Greece leads the way

Greece is rapidly heading towards economic collapse, and this has finally motivated tho do something that should have been done long ago:

The Greek government has announced it will start taxing churches as part of its efforts to get out of its financial crisis. A new draft bill to be tabled in parliament next week imposes a 20 per cent tax on the Orthodox church’s real estate income, reportedly worth over 10 million Euros (US $14.8 million) a year, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The Greek Orthodox church is squealing like a stuck pig, of course.

However, the Greek government has a debt of €216 billion; belatedly taxing €10 million isn’t going to make much of a dent. Let’s hope Greece isn’t leading the way into catastrophic economic failure.

My apologies to Canada

We have further information from the University of Ottawa about Coulter’s non-appearance last night.

Last night, the organizers themselves decided at 7:50 p.m. to cancel the event and so informed the University’s Protection Services staff on site. At that time, a crowd of about one thousand people had peacefully gathered at Marion Hall.

So…no word of violence at all, just a peaceful protest. Ann Coulter simply chickened out, and the decision was entirely hers and the organizations that invited her.

Never mind, there was no infringement of open discussion here, just another example of right wing cowardice.

Oh, wait — it gets worse. Here’s Ann Coulter’s description of the event.

The police called off my speech when the auditorium was surrounded by thousands of rioting liberals — screaming, blocking the entrance, throwing tables, demanding that my books be burned, and finally setting off the fire alarm.

I don’t know. Setting off a fire alarm after that chaos of rioting, screaming liberals sounds a bit anticlimactic, you know. As that link also reveals, most of the people in that mob were her fans, politely lined up to attend her lecture.

We also know it wasn’t the police who shut down the talk — it was the organizers. Her people.

Grand news from Ireland!

Citing a “sophisticated campaign” on the internet (congratulations, Michael Nugent and all the gang at Atheist Ireland), the Irish government is going to reconsider their blasphemy law.

Dermot Ahern, the justice minister, is proposing that a vote to remove the criminal offence of blasphemy be held as part of a planned series of referendums this autumn, writes Stephen O’Brien.

Well, frob me sideways with a sniny dirk…maybe there is a god.

Small Town America and institutionalize hatred

Constance McMillen is a high school student in a small town in Itawamba County, Mississippi. She’s also gay.

I think you can guess where this is going. I can see the flames of someone’s personal hell from here.

It looks like Ms McMillen is a very confident person, though, so I’d guess that her situation has made her stronger. She decide to attend the high school prom with her girlfriend; Ms McMillen was planning to wear a tuxedo. Good for her: she’s proud of who she is, and was going to be respectable and decorous about the issue. The flames are licking a lot higher, you can tell already.

I think you can predict that Small Town Mississippi was not going to react respectably and decorously about it, though, and they didn’t. The ACLU informed them that they were violating her rights.

So the school cancelled the prom altogether, and let Ms McMillen’s fellow students know why.

Hey, I don’t think that’s just a small hellish fire on the southern horizon, that looks like a mushroom cloud now.

The mayor is saying the community thinks this was a good decision. People are talking about putting together a privately sponsored prom…probably one that could exclude faggots (although, wouldn’t it be cool if someone did put together a prom that was inclusive, thumbing their nose at the cowards in the school administration? It could happen — younger people aren’t quite so hidebound as the calcified upper crust of small town USA, and that cohort also includes a lot of people who are itching for graduation day and their opportunity to escape Itawamba County forever).

I predict that Constance McMillen will be one of the progressive young people who will be fleeing Small Town America as fast as she can, as soon as she can. And the old geezers and flea bag preachers will sit around in their shrinking, backwards-looking community and wonder why the young people are so anxious to abandon them.

Roy Ashburn outs himself

Roy Ashburn, California legislator, opponent of gay equality, unwilling to even recognize gay rights activists, has admitted at the age of 55 that he is gay.

That is so sad. To live a half-century in denial, to be so steeped in self-loathing that you build a career on stamping down people just like yourself, and to only now wake up and confront the truth…assuming he lives into his 70s, that’s an admission that two thirds to three quarters of your life was spent living a lie.

This one life is all you’ve got, Roy. Live it by being true to yourself.

Please, Sarah Palin, go away

She’s as funny as a clown’s pratfall, but she’s also as fascinating as a head wound. I hope she’ll vanish from the public discourse, but here I am, at the same time gawking over her latest inanities.

Remember how she was caught looking at really trivial notes written on her hand? She’s got a new excuse. God does it, too, and if it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for Sarah. It’s in the Bible, in Isaiah 49:

15Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.  16Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.  17Thy children shall make haste; thy destroyers and they that made thee waste shall go forth of thee.

This is one of those stories where God tells the poor oppressed Israelites that he really does love them, and will take care of them, and will deal with their malefactors appropriately. And in Old Testament terms, “appropriately” means in as grisly a fashion as possible.

25But thus saith the LORD, Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered: for I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children. 26And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine: and all flesh shall know that I the LORD am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, the mighty One of Jacob.

That Jehovah. Keeps track of his loved ones by scribbling their names on his apparently very large hands, and punishes their enemies by making them eat their own flesh and drink their own blood.

And if that isn’t enough Palin stupidity for you, look at this: she hates that socialist health care, but she admits that she would regularly hustle across the border to take advantage of Canadian health care. I think it’s really cool that she so willingly identifies herself as a parasite, a thief, a hypocrite, and a good Christian.

Now…can we have Canadian-style health care put in place here in America? It’s good enough for Sarah Palin, so it must be good enough for God, so it must be the right thing to do.

Reality rejection syndrome

This is old news. The NY Times has an article on the expanding agenda of creationists to include denial of lots of other phenomena that make them uncomfortable. We’ve known this for years! It isn’t just creationism; those beliefs have a surprisingly high correlation with denial of climate change, denial of HIV’s role in AIDS, anti-vax nonsense, rejection of the Big Bang, dualism, etc., etc., etc. At the root of these problems is discomfort with modernity and change, resentment of authority, anti-intellectualism, and of course, goddamned religion, which is little more than a rationalization for maintaining barbarous medieval values. So, yeah, face the facts: creationism isn’t just a weird reaction to bad science instruction and those annoying godless liberal college professors — it’s just one symptom of a deep-seated mental derangement.

One example from the story:

In Kentucky, a bill recently introduced in the Legislature would encourage teachers to discuss “the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories,” including “evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.”

They often do this, taking the opportunity to try and get a whole slate of dogma incorporated into law. This one, from State Reprehensible Tim Moore of Kentucky, is just particularly stupid, but characteristic of the genre. I’m just impressed that now human cloning is a theory — I thought it was a technique.

They also mention the recent South Dakota resolution.

“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” the resolution said, “but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life.”

Change the wording a little bit, and substitute “shit” for “carbon dioxide”, and it’s still just as true.

I have been repeatedly told that going to the root of the problem, the unwarranted deference given to religious views, is a tactical error if what we want is to improve the citizenry’s understanding of biology. What these kinds of absurdities reveal, though, is that creationism is just one wretched excrescence of a whole body of pathological thought…and that focusing on one symptom while avoiding the cause is pointless.