Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label church and state. Show all posts
Showing posts with label church and state. Show all posts

Saturday, March 02, 2024

Today's TweeXt


Flynn is still an advocate for Trump, and a likely candidate for a cabinet-level position. And it has to be obvious what the plan is for Trump 2.0

Wednesday, January 03, 2024

Today's Wingnut

No matter what else, the god-knobbers always bring it down to, "That's what god told me, so that's what all of you have to go along with it."


It doesn't matter that the founders wanted to keep god and religion out of government. It doesn't matter that they wrote it down. The bible-thumpers are going to revise that history, in order to make the claim that this is a Christian nation, and therefor its government must be imbued with Christianity.


Sunday, December 17, 2023

Today's Wingnut

Sen Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)

I can't confirm this one
(I also can't confirm there's a banjo playing in the background)

This one -
with the White Power hand sign -
is official

I imagine Marsha's C Street Family gang is quite proud


The Fellowship (incorporated as Fellowship Foundation and doing business as the International Foundation), also known as The Family, is a U.S.-based nonprofit religious and political organization founded in April 1935 by Abraham Vereide. The stated purpose of The Fellowship is to provide a fellowship forum where decision makers can attend Bible studies, attend prayer meetings, worship God, experience spiritual affirmation and receive support.

The Fellowship has been described as one of the most politically well-connected and one of the most secretly funded ministries in the United States. It shuns publicity and its members share a vow of secrecy. The Fellowship's former leader, the late Douglas Coe, and others have justified the organization's desire for secrecy by citing biblical admonitions against public displays of good works, insisting that they would not be able to tackle diplomatically sensitive missions if they drew public attention.

The Fellowship holds one regular public event each year, the National Prayer Breakfast, which is in Washington, D.C. Every sitting United States president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has participated in at least one National Prayer Breakfast during their term.[citation needed]

The group's known participants include ranking United States government officials, corporate executives, heads of religious and humanitarian aid organizations, and ambassadors and high-ranking politicians from across the world. Many United States senators and congressmen have publicly acknowledged working with the Fellowship or are documented as having worked together to pass or influence legislation.

Doug Burleigh is a key figure in the organization and has taken over organizing the National Prayer Breakfast since the death of his father-in-law, Doug Coe.[citation needed] The current president of the organization (starting in 2017) is Katherine Crane.

In Newsweek, Lisa Miller wrote that rather than calling themselves "Christians", as they describe themselves, they are brought together by common love for the teachings of Jesus and that all approaches to "loving Jesus" are acceptable. In 2022, Netflix released a documentary called The Family which depicts the organization's influence on American politics throughout history.

History

The Fellowship Foundation traces its roots to Abraham Vereide, a Methodist clergyman and social innovator, who organized a month of prayer meetings in 1934 in San Francisco. The Fellowship was founded in 1935 in opposition to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. His work spread down the West Coast and eventually to Boston.[9][dead link]

The author Jeff Sharlet described the beginning of the Family as a reaction to union activities of Harry Bridges, "The Family really begins when the founder (Abraham Vereide) has this vision, which he thinks comes from God, that Harry Bridges, this Australian labour organiser who organised really the biggest strike in American history, a very successful strike, is a Satanic and Soviet agent."

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Saturday, November 18, 2023

Church & State


We put our hand on the bible
and swear an oath to uphold the Constitution.

We don't put our hand on the Constitution
and swear an oath to uphold the bible.

--Jamie Raskin (D-MD08)

 

Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Faith

It ain't what it used to be.


Over their individual lifespans, 24% of Americans have changed religious affiliation, with the biggest chunk moving into the 'None' category.

56% simply no longer believe in The Great And Powerful Pixie In The Sky.

30% have left their churches because of negative pronouncements against QueerFolk.

17% say it's because their church became too political.

Guess why the MAGA gang is always screaming, "This is a Christian nation!!"

It's probably got something to do with the fact that the numbers are heading south in a big hurry.

The percentage of Americans identifying with any Christian religion is off by more than 30 points since the early 70s - and it's headed for 'Minority Christian' status way sooner than anybody ever thought possible. Which, of course, scares the fuck out of the God-Knobbers because they're about to lose a big reason they've been able to wield the outsized political power they've spent 50 years nurturing and exploiting, so they have to pretend even harder that they still are - and will remain forever - top dog.

White Christian Supremacy is fast becoming a relic of glories past. And instead of understanding that maybe that's as it should be, since their dominance was based on lies and magical thinking, they're concentrating on their own bad feelings of being perceived as the failed generation - the people who lost the empire.

