I came of age in a Christian fundamentalist religion.  You know the type, replete with the stereotypical hellfire and brimstone, where all women, even girl-children, are considered, potentially, either Jezebels or Lot’s daughters.  We were not just daughters of Eve, there, but Eve incarnate, designed by our very natures to lead men astray whether we willed it or no.  Evil in our hearts, and powerless to control it, we were worse than Cain who slew his brother, worse than Isaac who would have slain his son, worse even than the matricide king, we, the daughters of men, would inevitably lead men astray.  Though not always by will, the result of our very femininity was both inexorable and inherently evil.

 

It was probably here that I began having issues with church.  But while the nature of my own evil might have given me pause, it was not, in fact, what finally caused me to leave.

 

The ultimate catalyst was the hatred inherent in the fundamentalist doctrine I grew up with.  It was a church where “love the sinner, hate the sin” homilies abounded, and yet I saw no evidence of loving sinners, only hating sin.  And the vile wretches who had the misfortune to be caught committing them.  And the sinners’ children, as well, who were guilty by progenation.

 

It was a call to arms then.  “Onward Christian Soldiers” wasn’t allegorical, but literal, and we were all – even we Eves – to take up arms against our fellow men to see God’s Kingdom well and truly established.  In fighting the Good Fight, we otherwise irredeemable repositories of sin might, somehow, see ourselves redeemed.  Ah salvation guaranteed.  The promise of an afterlife filled with naught but milk, honey and lotus blossoms, sitting at the feet of the almighty, and with less care than the lilies of the field.  You can imagine, can’t you, how sweet that sounds?  Especially to angst-ridden teenage outcasts looking for some sort of acceptance?

 

And yet the acceptance required a price, one I was ultimately unwilling to pay, the sacrifice of one’s conscience, of one’s humanity, to the Great Homogenizer.  It required hating one’s fellow man for no better reason than divergent beliefs about the divine, or even different interpretations of the same belief. 

 

Following the logic to its end, the doctrine required threatening judges, and killing doctors who performed abortions, and disenfranchising homosexuals, and executing children, and murderous imperialism in the name of a God who, if He existed, I was sure would not approve of the things being done in his name.  If a God could send his only son into the world to die, only to save this inveterate, injudicious, intolerant, scrap of biological ephemera called Man, then surely, thought I, he would not want us killing each other over the question of occasional pork consumption.  Surely, such an enlightened entity, and one that not only believed in free will, but purportedly endowed humanity with it, would not only allow for divergence, but also even enjoy and celebrate it.

 

It was, it seems, the beginning of heresy.

 

It was certainly the beginning of apostasy, followed by agnosticism.  And yet I cannot but think that God, if such exists, is better served by apostates and agnostics who follow the love aspects of those vaunted biblical teachings, than the self-appointed righteous who stand on the temple steps and loudly condemn all they see.  I cannot but think that Jesus / Yeshua, the man who dined regularly with lepers and whores, would prefer a following bent on helping their fellow men than on “making them pay.”

 

I wax philosophic I know (or perhaps more wan, depending on the reader’s point of view), but recent events – or perhaps it is the events of my lifetime – cause me to want to put pen to paper, or its electronic equivalent.

 

For those who claim to be Christian, and yet hate and sow hate, I say – I don’t buy it.  I haven’t bought it since I was 14 and old enough to figure out that the X chromosome was not also the evil genome, and the Y chromosome wasn’t a biological panacea; that love is utterly incompatible with hate; that hate, in any form, could never lead to peace or the metaphorical (if not concretely physical) Eden to which various religions promise a return.  There is no such thing as “love the sinner, hate the sin;” it’s merely a simplistic salve designed to soothe an undemanding conscience.  It’s flip-flopping at the highest level.  One should, instead, endeavor not to hate at all.  Or, if one must hate, hate honestly, without trying to cast fear and vitriol as somehow well-intentioned.

