Reading Time: 5 minutes The Republican party has made anti-immigrant prejudice the centerpiece of their strategy. How do progressive and secular parents living in a nation of immigrants explain this to their children?
bigotry
Posted inWar and Peace
Blaming the Devil is a lazy excuse
Reading Time: 4 minutes When you denounce your enemies as allies of the Devil, it excuses you from the necessity of treating them as human beings with rights. That murderous logic has been used by Christians against Jews through the centuries, and now it’s arising to justify Israel’s war on Gaza.
Posted inWar and Peace
The allure of tribalism in dangerous times
Reading Time: 5 minutes Moral codes based on tribalism—defining the in-group and the out-group, whether by culture, religion or race—offer no solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict or any of the other wars wracking our world. The only path to peace is a morality based on empathy and universal humanity, yet it seems further from our grasp than ever.
Posted inLGBTQ News
Christian cancel culture at Target
Reading Time: 4 minutes The religious right no longer has the numbers or the influence to stop corporations from catering to shifting cultural norms, but they’re becoming more and more willing to use harassment and violence instead.
Posted inFree Expression
College activists aren’t ‘snowflakes,’ they’re warriors against bigotry
Reading Time: 7 minutes There’s been a lot of talk in the last few years about how college campuses are overrun with lefty “snowflakes”—students and professors (and even administrators)—who try to shut down free speech because they can’t handle opinions that contradict their existing beliefs. I believe the naysayers are usually mistaken (yet, not always, unfortunately). But, in my […]
Posted inEducation
Why we need public school: Pluralism is how progress happens
Reading Time: 4 minutes [Previous: What rights do parents have over their children’s education?] The battle over public schools is a clash of values. There’s no such thing as neutral or value-free education. Every choice about what to present or what to omit from the classroom carries ideological weight. That’s why red-state politicians want to present one version of […]
Posted inReligious News
Mangled Methodist morality
Reading Time: 2 minutes The Methodist church, like other Christian denominations, is schisming over the question of whether LGBTQ people deserve equal rights.
Posted inReligion
Something about Muslims
Reading Time: 3 minutes I often write about Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church. Some Christian friends of mine have suggested that I should direct my critical attention onto Muslims. They join the chorus of similar anonymous grumbles I get on my blog. I criticise Islam (and Hinduism and Judaism and others) regularly, but they only notice when their […]
Posted inSatire
We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, especially you
Reading Time: 2 minutes In the recent past, conservative Supreme Court Justices have legalized bigotry by allowing businesses owners to refuse service to select customers. Conservative justices might do this again, and again and again. America is not a country with a well-evolved service industry, and many business owners do not want to make profits by receiving money from […]
Posted inPolitics
From Hitler to Trump, strongmen’s lies have devastated the world
Reading Time: 3 minutes At the risk of exaggerating a connection to today’s American political environment, bald-faced lies disingenuously and persistently applied over time destroyed Germany’s pre-World War II Weimar Republic. The lies were spread by the racist Nazi Party’s fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, in a cynical and diabolical propaganda campaign inflicted on the German people during years of […]