Fuck 'em.


Losing their religion: why US churches are on the decline

As the US adjusts to an increasingly non-religious population, thousands of churches are closing each year – probably accelerated by Covid


Churches are closing at rapid numbers in the US, researchers say, as congregations dwindle across the country and a younger generation of Americans abandon Christianity altogether – even as faith continues to dominate American politics.

As the US adjusts to an increasingly non-religious population, thousands of churches are closing each year in the country – a figure that experts believe may have accelerated since the Covid-19 pandemic.


The situation means some hard decisions for pastors, who have to decide when a dwindling congregation is no longer sustainable. But it has also created a boom market for those wanting to buy churches, with former houses of worship now finding new life.

About 4,500 Protestant churches closed in 2019, the last year data is available, with about 3,000 new churches opening, according to Lifeway Research. It was the first time the number of churches in the US hadn’t grown since the evangelical firm started studying the topic. With the pandemic speeding up a broader trend of Americans turning away from Christianity, researchers say the closures will only have accelerated.

“The closures, even for a temporary period of time, impacted a lot of churches. People breaking that habit of attending church means a lot of churches had to work hard to get people back to attending again,” said Scott McConnell, executive director at Lifeway Research.

“In the last three years, all signs are pointing to a continued pace of closures probably similar to 2019 or possibly higher, as there’s been a really rapid rise in American individuals who say they’re not religious.”

Protestant pastors reported that typical church attendance is only 85% of pre-pandemic levels, McConnell said, while research by the Survey Center on American Life and the University of Chicago found that in spring 2022 67% of Americans reported attending church at least once a year, compared with 75% before the pandemic.

But while Covid-19 may have accelerated the decline, there is a broader, long-running trend of people moving away from religion. In 2017 Lifeway surveyed young adults aged between 18 and 22 who had attended church regularly, for at least a year during high school. The firm found that seven out of 10 had stopped attending church regularly.

The younger generation just doesn’t feel like they’re being accepted in a church environment or some of their choices aren’t being accepted
Scott McConnell, Lifeway Research

Some of the reasons were “logistical”, McConnell said, as people moved away for college or started jobs which made it difficult to attend church.

“But some of the other answers are not so much logistics. One of the top answers was church members seem to be judgmental or hypocritical,” McConnell said.

“And so the younger generation just doesn’t feel like they’re being accepted in a church environment or some of their choices aren’t being accepted by those at church.”

About a quarter of the young adults who dropped out of church said they disagreed with their church’s stance on political and social issues, McConnell said.

A study by Pew Research found that the number of Americans who identified as Christian was 64% in 2020, with 30% of the US population being classed as “religiously unaffiliated”. About 6% of Americans identified with Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.

“Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of US adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’,” Pew wrote.

“This accelerating trend is reshaping the US religious landscape.”

In 1972 92% of Americans said they were Christian, Pew reported, but by 2070 that number will drop to below 50% – and the number of “religiously unaffiliated” Americans – or ‘nones’ will probably outnumber those adhering to Christianity.

Stephen Bullivant, author of Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America and professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St Mary’s University, said in the Christian world it had been a generational change.

While grandparents might have been regular churchgoers, their children would say they believe in God, but not go to church regularly. By the time millennials came round, they had little experience or relationship with churchgoing or religion.

In the Catholic church, in particular, the sexual abuse scandal may have driven away people who had only a tenuous connection to the faith.

“The other thing is the pandemic,” Bullivant said.

“A lot of people who were weakly attached, to suddenly have months of not going, they’re then thinking: ‘Well we don’t really need to go,’ or ‘We’ve found something else to do,’ or thinking: ‘It was hard enough dragging the kids along then, we really ought to start going again … next week.’”

Bullivant said most other countries saw a move away from religion earlier than the US, but the US had particular circumstances that slowed things down.

“Canada, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the nones rise much earlier, the wake of the 1960s the baby boom generation, this kind of big, growing separation of kind of traditional Christian moral morality,” Bullivant said.

“What happens in America that I think dampens down the rise of the nones is the cold war. Because in America, unlike in Britain, there’s a very explicit kind of ‘Christian America’ versus godless communism framing, and to be non-religious is to be un-American.

“I think that dampens it down until you get the millennial generation for whom the cold war is just a vague memory from their early childhood.”

When people leave, congregations dwindle. And when that gets to a critical point, churches close. That has led to a flood of churches available for sale, and a range of opportunities for the once holy buildings.

