Repenthouse: the Magazine for Porn-Again Christians

Condé-Nasty’s other recent success.

New York, New York, May 12 (AP) Condé-Nasty Publications announced today that starting next month it will begin selling a magazine aimed at the growing demographic of Porn-Again Christians, called Repenthouse. The magazine will come monthly to its subscribers and be available at nudesstands across the country.

With the release, Condé-Nasty thus hopes to penetrate the coveted demographic that worships Jizzus. A pokesman for the organization, Li Bido, said that Condé-Nasty had been probing the Porn Again market for some time, and biding its time until the moment was ripe to thrust itself onto the scene. “There’s a tremendous amount of exposure we can expect with this venture,” said Bido. “It’s not often that a mainstream publishing outfit seeks to establish itself as a presence in such a niche market, I’ll admit, but with our industry already strapped for cash, finding the sweet spot for our product can spread doors open wide for us in other arenas.”

Repenthouse represents a formidable risk for Condé-Nasty, however. If the magazine fails to penetrate the market to a significant degree, and does not stimulate sufficient subscriptions or sales to warrant its continued issue, the venture could showcase the publisher’s impotence or give it the stigmata of an outfit already on its knees.

“It’s an ambitious idea, I’ll give them that,” allowed Larry Flynt, an industry veteran with significant experience. “But they can’t exactly expect to be wearing divine protection. While I don’t yet see the Four Whoresmen of the Apocalypse breathing down their necks, but if sales are flaccid the whole enterprise will be blown to Kingdom Come,” he warned.

“But if they pull it off, I’ll be the first one to give them a hand; jobs are scarce enough, and anyone who can stimulate growth in this business will be snatching up profits,” he added.

At Condé-Nasty the mood is decidedly optimistic. “Things are definitely looking up for us – we have a few tricks left up our sleeves,” said President Lou Brickant. “Our religious values really come through with Repenthouse: our thrust in God and our fleshes of divine inspiration will be evident to any Porn Again reader. We have plenty of material over which our subscribers will want to linger – we don’t veneriate the saints the way Catholics do, but there’s a decided reverence for foreplague and the Sin-optic Gospels.”

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GOP Changes Stance on Abortion: Fetus Might Be Gay

Washington, DC (AP) – In a dramatic shift pregnant with implications for the debate over the legality and morality of abortion, the Republican National Committee announced today that it intends to alter its attitude toward the issue: the rising number of homosexuals in American society means a greater proportion of fetuses are homosexual, and the GOP will therefore no longer oppose abortion.

“The problematic morality of aborting a fetus remains,” said Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, at a press conference, “but on balance we give priority to the greater good of ridding our society of the evil of homosexuality; if it means aborting many fetuses to do so, we are willing to pay that price.” He cited other cases in which conservatives have supported sacrificing human life for higher goals, such as the 2003 Iraq invasion, which produced the societal benefit of enriched defense contractors and, at least temporarily, American control over oil-producing areas.

To some observers, the GOP shift was to be expected. “It was never really about abortion per se,” said Ann Coulter, a conservative commentator. “We conservatives talk about the sanctity of life quite a bit, but that’s just a simplification. If we cared about life so much we’d be all for expanding welfare and health care.” In fact, says Coulter, homosexuality is a greater threat to societal morality than abortion, since the most likely and numerous cases of abortion involve populations that the GOP wrote off long ago as irredeemably immoral: African-Americans, Latino immigrants, and anyone with an annual Adjusted Gross Income of less than $180,000.

While echoing Coulter’s assessment, other analysts cast the GOP’s change of position in starker demographic terms. “The Republican Party suffered an unexpected backlash this past November when their campaign strategy clearly indicated they view women, African-Americans, and Latinos as threats to society’s fiber, moral or economic,” explained  Immie Grant, who writes about politics for The Los Angeles Times. “The election results gave the GOP a wake-up call about the future of America’s population: browner, poorer and in favor of greater government involvement in social affairs.”