 

But then there are two Gods.  And liberals cannot forget the second.  The same God who is said to have inspired 1 Corinthians also inspired Revelation.  Unless the Council of Nicea got it all wrong and fell for a false prophet, that is.  But I don’t suppose that could ever happen.

As part of the I Believe series, I propose the following:

With proceeds to go to providing frogs for biology classes.

Unless ET objects to the frogs, in which case I suggest home chemistry sets for every kid.

I have long held that the problem with letting Christians erect religious monuments on public land is not necessarily that I will have to look at those monuments, but that if we allow Christians the privilege of memorializing their religion in stone on public property we must, as a free and fair people in premise if not always in practice, allow other adherents of other religions to erect their own monuments to their own gods, demigods, sacred books, and pasta.

I mean, really, that's why people have previously told Christians to erect their monuments on private land.  It's not because they're not allowed to have monuments, but because if they put a monument on public land, pretty soon Jews or Muslims will want a monument, and then the Buddhists start feeling left out, and once you let them in, well, you have to let everybody in.

Imagine, a ten commandments monuments goes up.  Okay.  Then a golden seagull perches nearby, then we add a Buddha and a Shiva and maybe a statue of L. Ron Hubbard.  Next someone erects a crescent, and some of the Pagans get in with a statue of Gaia.  And then there's the modern art with the plate of actual spaghetti and meatballs with a nice lighting effect indicating a heavenly glow.  That one has to be changed daily.

Not only would it be a mishmash of competing ideologies, such a hodgepodge would have little aesthetic value.  Quite frankly, I think it would make for a very crowded park.  What might make for an interesting example of roadside object d'art, a la Route 66 circa 1960, would, I think, be terribly out of place in a city park - or courthouse, for that matter.

Having gone through the preamble of what should be the ridiculous, the LA Times reports that the Supreme Court has agreed to consider a case along this vein:

But last year, the U.S. appeals court in Denver extended this free-speech rule to cover the monuments, statues and displays in a public park. It ruled in favor of a religious group called Summum, which says it wants to erect its "Seven Aphorisms of Summum" next to the Ten Commandments in Pioneer Park in Pleasant Grove, Utah.

Its ruling left the city with an all-or-nothing choice: Allow Summum and others to erect their own displays in the park, or remove the other monuments.

The city is apparently upset that it will have to either allow everybody to put up religious monuments, or remove the Christian-only material which it currently allows.  Some of these monuments are old, you see.  I get that.  We often place historical value on certain items that the newfangled contraptions just can't claim yet.  It's tradition.  Just because a thing is traditional, however, doesn't make it right.  Take slavery, for example, or female genital mutilation, or torturing a confession out of an enemy.  Or haggis, for that matter.  Tradition, for all it is often beloved, can be wrong, and being forced to choose otherwise can be tough.

Myself, I think if the city believes in the value of ancient Christian monuments so much that they are willing to spend precious tax dollars to defend them, they should keep them.  They just have to desegregate and let the other kids in, too.

The city could always plant lots of trees and other flora to obscure all of the monuments, make a sort of wild ramble out of it.  Then they could print up maps and charge a dollar a person to enter the park and hunt for the monuments.  It'd be like a modern day treasure hunt, only with civics and history and tolerance and stuff.

For those of you neither from the MidSouth nor interested in the country music business, Belmont University, located in Nashville, TN, is the place to pursue your degree if you want to make it in the Music City.  It is also financed by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), a highly fundamentalist brand of Christianity which, while very wealthy here, is generally incompatible with those who gravitate toward the entertainment business.

As such, Belmont doesn't have a majority SBC enrollment in their student body (it's about 1/3), though their trustees are 100% SBC.  In light of their diversity of enrollment, their status as a feeder to the country music industry, and their need to raise additional funds, Belmont is attempting to reduce its SBC trustee load from 100% to 60%.  The Convention, however, had other ideas, informing the school that if they let other so-called Christians (that would be any denomination other than SBC, including but not limited to Primitive Baptist or Bible Baptist or Old Regular Baptist), then Belmont could expect to stop finding $2MM annual checks in the mail.