Brian Dolehide, managing director of AD Advisors, a real estate company that specializes in church sales, said the last 10 years had seen a spike in sales. Frequently churches become housing or care homes, while some of the churches are bought by other churches wanting to expand.

But selling a church isn’t like selling a house or a business. Frequently the sellers want a buyer who plans to use the church for a good cause: Dolehide said he had recently sold a church in El Paso which is now used as housing for recent immigrants, and a convent in Pittsburgh which will be used as affordable housing.

“The faith-based transaction is so different in so many ways from the for-profit transaction. We’re not looking to profit from our transactions, we’re looking for the best use that reflects the last 50 years or 100 years use if possible.”

The closures aren’t spread evenly through the country.

In Texas, John Muzyka of Church Realty, a company that specializes in church sales, said there were fewer churches for sale than at any point in the last 15 years. He believes that is partly down to Texas’s response to the pandemic, where the governor allowed churches to open in May 2020, even when the number of new Covid cases was extremely high.

“I would say if a church stayed closed for more than a year, it was really hard to get those people to come back. When you were closed for three months, you were able to get over it,” Muzyka said.

That aside, closures are often due to a failure of churches to adapt.

“A church will go through a life cycle. At some point, maybe the congregation ages out, maybe they stop reaching young families.

“If the church ages and doesn’t reach young people, or the demographics change and they don’t figure out how to reach the new demographic, that church ends up closing.

“Yes, there’s financial pressures that will close a church, but oftentimes, it’s more that they didn’t figure out how to change when the community changed, or they didn’t have enough young people to continue the congregation for the next generation.”

Thursday, May 04, 2023

It's A Contagion

James Madison

The purpose of separation
of church and state
is to keep forever from these shores
the ceaseless strife
that has soaked the soil of Europe
in blood for centuries.

Theocratic shit keeps breaking out all over the damned place, but this too shall pass. Not before we see more damage done - but it'll start to fade as more people wake up and realize maybe politics is something they can't afford to ignore.

We should be able to expect better from people, but "better" is a very subjective term. So if we want good government - and no, that's not an oxymoron - we'd best be paying attention to the shit some of these good Christian folk are trying to pull.

You have the right to worship your god - or some oil spot on the garage floor that you think looks just like the Virgin Mary's tits - or anything else - or nothing.

But you don't have the right to impose any of your weird beliefs on me - because I have the right to expect you to keep your imaginary friends to yourself, and out of my fucking government.


One Family Has Spearheaded Montana’s Unflinching Conservatism

Three members of the Regier family now hold leadership positions in the Montana Legislature as the state’s conservative shift has left even some Republicans wary.


During a legislative hearing in 2011 that was a prelude to Montana’s debates on abortion, State Representative Keith Regier displayed an image of a cow and made the argument that cattle were more valuable when pregnant.

The comparison drew a prompt rebuke from some women in the room, but Mr. Regier, a Republican, declined to apologize. Over the years, the former schoolteacher and sod farmer has seldom demurred from his growing brand of combative Christian-oriented politics, in which the Ten Commandments are the foundation of good law and some of the biggest battles have been with moderates in his own party.

Mr. Regier has now emerged as the patriarch of a new family political dynasty that has injected fresh conservative intensity into debates over abortion, diversity training and, this spring, transgender rights. Mr. Regier chairs the Senate’s powerful judiciary committee, while his daughter, Amy, leads its counterpart in the House. Mr. Regier’s son, Matt, has risen to speaker of the House. The trio of legislators, each wielding a similar brand of unflinching conservatism, were among the most powerful proponents of a set of bills that took particular aim at the rights of transgender people.

It was Matt Regier who led the move to bar one of the legislature’s only transgender representatives, Zooey Zephyr, who had spoken out vociferously on the House floor last month against a measure banning hormone treatments and surgical care for transgender minors. The proposal was one of several new laws that passed recently, including one prohibiting adult-oriented drag shows on public property and another creating a strict definition of a person’s sex.

At the close of the legislative session on Tuesday night, fellow lawmakers gave Mr. Regier a standing ovation. “There were many times of sunlight, and there were also times of shade, but overall it’s been an incredible ride,” the speaker said.

The Regier family hails from the Flathead Valley of northwest Montana, a majestic region of glaciers and fir forests around Kalispell that has become a destination for conservatives looking to flee urban life and liberal politics in other states. Militia groups and far-right religious leaders have also found a home in the valley, some of them drawn to the notion of establishing what is often called a “redoubt” in the American Northwest.

Keith Regier and his wife settled there in 1975 after he obtained a degree in physical education from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. At the time, Democrats dominated much of state politics, in part because of strong labor organizing in the state’s expansive mining and timber industries.

