Our old friend and favorite state senator, Chris Buttars, is back in the news again. This time he's appearing before the Eagle Forum to be praised by a group that is right about at the same intellectual level (which is to say, vacuous and ignorant):
Singing to the choir, Sen. Chris Buttars sought support at the Eagle Forum annual convention for his proposed legislation on teaching intelligent design and banning high school gay/straight support clubs.
And support he received, with Utah Eagle Forum president Gayle Ruzicka saying, "I love Chris Buttars," and national Eagle Forum found Phyllis Schlafly telling him, "Senator Buttars, you're our kind of guy."'
Buttars told the gathering Saturday at Salt Lake Community College that he knows the reaction of the scientific community to his Origins of Life bill will be, "How dare you dumb people challenge us scientists."
This whining might be a bit more effective if Buttars hadn't already conclusively proven that he is, in fact, not very bright and exceedingly ignorant on the subject of evolution. Phyllis Schlafly's support is hardly surprising given her monumentally ridiculous claims about evolution and her virulent anti-gay bigotry. There's more fun to be had with the article, which will appear below the fold.
"This gay issue is everywhere - they're getting into everything," he said.
Sounds a lot like "Them negroes are gettin' uppity", doesn't it?
Buttars told his audience that gays and lesbians are targeting "your kids."
And they want our white women!
Buttars said gays want to appear as victims in the fight and that they characterize opponents as bigots, narrow-minded and out of touch with reality.
Which would be a lot more difficult to do if narrow-minded, out of touch bigots like Buttars weren't so busy trying to victimize them.
I was glad to see that the article noted the irony that gay-straight clubs are protected under Federal law by the Equal Access Act, a law that was sponsored by - guess who? - Utah Senator Orrin Hatch.
"I guarantee, if I lose this time, you probably won"t get to rise again on this issue," he told the Eagle Forum convention.
From your lips to God's ears, Chris.
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My former home of Minnesota can toss in a few nominees...Michelle Bachman's a wonderful candidate for "favorite Senator", but the North Star State's star nominee would have to be former Representative Arlon Lindner. Here's a man who called the Dalai Lama a cult leader or denied that gays were targeted during the Holocaust--Hell, he introduced a bill to remove gays from the state's legal definition of a category of Holocaust survivors. Alas, Arlon was finally defeated in a primary.
The interesting thing to me is that Phyllis Schlafly is no doubt a quite intelligent woman--her two sons, Roger and Andy Schlafly, are also quite intelligent (Roger earned a B.S. and M.S. from Princeton and a Ph.D. in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley and works for Information Security Corporation in Santa Cruz, CA; Andy earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and is general counsel for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons in NYC). Yet Roger says some of the same sorts of crazy things as his mother does (most notably about evolution--for a time he was a talk.origins participant--but on other subjects as well). He blogs at "Dark Buzz" (www.darkbuzz.com) and "Singular Values" (www.singularvalues.com), neither of which seems to be widely read (based on its SiteMeter link and lack of comments).
I think they appear to be a fascinating family, maintaining views which are remarkably immune to change from outside data, even while they display evidence of some familiarity with the outside data.
I dunno if Buttars is my favorite Senator... I mean, look at Ted Stevens. How can you not love a man who gets personally offended and threatens to resign because of the suggestion that they scrap his insane "bridge to nowhere" and use the money to rebuild New Orleans?
Okay, I may be confusing some separate incidents there, but still. Y'gotta love Stevens.
A few years ago the Schlafly boys were regular posters on usenet, most notably Roger in health based newsgroups. Roger pushed his anti-vaccination, anti-medicine agenda. Andy's client, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, is a small fringe group with similar ideas. The two are proof that education is sometimes wasted.
Let me a throw a "favorite senator" vote in for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL). He's 1% man and 99% partisan hack.
And Schlafly's eldest son John is gay. Why didn't Sen. Buttars take Phyllis to task for failing her responsibility as a mother?
Well, Stevens and Sessions are pips, I agree. But Chris Buttars is just a state senator, and he's showing enough dumbness to compare with the national boys.