Writing today, I came across the need to use the word “flout.” To be sure I wasn’t making the old “flout-flaunt” mixup that is so common, I checked the dictionary and found that the word “flout” — which means to mock, show contempt for, or blatantly disregard — came from the old Middle English flouten verb, to play the flute. In Middle Dutch, fluyten was a verb that meant both to play the flute and to jeer.

How did the image of someone playing the flute, toot toot toot, come to indicate a highly public, mocking, contemptuous disregard?

I love etymology, not least for its mysteries.

Oolon Coluphid has catalogued some 75 examples of Stupid Design in the natural world, aspects of biology that, if the religious theory of creationism were to be true, would indicate that God is a friggin’ idiot.

My favorites from Oolon’s list:

Late yesterday, Captain Rogelio Maynulet was convicted of killing a wounded, unarmed, innocent Iraqi bystander. Captain Maynulet killed the Iraqi because Maynulet didn’t want to bother providing medical care, or finding someone who would. Republicans back here in the United States of America say that the killing was justified, and should not be punished, because it was a “mercy killing”.

Yet, these same Republicans twist themselves into knots of fury when doctors allow the injuries of a woman called Terri Schiavo to run their course, after ten years of attempts to bring Mrs. Schiavo back from the brink of death, after an episode that left her with the function of all but her non-conscious brain stem intact.

In the first case, Republicans are supporting the right of soldiers who have no medical training to make snap judgments about whether wounded people deserve medical treatment, and then to shoot them to death if they think that medical treatment is not deserved.

In the second case, Republicans are arguing that right-wing religious groups should have the power to sever the family ties between husband and wife, overrule medical experts, dismiss scientific evidence, and nullify years of carefully weighed judicial decisions in order to prevent a man from carrying out the wishes of his wife to not use extraordinary medical procedures to keep her devastated body alive for many years after her conscious brain has died.

I have to ask this simple question: What gives?

State’s Rights n (orig. Dixiecrat circa 1950; Republican early 21st cent.)

1 (plural) powers vested in a central governing authority to overrule bodily integrity, individual prerogative, familial autonomy, public assembly and civil rights.
2 (singular) affirmation, not subject to questions, doubts, or challenge, of the legitimacy of a central governing authority’s perceptions, decisions and actions.

Do you feel as though you’re in a rut? Are you eager to move yourself beyond your daily routine just a bit?

Two words: cashew butter.

I’ve been stunned today about the news coming out about, Douglas S. Smith Jr., the man who led the Boy Scouts of America task force to prevent sexual abuse, and have been writing a couple articles about the implications for the Boys Scouts’ claims to teach moral values.

However, I’m shaken by the amount of new revelations that have been released all day today. Here’s are a couple new developments since my last posting just a couple hours ago:

- Douglas S. Smith Jr. has now officially plead guilty, but claims that he began his huge cache of child pornography, and became a major source for child pornography photographs within the United States, “by accident”. Oops, I’m a child pornographer! How on Earth did that happen? Clumsy me!

- It is now confirmed that the images that this Boy Scout leader spread around the United States were all of little boys. So, as a Boy Scout leader, he bashed non-pedophile gays and drove them out of the organization, but then became a trafficker in the sexual exploitation of boys by adult men. That’s like a priest driving sexually active adult heterosexual couples out of a church, but then raping little girls.

So, here are two more supposedly moral values that the Boy Scouts of America is teaching by example: Finding lame excuses for horrible crimes, and blatant hypocrisy.

What’s amazing to me is the number of American parents of young boys who are willing to ignore the decades of repeated instances of sexual abuse by Boy Scout leaders. In each case, they say that the abuse was just an isolated incident, and they’re sure that their own sons will be left alone. They ignore that there is now a mountain of cases of sexual abuse by Boy Scout leaders. Well, you can say that every little part of that mountain is just an isolated pebble, I suppose, but it seems to make more sense to me to call a mountain a mountain.

It’s time we parents wake up and do something about the stink that is coming from the dark corners of church basements in our communities. There are, apparently, serious allegations that the Boy Scouts of America has, as an organization, conspired to obstruct justice by covering up even more incidents of sexual abuse than have been revealed so far. Hey, don’t take my word for it. Listen to the reporters at Reuters, who write that the national leaders of the Boy Scouts of America “also have been accused in legal actions of hiding sexual abuse incidents by scout leaders.”