Keith Regier taught sixth grade in Kalispell for nearly three decades. Matt was a quarterback for the high school football team, taking it into the state playoffs. Amy earned a degree in nursing and began working at the hospital.

Keith Regier said he had not seriously considered running for office until he retired from teaching, telling The Daily Inter Lake news outlet in 2005 that he planned to focus on sod farming with his son and perhaps do some writing. But by 2008 he had won a seat in the State House, promising to lower taxes, protect the death penalty and undermine labor unions by converting Montana into a “right to work” state.

“This country was founded on Judeo-Christian values,” he said. “Just read the Declaration of Independence. It’s very obvious.”

His unyielding approach gained traction in the state capital of Helena — including his beliefs on abortion — and he rose up to become majority leader in 2015.

That was a surprise to Bob Brown, a longtime former Republican lawmaker from the Flathead area who once ran for governor. At his home where he displays artwork featuring former Republican presidents and a plaque thanking him for contributions to the party, Mr. Brown said he had noticed a shift since his days at the State Capitol: Republican lawmakers no longer wanted leaders who were looking for compromise, he said.

“They just want to implement their own concept of what is right,” he said. “I think Keith Regier is a pretty good example of that.”

The Regiers’ views appealed to the growing movement of extreme conservatives who were gaining traction in the region, said Frank Garner, a former police chief in Kalispell who later represented the area as a moderate Republican in the Legislature. That included not only militia groups but also people like Chuck Baldwin, a pastor with apocalyptic views and a Constitution Party candidate in the 2008 presidential election who had moved his family to the state seeking refuge from what he predicted would be escalating conflict elsewhere in the country. Mr. Baldwin used his pulpit to celebrate the Regiers’ brand of conservatism in Helena.

“They were philosophically the right people in the right place at the right time,” Mr. Garner said.

In 2016, Matt Regier joined his father in running for office, saying he was motivated to do so after the local school board added gender identity to its anti-discrimination policy. He said he feared that the rise of transgender advocacy was threatening traditional values.

Amy Regier ran in 2020, sharing her perspective as a nurse about the societal dangers of coronavirus pandemic restrictions and vowing to cut taxes. In the primary, she defeated a veteran Republican lawmaker, Bruce Tutvedt, who characterized the new Republican stance as “very authoritarian politics, top-down — no tolerance for a Republican like me.”

While the Democrats had held onto the governor’s office for 16 years, that ended in 2021 as Republicans steadily gained ground.

The Regiers turned their attention not just to defeating Democrats but to ousting Republicans who did not fall into line.

In one race, the Regiers joined with anti-abortion activists to create a political action committee called Doctors for a Healthy Montana. Matt Regier was the treasurer, according to campaign finance records. Keith and Matt Regier accounted for two of the group’s five donors.

Among the committee’s targets was Representative Joel Krautter, a Republican from the eastern Montana community of Sidney who had voted to expand Medicaid. The committee leased a large billboard that showed a picture of a baby with the message: “Joel Krautter voted for taxpayer funded abortions.” Mr. Krautter, who opposes abortion, objected to the characterization.

“I thought it was bogus, but these people don’t care too much,” Mr. Krautter said. He lost in the 2020 Republican primary to a more conservative candidate.

Then last fall, in a private caucus vote, Matt Regier narrowly emerged as House speaker. It was a result that shocked some Republican lawmakers. Some were queasy about the direction that the party was set to take.

It did not take long: A text message went out inviting Republican women to a meeting in Mr. Regier’s office, according to two people who were in attendance.

Mr. Regier wanted to talk about Ms. Zephyr, who had been newly elected from Missoula. He asked the women what steps the House should take to manage the chamber’s bathrooms in Ms. Zephyr’s presence.

Mallerie Stromswold, who was among the Republicans at the meeting, said she was surprised that such an issue was one of Mr. Regier’s first orders of business. But some of the women in the room expressed concerns about sharing private quarters with Ms. Zephyr, she said, and a decision was made to add locks to the bathroom so that one person could use the whole facility, with several stalls, in private.

“I was the only one who openly had a problem with the conversation,” said Ms. Stromswold, who has since left the Legislature.

Once the session began in January, Keith Regier caused a national stir when he submitted a draft resolution calling for Congress to investigate alternatives to reservations for Native Americans; the resolution said the current system had caused “confusion, acrimony and animosity.” He later withdrew it.