Belmont responded with refusing to accept any additional funds.

The Tennessee branch of the SBC subsequently filed a suit in October seeking reparation of the $57MM it's given the school since the Convention took over in 1950. 


Interesting, since Belmont didn't actually want to sever the connection completely, just loosen the stranglehold a bit.  But what else can we expect from a dogma sees most everything in black and white?  If the SBC doesn't own that college lock, stock and barrel, then just hanging on to the lock and the barrel don't count, and they'll spend countless thousands getting that freaking stock back in their pockets.

Belmont is still looking for a way out of being held at SBC gunpoint.  I've got a great idea for them.  They should do what Georgia's Mercer College did earlier this year and host a campus "Coming Out Day."  The Southern Baptists dropped Mercer like a sackful of unblessed snakes, no lawsuit required.

And it had the added benefit of being the right thing to for their students.  Funny how that worked out.

Certain members of our notably advanced western culture believe that Muslim women who wish to live on the land for which we duly paid our two shekels should be permitted to do so only on the condition that they forgo their peculiar religious dress, the all-encompassing burqa.  The argument goes that the enveloping ensemble, meant to hide the woman (a.k.a. temptation, uncovered meat) from the world, in our Euro-centric culture actually achieves the opposite, calling attention to her and forcing all of us to remember that we are not a homogenized Borg race of waspy, light-skinned protestants tossed with maybe a few Anglicans for spice.  Some people take offense at the idea that others might not be quite so enamored of our singularly spectacular way of life, including belly shirts, and baby blue eyeshadow, and jeans two sizes too small, that they are not willing to abandon everything they knew or have been taught, or their own crazy brand of values, just to fit in.  Wearing the burqa in the west gives the finger to every person who doesn't wear it.  It's just rude to place so much value on your own cultural heritage that you won't embrace every single contrary aspect in the new culture.

Okay, I'll go with that.

Now, someone please inform the Catholics that their priests and nuns will no longer be allowed to wear their particular religious get-ups.  The Cardinals will have to buy some Levis, and the Pope will have to both give up his Prada shoes and burn his silly hats.

We'll need to write a letter to the Amish and the Mennonites - mainstream western culture abandoned those hats and old-fashioned dresses 100 years or so ago.  They've also got to sell their buggies and buy Fords.  It's absolutely shameful to live in America while refusing to support our industry.

The Hassidim will all need a decent haircut and a shave, of course.  It is unthinkable that they should be able to flaunt their weird style of supernatural hairdo while the rest of us worry over whether bangs are in, if the shade of blonde we've chosen is right, and why we can never make it look like the picture the stylist promised he could make work.

Let us not forget the Buddhist monks, who aren't just men wearing dresses (unnatural in the west, outside of Scotland), but orange dresses at that.  Talk about calling attention to one's refusal to integrate - those freaky monks with their lame focus on nirvana, and peace, and doing good instead of getting ahead and amassing wealth and being as comfortably insulated as possible, they go out of their way with the bright orange dresses to rub our faces in it.  They should be made to wear The Gap for the rest of their lives to atone for their outrageous insistence on such showy separatism.

Oh, and also the Duggars (Arkansas parents to 17 children), and all of the cracked quiverfull like them, we'll have to do something about them.  First of all, having that many children is entirely too ostentatious a declaration of difference - some of those kids will need to be put into foster care immediately (perhaps give them to the priests and nuns who we'll force to marry so we can create insta-families).  Then, the women will need IUDs implanted and decent haircuts.  Finally, they will no longer be able to dress the remaining children in cutesy-wootsey matching homemade outfits; they'll have to buy their kids' clothes at Wal-Mart like every other good, upstanding American.

Yes, in the west the burqa is an expression of religious freedom, of cultural heritage, of personal values, of intentional and unrepentant dissimilarity from the otherwise uninterrupted whole.  And we cannot have that here.  Difference is divisive.

