Not the UN’s finest hour

While the UN does a lot of good work, one of its biggest problems is that many of the roles on its committees are either arrived at by rotation or by some Byzantine process that can result in what to outsiders seems like utterly ridiculous outcomes. In this category is the news that Faisal bin Hassan Trad, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador at the UN in Geneva, has been appointed chair of a panel of independent experts on the UN Human Rights Council, even as that nation is about to behead a young man Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr “accused of a variety of crimes against the state, all stemming from protests he took part in against the Saudi government” and who was just 17 years old at the time of his arrest.
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Little girl with letter catches the eye of the pope

A five-year-old girl broke through the security barrier along pope Francis’s motorcade to try and reach him. Fortunately for her in this day and age, she was not immediately shot and while she was being escorted away by security, the pope noticed her and asked her to be brought to him and she managed to give him a hand-drawn picture and a letter.
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The Thinking Housewife goes bonkers

Regular readers know that from time to time I wander over to the website known as The Thinking Housewife, a kind of online salon where hostess Laura Wood presides over a Downton Abbeyish genteel world in which the atmosphere suggests people daintily eating biscuits and drinking tea out of fine china, all the while politely discussing how hard it is to get good help these days and how these ghastly foreigners are ruining the country. All the usual tropes of conservative right-wing ideology are lauded, feminism and homosexuality and socialism are seen as horrible evils, and traditional Catholicism is venerated to such an extent that pope Francis is seen a subversive, Commie, usurper anti-pope who should be rejected. He is invariably referred to with ironic quote marks as “pope” Francis or by his street name Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
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Is religion becoming outdated in America?

On The Nightly Show Larry Wilmore discusses with his panel the above topic, sparked by the fiasco in Kentucky. What is interesting is not the answer but the fact that these kinds of discussions are becoming common on TV and other forms of popular media. The grandstanding by Kim Davis and her allies may have been a warning sign to many people that religious extremism and a sense of entitlement, that is manifesting itself as a persecution complex if they cannot do whatever they want, is getting out of hand.
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Darwin letter should settle all doubts about his lack of religious faith

Charles Darwin came from a family of skeptics and freethinkers and although at one point he studied for the clergy, it was clear that he was never that religious and his research into the origins of species frayed even that weak link and he moved away from the biblical theories of special creation that were dominant at the time and became an unbeliever as a young adult.
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How same-sex marriages are being obstructed across the US

With all the focus on Kim Davis and her crusade to stop same-sex marriage in her county, we should not overlook the fact that similar strategies are being used by other regions in the US.

In North Carolina, 32 of the state’s 672 magistrates have excused themselves from marrying couples altogether, once a duty of the office, to avoid marrying same-sex couples. Magistrates opted out as early as June, when a new religious objection law was passed. The law allows magistrates to refuse to perform a marriage, but once they do so they are then barred for performing any other marriage for six months.
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