Republicans also began advancing the bills on transgender issues, moving many of them through the Regier-led judiciary committees. As the bill prohibiting gender-affirming care for minors moved toward passage, Ms. Zephyr warned that the measure would be “tantamount to torture.”

“I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,” she said. Matt Regier responded by refusing to recognize her in floor discussions. Later, a crowd began shouting, “Let her speak,” and Mr. Regier ordered people to clear the chamber. Ms. Zephyr raised her microphone in solidarity with the demonstrators.

Ms. Zephyr was barred from the House chamber and spent the rest of the session in a hallway. Matt Regier confronted her there last week and tried to have her moved to an office, but she remained outside near the snack bar.

Ms. Zephyr said the effort to “silence” her was an “affront to democracy” and vowed to fight it.

“The Montana State House is the people’s House, not Speaker Regier’s, and I’m determined to defend the right of the people to have their voices heard,” she said in a statement.

Keith Regier said he had long been misunderstood for his remarks all those years ago about pregnant cows, offered in support of his bill to make it a homicide to harm a pregnant woman whose fetus then dies.

“If unfinished buildings and unborn calves have a value in Montana, shouldn’t unborn children have a value?” Mr. Regier said as part of his cow analogy.

But opponents saw the 2011 legislation as a back door effort to undercut abortion, and it was vetoed by the state’s Democratic governor. His successor, also a Democrat, allowed a diluted version of the bill to become law two years later.

Republican lawmakers under the Regiers’ leadership have approved several new abortion restrictions, including a ban on the procedures after 20 weeks. The courts have ruled that the state’s constitutional right to privacy protects access to abortion, and new lawsuits are pending.

Keith Regier also defended Republican House members’ vote to bar Ms. Zephyr from the floor, saying her “blood on your hands” remark was inappropriate, and that she had taken it further by encouraging protests in the chamber.

“We need to be careful of what we say,” he said. “If we are offensive, you say sorry.”

Ms. Zephyr never apologized, but she did file a lawsuit, aided by the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana and others, to regain access to the chamber before it recessed. A judge rejected the effort.

For this round, the Regiers had won.

Keith Regier said he and his children were doing no more than what they had been elected to do. “I guess people know our family and identify with our values and want us to come and represent them.”

...for I have sworn
upon the altar of god
eternal hostility
against every form of tyranny
over the mind of man.

Thomas Jefferson

Monday, March 20, 2023

Today's Tweet


This might be a good time to hear from them Satanic Temple fellers.







Wednesday, December 07, 2022

Today's Wingnut


Kari Lake, Arizona loser


First the absurdities:
You're already convinced there's a "divine plan", so Ms Lake invites the inference that the divine plan gives you a divine right to win elections (cuz that's what god's perfect plan calls for).

Then she points to the evil-doers who are thwarting god's plan - and just leaves it up to the faithful to go ahead and take it from there (aka: Stochastic Terrorism).

BTW, ignore the logical contradiction that god's perfect plan would include evil-doers thwarting god's perfect plan, and you'd be interfering with god's perfect plan were you to step in and fight those evil-doers who are thwarting god's perfect plan in accordance with god's perfect plan, which of course has to include the righteous stepping in to put god's perfect plan back on track, because a perfect god with a perfect plan could always use a little help, and that's about when all the "thinking" stops and the shooting starts ...

... and then the atrocities:
When battling evil, you must be willing to take up the devil's own sword - to wield it against him, and all others whom god now commands you to smite hip and thigh, and blah blah blah.

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Today's SCOTUS Fuckup

Standing at midfield after losing another football game and offering up a little prayer is one thing. Making it a spectacle - which puts pressure on others to do likewise - is another thing altogether.

It's not about you having the right to express your commitment to your imaginary friends. It's about some kid who will eventually get beat up for not having the "right" religiousness, or for resisting the pressure outright, or for stating his own belief that there is no god.

We know it's going to happen because it's been happening for more than 20 centuries.

By looking the other way while a school district employee passive-aggressively proselytizes kids, the administration puts its imprimatur on the establishment of religion.

There's a rule against that, and SCOTUS just chipped away at it.



'Beyond shameful': Legal experts slam Neil Gorsuch for using 'flat-out, knowing lie' in SCOTUS ruling

Many people from legal experts to court watchers to journalists to ordinary Americans on social media are criticizing Justice Neil Gorsuch for his majority opinion in a decision siding with a former high school football coach. That coach sued after the school district ordered him to stop praying after every game at the 50-yard line. Justice Gorsuch’s opinion, as many are noticing, appears to be based on facts that are false. Several are accusing Gorsuch of just plain lying.

