Hate is NOT an American value

Ever wished your iPhone could be used to foster homophobia and extreme anti-choice views? Well, consider that wish granted, because Apple has approved an iPhone app for a project known as the Manhattan Declaration. Started with the help of convicted felon Chuck Colson, the Manhattan Declaration is a document signed by a number of anti-gay activists pledging to revive the culture wars and stop same-sex marriage.

Spelled out in the Manhattan Declaration are a set of principles that boil LGBT people down to little more than deviant cretins. According to the Manhattan Declaration, society should refer to gay relationships as "immoral sexual partnerships," and all people of faith should adopt a belief that "LGBT people erode marriage." Colson, as the Declaration's author, even went so far as to say that gay people will destroy the family unit, and could bring down civilization as we know it.

Nothing like a little extremism to start the morning.

So why would Apple sanction an iPhone app that sends these same messages? That's a question that Jeremy Hooper over at Good As You is wondering. Hooper perused through the Manhattan Declaration's app, and took the survey that the Manhattan Declaration allows iPhone users to take. Not surprisingly, anyone who responds to the survey with answers that favor LGBT equality get told they're wrong and inaccurate.

Among the questions that the app asks users are: (1) Do you believe in the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman?; (2) Do you believe in protecting life from the moment of conception?; (3) Do you support same-sex relationships?; and (4) Do you support the right of choice regarding abortion.

Hooper answered the questions like most pro-equality, pro-choice folks would do, and was promptly told by the Manhattan Declaration: "SURVEY COMPLETE! 0%, You answered 0 out of 4 questions correct. [sic]"

So much for an objective survey, right?

The application also allows users to wade through a series of right-wing talking points that call for the elimination of choice for women, as well as an end to same-sex marriage. And then for kicks, the app also tells users that there's no such thing as separation of church and state.

Apple, for their part, has given the app a rating of 4+. What does that means? According to their rating system, it means that the app contains "no objectionable material." Say what?

Because it sure seems like if you're going to call same-sex relationships "immoral sexual partnerships," or if you're going to accuse gay people of "eroding marriage," or if you say that gay people don't deserve basic civil rights, that should at least fall into the category of "objectionable."

Send Apple a message that applications that support hate and division have no place in the iTunes Store. It's bad business, and all it does is foster a climate of homophobia where people who support LGBT equality are told that they're "immoral" and wrong. That's not an iPhone app. That's bigotry.

The South Fought to Keep Slavery, Period

By LEONARD PITTS JR.

"We went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery. Men fight from sentiment. After the fight is over they invent some fanciful theory on which they imagine that they fought.'' -- Confederate Col. John Mosby

Ten years ago, I received an e-mail from a reader who signed him or herself ``J.D.'' ``I am a white racist,'' wrote J.D., ``a white supremacist, and I do not deny it.''

From that, you'd suspect J.D. had nothing of value to say. You'd be mistaken. J.D. wrote in response to a column documenting the fact that preservation of slavery was the prime directive of the Southern Confederacy. ``I was most pleased to see you write what we both know to be the truth,'' the e-mail said. ``I never cease to be amazed at the Sons of Confederate Veterans and similar `heritage not hate' groups who are constantly whining that the Confederacy was not a white, racist government . . .''

That argument, noted J.D. with wry amusement, plays well with ``white people who want to be Confederates without any controversy.''

It was an astute observation, the truth of which was deftly illustrated recently by Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. Seems he issued a proclamation declaring April Confederate History Month in the Commonwealth. Said proclamation contained not the barest mention that the Confederacy went to war to preserve slavery, an omission that got the governor pilloried in the court of public opinion.

So McDonnell apologized and tried again, inserting into his proclamation a paragraph observing that this Confederacy we are invited to commemorate was built upon an ``evil'' and ``inhumane'' practice. That little bit of cognitive dissonance neatly accomplished, the proclamation was duly reissued.

But there's still a flaw in it. Namely in a line that speaks of how ``the people of Virginia joined the Confederate States of America.'' See, no one asked half a million of ``the people of Virginia'' about joining any Confederacy. As they were owned by their fellow citizens, they had no say in the matter.

And so it goes in the ongoing effort by apologists for the Confederacy to convince the rest of us that an act of high treason committed in the name of preserving human bondage somehow deserves honor and respect. It's a case that cannot be made on its own dubious merits, so they are obliged to pretend the cause wasn't what it was, to write slaves and slavery out of the story.

McDonnell is hardly the first. Indeed, the practice is nearly as old as the Civil War itself. Confederate ``President'' Jefferson Davis once flatly cited ``the labor of African slaves'' as the cause of the rebellion. After the war, with that cause repudiated, he wrote, ``slavery was in no wise the cause of the conflict.'' It's a straight line from Davis' amnesia to McDonnell's omission.

The governor seeks to render the Confederacy harmless, to be a Confederate without controversy. He seeks to validate the vestigial southern impulse which insists, contrary to logic, that the tragic suffering and incontestable bravery of Confederate forebears must somehow redeem the awful cause for which they fought. But the simple truth is, they do not. Nor can they until or unless we agree to murder memory, to kill recollection of our greatest national trauma, to enter into a conspiracy of romantic lies.

Confederate hero John Mosby, quoted above, understood this. Even J.D., the unrepentant racist, did.

It is past time the entire remnant of the Confederacy, all its apologists and battle flag fetishists, understood it, too. The alternative is to continue insisting upon sophistry as truth, and to periodically embarrass themselves and mystify the rest of us with their stubborn fealty to the stinking corpse of a long lost cause. It is to learn for the umpteen-millionth time what the governor was just taught.

Memory dies hard.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/14/1578171/the-south-fought-to-keep-slavery.html#ixzz0l63Slkk1