Grant noted that some of the less scrupulous Republican rhetoric during and after election time accused the Democrats of registering illegal immigrants and others to vote. Although voter fraud accounted for an insignificant fraction of voter turnout, the demographic menace implied by that accusation made the Republicans realize they must act either to embrace those growing demographics with more a more solicitous platform, or combat the very growth of those populations. Since the number of unwanted pregnancies is high in those population sectors, the new GOP strategy will also have the effect of limiting the number of registered voters hostile to Republicans, to the tune of thousands per year.

In keeping with its confrontational stance of late, the party decided to stand up directly for the values it espouses, and elected to oppose the growth of those undesirable populations instead of appealing to them. The availability of abortions is but one prong in their strategy: others include maintaining the ban on narcotics and other controlled substances, which helps foster gang violence and reduce the number of inner-city residents available to compete with whites for coveted jobs and influence; and keeping firearms freely and easily available to increase the chances that those minorities will   fall victim to the use of those weapons.

Coulter did note that the shift might bring the GOP on a collision course with more traditionally minded voters, especially in conservative Christian circles, and with the Catholic Church. She declined to speculate how the party will navigate the new set of considerations, but did mention that ideological integrity has never been a strong point with Republicans.

“Remember, this is the party that gave us a ‘fiscally conservative’ Reagan who increased government spending like no one before him,” she said.

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India To Limit Brutal Rapes to 1 Per Month

“Listen, we can only allow this much publicity at once.”

New Delhi, India (AP) – In the wake of several violent rapes over the last several months, the Indian government has announced a cap on horrifically brutal sexual assaults, limiting the number to 12 per year. The law will go into effect in January 2014.

The four-year-old victim of an April 17 rape in Madhya Pradesh died today, on the heels of a similarly brutal rape involving a five-year-old girl in New Delhi two weeks ago. Sexual assault of minors in India has become increasingly common in recent years, or at least have become increasingly reported. Two other cases of gang rapes made international headlines in December and January and sparked tumultuous protests across the country. Demonstrators accused the police and prosecutors of treating accused rapists leniently and turning a blind eye to the phenomenon.

The new legislation, formally ratified this morning, applies only to those “non-consensual sexual acts,” as the bill refers to them, that generate significant media coverage and spark public outcry. Theoretically, all twelve highly publicized annual beating-rapes or rapes of children could occur in the same month, as long as none occurred during the rest of that calendar year. And since the law only covers the assaults that make headlines, it will not affect the thousands of rapes that continue to occur.

“This is a call to rapists to be much more careful,” said Shewantsit Dontcarewatchusay, a Mumbai sociologist who has studied the issue extensively with the young offspring of his neighbors. “It would be too ambitious, I think, to call for a complete elimination of excessively violent rapes in so short a time, but anything to keep things quiet is a welcome step.”

Dontcarewatchusay expects further legislation in the same vein if the community of rapists and child molesters embraces the new law. The practice of highly publicized gang rape might fall out of disuse entirely if adherence to the new limits takes hold. “It’s in their interest to generate as little publicity as possible so they can continue their work,” he said of his fellow practitioners.

Some advocates have been agitating for more reform along different lines. Idowanna Takkabowdittagain, a lobbyist, represents a number of organizations that would prefer the simpler step of a ban on using social media to facilitate the unwanted publicity that has made these incidents so unpopular. The advantages of such a policy, she noted, have been demonstrated in locales such as North Korea, where not a single rape has been reported in international media in decades.

Others call for more sweeping measures. “If we outlaw women this problem would solve itself,” argues Missengh Deforestforthetrees, who leads a non-profit legal research foundation. He referred to similar initiatives in other countries, but concedes that India’s huge population might make implementation of the measure a formidable logistical challenge.

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FOX News Under Fire for Factual Accuracies

Washington, DC (AP) – The news division of the FOX network is facing criticism for its reliance on actual facts as part of its news coverage.

