That graphic speaks volumes, doesn’t it? Via Gay Rights Maps.

If you haven’t seen this hilarious and epic anti-Chick-fil-A rant from former HUGE Chick-fil-A fan Jackson Pearce, you have to watch it. Stay with it all the way to the end. This woman is a star. Jackson Pearce could conceivably be the “new Molly Ivens.” She’s that good.

It was Pearce’s call for protesters to videotape their interactions with Chick-fil-A that caused Arizona man Adam Smith to be fired from his job when he posted a YouTube video of his low-key, innocuous—yet ultimately misguided—protest. Smith has since had to go into hiding with this family (including two adopted special needs children) due to all of the death threats he is receiving, many of them coming from readers of the white supremacist website Stormfront.

Jon Stewart’s commentary on the Chick-fil-A controversy, “Fast Feud Nation” last night on The Daily Show was Stewart at his very best.
 

 
Via Joe.My.God.

 
*There are, of course, exceptions to this. I would be remiss in not mentioning that my very own parents, who are super religious, do in fact run a soup kitchen. (Having said that, I have no doubt that they probably ate at Chick-fil-A yesterday if they were anywhere near one).

Thank you, Ruth Waytz!

 
Although same sex marriage was legalized in Washington by the state’s legislature back in February, opponents of the new law were able to get a referendum on the ballet to put the matter before voters and were raising considerably more cash than pro-gay rights groups. Were being the operative word, Via The New York Times:

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com, and his wife, MacKenzie, have agreed to donate $2.5 million to help pass a same-sex marriage referendum in Washington State, instantly becoming among the largest financial backers of gay marriage rights in the country.

With the gift, the couple have doubled the money available to the proponents of Referendum 74, which would legalize same-sex marriage in the state by affirming a law that passed the Legislature this year. Courts or lawmakers have declared gay marriage legal in six other states, but backers of such measures have never succeeded at the ballot box.

Proponents of the effort in Washington State called it a game-changing gift that gives them a fighting chance in November.

“To get this from a straight, married couple sends a powerful message that marriage is seen as a fundamental question of fairness,” Zach Silk, the campaign manager for Washington United for Marriage, said Thursday in an interview.

Mr. Bezos, who founded Amazon.com in 1994 in Seattle and remains its president, now tops a growing list of heterosexual business executives who are replacing wealthy gay people as the some of the biggest donors to the movement behind same-sex marriage and equality for gay men and lesbians. Bill Gates and Steven A. Ballmer of Microsoft each gave $100,000 to the referendum campaign, according to its officials.

But with the seven-figure gift, Mr. Bezos — a famously private executive who runs a $48 billion-a-year retail empire — has now set the bar even higher.

How this came about is interesting: On Sunday, Jennifer Cast, a mother of four children, one of Amazon’s very first hires—and a lesbian—wrote a very personal email to Mr. Bezos pointedly hitting up her former boss for between $100,000 and $200,000 to fight the referendum.

“I want to have the right to marry the love of my life and to let my children and grandchildren know their family is honored like a ‘real’ family,” Ms. Cast wrote. “We need help from straight people. To be very frank, we need help from wealthy straight people who care about us and who want to help us win.”

In an interview on Thursday night, Ms. Cast said she had no idea how Mr. Bezos would respond. Though she had worked closely with him when Amazon had only a few dozen employees, she left the company in 2001 and said she had never talked about same-sex marriage with him.

“We were chatting about the biz. We weren’t chatting about our lives,” she said, recalling her time at the company. “I never, ever in my life talked to him about gay marriage.”

It took Bezos two days to reply:

“Jen,” the e-mail said, “this is right for so many reasons. We’re in for $2.5 million. Jeff & MacKenzie.”

Right on, Jeff Bezos, and well done Jennifer Cast!

 
I’m sure he meant well…

Follow The Mountain Goats on Twitter.

Via reddit/r/politics

 
Is the Tar Heel State getting jealous of Arizona’s reputation for bad craziness and low IQ buffoonery? WTF, North Carolina?

Scott Huler writes at Scientific American:

In a story first discussed by the NC Coastal Federation and given more play May 29 by the News & Observer of Raleigh and its sister paper the Charlotte Observer, a group of legislators from 20 coastal NC counties whose economies will be most affected by rising seas have legislated the words “Nuh-unh!” into the NC Constitution.

