(Wait! Don’t Go! You haven’t told us how to properly stone pregnant women!)

Geraldo Rivera, who will give a one-foot-clearance walrus ‘stache ride to the highest bidder, was the first television personality to tackle the Glenn Beck speech, that I could tell. He had guests ranging from a smattering from FOX’s stable of pretty bubble heads, to Beck pal and civil-rights traitor Alveda “What’s Context?” King, to the blind, flailing activist boxer himself, Al Sharpton. The poor, silly reverend was lambasted with questions about why, in the weeks leading up to the 6 to 500,000 man (depending on who you ask) asskiss, Sharpton and his progressive ilk would rail against the rally. After all, Beck didn’t touch on any political hot buttons, any racial lightening rod topics — he didn’t actually say anything at all. Hey, Seattle Tea Party youth group, glad you got out of bed for the 3,000 mile bus ride to vacuous homily?

Now, unknowingly, Al Sharpton is a puppet of the right wing media, an ignorant talking head  to add to a panel on FOX News to speak for progressives and make them all look stupid. Not the kind of guy we want for the job, but under the circumstances, he comported himself well. He made the point that he wouldn’t have made a big deal out of it all if he had known the message Beck planned to give: a muddy, convoluted argument about something that sounded like “equality and justice for all.” Nobody disagrees that this is important. How could Sharpton have known the speech wouldn’t have been a call to violent revolution, the culmination of all the hate speak and fear-mongering Beck’s two shows are known for? But given a couple of days to think about this, Sharpton might have found something real to bitch about.

Glenn Beck is now a full-on, Hebrew Scriptures prophet. His ass is Jeremiah, motherfucker, and if he sees any backlash to his intentionally tame and cowardly speech on 8/28, he’ll be happy to level up and assume the mantle of Job. He’ll say otherwise in the next week, but the crux of his speech is that he has God’s ear, and God speaks to him. He prayed to God for money for a politically safe cause, and without telling anyone else, ‘received’ $600,000, and more is still pouring in. Wherever did it come from, if not from God? It’s called your bloated paycheck, shithead. It’s the blood money you accrued scaring gullible Americans into arming themselves against the other 3/4 of the country, perpetuating false narratives about Islam and health care, and the birth/theology of the president.

I know the Newscorp symbol looks like a bunch of crosses, but Rupert Murdoch is not Super-Jesus

But that’s only a small point. Any televangelist can threaten damnation if a monetary donation isn’t received. On the surface, his hour long tirade that phrased the same point in a hundred different ways, is seemingly innocuous. It’s simple, and it isn’t new. “America needs to put its faith in God.” What’s so bad about that, other than the obvious predicate, “… my God”? We all need to square ourselves with Jesus, and embrace a faith-rich America in which we all agree that some problems can only be solved by “our creator” who is also considered by crazy people like Beck “the founder of our country.” Here’s your first amendment rights, Beck, you’re entitled to them, and we’ll even throw in a free crucifix. Get up on it, and get out of our faces.

The argument sets a dangerous precedent for his all-white, all-protestant audience. It’s a precedence of laziness and violence, permission to shoot from the comfort of your favorite porch chair. The philosophical idea of the terrifying ‘other’ that will eat a society alive, because there will always be that other to punish for the problems of the whole, exactly what this American experiment was designed to avoid. Being right with Jesus is unquantifiable and worse, unobservable in its purest form. We may never be able to tell just how square-with-the-lord every white protestant is, but there’s one thing we can be sure of: people that aren’t white protestant are not part of the solution. They’re part of the problem, and until atheists and members of other religions are eradicated, the United States will never be the shining beacon of peace, liberty, and tolerance we all want it to be. Try to defend new mosques and gay marriage in the face of that! And Shredder would have been perfectly happy to let the Ninja Turtles exist if only they would exist as turtle soup in his tummy. He was so misunderstood, and that scar was probably really itchy, the poor guy.

Of course, being a member of a recognized batshit cult offshoot himself, he’s generously deigned not to pick nits about which white Jesus loves you. I guess being a Mormon, he learned from the best. I bet if you got Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, and Glenn Beck in the same room, the Universe would implode with the concentrated spiritually manipulative powers.

Beck wants to play the victim. He picked his topic wisely, so that he’d be perfectly shielded behind the 1st Amendment and common decency. He will at once play his peaceful religious freedoms against his own intolerance. He’s already started, in his exclusive post-rally interview on FOX. In his speech, he placed himself firmly in the camp of the benevolent Christian God. Then, in a question that simply had to be fed to him on a tiny, plastic Big Bird spoon, he was asked to clarify his earlier statements calling Obama a racist. He said he regrets that statement, and amended it, saying, “I don’t understand Obama’s theology… Liberation theology, which is oppressor and victim.” Outside of his complete misunderstanding of the term – a violent twist that, by the way, calculatingly emphasizes his social-justice-is-unamerican bullshit from a few months ago – is it not retch-inducingly obvious that his speech was not innocuous but a foundation for a new agenda? Let’s do this as simply as possible:

Glenn Beck is a good Christian, and so are you —> Christianity is the only salvation for America —> Glenn Beck understands Christianity, and so is a good one —> But he doesn’t understand Obama’s theology —> Obama’s theology cannot be Christian, and is therefore the enemy ‘other’ Beck alluded to in his speech yesterday —> Oh, and that 20% of Americans that believe the president is a Muslim might not be pulling it directly out of their asses.