Conservative commentators, even some typically loyal to the network, have lashed out at the news team for resorting to a complete picture instead of using half-truths in an effort to paint Democrats as immoral.

“Its a disgrace,” said Ann Coulter. “This is not what we’ve come to expect from FOX, and they’d better get their act together if they want to hold onto their conservative credentials.”

Glenn Beck, a former FOX host, concurred. “Facts are things you get from networks beneath contempt, such as CNN,” he said. “The cause of right-wing conservatism is badly served when the flagship network of the movement resorts to techniques and content unbecoming of its viewership and reputation.” He said the network could reestablish itself as independent of factual accuracy if it made a concerted effort, but only time would tell if it could sustain that effort.

In this case, a FOX reporter mentioned reputable medical statistics on gunshot injuries and deaths, statistics that unmistakably frame gun control as a public health issue worthy of consideration. After angry reactions from the National Rifle Association and from Merle and Lydia Guntherspoon of Texarkana, Arkansas, the network retracted the report.

Other news media organizations have also been accused of factual accuracy, and responded in various ways. Al Jazeera, for example, has found itself trying, often unsuccessfully, to negotiate the boundary between journalistic plausibility and anti-Israel bias.

Some outlets have developed strict policies to forestall such criticism. The British Broadcasting Corporation, though recently mired in an ethics scandal, has only rarely let facts get in the way of its reporting, most notably in the Middle East, thanks to a rigid policy of always portraying one side in a conflict as wrong, facts notwithstanding. It remains unclear whether FOX will tighten its guidelines – or at least the enforcement of existing ones, if any – or will simply let the incident slide and assume the prevailing corporate culture will prevent a recurrence.

“I can see them going either way, really,” said media analyst Leis Daly. “FOX wants to maintain its reputation, so they might work hard to keep the facts from intruding on their work. On the other hand, the demographic that gave rise to FOX’s success, and from which it draws its ethics, embodies a conservatism so powerful that actually doing anything to effect change runs counter to everything it holds dear.”

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Newborn Never Going to Live Down 34-Hour Labor

S, enduring the first of thousands of uncomfortable recountings.

Chicago, IL, April 24 (AP) – S, an infant born early last week, is already dreading the lifetime of hearing about the discomfort and trouble he caused his parents in the day leading up to his birth.

“I can’t wait for it to kick in,” remarked the nine-day-old, grimacing at the thought, or possibly at nothing. “You’d think world events, or actually amusing things, would make better fodder for conversation, but no, it’ll be decades before discussion of my mother’s experience with me peters out.”

His mother is expected to regale friends and acquaintances with the 34 hours of labor preceding S’s delivery by suction in the wee hours of last Sunday. After the postpartum period, when talk of the labor and delivery is typical of any birth aftermath, the mother’s relatively unusual travails will continue to be described when she wishes to contribute to a conversation about childbirth, or when she wishes to half-jokingly explain her child’s tendencies or behavior.

S’s fears are well founded, says Columbia University cultural anthropologist Beth Nossentrik. “The difficulty of a labor and delivery is a reliable predictor of the number of times the experience will be brought up in conversation,” she explained in a telephone interview. “For each additional hour of labor, a mother can be expected to tell her story an average of eleven times per year in the first four years, with the number gradually decreasing – unless she subsequently has more children, in which case the number actually increases by two until four years after the last child is born.”

According to Nossentrik, other factors can add to the number of times the narrative is rehashed. In this case, she says the fact the labor went on that long without a Cesarean Section being performed has the potential to add anywhere from six to eight occasions for relating the story over the next two years, and twice per year on average after that.

Chicago-area family therapist Hedda Schrinker  concurs. “The statistics are pretty robust in that regard,” she said in an e-mail. “Mothers tend to want to share the unusual aspects of their childbirth experience. What I would also add is that the numbers tick up again slightly when she is about to become a grandmother, and do not really come down again,” unless she eventually suffers a stroke or other debilitating condition that removes her ability to communicate coherently.

