Reading Time: 5 minutes Turns out Barack Obama was right about guns and religion. During his successful 2008 presidential campaign, he alluded to white, blue-collar manufacturing workers in America who were terribly incensed that their well-paying jobs and comfortable lives had vaporized in globalization during the previous quarter century: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling […]
Barack Obama
Posted inSocial Media
Trump was never king of Twitter. This guy was (and is)
Reading Time: 3 minutes Among the more depressing news tidbits I recently ran into informed me that Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has 1.1 million Twitter followers. 1.1 million! It’s true. I checked. By comparison, I have, uh, 170 followers (.00001545% of Greene’s), which may or may not be a function of never using it. And virtually everything […]
Posted inReligious News
Christian outlets seek to trash Obama with a decade-old interview
Reading Time: 2 minutes The opening paragraph in a Christianity Daily report dated April 5, 2022, report reads, “The former president’s religious beliefs were often shrouded in mystery, which is why one political commentator took it upon himself to do the research.” Despite referring to Obama as “the former president” the author, Olivia Cavallaro, would have known that the […]
Posted inGeneral
Brace yourselves: Unreality will soon mimic reality
Reading Time: < 1 minute Fake news is looking realer and realer all the time, but it’s still totally fake. That portends an enormous potential problem globally.
Posted inReligion
The Election Apocalypse of 1992, and 2000 and 2008 and 2016
Reading Time: 9 minutes I woke up today after a day that sucked on every conceivable level. I mean, it wasn’t just my imagination. One of my major appliances went belly-up, I had a really bad back day, Bother’s decided she mistrusts cat boxes, and a swarm of angry religious nuts, white supremacists, and ignorant malcontents have somehow elected a complete buffoon to the top leadership position of my country. At least the car is running.
Posted inPolitics
White Supremacy and the US Presidency
Reading Time: < 1 minute This is a meme going about the internet at the moment, but I think it is pretty much on the money. What do you think? When a faithfully married black president who was the son of a single-mother, the first black editor of Harvard Law review and a professor of constitutional law is considered unintelligent, […]
Posted inReligion
The Religious Right Clearly Thinks We’re Idiots.
Reading Time: 10 minutes I’m noticing a trend lately with the Religious Right that might well baffle observers but which makes perfect sense within the strange subculture that its adherents inhabit: they act for all the world like they think we’re idiots. As usual, there’s a bit more to it than that, though. Today we’ll talk about three examples of what I mean.
Posted inCulture, General, History, Politics
How One Religion Normalizes Crazy Talk
Reading Time: 7 minutes It would be difficult to overstate the political impact of the recent passing of Antonin Scalia, who was undoubtedly the most colorful and outspoken conservative justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. The effort to fill the vacancy created by his departure may very well dominate the next year in American politics, a year in which tensions […]
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
Priorities, Priorities: Freedom 2015
Reading Time: 10 minutes Sometimes when people can’t possibly achieve a goal, they start setting some downright odd priorities to make themselves feel like they’re getting something done. Lately we’re seeing some of that behavior out of Christians–and it’s another sign that things are getting better (for the rest of us). Misplaced priorities are just part of the dying pains of a major movement. This time it’s not quite as comical–or as harmless–as their apparent war over how brightly-lit their churches should be during services. This time they’re attacking tolerance itself.
Posted inReligion
My Breath Caught in My Throat.
Reading Time: 8 minutes In the wake of the murder of an atheist blogger at the hands of religious extremists, we examine the kinship of extremism in Christianity and Islam.