The stink rises all the way to the top of the Boy Scouts of America. This is not the kind of organization I want to lecture my son about moral values. More and more, it looks like the Boy Scouts of America is doing nothing so well as fostering a culture of secretive immorality.

A quick update:

Earlier today, I wrote about how Douglas S. Smith, program director for the Boy Scouts of America has been caught sending out huge files of child pornography - including images of children who may be boy scouts themselves - all across America.

Well, now we find out that there’s another wrinkle. It turns out that in his position as program director for the Boy Scouts of America, Mr. Smith was in charge of writing rules to prevent boy scouts from being sexually abused.

You see, over the decades, so many boy scouts had been abused by their pack leaders that the Boy Scouts were forced by lawsuits in the 1990s to overhaul their procedures for dealing with children. Now it appears that the Boy Scouts actually hired a pedophile to protect children from sexual abusers in the Boy Scouts organization!

When the person who’s supposed to solve a history of widespread abuse in an organization is actually involved in the abuse himself, there’s one word that best describes the crisis: Systemic. This isn’t about an isolated incident. It’s about a culture of sexual abuse and corruption in the Boy Scouts of America.

Some people say that it’s worth supporting the Boy Scouts in spite of the organization’s sordid history of widespread sexual abuse. They say that it’s worth supporting the Boy Scouts in spite of the organization’s written practice of discriminating against secular families and gay youths. They say that it’s worth supporting the Boy Scouts in spite of the organization’s lax dependence upon a government dole.

What do they think makes the support worth it? Moral values, they say. Moral values! Think, parents, before you let your boys join the Boy Scouts, and you leave your young boy to go out on a camping trip with their so-called “leaders”. Don’t just listen to what the Boy Scouts of America says about its programs. Pay attention to what the Boy Scouts of America actually does.

The moral values taught by actions of the Boy Scouts of America are especially dangerous for children: Blind obedience in authority, sexual abuse, trafficking in sexual images of children, abuse of power, corruption, discrimination against cultural minorities, and lazy dependence on government welfare. The Boy Scouts of America seems to think that those are traditional values. Well, there are some traditions that we are better off without, thank you.

Hey, if you want to send your boy off to this pack of wolves, that’s your business. Just don’t ask me to support them with my tax dollars, please.

Put these two pieces of information together and consider:

This week, Douglas S. Smith Jr., the national program director of the Boy Scouts of America was caught with huge amounts of child pornography. Not only was Smith receiving child pornography, he was also distributing child pornography to people across America and around the world. Smith has admitted his guilt, and will be entering a formal guilty plea today.

The identities of the children posing for the Boy Scout director’s pornography are not yet known, and so it is not yet clear how many of the children are Boy Scouts. It is also not known how many of the people receiving Mr. Smith’s child pornography are Boy Scout leaders.

It is quite clear, however, that the pedophilia of Mr. Smith is not an isolated incident. The Boy Scouts of America has a shameful, decades-long history of the sexual abuse of the children entrusted to its care. Boy Scout pack leaders from every corner of America have been caught molesting the little boys that they are supposed to be instructing in “moral values”.

The parallels between the sexual abuse of children by adult leaders in the Boy Scouts organization and the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests are too striking to be ignored. Both the Boy Scouts of America and the Catholic Church claim to teach children traditional moral values, yet seem unable to follow the most basic standards of human decency themselves.

Also, both organizations receive huge amounts of government assistance. That’s right - although the Boy Scouts of America and the Roman Catholic Church both claim to be non-governmental, the Republican Party has put these groups on the government dole. It doesn’t seem to matter to the Republican elites in America how many little boys and girls are raped and molested by these organizations - with every sex scandal, the Republican Party just increases the amount of taxpayer money doled out as public gifts to the Boy Scouts of America and the Catholic Church. It’s as if the Republican politicians in Washington D.C. don’t care about, or are even willing to encourage, the culture of abuse.

It’s no wonder that the Boy Scouts of America and the Catholic Church are full of sexual predators. Among the so-called moral values that these organizations teach children is blind obedience to their “superiors” in their secretive hierarchies. Children who are placed under the care of these groups are taught that good children always obey adults, and so the children obey - even when they’re told to take off their pants in front of the camera.

Republican Senator Bill Frist has responded to the ongoing scandal of sexual abuse within the Boy Scouts of America by introducing a bill in the United States Senate that would increase government welfare for the Boy Scouts organization, even requiring the U.S. military to provide the Boy Scouts with military equipment at a time when real, grown-up soldiers fighting in a real war zone remain only partially equipped. The bill is formally recorded as S. 642, though its name ought to be The Boy Scouts Welfare and Seduction Act.

