There has been an interesting public split emerging among Catholic bishops over the attitude the church should take towards gays. Some bishops have taken a hard line, especially among those in Africa where they have supported vicious anti-gay legislation that has been passed in nations like Nigeria and others have been proposed in Uganda, Cameroon, and Tanzania.
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The latest revelations from the Edward Snowden documents is that the Australian government spied on members of an unnamed US law firm that was representing the Indonesian government in a trade dispute with the US, violating attorney-client privilege in the process. The conversations were picked up by the Australian Signals Directorate, their equivalent of the NSA, who then offered to share their information with the NSA, because what are friends for if they don’t help each other in taking advantage of others?
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From reader Marcus Ranum, I got this link to an article that says that Britain’s GCHQ launched DDoS attacks against websites of political dissidents who were engaged in lawful activities. Thus the government is doing what it asserts are criminal activities if done by private entities.
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The case of United States v. Windsor that the US Supreme Court ruled on last summer in which the Defense of Marriage Act DOMA was held to be unconstitutional has had a domino effect, with lower courts in state after state ruling that bans of same-sex marriage are unconstitutional.
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French president Francois Hollande made a state visit to the US. The Daily Show looks at the coverage of the visit by our esteemed media who clearly have a good grasp on the important issues at play during the visit and what the public needs to know.
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The story put out by the government that the NSA had created and uses its massive spying powers purely to combat terrorism has been seen to be a joke. The US and UK are spying on everyone because they can and are willing to do it to gain any advantage in any area, even if it does the kinds of things that are condemned as criminal when done by others.
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You may recall Thomas Perkins, the multi-millionaire who recently said that the attacks on the one-percenters is similar to the rhetoric that the Nazis used to inflame people against Jews and thus may be the precursor to a something similar happening here. He must be feeling pleased with the reception those remarks got because he is back in the news, with new and even more profound insights.
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There were several commenters who disagreed with my assertion in an earlier post that belief in both god and evolution by natural selection are incompatible and forces one to choose one or the other. They pointed out that there were large numbers of people who believed in both god and evolution or that the tremendous suffering that occurs in nature was incompatible with only a loving omnipotent god or that I was being parochial and equating all religious people with the young Earth Christians in the US.
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A US district judge in Virginia ruled today that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional because it violated the due process and equal protections clauses of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. This follows Wednesday’s similar ruling in Kentucky and earlier rulings in Oklahoma and Utah. Like those rulings, the order was stayed pending appeals, so that this issue is being fast-tracked to the US Supreme Court.
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