrod has stunned the political world with the revelation, in his new tome Believer: My 40 Years In Politics, that Barack Obama supported gay marriage long before he completed his public "evolution" on the topic. From ...read more
(Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP) As a lot of people are saying right now: this is it. The Supreme Court has now decided that it will hear a 2-to-1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit that is currently upholding bans on same-sex marriage in Ohio, Michigan, ...read more
Ted Cruz isn't happy about yesterday's non-ruling by the Supreme Court on the issue of gay marriage. The court refused to review lower court decisions that overturned bans on same-sex marriage in five states, letting those decisions stand and effectively opening the door to gay ...read more
President Obama's nomination of Judge Michael Boggs for a lifetime appointment to a federal District Court has been a source of fierce opposition from progressive Democrats, who scored a victory this week by effectively killing the nod in the Senate Judiciary Committee. ...read more
The most fundamental problem with any religion is that it has no evidentiary foundation whatsoever. Were this its only fault, it would hardly be worth anyone's time to critique it. Plenty of people, for example, believe Bigfoot exists or that Elvis is still alive, but the effects ...read more
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is mercifully retiring from Congress in January after somehow being elected and reelected four times by the voters in Minnesota's sixth district. She is exiting the House just as she entered it: in a spectacular blaze of ingloriousness. On Friday, ...read more
Every good comic hero has to die sometime. Superman did it back in the early 90s. Spider-Man just got back from dying (sort-of?). Now it’s Archie’s turn. And he’s going out in a blaze of liberal glory. The AP reports, “The 73-year-old red-headed character will die in Wednesday's ...read more
Thursday was the one-year anniversary of Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis’ famous filibuster against the enactment of abortion restrictions in the state. While the 11-hour protest made her a national darling of the Democratic Party, you won’t find language about abortion anywhere on ...read more
On Wednesday night, the city of Houston, Texas passed an ordinance banning discrimination based on, among other characteristics, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, sex, nationality, age, religion, disability, pregnancy, and military status. Given the sweeping nature of ...read more
Of all the things ever said about gay marriage in the United States, none has been as sad, pathetic, and stupendously idiotic as the notion that it somehow persecutes Christians. This view was most recently articulated by Texas congressman and noted slack-jawed yokel Louie ...read more
Steve Austin, better known by his wrestling persona "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, a beer-swiggin', middle-fingerin' sonofabitch who once made up his own biblical verse (Austin 3:16) which stated that he had "just kicked your ass," has made his very strong opinions on gay marriage ...read more
God, I hope so. The Supreme Court disappointed conservatives this week by refusing to hear the case of a New Mexico wedding photographer who refused to photograph a lesbian couple's commitment ceremony in 2006. The wrinkle in this case is that the defendants attempted to carve ...read more
I've written about our Age of Outrage and my loathe for it so often that at this point I could probably create a template Mad Libs piece and just plug the specifics in every time a new example of it comes up. Suffice it to say, I almost always dislike the notion of bullying ...read more
Photo: AFP/File, Yasuyoshi Chiba Just a little while ago, a U.S. district judge struck down Texas's ban on same-sex marriage. Judge Orlando Garcia says that while he'll allow the state to continue to enforce the ban while his ruling is appealed, likely all the way to the Supreme ...read more
Is it really possible to separate the art from the artist? No, this isn't another piece about Woody Allen and a 20-year-old case of alleged sexual abuse. It's about a question that rarely arises given the lack of quality art that's traditionally come from a certain end of the ...read more
In the first ever gay marriage in the state of New Jersey, Newark Mayor Cory Booker officiated the marriage between two of his friends at City Hall at 12:01 a.m. this morning. Following the law, Booker asked whether there was anyone present who objected to the union of the two ...read more
The marriage equality debate in the United States has finally come full circle, with Hawaii’s Democratic governor, Neil Abercrombie, on Monday calling a special session of the state Legislature for October 28 to take up a bill that would legalize same-sex marriage in the 50th ...read more
I love being from Africa but the motherland definitely needs to loose some of its more homophobic tendencies. This video gives me hope for the future. ...read more
So DOMA is no more and Prop 8 has been kicked back to the lower court's ruling by the Supreme Court, meaning that it's pretty much left-for-dead as well. It practically goes without saying that this isn't the end of the fight for marriage equality in this country, but it's ...read more
I'm going to make this quick. I defend religion and religious people quite a lot on these pages. I get almost as annoyed with dogmatic atheists as I do religious fundamentalists given their lack of tolerance for anyone with views that differ from their own. I don't think ...read more
David Brook's latest NYT column on gay marriage is, well, rather weird. After reading it a couple of times, it's clear Brooks thinks gay marriage is ok, but his argument is so convoluted and condescending it makes you want to dunk his head down a toilet bowl. Brooks essentially ...read more
For what's seemed like an eternity, Bill O'Reilly has amassed a fortune by anointing himself a "culture warrior" while waging what he's called "the culture wars" -- an ongoing battle between white Christian conservatives, commanded by narcissist-in-chief O'Reilly, against ...read more
The American Academy of Pediatrics recently released a policy statement endorsing same sex marriage. You can read their full report here. According to them:"Children need secure and enduring relationships with committed and nurturing adults to enhance their life experiences ...read more
It's always entertaining to watch the right, particularly the Christian right, whine about victimization. As Steve Benen over at the Maddowblog says today, no one's raised melodramatic self-pity to an art form the way America's conservative Christians have, regardless of their ...read more
I'll make this quick and to the point. I don't know what decisions the Supreme Court will return regarding California's Prop 8 and the national Defense of Marriage Act, but in the end it will hardly matter. Oh, sure, it will certainly matter in the short term because it will ...read more
After what seemed like a decade of 24/7 coverage of the Republican 2012 primary process, news has come out that there are still untold stories. Apparently, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum negotiated to team up against Mitt Romney. Ok, this doesn’t sound like a one meeting kind ...read more
According to the stats that the Daily Banter numbers crunchers keep track of, one of the most popular columns I've written for this site had to do with my decision not to eat at Chick-fil-A anymore. I'm sure you've only recently been discharged from Walter Reed and are still ...read more