This is, of course, all reinforced by Glenn Beck being a prophet, which he totally is, because he subconsciously led you to reach that conclusion about him. How humble he is in the face of that honest-to-goodness miracle of shrewd financial jockeying! How honest and trustworthy, espousing the ideals of Jesus Christ ahead of his own ambition! This guy is a scumbag genius of early pope proportions. Robert Tilton and Ted Haggard are small fries compared to the televangical cunning of Beck, because they didn’t have the foresight to build a political following based on fear before they used God to rape innocents of their cash and dignity. Oral Roberts University’s football team can suck several and varied dicks next to Beck University’s gridiron army.

Did you know, most Canadians are unaware of the ‘theology’ of their leaders? That’s because they don’t care, because they realize a good French Catholic can kill a black hooker in a seedy hotel room as epediantly as a Jew. Sure, publicly announcing your religion can help your constituents assume you hold a set of values that can quickly be looked up in a book (if those values aren’t contrdicted on the next page), but doesn’t that flatten that politician to a 2-dimentional, boring pushover? Again, laziness is encouraged in the political system. FSM forbid you have to learn the specifc ideals of the candidates you are charged with electing. If we all, as Beck suggests, rely on faith on those issues that are just too complicated for us puny humans to comprehend, who the hell is ging to do anything? Justified laziness! If the economic crisis isn’t solved, if more people are killed in hurricanes, it must be because some unworthy American is indulging in sodomy somewhere we can’t see. It can’t be that we just had to buy that hummer, and that government regulations are lax. Do we want a country of politicians and civilians with no sense of personal responsibility, believing God will solve very real problems on Earth? Eat the hairiest, dingleberriest part of my asshole, Glenn Beck, and let me know what your God tells you about those hideous shirt and tie combinations you seem to like to pair with jeans so much. And if you, dear reader, are still planted firmly in Beck’s camp: Do you really want Canada to win?

(Why risk your child’s innocence on the dubious information in the world’s most popular reference volume when the only reference book he needs is already sitting on the shelf next to the wedding photo?)

The minutia and special interests involved in the sex-ed in public schools debate are myriad and complicated, especially because some people’s heads have been so crushed by their own colons they can’t see past their own polyps. But you’d think this Foucalt’s Pendulum of a debate would have found a position somewhere closer to middle ground than the evidence over the last couple of days seems to want to indicate. We seem stagnated at the opposite ends of  “don’t tell the nine-year-old he grew out of his mom’s carrot patch” and “don’t fuck the nine year old to show him what anal sex is like.” A couple of U.S. towns aren’t even ready to decide if condoms should be referred to as “contraceptives” or “receptacles for angels’ tears,” as evidenced by the following stories.

First we go to Texas (Jesus Taintlicking Christ, Texas of all places), where a woman named Shirley Price, who overcame physical disabilities now sits on the Hitchcock school board with a doctorate, was asked to give a motivational speech at a school about over coming odds or some ghey shit like that. Instead, she asked the principal to leave the room, and the kids got treated to this:

What was supposed to be a motivation speech to a collection of sixth- through eighth-grade girls at Crosby Middle School instead turned into an explicit sex talk, including descriptions on how to perform oral and anal sex, [and several curse words] Hitchcock school officials said.

First of all, what do you mean by curse words? I understand the… Galveston County Daily News is a publication of some merit, and wouldn’t want to taint its pages with naughty words, but you live in a state in which “intercourse” is a curse word, so I’m going to need a little clarification. Also, I think if you really thought about it, Ms. Price’s speech came from a very honest and helpful place. If college taught me anything, it’s that crippled chicks totally do anal, at first because they can’t get away, but eventually they begin to love human connection that isn’t from a 90 year old doctor’s rubber glove and they get attached to it. Especially when they realize that certain concessions are the only thing between anyone seeing the point in touching them and the oblivion of numb loneliness, a factor which becomes more important depending on how annoying being home schooled and taking your mom to “living room prom” has made her personality. So the service Shirley Price was providing to the children was letting them know that overcoming adversity and becoming a functioning member of society against all odds can often be expedited with a little Anal-Eaze. And there is definitely a sliding scale in these situations; the worse off they are the farther they’ll go. When I was in high school, Terry Schiavo came to do a motivational speech. She didn’t say much, but you could tell she wanted to teach us about donkey punching.