Justice Gorsuch claimed the coach’s First Amendment rights were violated, and that he was merely engaging in “quiet personal prayer” as he knelt.

Gorsuch uses the word “quiet” 14 times, as The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman notes.


“Joseph Kennedy lost his job as a high school football coach because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks,” Justice Gorsuch writes as he begins his majority opinion. “Mr. Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters. He offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied. Still, the Bremerton School District disciplined him anyway. It did so because it thought anything less could lead a reasonable observer to conclude (mistakenly) that it endorsed Mr. Kennedy’s religious beliefs. That reasoning was misguided.”

“The contested exercise here does not involve leading prayers with the team,” Gorsuch continues (despite photos that appear to suggest otherwise), “the District disciplined Mr. Kennedy only for his decision to persist in praying quietly without his students after three games in October 2015.”

These are the photos of Coach Kennedy that Justice Sonia Sotomayor included in her dissent:




“They aren’t even trying to use reason anymore,” former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade laments:

And Vox’s Ian Millhiser makes clear what just happened: “The Supreme Court hands the religious right a big victory by lying about the facts of a case.”

Calling the decision “a big victory for the religious right,” Millhiser writes that’s “only because Gorsuch misrepresents the facts of the case.”


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Bring on the Satanic Temple.

Everything you need to know about the Satanic Temple, which the US government just officially recognized as an organized religion

  • The US government has recognized the Satanic Temple as a tax-exempt organized religion.
  • The Satanic temple is a non-theistic religious group.
  • It is based out of Salem, Massachusetts, but it has branches across the US and world.
  • Founded in 2013, it has roots in political activism.
  • It is different from the Church of Satan.

Sunday, June 26, 2022

Today's Wingnut

Can we please stop wondering why these assholes are fucking things up?

IMHO - They're doing it on purpose. They want our current form of government to be unworkable. They're doing whatever they can do to make us believe democracy is the problem, and that if we'd just consent to being ruled by "our betters", then everything will be peachy.

We have to find a way to keep these fucking god-knobbers out of government.



Deposition In 2010 Claims Sen. Lankford Said A 13-Year-Old Could Consent To Sex

U.S. Senator James Lankford is in the center of a controversy after the Associated Press released an article.

The subject, Lankford's views on whether a 13-year-old girl could consent to sex.

His answer during the deposition in 2010 was yes.

Lankford was the youth programming director at the Falls Creek Baptist camp at that time.

A family of a 13-year-old had sued a 15-year-old boy who was accused of having sex with her at the camp.

Lankford is up for reelection this year.

His campaign spokesperson declined to comment.

For fuck's sake - push these people away.

Saturday, September 04, 2021

How Weird Is It Getting?

The short answer is: Pretty fuckin' weird.



The state of Texas, with approval from the U.S. Supreme Court, instituted the most draconian set of anti-abortion laws in the last 50 years this Tuesday. While pro-choice advocates scramble to save what’s left of Roe v. Wade, their salvation may come from an unexpected place: The Satanic Temple.

The nontheistic religious group, based out of Salem, Massachusetts, has filed a letter with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration arguing that their members should be allowed to access abortion pills without regulatory action. The temple is attempting to use its status as a religious organization to claim its right to abortion as a faith-based right.

The group argues that they should have access to the abortion pills Misoprostol and Mifepristone for religious use through the The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) which was created to allow Native Americans access to peyote for religious rituals. Under these rules, the Temple is arguing that they should be granted those same rights to use abortifacients for their own religious purposes.

“I am sure Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—who famously spends a good deal of his time composing press releases about Religious Liberty issues in other states—will be proud to see that Texas’s robust Religious Liberty laws, which he so vociferously champions, will prevent future Abortion Rituals from being interrupted by superfluous government restrictions meant only to shame and harass those seeking an abortion," wrote Satanic Temple spokesperson, Lucien Greaves in a statement.

Satanists hold bodily autonomy and science sacrosanct, he said, and abortion “rituals” are an important part of those beliefs. “The battle for abortion rights is largely a battle of competing religious viewpoints, and our viewpoint that the nonviable fetus is part of the impregnated host is fortunately protected under Religous Liberty laws,” he added.

Last year the Supreme Court refused to hear a case from Satanists to overturn Missouri’s abortion laws, but the group is hoping that an appeal to the federal government could make a difference.

In the past few years, the Temple of Satan, which has about 300,000 followers, protested a Ten Commandments monument erected outside of the Arkansas Capitol by erecting their own statue, a bronze satanic goat monster Baphomet next to it. In the Illinois Capitol rotunda, they were able to install a statue of an arm holding an apple with a snake coiled around it next to a Christmas nativity scene and a Hanukkah menorah.

