Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge

Over the weekend I remarked that the dolts at GraniteGrok.com had not only evaded this week’s round of simple questions about their stance on gay unions but had corrupted their position further by posting a clip from an indefatigably profane former rocker and right-wing icon. Now, with tear-jerking but predictable irony, they have slid further into their own toxic morass by posting something apparently intended as an insult, or a retort, or something. It consists of a picture of three chimpanzees and a series of sentences that might have been written by those chimps.
I’ll try to keep this brief (but won’t) and to the point. Doug writes:

“Using big fancy words in some apparent attempt at demonstrating their superior intelligence, interspread with salty language mostly heard in biker bars and drunken sailor enclaves, the “Chimps” cannot say enough how they despise us and our points of view…”
Hmm. “Interspread” is such a big word that even I have never seen it; I think someone may have confused it with “interspersed.”
Anyway, at this point Doug no longer even pretends to acknowledge the truth — that this isn’t about us or them, but about honest ideas concerning civil unions, homosexuality in general, and other ideas that would be of no concern if a bunch of misguided desert-wandering plagiarists hadn’t decided to to create yet another unwashed godman/martyr-icon, one flying from a couple of two-by-fours with holes punched in his legendary hands for the world’s bereaved and dark-minded to rally around, a figure who unwittingly but neatly separated men and women into MORAL and IMMORAL camps for at least the next 75 generations.
Here’s my idea of framing: Judy would not be complaining about gays if it wasn’t for the shit smeared all around the interior of her skull by whichever agent of doom first sucked her irrevocably down the path of worshipping Zippy the Psychotic Pinhead’s nonexistent celestial twin, and Doug and Skip wouldn’t need to support her.
From the beginning I’ve been trying like hell to get some answers, good bad or ugly, from all of these people. But you can’t get blood from a Grok, and they have shown an increasing lack of interest in concern with rising levels of frustration tempered only by the fact that someone, anyone, has noticed them. In truth, despite the flagrancy of their outcries, I doubt I even would have said a word about GraniteGrok.com had it not been the fact that they purport to represent my home state, a place I can’t help but like.
Doug claims that we, or I guess I, can’t especially dislike their “religious beliefs and unabashed defense of traditional marriage.”
This is how bigots always justify their attacks: by claiming to “defend” something. In the crossed eyes of this crew, railing against gay civil unions is tantamount to standing up for heterosexual marriage. In that case, leaving notes that say “fuck off, darkies” in the mailboxes of black families so that they’re inclined to move out of a mostly white neighborhood is nothing more than a defense of European-American heritage, and railroading quiet Muslims, Hindus, or the entirely god-free out of a Mississippi town is simply a defense of Christianity. This is not a gambit to not-so-slyly skirt Godwin’s Law or otherwise go for the rhetorical kill by invoking modern society’s most extreme examples of bigotry; it’s reality. Not one person or one couple in America is deprived of anything when two gays tie the knot. They Groksters at some level know this, which is why they haven’t even tried to give examples of material damage done to anyone by “the gay lifestyle.” I’ve asked them and others countless times to supply examples of harm done to straights in places where civil unions are legal, and all they can do is stammer and blink owlishly and contort their faces into Mr. Magoo-like ricti of angry confusion. It frustrates the shit out of them that they cannot reconcile their programmed distaste with reality, and in response they post pictures of our primate cousins, videos of deaf gun-nuts, and basically evidence all of the wisdom, composure, and dignity of a mongoloid child hungrily shoving shit into its own mouth and masturbating to granny porn at the same time. I don’t blame them for being upset at their own impotence, but no one has to abide by the ruckus people this stupid make. It’s abhorrent.
Oh, but it gets worse. Doug claims that “[a]dditionally, [the Chimp Refuge has] little respect for our desire to enter the battlefield of ideas that is the Blogosphere.” He follows this up with my expression of curiosity about why knuckle-draggers ever bother seriously with political commentary given that following politics involves a lot of reading, writing, and (though not so much anymore) thinking. Not only is this hardly the same thing as not welcoming such contributions, but I, to repeat myself, have all but demanded answers from the Grokkers over and over in this very battlefield of ideas, and Doug and company refuse to even try to serve them up. All I know — and it’s only because I can see it, not because they’ve admitted it — is that they have a radio show no one cares about, a new set of New Hampshire statutes they can’t do anything about, an increasingly left-shifting political scene that they detest, and a god who isn’t there to answer their prayers, and a disturbingly fanboy-esque manner of patting each other on the back for producing things that make very little sense in the environment of a fully developed and intact neurological system. Other than that, I’d say they’re right where they want to be.
The finale is this: “In addition to our words in opposition to civil unions and gay marriage, now the ‘Monkeys’ are upset about this post defending Ted Nugent.”
At this point these guys are, I suspect, flitting around the edges of the Scott Adams defense. (PZ and his readers know what I mean; I can’t be bothered to dig up links, but in a nutshell, the Dilbert creator and his proxies have on multiple occasions used “Hey, we were just funnin’ with ya! Grow a sense of humor!” as a means of dodging the hammer of reason after Adams has said something goofy.) Not only does Doug appear to have forgotten what his own post was about — it wasn’t a defense of Nugent but a nod to his supposed greatness — but I was distinctly not upset by its appearance on GraniteGrok. By complaining that I’m profane and then using the half-crazed Nugent as an example of conservative rectitude, the Groksters are hanging themselves with more rope than I could ever feed them on my own; no more stark example of hypocrisy exists. (Well, there’s always that other Ted on the right, the fellow in Colorado with a thing for stimulants and young men.)
Doug’s coda is this: “Here’s a YouTube of what we here at the ‘Grok do sometimes on the weekends to unwind. I’m sure that it won’t sit well with the liberal monkeys at the Chimp Refuge, but, oh well. Maybe if they took their sons out to do something like this, instead of to the gay pride rally… er, never mind.” This is followed by a large, blank white space where a YouTube video is apparently supposed to be. Fittingly, either the video is no longer online or Doug has fucked up the code.
I imagine the clip is of some kind of hunting and fishing expedition, and though I do find these boring, I don’t really give a shit whether others enjoy them as long as I’m not shot during a trail run. New Hampshire’s an outdoorsy place, which is a nice way of saying that lots of its now-dead citizens don’t understand that snowmobiles are to be ridden on lakes after they freeze over. But the take-home message is that Doug, whom I believe is around 45 or 50 years old, argues exactly like a third-grader to the bitter end. And the end this is. If, by some miracle, these putzes do decide to talk at the level of facts or viable (non-Bible-driven) opinions about gaydom or anything else, we’ll be more than accommodating here. If not, I’m sure you’ll find someone else who loves you just as much, and Judy can go on singing about how much she enjoys being called names.