I say we ban it all.  I know you all agree with me.  You must.  We are all the same, yes?

"Think Tank Will Promote Thinking," read the headline in WaPo's politics section this morning - on the Federal Page, no less.

Wow, thought I, that's kind of an oxymoron.  Let me click on that and read more.  So I bypassed a handful of articles detailing how Nancy Pelosi screwed up by writing that letter supporting Murtha, even if she didn't mean it to be taken literally and secretly wants Hoyer to win, and clicked through to read about this strange new species - the think tank that wants people to think.

Scientists, the really good ones, have long been noted for their quasi-detachment from the world.  A shining attribute in scientific study, dispassionate observation does not usually lend itself well to political activism unless that activism is somehow triggered by certain stimuli such as progressive  and unrelenting encroachment, spearing, or repeated facemasking.  Which is to say, it can take a little something to get them to notice that the other team is trying to take the ball, stab 40 holes in it, set it on fire, and bury it in a nuclear waste dump.  Well, some scientists have finally both noticed that "science" has come to be acquainted with "evil," (which is a ridiculous comparison both on its face and under its hood), and decided to do something about it.  They've formed a Washington think tank to attempt to influence public policy regarding the principles of separation of church and state (SOCAS): the Center for Inquiry-Transnational.

Since our arrival on these shores, religion has always attempted to interfere in our public policy.  Though a constant undercurrent even at its weakest points, religion's success in informing said policy, relative to the percentage of widely accepted initiatives grounded in secular human and civil rights as opposed to those founded upon the religious imperatives of the nationally dominant genre (i.e., Christianity) irrespective of empirical data or socioeconomic impact, can be viewed in waves, many of them tied to conflict and political and national uncertainty.  Among other items - in 1864, after an upsurge of religious feeling during the Civil War, Congress approved the addition of "In God We Trust" to coins.  It appeared there on and off until 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower (R) approved a Congressional joint resolution declaring "In God We Trust" the national motto of the US.  Eisenhower also signed the 1954 law adding "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance - the campaign for which was spearheaded by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal group.  Government-sponsored prayer in public schools, ruled against between the 1850s and 1948, saw a resurgence during the Eisenhower years before being ended again by the Supreme Court's 1962 decision in Engel v. Vitale.  Not coincidentally, Eisenhower's presidency also saw the height of McCarthyism, the Korean War, the Suez conflict, the entrenchment of the Cold War and the beginning of intervention in Vietnam.  Religious influence on public policy relative to perceived security could be a dissertation in and of itself.

While the wave of the 50s briefly abated during the 60s and 70s, it began to rise again in the 1980s concurrent with the ascendance of Reagan conservatism and has since faced little orchestrated opposition from the scientific community.  Though scientists thought it a disease of national import, AIDS research failed to obtain early funding because it was a "gay disease," according to (uninformed) public perception.  "Gay" was evil, and therefore did not merit study or cure the way, say, measles (primarily a "kid" disease) did, even though it was exponentially more fatal.   

The push has become greater since fundamentalist George W. Bush became president, and entered its ascendancy post 9/11 as economic pressures, national instability and concerns over daily security increased.  As though presenting Marshall Applewhite as on equal footing with Einstein, the media, in their over-earnest attempts at "balance," will promote the dissent of 1% of the scientific community on any given issue as on par with the agreement of the significantly larger 99%.  Movements to add the newfangled creationism euphemistically referred to as "Intelligent Design" were largely ignored until a spate of them achieved national notoriety just within the last 5 years.  In the latest developments to come to light the public has discovered that FDA, environmental and health policies have been subject to Christian review and religious affirmation.

The last item is, no doubt, the proverbial straw on the complacent camel's back.