S’s parents also feature the additional augmenting factor of friends in multiple far-flung places who will need the story repeated to them individually, as they will not be in position to hear it collectively. Shrinker has attempted to reassure S that his situation is not unique, and that many other perfectly dysfunctional parent-child relationships have weathered this sort of repeated rehashing.

“He kind of whined when I said that,” admitted Shrinker. “It reminds me of when I had my second daughter…” she began.

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NY City to Levy Fines for Dispensing Unsolicited Parental Advice

New York, NY, April 19 (AP) – Responding to increasing pressure from parents, the Bloomberg administration announced this morning that it will begin penalizing people who offer advice to parents without being asked to do so. Additionally, people whose unsolicited remarks include implied or outright criticism will be subject to further fines.

At a press conference on the steps of City Hall, Mayor Bloomberg introduced the initiative, which he called Urban Parent-Youth Operation to Urge Restraint in Scolding (UPYOURS). UPYOURS, approval of which in the City Council is all but assured, will take effect in time for the more pleasant spring weather, when children and their parents return to playgrounds en masse, often attracting “helpful” comments from others.

“It’s high time we defend the good citizens of this city from the scourge of harassers,” said the mayor. He cited statistics compiled over the last decade which document a fourfold increase in the number of uninvited parenting critiques or remarks within the five boroughs. “As the most responsive administration this city has ever seen, our response is UPYOURS.”

Neighborhood parent associations had taken note of the increase and began petitioning the city to address the problem. “We parents have enough challenges living in this city,” said Getta Wayfromme, a Park Slope mother of two preschoolers. “Between the mommy-child yoga, the swimming lessons, the interrogation – I mean vetting – of possible caregivers and the shopping for stylish accessories, it’s tough enough as it is. We don’t need people implying that we’re not already giving our children the very best, let alone saying it outright.”

Not everyone is pleased with UPYOURS. Sharyn N. Karen, 54, of Williamsburg, says she has seen enough parents to know which ones are doing fine and which ones could use some helpful guidance. “People don’t like to admit it, but they need other people,” said the childless, single artist. “It’s just good that there are people such as I to helpfully correct the errors of others’ ways, such as when they fail to impart when to use the phrase, ‘such as I’ instead of ‘like me.’”

Other provisions of the city ordinance include: greater leniency for advice-givers who have children the same age as the parent receiving the comments, all the more so if the children have been playing together for more than thirty seconds; additional fines for belittling or dismissing the anxiety of a parent over his or her child’s possibly fatal food allergies; and mandatory jail sentences for lecturing on the benefits of cloth diapers or for treating breastfeeding in public as objectionable.

At the press conference, Bloomberg praised the parents who first proposed UPYOURS. “This city has always benefited from citizens who understand where public action is necessary and where things are best left in the realm of the individual. As this administration has made clear before, it is not the place of other individuals to tell people how to live their lives.”

“That’s the city’s job,” he said.

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Congress Raises Minimum Number of Unused Checkout Lanes

Washington, DC (AP) – For the first time in two decades, the government has increased the minimum number of supermarket checkout lanes that must be closed at one time, raising it to 4 from 3. The law applies to supermarkets that have at least 6 checkout lanes.

The law, dubbed the American Supermarket Standard Hampering Of Line Expediency, aims to maintain a certain level of customer dissatisfaction. “If the American supermarket consumer experiences too much efficiency, we run the risk of greater spending, which in turn contributes to inflation,” explained the bill’s sponsor, Fred Upton (R-MI). “While we’re working so hard to rein in the deficit, it makes no sense for us to be encouraging freewheeling spending on the part of Mr. and Mrs. America, so this is a natural move.”

The bill passed by a large margin in both houses, owing to bipartisan disdain for people who actually have to visit supermarkets, the overwhelming majority of whom do not make political campaign contributions. Retail groups lobbied heavily in favor of the law, preferring to have the option of blaming restrictions imposed from the outside for unpleasant conditions in their stores.