Students apparently were told to keep the contents of the speech secret, [Hitchcock Superintendent Mike] Bergman said.

Are you sure we’re not confusing the Price case with the People vs. Clown-Priest Handing Out Candy and Cigarettes From The Back of a Panel Van With Big Bird Painted On the Side? Nobody with half a brain thinks that abstinence-only sex-ed is the perfect way to go, but Price’s approach was certainly extreme, especially considering it wasn’t even supposed to be sex-ed. Probably, she is of the mind-set (the same I employ in my own life) that every day of her life is sex-ed day, and whoever wants to gather ’round the mound is welcome to benefit from her vast knowledge of things like how to properly perform a Jelly Donut. But Price’s real mistake here was not realizing that if you tell a room-full of kids not to tell their parents about something, at least one of them is going to be smart enough to do exactly that. It was a hard lesson, but I learned it early. Hey, bubba.

“There was no motivational speech at all,” Bergman said.

Says you. I can think of a few things I’m motivated to do right now. But the extreme nature of that case can only be matched by the sphincter stretching dick-lickery coming out of Southern California, who banned The Merriam-Webster Dictionary in its public schools for including the definition of “oral sex.”

Merriam Webster’s 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the “sexually graphic” entry is “just not age appropriate”, according to the area’s local paper.

Damn! What was the definition of oral sex, “Noun: Kissing and licking a cock, cunt, or ass-hole for the purposes of giving pleasure, with the hope of receiving monetary compensation and a face full of white leak”? Or was it the example sentence, “Susie gave a different boy oral sex on the school bus every day, because collecting colored bracelets is so rad, and the best way to be popular”?

The dictionary’s online definition of the term is “oral stimulation of the genitals”.

Burn it! I can’t tell what is more offensive and less age appropriate, “genitals” or “stimulation.” Come spelling bee time, the class clown is going home with the gold star for that 4-syllable gem. Clearly the parents of these kids don’t remember what it was like to have the classmate in the school yard talking about the shit he found under his older brother’s bed, and not even having a rudimentary understanding of what was being said. It doesn’t make for a good time, I’ll tell you what. Apparently, “age appropriate” to them means when he’s fumbling around under his prom date’s dress to find the bra strap and ends up kneeing her in the face in an incredibly embarrassing and totally avoidable tugging accident.

“It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.

Good. While your wrinkly, bespectacled ass is pouring over a book that’s almost harder to get through than A Tale of Two Cities looking for dirty words like “penis”, the rest of us will be having oral sex. Isn’t there some Bingo you could be losing right now? Do your grand-kids have enough home-made cookies? Whatever, it will keep your swirling vagina sand out of other people’s eyes for a few days so I say go for it. The thing is already banned, what more damage can you do? Just do me a favor and try to keep something in mind as you turn each delicate page of that reference book: when you were a kid, what motivated you to really learn how you use the dictionary? My guess is “dick.”

(“You remember when I said God would call me home if I didn’t raise 8 million bucks, so you sent me 9? Well, I’m getting buried with your hip replacement money, Betty! Ahahahaha! … Who the fuck is Jacob Marley? Get the hell out of here!”)

One of our own passed today, and I think we should all take a moment to remember him. Oral “Anal” Roberts was a dedicated and practiced Scumbag, and his career in “faith healing” was a prominent, veiny example of how religion can be used to prison rape masses of people. Even when faith healing was exposed as the unbelievable soap-drop scam people with half a brain always knew it was, Oral persevered, collecting millions (Tafts, to the rap-music community) off of desperate people’s fear and unfounded faith.

Life was often hard for the millionaire preacher. When the law school of Oral Roberts U was closed for lack of funds (how?), hundreds of dissapointed students had to learn how to avoid fraud charges and prison time using conventional methods instead of religion. When its medical school was closed for the same reason, hundreds of dissapointed future healers had to learn how to slap people and say “You’re healed! Bam!” without paying tuition. It was enough to make a lesser man lose his faith. Luckily for him, everything he owned was a charity AND a religious institution, so he pulled through, and lived in his mansion until he died today at 91. I guess God just takes people when he sees fit, no matter how tragically young.

Oral is survived by his son, Vaginal, who is thankfully carrying on his father’s fine work with the traveling Jesusy medicine show that is the Oral Roberts Evangelistic assOciation (OREO). So, those worried that they would have to simply burn their money and hope that the smoke would reach heaven and please their god (it won’t work, dude, God needs his greenback intact) won’t have to worry anymore. The OREO is in effect, coming to your town, and God talks to them too (why the hell not?), so be good for goodness’ sake.

Oral is in hell now, of course, but not because he screwed a bunch of fucktards out of their money for a living. He’s chosen to continue his work there, because idiots are idiots, and the promise of salvation is too tempting not to throw a donation at. He also wants to see if he’s a good enough salesman to sell fake salvation to the damned. He already has a nickname in hell: Bitches. We at Scumbag Style wish him godspeed and best of luck. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.