When faced with the revelation that a child pornography had infiltrated the Boy Scout of America’s top leadership, Senator Frist has refused to withdraw his bill, or even to delay it until investigations of sexual abuse within the Boy Scouts are conducted.

So what exactly are those moral values we’re supposed to get from the Republican Party, and the Boy Scouts organization they support with public money? The more I see of their simpering, weak reactions to the abuse of children, it seems to me that their supposed moral lessons to America are to shut up, don’t ask questions, salute like good little boys, pledge obedience, and look the other way when our leaders do something we know to be wrong.

I have a four-year old little boy, and I know it won’t be long before the Boy Scout recruiters start coming around, trying to seduce my son into becoming their little “cub”. Well, I don’t want naked pictures of my son being sent around the Internet, thank you, and there is no way in hell I am going to let anyone associated with the Boy Scouts of America get their filthy, two-fingered saluting hands on him.

Cult·ure Of Life n (Republican; early 21st cent.)

1 thin patina of human flesh spread over the landscape after the strike of a cruise missile, useful for the growth of bacteria
2 religious sect dedicated to the worship of a hollow sphere of brainless cells, involving the sacrifice of sick and injured individuals

Now, be good…

For those of you interested in this debate, here’s a great site devoted to discussion of the debate from a mainstream scientific point of view: Talk.Origins. It has lots and lots of resources. I was particularly impressed by the FAQ section. There’s probably enough reading here to keep you busy for months, and to completely arm you to engage in this discussion with anyone.

Here’s a searing commentary at Pandagon.

A little quote:

Anyway, the thing about this stupid “culture of life” phrase is not just the hypocrisy. I have also noticed that two values that BushCo likes to fling around are “life” and “freedom”, but I have also noticed that the two are opposite values in their rhetoric. You can have freedom or life, but not both. They are pretty consistent in this viewpoint, and if they evoke freedom, you can be sure they are covering up for someone’s death, and if they evoke “life”, you can be sure they are trying to take away your freedoms.

The Michigan House of Representatives just passed a bill saying that doctors and other health care providers can opt out of treating a person because of moral, ethical, or religious objections. WHAT? Since when do health care providers get to not treat someone for any reason (practically anything can be called a “moral, ethical or religious objection”)?! Hopefully, the Michigan Senate will have some friggin’ sense in its collective head and defeat that one.

Unbelievable. It’s just flat-out, no holds barred discrimination, and we should call it like it is.

You can read about it here.

One of the great liberal traditions of civic life in the United States is that even when people disagree with the government, they are not punished for their disagreement, but remain welcome in a spirit of healthy, vigorous debate over public policy. Unfortunately, the Republican Party is not very fond of traditional liberal values such as open debate. So, it should come as no surprise that Republicans in Congress are beginning to speak out against the right of dissent, now that the Republican Party controls all three branches of the federal government. It should come as no surprise, but it is nonetheless shocking to me to see such outright suppression of dissent taking place.

When Alabama Congressman Jo Bonner attended a recent public meeting in Mobile, Alabama, he was outraged that many of the people who had come to meet him dared to criticize his decisions as a member of the House of Representatives. He snapped at them angrily, essentially telling them that if they didn’t care to agree with the new Republican Party Line, they should be prepared to leave the United States. “The great thing about this country is if you don’t like it, you can leave,” Bonner lectured the crowd.

Wait a minute. This is the great thing about America? That I can leave it? Surely we can do better than that.

Republicans are finding it very easy these days to tell people with opinions that differ from the Republican agenda to go live in another country, but, true to form, they never follow through on the details. Unfortunately, the implications of their haughty lecturing are too immense to leave the particulars until later. After all, something like 48 percent of Americans disagree with the Republican Party Line. That’s about 140 million people. Where exactly do Republicans like Jo Bonner suggest that we all go - to a gigantic refugee camp on the shores of Antarctica?

In a truly free country, no single political ideology gets to dictate which people stay and which people go. In a free country, people get to keep their homes even if they don’t like what the government is doing.

Apparently, Republicans like Jo Bonner don’t really want America to be a free country anymore. Luckily, huge numbers of good Americans disagree with him - and we’re planning on sticking around. Some of those good dissidents will be in Mobile, Alabama and they’ll be voting against Jo Bonner when he comes up for re-election in 2006.