Okay, cheap shot alert. Actually all they did was say science is crazy. There is virtually universal agreement among scientists that the sea will probably rise a good meter or more before the end of the century, wreaking havoc in low-lying coastal counties. So the members of the developers’ lobbying group NC-20 say the sea will rise only 8 inches, because … because … well, SHUT UP, that’s because why.

That is, the meter or so of sea level rise predicted for the NC Coastal Resources Commission by a state-appointed board of scientists is extremely inconvenient for counties along the coast. So the NC-20 types have decided that we can escape sea level rise – in North Carolina, anyhow – by making it against the law. Or making MEASURING it against the law, anyhow.

Here’s a link to the circulated Replacement House Bill 819. The key language is in section 2, paragraph e, talking about rates of sea level rise: “These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of seas-level rise may be extrapolated linearly. …” It goes on, but there’s the core: North Carolina legislators have decided that the way to make exponential increases in sea level rise – caused by those inconvenient feedback loops we keep hearing about from scientists – go away is to make it against the law to extrapolate exponential; we can only extrapolate along a line predicted by previous sea level rises.

Which, yes, is exactly like saying, do not predict tomorrow’s weather based on radar images of a hurricane swirling offshore, moving west towards us with 60-mph winds and ten inches of rain. Predict the weather based on the last two weeks of fair weather with gentle breezes towards the east. Don’t use radar and barometers; use the Farmer’s Almanac and what grandpa remembers.

Willful ignorance will not be a valued survival skill for the species as time goes on…

 
This provocative masterpiece by Mr. Fish, found via The Cagle Post, where reactions have been widely varied…

Polygamists for Romney

Mitt Romney, who added “teenage gay basher” to his distinguished resume of fucking people over yesterday, unwisely decided to speak out about President Obama’s support for marriage equality.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

“[Below], Romney says that we should not discard 3,000 years of history of one-man-one-woman marriage. Ahem. His own family were ardent polygamists only a century ago - and went to Mexican colonies to escape US federal oppression of their version of marriage (which also goes back a long, long way and still exists across the world). Romney’s great-grandparents were polygamists; one of his his great-great-grandfathers had twelve wives and was murdered by the husband of the twelfth.

For Romney to say that the definition of marriage has remained the same for 3,000 years is disproved by his own family. It’s untrue. False. A lie.

Big love, Mr. Sullivan. This hits it right squarely on the bulls-eye, doesn’t it?

Memo to Mittens: This isn’t going to be an argument that you—you IN PARTICULAR—are going to win.

What’s that epigram from Wittgenstein that’s appropriate here? Ah yes:

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

In other words, zip it, dumbass, before you make a fucking fool of yourself.

Again.

(Are the Republicans deliberately trying to throw the election? If so, WHY?)
 

“North Carolina allows first cousins to marry but not double first cousins (the offspring of two siblings who marry two siblings)”

Via Buzzfeed

 
Via Joe.My.God

 
Now that this country’s judicial system has again inched a bit closer to its enlightened ideals, why not enjoy a bewildered chuckle courtesy of Peter Barber Gallagher-Sprigg via wakingupnow.com?

 
For a Catholic country that’s endured more coups in the past century than a Tea Party rank-and-filer can conceive of, Argentina seems to have come into its democratic own this week as it joined the other nine nations that have legalized same-sex marriage.

Andrés Duque’s great Blabbeando blog has provided great coverage, including some enlightened sport-star involvement in the issue and the segment below featuring baby-dyke blogstar Cumbio. In a report for Buenos Aires TV magazine Vertigo, homegirl and her camera crew walk right up to participants in an anti-gay marriage demonstration and starts engaging them, taking in a bunch of the usual insulting arguments against equality. But in a startling scene that you couldn’t imagine in a similar segment here in the US, she’s actually embraced and kissed by some of the maternal types among the evangelicals who insist on the old cliché that “it’s the sin, not the sinner.” Cumbio comes out of it a little annoyed, but notes later that they “didn’t treat [her] badly.”

Kinda refreshing, eh?
 

 
Bonus clip after the jump: Federacion Argentina LGBT’s simple and powerful ad for marriage equality…