"The State of Illinois is required by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution to allow temporary, public displays in the state capitol so long as these displays are not paid for by taxpayer dollars,” said a sign next to the statue. “Because the first floor of the Capitol Rotunda is a public place, state officials cannot legally censor the content of speech or displays. The United States Supreme Court has held that public officials may legally impose reasonable time, place and manner restrictions regarding displays and speeches, but no regulation can be based on the content of the speech."

In spite of its name, the Temple of Satan largely stands as an activist institution, with the intent to fight the proliferation of religion in U.S. policy and law.

Saturday, July 10, 2021

A Look At Ourselves

There are occasions when the New York Times manages to step away from its own self-imposed Poodle-ishness.



The presidency of George W. Bush may have been the high point of the modern Christian right’s influence in America. White evangelicals were the largest religious faction in the country. “They had a president who claimed to be one of their own, he had a testimony, talked in evangelical terms,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the 2016 book “The End of White Christian America.”

Back then, much of the public sided with the religious right on the key culture war issue of gay marriage. “In 2004, if you had said, ‘We’re the majority, we oppose gay rights, we oppose marriage equality, and the majority of Americans is with us,’ that would have been true,” Jones told me. Youthful megachurches were thriving. It was common for conservatives to gloat that they were going to outbreed the left.

Activists imagined a glorious future. “Home-schoolers will be inordinately represented in the highest levels of leadership and power in the next generation,” Ned Ryun, a former Bush speechwriter, said at a 2005 Christian home-schooling convention. Ryun was the director of a group called Generation Joshua, which worked to get home-schooled kids into politics. The name came from the Old Testament. Moses had led the chosen people out of exile, but it was his successor, Joshua, who conquered the Holy Land.

But the evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were destined for disappointment. On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.

One of P.R.R.I.’s most surprising findings was that in 2020, there were more white mainline Protestants than white evangelicals. This doesn’t necessarily mean Christians are joining mainline congregations — the survey measures self-identification, not church affiliation. It is, nevertheless, a striking turnabout after years when mainline Protestantism was considered moribund and evangelical Christianity full of dynamism.

In addition to shrinking as a share of the population, white evangelicals were also the oldest religious group in the United States, with a median age of 56. “It’s not just that they are dying off, but it is that they’re losing younger members,” Jones told me. As the group has become older and smaller, Jones said, “a real visceral sense of loss of cultural dominance” has set in.

White evangelicals once saw themselves “as the owners of mainstream American culture and morality and values,” said Jones. Now they are just another subculture.

From this fact derives much of our country’s cultural conflict. It helps explain not just the rise of Donald Trump, but also the growth of QAnon and even the escalating conflagration over critical race theory. “It’s hard to overstate the strength of this feeling, among white evangelicals in particular, of America being a white Christian country,” said Jones. “This sense of ownership of America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles.” The feeling that it’s slipping away has created an atmosphere of rage, resentment and paranoia.

QAnon is essentially a millenarian movement, with Trump taking the place of Jesus. Adherents dream of the coming of what they call the storm, when the enemies of the MAGA movement will be rounded up and executed, and Trump restored to his rightful place of leadership.

“It’s not unlike a belief in the second coming of Christ,” said Jones. “That at some point God will reorder society and set things right. I think that when a community feels itself in crisis, it does become more susceptible to conspiracy theories and other things that tell them that what they’re experiencing is not ultimately what’s going to happen.”

The fight over critical race theory seems, on the surface, further from theological concerns. There are, obviously, plenty of people who aren’t evangelical who are anti-C.R.T., as well as evangelicals who oppose C.R.T. bans. But the idea that public schools are corrupting children by leading them away from a providential understanding of American history has deep roots in white evangelical culture. And it was the Christian right that pioneered the tactic of trying to take over school boards in response to teachings seen as morally objectionable, whether that meant sex education, “secular humanism” or evolution.

Jones points out that last year, after Trump issued an executive order targeting critical race theory, the presidents of all six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention came together to declare C.R.T. “incompatible” with the Baptist faith. Jones, whose latest book is “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” could recall no precedent for such a joint statement.

As Jones notes, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 after splitting with abolitionist Northern Baptists. He described it as a “remarkable arc”: a denomination founded on the defense of slavery “denouncing a critical read of history that might put a spotlight on that story.”

