Oh noes! ChristianToday.com reports that Louisiana lawmakers failed to pass a law that ostensibly would have protected churches and pastors from the non-existent threat of being forced to perform gay marriages against their will. Now the only thing protecting conservative Christians in Louisiana are the First Amendment, a number of federal laws that already protect religious liberty, and a couple centuries or so of legal precedent.
Eek.
The actual article is behind a paywall, but according to the headline and a short snippet, the best way for Hillary to convince people of her authenticity may be—wait for it—talking about her faith. At least, so her “Director of Faith-Based Outreach” is saying.
Burns Strider (right), director of faith-based outreach for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2008, says if she talks about faith, people will see her authenticity.
In other words, if she adopts the same sort of religious pandering the Republicans have been using to manipulate people for decades, she can dominate the “gullible voter” demographic. Lip service to religion is all it takes to convince believers that you are “authentic,” just like Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, and Duck Dynasty.
And the sad thing is he may be exactly right. Says a lot about religion, doesn’t it?
As a preliminary caveat, I think it’s only prudent to say that confrontations—especially with irrational people—have a non-trivial potential for escalating into violence, and we need to understand that and be careful to avoid it. Knowing when to shut up and let the store/security staff take over can be key.
That said, it might be fun to ask, as a mental exercise, what would be a good question to ask a hate-preacher if they happened to storm in to your local Target and begin harassing innocent shoppers?
Via Ed Brayton comes this report that “NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton is blaming the “epidemic” of cell phone videos of police officers committing misconduct and abuse for that misconduct.” Makes perfect sense to me, and it confirms a theory I have that I call “Schrödinger’s Cop.” See, there’s two waveforms present in any police interaction with citizens, and the act of observing this interaction, via a cell phone’s video camera, causes the waveform to collapse. It’s all quantum, right Commissioner Bratton?
Either that or else Bratton is just bullshitting to try and excuse police misconduct. Hmm.
According to a report on NPR, almost a dozen states have joined together to file a lawsuit seeking to protect bigotry and privilege against an onslaught of justice and equal rights for minorities.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, says the federal government has “conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights.”
Yes, a “massive social experiment.” Those evil government officials, with their bubbling test tubes and unstable nuclear reactors, rubbing their rubber-gloved hands together and gleefully cackling, “Let’s take a bunch of innocent, harmless people and see what happens if we mind our own business and leave them alone, MUAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!”
I was listening to Christian talk radio on the way home again, and one of the two co-hosts had an interesting story to share. It seems he and his son stopped at one of the larger gas station/convenience store combos so his son could use the bathroom, and while he was waiting outside the single-occupant mens room for his son, a man came up and said, “You waiting to use the rest room?” The dad said yes he was, whereupon the newcomer said, “Well, I guess I’m feeling like a woman today,” and entered the women’s rest room and locked the door and used it.
And that was the end of the story. No women were involved, no sexual assaults occurred, no one was injured (unless you count the tarnished pride of the guy who was so desperate he had to use the ladies room). All that happened was that a person who might otherwise have suffered an embarrassing and messy biological malfunction got to use a perfectly serviceable facility that would otherwise have gone unused.
Of course, this being Christian talk radio, the discussion thereafter was all about “how far America has fallen” and “haven’t Christians been warning us this would happen” and “isn’t it shameful that the President would get involved” and so on and so on. But I couldn’t help but think, “This is the end of America they were so worried about? A guy making a joke while taking harmless steps to avoid peeing himself?”
And they wonder why more and more people are ceasing to take Christianity seriously.
The Friendly Atheist has the story of Glyn Barrett, pastor of the “!Audacious” Church, who claims to have utterly defeated “the atheists” in a debate with “the atheist society” at Cambridge University—in only 2 minutes! The only problem is, he apparently did not merely exaggerate claims of success, but made up the debate entirely. When skeptical viewers saw the video of Pastor Barrett’s talk, they contacted the only atheist/agnostic society at Cambridge and found out no such debate ever happened.Thus far no explanation has surfaced for why the pastor said it did, and the video has been pulled from the church web site. But it did happen, and The Friendly Atheist still has a downloaded copy of the original.
It seems like a pretty clear-cut case of lying for Jesus, and the only question that remains is how on earth could Pastor Barrett possibly have expected to get away with it?
North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest has released a statement about the Obama administration’s new bathroom policy. Forest states, in part,
North Carolina will not stand by and let our locker rooms and high school showers be used for social experimentation at the expense of the privacy and protection of our young boys and girls. I do not think it is appropriate for teenage boys and girls to share the same bathroom. I don’t think it appropriate for teenage boys and girls to shower next to each other.
Which sounds almost moral until you realize that this is his argument in favor of forcing high school girls to share bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers with transgender boys.
I forget what it was, but the other day I was reminded of an experience I had as a Christian, many years ago. I was listening to a preacher talk about the creation and Adam and Eve, and he mentioned almost in passing that, “God created Eve from one of Adam’s ribs, and that’s why to this day women have one more rib than men.”
Do you know, I believed that for years before it occurred to me that it might not be true. I simply never questioned it. I heard it from an authority I trusted, and I never imagined that it might not be true. Plus it reinforced my religious faith, so I had even less reason to question it at the time.
I’m not sure there’s any really profound lesson to be gleaned from my experience, but it does go to show religion’s power to misinform and keep people misled long after they’re old enough to really know better.
Poor, persecuted Roy Moore. As you may have heard, he’s been suspended (with pay!) pending the outcome of proceedings against him in the Alabama Court of the Judiciary. The suspension follows a complaint filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center after Moore’s refusal to comply with the Supreme Court decision upholding the right to gay marriage. But according to the Christian Post, this is all just a big misunderstanding. Moore wasn’t trying to obstruct justice. Not at all! He just was a little confused about a few things.
Travis S. Weber, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Washington, DC-based Family Research Council, told The Christian Post that while the Supreme Court decision is clear, Alabama’s high court has not contemplated the full impact of this decision on all pending orders. Chief Justice Moore was simply stating that fact.
“Chief Justice Moore has merely pointed out this lack of clarity, and noted that until the state’s high court rules with finality, the administrative order to probate judges from last March remains in effect,” said Weber.