Florida bans its schools from teaching critical race theory On Thursday, Florida’s State Board of Education unanimously voted in favor of an amendment banning the teaching of critical race theory in schools throughout the state. The theory, according to PolitiFact, is a collection of ideas about systemic bias and privilege...
Fundamentalists
The Gallup Poll has results that may seriously rattle everyone’s assumptions of American society and politics. From 1937, the first time they started asking about church membership, to 1999, about 70% of Americans told Gallup they belonged to a church, synagogue, or other house of worship. In the last 22 years the number has dropped by...
Back in 1787, as the Constitutional Convention ended, a woman came up to Ben Franklin and asked him what we got. He replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” After this election, it looks like we can’t. It doesn’t matter whether Biden wins (as is looking more likely,...
Five years ago (was it only five years ago?) the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Obergefell v Hodges that same-sex couples were entitled to the same marriage rights as opposite-sex couples. Jim Obergefell was the named plaintiff, and Richard Hodges the defendant in his capacity as director of the Ohio...
Trump said if there were 100,000 deaths, “then we’ll have done a good job”. Low-Information Individualism may continue among the Trumpist population to November. There will be more conflicts on mask policies, as if resistance was a pro-Trump statement. And the death toll will likely rise. “We’ll have done a...
Trump’s tweeting more gibberish replete with nonsense and continues to tank the economy built by the previous administration. Ever the opportunist, Trump would have signed off on the recent “Justice and Open Debate letter in Harpers if they’d have put it in front of him. He’s defaulted to the same playbook...
Rule of thumb: If Rand Paul and Congressman Thomas Massie are screaming, you are doing something right. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has been pleading for weeks with churches, synagogues, mosques and and other sites of worship to shut their doors to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Beshear has issued...
As usual, Paul Krugman makes an excellent point. Today’s column, This Land of Denial and Death, lays it out in clear and damning words: Incredibly bad leadership at the top is clearly an important factor. Thousands of Americans are dying, and the president is boasting about his TV ratings. But...
Others have speculated on this question, and I have previously posted a diary in which I argued that evangelicals support Trump because his support for Israel may trigger the apocalypse. But I want to propose a different angle of interpretation: Evangelicals think Trump really is the Antichrist — and that’s...
I want to get some feedback on a topic I’m researching for my book on religion: the degree to which some Christian fundamentalists may be actively working to trigger the apocalypse. I’m not going to get into the weeds here (keep your sighs of relief to yourselves, thank you!), but,...
Winston Churchill once said, “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” Now, Churchill was a pretty good (amateur) historian, and he did write a lot history (as well as making it), but history has nonetheless not been kind to him. I am pretty sure that...
Apparently people don’t. Nor do they remember that his actual response was half hearted, strangely worded, and McCain and his campaign immediately backtracked to excuse McCain’s supporters for their flagrant bigotry. So let’s back up a bit to give some context. The news cycle in recent days has been dominated by stories...
President Trump has appointed Brett Michael Kavanaugh, a far-right federal appeals court judge, to the soon-to-be vacant seat on the U.S. Supreme Court currently occupied by right-leaning Associate Justice Anthony McLeod Kennedy. Kavanaugh, if confirmed, would represent the fifth man of a five-justice bloc of hardline fascist activist judges, the...
“Extremist Islamic Terrorists” An oxymoron. “Islamic” is the generic term for all things Muslim. Used properly it applies to practicing Muslims regardless of country, sect, race, or sex. The murderer, torturer, kidnapper, rapist psychopaths at ISIS/Da'ish would give their eye teeth to be Islamic. ISIS is not a part of...
When Boston Mayor Thomas Menino came out against Chick-Fil-A after its CEO expressed opposition to gay marriage, numerous grassroots campaigns throughout the nation followed suit encouraging people to take their business elsewhere. If your Facebook is anything like mine, it’s probably full of statuses standing with, or against, the Boston...
There is a rather disconcerting idea touted by so-called progressives on the order of: Islamophobia is on the rise in the West: most particularly in Europe and the United Sates. The idea itself presupposes that there is such a phenomenon as Islamophobia and that it is some nefarious and specious...