It is high time scientists joined with other SOCAS supporters in providing basis and impetus for pushing back the rising tide of religious fundamentalism undermining a nation founded on secular freedoms.  Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of civil rights infringed upon by religious zealotry, it is reprehensible that this administration has thus far been permitted to either ignore or hide science where it disagrees (as it frequently does) with their theocratic agenda on matters of basic earth science or public health.  And, if we pick civil rights up again, we find the religion extremists no better - attempting to codify discrimination and legislate morality, absent logical reasoning, based entirely upon their interpretations of a collection of stories they deem as "holy" while rejecting any conflicting data - including but not limited to proven science, basic human decency, and anyone else's concept of "holy."

While even the extremists have a right to believe and live their personal lives as they see fit, their religious fervor should give them no additional standing in a country predicated upon equality.  To be balanced and to live up to the egalitarian ideals upon which we claim foundation, health and environmental policies, as well as human and civil rights, must be grounded in the secular and based on facts.  To do otherwise is to grant both political and personal ascendancy to one collection of mythology over all others, even though all have equal basis for belief, nullifying the rights of every citizen.  Because, even though the Christian fundamentalists have found themselves with the power thus far, other faiths in the US are growing and may well one decide to usurp that power for themselves.  Better for all of us, even the fundamentalists, to leaves religion out of government, lest we one day find ourselves subject to a religion not our own.

I look forward to the Center's efforts and seeing the results thereof.  The passion of the dispassionate may yet be something to behold.

What can I say about Ted Haggard, leader of New Life Church in Colorado and the National Association of Evangelicals, vociferous pro-discrimination operative, and apparent homo- or bi-sexual that hasn't already been said?

Haggard only just denied allegations of paying a male escort for sex.  "I did not have a homosexual relationship with a man in Denver," the indignant pastor emphatically told television station KUSA on Wednesday night.  However, an associate pastor at New Life confirmed this morning that Haggard had admitted "some truth" to the accusations regarding gay sex and methamphetamine use.  It is unclear, at this point, if the truth relates to the former, the latter or both.

James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Reverend Steve Holt of Mountain Springs Church have both stated they feel the timing of the accusation are related to the election.  Mike Jones, the escort making the accusations, does not deny that Colorado's proposed Amendment 43, defining marriage as between one man and one woman, impacted his decision to come forward.  However, he began approaching Denver news outlets two months ago, after learning just 4 months prior that his client "Art" was a leader of the movement against gay rights.

Once again, one of the most vocal proponents of discrimination may have been screaming from the closet.  Combine that with the use of the bully pulpit of his power and position, and the bully closet once manned by former Governor Jim McGreevey opens just another crack.

According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, a woman drove by the media encamped outside Haggard's home last night and said:

I hope you all aren't giving our pastor a hard time.  He's a good man.

I guess here is where I can take a different tack.  While schadenfreude is often immensely enjoyable, and I am certainly not immune, maybe the fact that many people view this guy as a "good man" (despite whatever feelings I may have to the contrary) means they can begin to see that one can be a good person and be homosexual.  The two are not mutually exclusive.

Of course, I think it would be easier to reach that conclusion had Haggard not been doing drugs and cheating on his wife for three years, but ideologues tend to rationalize and forgive their leaders for even the most egregious of sins - just look at George W. Bush.

----------------------

Update: According to NPR, Haggard has admitted buying meth and "getting a massage" from Jones, though he still denies intercourse.  His books remain on Church bookstore shelves, for now.

Oh, and Haggard says he threw the meth away without using it, though Jones insists he saw him use it, and the voicemails Jones released indicate a repeat purchase.

I wonder if Haggard will have the book thrown at him for buying drugs, or if he'll be let off the hook with the Limbaugh defense?  I know, silly question.

NY Times:

New York State’s highest court ruled yesterday that the Roman Catholic Church and other religious organizations must abide by a state law that requires most employee health insurance policies to cover the cost of contraception.