Then again, white evangelicals probably aren’t wrong to fear that their children are getting away from them. As their numbers have shrunk and as they’ve grown more at odds with younger Americans, said Jones, “that has led to this bigger sense of being under attack, a kind of visceral defensive posture, that we saw President Trump really leveraging.”

I was frightened by the religious right in its triumphant phase. But it turns out that the movement is just as dangerous in decline. Maybe more so. It didn’t take long for the cocky optimism of Generation Joshua to give way to the nihilism of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. If they can’t own the country, they’re ready to defile it.

Thursday, May 20, 2021

OK - One More Time


In what would be nice to think of as one last desperate Hail Mary before the wheels come completely off and even the hard right fanatics and zealots throw up their hands and say "Holy fuck, you guys, you gotta stop this weird shit", here comes the Gilead Wannabe Gang again.

WaPo (pay wall)

Texas governor signs abortion bill banning procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Wednesday signed legislation banning abortions in the state as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, a measure slammed by critics as one of the strictest and most extreme measures in the nation and hailed by antiabortion supporters as a landmark achievement.

The Texas bill known as S.B. 8, described as a “heartbeat ban” abortion measure, prohibits the procedure the moment a fetal heartbeat has been detected. By banning abortion after the six-week mark, many women in Texas who are not even aware they are pregnant will not be allowed to get the procedure done in the state. The bill, which goes into effect Sept. 1, does not include exceptions for women impregnated as a result of rape or incest, but offers a provision for medical emergencies.

Abbott, who had publicly offered his support of the bill, celebrated what he deemed a victory for Texans while surrounded by Republicans gathered to watch him sign the proposal in Austin: “The heartbeat bill is now law in the Lone Star State.”

The piece goes on to describe the gruesome details of a religiously diseased constituency's attempt to impose their shitty paranoid freedom-hating woman-hostile rules on everybody but themselves.

Some things to keep in mind:
  1. These stoopid laws do not stop abortions - they just make abortions unsafe
  2. These stoopid laws do not stop abortions for anyone with the price of a plane ticket
  3. These stoopid laws just make it harder for poor people to get ahead
So here it is again:

eggs ain't chickens
-
caterpillars ain't butterflies
-
ain't nuthin' goin' on in my daughter's uterus
that's any of your fuckin' business

Saturday, February 23, 2019

A Greater Truth


Conventional wisdom has always assumed Religion = Morality.

Without religion, we have no morality, and without morality, we have no basis for ethical conduct in society.

Over the last 30 years, every time the pollsters have asked about Americans' "Faith Profile", the number of people self-identifying as Atheist goes up a little.

It's now believed to be anywhere from 5% (when respondents are asked directly) to a high of maybe 25-30% (in a study where the methodology was more subtle).

One thing I find pretty interesting is the possible confluence of a shifting Religious Profile and the changes in crime rates. (ie: a falling crime rate is coincidental with the rise in atheism)

We're told that religious people must be good people because they're religious, which invites the inference that atheists must be bad people because they don't have that religion thing to keep them in line.

But while a full-blown 70-80% of Americans in the general population are either affiliated with a specific religion, or at least self-identify as "religious / believers",  99.93% of the people in prison here in USAmerica Inc self-identify as "religious / believers".


Flip side: 5-30% of Americans at large are non-bleievers, while 0.07% of our prison population are non-believers.

This does not prove anything - gotta be careful with the whole Correlation thing. 

Not everybody lying down with their eyes closed is dead.

But, as we start this next silly season of electioneering and clownery, we need to leave all of the Purity Tests out of it - including the one where we try to measure a candidate's worth by their willingness to abdicate part of their responsibilities to an imaginary friend.

Friday, February 15, 2019

Seems Odd

I guess we file this one under "When You've Lost the..."

Daily Caller - OpEd:

When these radical religious ideologies come from within our government, the phone call, as the horror film says, is coming from inside the house. The White House in this case.

Recall Attorney General Jeff Sessions used Romans 13:1-7 to argue that the Trump administration had the political and biblical right to remove and cage children and parents at the southern border. And that is precisely why when Sanders says that God wanted Trump to be the president — we must resist.

Sanders’ statement is a flagrant breach of the First Amendment’s wall of separation between church and state. So concerned were our nation’s founders about the State imposing or restricting religion that they expressly prohibited the establishment of state religion in order to protect the integrity and free exercise of all religions. Sanders took a sledgehammer to the First Amendment when, as an officer of the state, she declared definitive understanding of the mind of God.


The efforts of certain "conservative" allies to put distance between themselves and 45* seem to be increasing in both numbers and alacrity.

We'll see what we see, but there are signs of a break up.