A provision of the law also clarifies the procedures for “express” lanes. Under the previous law, passed in 1981, strict rules prevented supermarkets from calling anything greater than 15 items “express,” with exceptions for multiple units of the same item. Under the new law, an additional provision mandates at least two delays of at least three minutes each for each item fewer than the express ceiling.

For example, if the lane maximum is 10 items or fewer and a customer wished to purchase only seven items, the cashier will be required to find some problem that takes an extra nine minutes to resolve before he or she may complete the transaction and accept the next customer. The bill gives a list of such possible problems but allows for the supermarket management to add to the list at its discretion.

Included in the list are running out of receipt paper, deciding it is time to replenish one or more of the small change denominations, and difficulty with authorizing a particular purchase – or any other difficulty that would necessitate calling over an already-occupied management figure.

Macomb Waite-Moore, manager of a Safeway in Portland, Oregon, greeted the news of the law’s passage with circumspection. “Fact is, we’ve been doing this kind of thing for years in any case.”

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Urine Connoisseurs Insulted at Comparison to American Beer

All it’s missing is a label with a cool font.

Washington, DC (AP) – People for the Imbibing of Strange Substances (PISS), a coalition of citizens devoted to the appreciation of drinking urine, expressed outrage today that the liquid they enjoy has been used to indicate inferior-tasting American beer.

At a rally on the Washington Mall this afternoon, several hundred PISS activists chanted slogans protesting the unflattering association and calling for greater awareness of how much better urine tastes than most American beer. “It’s just not right to compare it with Bud Light!” shouted the crowd, referring to a particularly low-quality product made by the Anheuser-Busch company.

“We understand that not everyone appreciates the taste of urine,” said PISS director Mick Turitian. “As with many of the finer things, it’s an acquired taste. But to go ahead and put urine in the same class as American beer, well, that’s just beyond the pale – and I don’t mean ale.”

Turitian said that in Europe, where quality beer is essentially a given, he would be disappointed, but not offended, to have an inferior grade be compared to his favorite beverage. In some cases he conceded it might even be a compliment. “But there’s no way to justify saying Miller Lite” – he paused to spit – “tastes like piss. Piss tastes a hundred times better than Miller Lite could ever hope to.”

Yuri Terr, 34, of Richmond, Virginia, also attending the rally, said the only way to get people to stop making such unfair analogies was to raise public awareness of the issue. “The beverage companies spend billions of dollars on marketing and advertising, to get people to buy their products based on image, and obviously not on taste,” he explained. “Once enough people are aware how unjust the association is, peer pressure can be brought to bear on those who, wittingly or not, put urine and American beer in the same sentence.”

The demonstrators brought samples of their favorite drink to offer passers by, but few, if any, of the onlookers accepted. A block away, a convenience store was doing a brisk business selling cases of Budweiser, Michelob and Coors.

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Soccer Player Incurs Actual Injury; FIFA to Develop Procedures

A player rehearses being “hurt.”

Zurich, Switzerland (AP) – After more than a century of players faking injury on the soccer pitch, last week a player suffered actual physical harm during a game, and neither the game officials nor the team personnel were prepared. In response, FIFA, the sport’s governing body, has promised to develop procedures in case such an incident happens again.

In a game between Barcelona and Juventus, Barcelona striker Alfonso Peña was attempting to wrest control of the ball from an opponent, and when the latter extricated himself successfully, Peña did as professional soccer players are trained to do: he fell down grasping his lower leg, hoping the officials would find the display worthy of an infraction for the opposing player.

However, through circumstances that remain unclear, Peña suffered a bona fide fracture to his left fibia, and has been sidelined for several weeks while the bone heals and he undergoes rehabilitation. Team officials have had to scramble to meet the player’s unexpected medical needs, as emergency treatment resources for professional athletes within the various FIFA member associations seldom extend beyond massage. Realizing that the situation lay beyond their capacity to address, the referees and Barcelona personnel had to summon an ambulance.