The 6-to-0 decision by the Court of Appeals upheld rulings by the State Supreme Court and the Appellate Division, and left intact the state’s Women’s Health and Wellness Act of 2002, which requires company health insurance policies that provide coverage for prescription drugs to include “coverage for the cost of contraceptive drugs or devices.”

The suit, brought by 10 religious organizations (8 Catholic and 2 Baptist), argued that the Women's Health and Wellness act violated their religious freedom by forcing them to act contrary to their beliefs. 

The act makes exceptions for religious employers, which are defined as religious organizations serving members of their own faith either exclusively or primarily.  It does not, however, recognize hospitals, Catholic Charities, or other ad publicum organizations as "religious employers" because they intentionally employ and serve a diverse cross-section of people, many of whom do not espouse their particular brands of belief.  "Religious employer" was originally defined so narrowly on purpose.  During its formulation "[t]hose favoring a narrower exemption asserted that [a] broader one would deprive tens of thousands of women employed by church-affiliated organizations of contraceptive coverage" (Kaiser Network)

In the ruling the judges acknowledged that the plaintiffs felt contraception to be sinful, but added that "We must weigh against (their) interests in adhering to the tenets of their faith the state's substantial interest in fostering equality between the sexes, and in providing women with better health care."  (Kaiser)  Later in the decision, the judges note that legislators had intended the law advance both women's health and inequality, citing a study which showed that women paid 68% more healthcare out-of-pocket expenses than men, primarily for reproductive services.  (NY Times)

The churches promise to appeal, on the basis that they take offense at being forced to obey a law with which they disagree (as if anyone likes following laws with which they disagree), and plan to make the secularization of their organizations the issue.  They also insist that this isn't about women's health or equality of reproductive choice at all, but about eventually forcing churches to pay for abortions.  Just like forcing them to live in the same cities with homosexuals will eventually end heterosexuality, forcing churches to marry gay couples and precipitating the end of civilization. 

Because that's what women really want, not authority and control over their own procreation, but the end of civilization.   It's our super-secret agenda.  Bwahahaha.

What these people miss, of course, is the fact that by opening a hospital or school to the public, they subject themselves to this law.  If they don't want to follow it, all they have to do is restrict their clientele to other Catholics or Baptists.  That might cut into their profits, but what is money in the face of God?

They must decide which master to serve, and if it is Caesar, they must render unto him that which is his.

 

Normally, if I think some news is getting enough play I’ll leave it alone and search out some other material. Witness the lack of Pope coverage on this site. I know he’s dead, and I do have my own set of mixed opinions about him, but the world does not need yet another ambivalent elegy on John Paul II.

What it does need, however, are more church leaders like Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson. If ever a clergyman’s comments embodied my concept of what Christianity should be – truly compassionate and actively working for the betterment of all people – they are, along with Dr. Robin Meyers’ speech posted here in January, Rev. Robinson’s in an interview recently given to Planned Parenthood.

Pam at Pam’s House Blend and Big Brass Blog posts some excerpts, along with quotes from some disgruntled extremists in response to Robinson’s stance. Go on over there if you’re feeling a little masochistic this morning. Otherwise, I’m excerpting the excerpt here:

With so much strife around issues like abortion and gay marriage, including within the Episcopal Church, how do you create common ground?

I'm doing everything I can to emphasize the ways in which we all share the same reality, though we live in a culture that thrives on polarization.

Little has been written about your stance on reproductive rights. Are you pro-choice?

Absolutely. The reason I love the Episcopal Church is that it actually trusts us to be adults. In a world where everyone tries to paint things as black or white, Episcopalians feel pretty comfortable in the gray areas. I'm sure there must be individual congregations, and certainly individuals, who are off the deep end about this issue, but for the most part, the stance that we have taken speaks to our people as a mature and adult way of dealing with this — that we protect a woman's right to choose but also say that obviously there are very deep things involved here.

So we encourage our folks to take this very private issue seriously. We urge them to talk to their priests about it and to think through all the questions they might have. And then we absolutely stand behind a woman's right to choose. I think that's a responsible place to be.

Has abortion been a divisive issue in your church?

Not really — surprisingly. From time to time it has come up, but the church has steadfastly resisted efforts to retract in any way our support for a woman's choice.

You've said, "We have allowed the conservative religious right to take our Bible hostage, and I think it's time we took it back." How can people who are both religious and progressive reclaim religion?

It's time that we re-familiarize ourselves with our sacred text, so that we can interpret it for the world, and not let the only voice that Americans hear from a Christian standpoint be those wildly conservative voices. As a gay man, I find stories in both Hebrew and Christian scripture that have literally called me out. For instance, in the Passover story, I know what it's like to leave Egypt, or leave the closet. The ancient Israelites, instead of finding the Promised Land immediately, wandered the desert, and I know, too, that life doesn't immediately get better for you. At the same time, as a whole community, we're getting closer to the Promised Land all the time.

I think it's time we learn to tell those stories out of our own context again, so that people speaking biblically and from a place of faith are not just wild-eyed conservatives.

There is an alarming trend toward enforcing abstinence-only sex education, encouraging the teaching of creationism, discouraging stem cell research — all in an attempt to put ideology over science. How do you think religion and science intersect?

I don't find any disconnect between science and faith. There are ways of incorporating all of faith with all of what we know about science. [Right-wing politicians] and the so-called "pro-life" movement focus on all this as a great way to raise money, solidify their base, and get people all whipped up. If they can keep people whipped up about abortion, stem cell research, and gay marriage, then we don't have to talk about the things that really matter,like this illegal and immoral war in Iraq, the economy, the some 45 million people without health insurance in this country, and balancing the budget so that those least able to take care of themselves don't lose Medicaid. I think it was Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) who called all of the folderol about gay marriage a "weapon of mass distraction." That's what I think is going on here. I don't find anything in scripture that says we shouldn't be doing these things.

I've been involved in AIDS education for both young people and adults for a long, long time, and Ithink it's cruel beyond belief to be advocating abstinence-only sex education.

This is the real disconnect — if you are against abortion, how can you not be for full and sufficient education about birth control? It's something that would stop unintended pregnancies to begin with. It also exhibits a very low opinion of humankind. It says we can't make appropriate choices for ourselves, so somebody has to make those choices for us.

Unfortunately, some Episcopalian parishes in Alabama don’t share my admiration. They have, by all means, every right to disagree, and every right, too, to leave their church if they feel it incompatible with their core beliefs. In fact, if this is the worst of it (I don’t know yet, and it remains to be seen), then those departing Alabama parishioners actually have my respect in their leaving. They did not threaten; they did not attempt a Rovian coup; they simply went on their way when they felt the two paths no longer converged.

Would that all churchgoers handled such issues similarly. If you don’t like gay unions, don’t have one, or attend a church that performs them. If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one. If you don’t approve of pre-marital sex on religious grounds, don’t do it. If you don’t like birth control, don’t take it. But allow that, "God loves those who feel like in good conscience that they must leave, and God loves those who choose to stay." And mean it.

It’s so blindingly simple.

US District Judge Clarence Cooper ruled in favor of science and SOCAS yesterday, ordering the Cobb County, Georgia, school system to remove the inane yellow warning stickers from their high school biology textbooks.

:does the happy dance

The stickers stated, "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a ...   

More after the jump... »

Still nothing from the judge in Cobb County, Georgia on the science textbook stickers labeling evolution "just a theory," but 11 parents, along with the ACLU, have taken the Dover school system to court over their recent decision to require the teaching of creationism / intelligent design in high school ...   

More after the jump... »

Wondering what U.S. religious extremists are planning to do with their supposed mandate under their new messiah?  Read this. 

Be warned, those who hold SOCAS dear may want to puke.

Meanwhile, I'm going to be re-reading my copy of The Handmaid's Tale.  Seems I might need to familiarize myself with the joys and glories of a righteously patriarchal theocracy.