“This was new to us,” Alejandro Muñoz, the ambulance crew chief, was quoted later as telling a local newspaper. “When you get a call to treat someone at the football stadium, your first thought is that it’s some stupid fan who fell, or got injured in a fight – but a real, live, player getting hurt? It just doesn’t happen. It was all we could do to remember that he was genuinely hurt, and not to ask him for an autograph.”

FIFA President Sepp Blatter has promised an investigation, including the use of instant replay, to discover what exactly went wrong. “We do not yet know for certain whether the fracture occurred at the moment Peña went down, but that will be the preliminary focus of our inquiry,” he said in a statement released yesterday. Focusing on that moment makes the most sense, explained the statement, given that moments before, the player had been running, jumping and comparing his opponents’ mothers to women of ill repute, with no sign of impairment or discomfort. However, Sepp noted that no reasonable lines of investigation will be left unexplored.

He also said that he had assigned a task force to take the eventual results of the investigation and develop preventive procedures to ensure that an actual injury does not recur. “FIFA is not accustomed to having its players subject to rough treatment,” he noted.

Sepp declined to answer questions regarding the fate of Miskitas Tankakis, the Juventus player involved in the scrum with Peña. “Since we have not yet determined whether anyone in particular is to blame for this unprecedented event, it would be premature to speculate on any disciplinary measures to take against any possible guilty parties,” he told reporters earlier.

Peña himself has said he cannot judge whether Tankakis caused his injury. “I did the ‘wounded’ dance we always practice, but something felt wrong right after I landed,” he said during a radio interview on Friday. “I’ve never felt such pain in my life. We footballers aren’t used to pushing our bodies very far, so I had no idea what was going on. It’s a very delicate sport, football. We players are dainty.”

He said he only other time he ever felt pain anywhere close to the same intensity was seeing a matador get gored in the testicles fifteen years ago. “That still hurts when I think about it,” he said.

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Fundamentalists Seek to Censor Rainbow from Noah Story; ‘Gay Symbol’

Memphis, TN (AP) – Following in the footsteps of earlier efforts to forestall the use of Biblical sources in support of distasteful causes, a grass-roots religious coalition called Personal Responsibility Union for Decent Ethics (PRUDE) is lobbying various churches to purge the mention of the rainbow following the Deluge in the book of Genesis, out of concern that the image may be taken as an endorsement of homosexuality.

In the biblical account, God wipes out most of humanity and land life when society becomes mired in immorality. He then enters into a covenant with the Earth not to bring another such deluge, and uses a rainbow to symbolize that commitment.

Ironically, the verses leading up to the divine decision to destroy all of humanity except Noah and his family stems from a series of crimes that include wanton sexual immorality, in addition to perversions of justice and pervasive violations of property.

Although the rainbow only came to symbolize the Gay Rights movement over the last several decades, PRUDE is taking no chances. “We know how dangerous images can be, and we’re not going to allow the Gay Agenda to dictate people’s understanding of Holy Writ,” said Pastor Rob Eublind of Chattanooga. “When all is said and done, and we have wiped the twin scourges of homosexuality and liberal politics from the Earth, we can go back to seeing the rainbow as it was supposed to be. In the meantime, we’re just going to keep it covered up,” just like allegations of children molested by clergy, he added.

The crusade has won support from conservative churches throughout the South and Midwest, and RePress Publications is preparing a special edition that replaces the rainbow with a metaphor less confusing to the modern reader: a fiery cross. “The new image solves two problems at once,” explained Carrie Uggrudge, an editorial consultant with RePress. “While short-circuiting any possible misuse of a rainbow by the Evil Gay Agenda proponents, the explicit use of a cross allows us to implant explicitly Christian messages in the Old Testament,” which have been sorely lacking.

Many of the church groups involved in the project also cited a secondary motivation: they have always felt uncomfortable with the ideals of the Rainbow Coalition, which advocates for the rights of African-Americans. Editing the text, they hope, will deny rhetorical ammunition to forces seeking to disturb the conservative social order.

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