If you’re following America’s electoral theater at all, you know that we have a candidate with a preacher problem. And that the candidate in question has been put in the uncomfortable position of having to repudiate some of said preacher’s remarks (while not alienating those voters in the flock who actually, you know, agree with what the Reverend was saying). In case you haven’t been paying attention, the controversial cleric has pronounced God’s doom upon certain of the nation’s citizens, and the backlash against him and his favorite for the White House has significantly damaged the candidate’s chances.

Of course, I’m talking about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama. Errr, wait … that’s not right. That’s not who I’m talking about at all. Full Story »

I’m Jewish. You don’t hear me blog about this much for a variety of reasons, one of the major ones being that you are then inevitably asked to take a stand on Israel–as if such a thing even needed to be discussed, like Marx’s odious asking of “The Jewish Question.”

My faith influences my thinking in a lot of ways, but it is not the sole arbiter of my thinking, and I don’t feel that I have to travel in lockstep with what any other Jew thinks–certainly not about Israel, which has every right to exist as a sovereign state, yet commits indefensible acts against peoples it (rightly or wrongly) perceives as implacable foes. As such, people like myself stay out of the debate, allowing it to be usurped and dominated by a cabal of crazy ultrahawkish right-wing Zionists who claim that anything short of total annihilation of Palestine will end with, as my father says, “the Jews being driven into the sea.”

Thankfully, there’s an alternative coming around, and it is called J Street. Full Story »

Officials from Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) removed a total of 183 young women, girls and boys from the Fundamentalist LDS Church’s compound near Eldorado, TX. According to Marleigh Meisner, spokesperson for CPS, told reporters they had removed 97 girls, 40 boys and 46 young women over the age of 18 from YFZ Ranch.

Eighteen of the girls removed from the compound were put legally into state custody because they appear to be “under threat of physical, mental or sexual abuse, or of neglect.” The remaining children have been taken to a local civic center for questioning and until authorities have found them foster homes. Full Story »

After the debacle of last September’s murder of Iraqi civilians, many Americans held out hope that Blackwater, former Navy Seal and right wing evangelical Erik Prince’s guns-for-hire to the Busheviks operation located in the Great Dismal Swamp of eastern North Carolina had been exposed and might be forced into decline and eventual disenfranchisement.

A new article in Mother Jones warns us not to be sanguine - or naive about such a happy possibility occurring. Like Phillip Morris, Blackwater has simply devised another name and plans to continue business - and, like Altria (not to be confused with nutria, although such plagues abound all around us, it seems), that business will be same as it ever was. Full Story »

I ran into the story of The Political Candidate Formerly Known As Marvin ‘Pro-Life’ Richardson this morning.

Long story short, an Idaho strawberry farmer has pared his legal name all the way down to ‘Pro-Life,’ that being the only way for him to appear specifically as Pro-Life on the upcoming ballot to succeed Senator Larry Craig (and every subsequent Idaho ballot until he meets Janis Joplin).

Considering he advocates murder charges for those who seek and perform abortions, he could have gone the Prince route and changed his name to an ultrasound picture. (Or one of those other ones… you know… *full-body shiver* from the protests. How would the DMV handle that?)

by Dr. Lynn Schofield Clark

When it’s time for politics in the U.S., it seems, it’s also time to talk about religion. So first there were stories of Huckabee’s success among evangelicals, and then there was the quelched rumor about Obama’s supposed connections with Islam (he is a member of the United Church of Christ, a liberal Christian denomination). Hillary Clinton received fewer stories about her Methodist faith, although she did speak of it at the Global Summit on AIDS at a large California megachurch pastored by Rick Warren (best selling author of “The Purpose-Driven Life”), according to one story.

By far the most religion-and-politics coverage so far has gone to Huckabee. Full Story »

Welcome to the fifth and final installment of the Scholars & Rogues year-end wrap-up. Today we tackle the dirty, but oddly riveting world of politics. We’ll take a couple shots at the even dirtier world of media that makes it all possible. Let’s start at the top, shall we?

George Walker Bush: I’ve been telling my Republican friends for five years now that Dubya was going to do more damage to their party than an army of Hillarys could dream of doing. And 2007 was the year where I think the truth of this proposition finally started becoming evident. Scandals at the Justice Department and World Bank did him no favors, nor did the conviction of Scooter Libby (which necessitated the most politically debilitating pardon/commutation sequence since Ford saved Nixon). Iraq got worse by the day and we’re not seeing a lot of GOP presidential hopefuls looking to surf that Bush legacy. Full Story »

Hey, what’s that in our stocking? It’s Ron Paul! Oh joy - we got The Truth® for Christmas!

Ahem. So those of you who thought Ron Paul was going to go away once the big boys got serious have probably been surprised by his staying power so far. He’s polling in the high single digits (something Ronald Reagan Fred Thompson can’t say) and one pollster thinks his actual numbers are in the double digits. He says he’s raised $19M this quarter. His supporters are insane courageously enthusiastic, and he seems to be showing strength among some groups that you wouldn’t expect - progressives, younger voters, etc.

And of course, he’s left the rest of the pack for dead in the highly scientific S&R reader poll, where at the moment of this writing he has over twice as many votes as the rest of the GOP candidates put together (unless you count “other”).

Election watchers in both parties are trying to better understand Paul’s appeal and what it means for their candidates’ chances. Full Story »

Some nut out in Bremerton Washington has put up a cross in his yard with Santa nailed to it. Normally I wouldn’t comment on such a shameless plea against the commercialization of Christmas, but this one crosses a line and I feel compelled to speak out.

Who does this jerk wad think he is? How can any of us enjoy the excess and over consumption that is our right as members of the American Empire® with this kind of criticism paraded before us in a naked attempt to make us think about - well, to think…? Full Story »

There’s a funny parenting story in the news. And there’s another funny parenting story that isn’t in the news. Unfortunately, the one that isn’t needs to be.

The “in the news” story involves Britney’s little sister, Jamie Lynn. You may have heard that the 16 year-old TV star is pregnant. By a nice boy she met at church. And of course, now they’re wondering whether there was any statutory rape involved. Please, no snark. We’re above that.

Britney, of course, is the whore of Babylon. It’s hard to say if she’s the worst trainwreck in Hollywood history, but when you’re bad enough that Paris and Lo-Blow are relegated to playing for a distant second, you’re in 2007 Patriots mode, for sure.

And then the hammer drops: Full Story »

Found this great essay by University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone over at ACSBlog, and I thought it might be of interest to some readers here. In short, no Mitt, Jesus didn’t write the Constitution. Pardon the longish quote, but it’s worth the read. Then click the link and go read the rest of the piece, which gets even better.

That version of history suggests that the Founders intended to create a “Christian Nation,” and that we have unfortunately drifted away from that vision of the United States. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Those who promote this fiction confuse the Puritans, who intended to create a theocratic state, with the Founders, who lived 150 years later. The Founders were not Puritans, but men of the Enlightenment. They lived not in an Age of Faith, but in an Age of Reason. They viewed issues of religion through a prism of rational thought. Full Story »

The Thin Chalk Line (coll.) in a public school system, the institutionalized reluctance of teachers and administrators, for reasons of loyalty, fear or guilt, to report and/or prosecute the misdeeds of their colleagues. (see Cosa Nostra, plausible deniability, Thin Blue Line)

Down here in my particular patch of the Bible Belt, there is technically no such thing as tenure for public school teachers. In practical terms, however, the average pedagogue latched onto the taxpayers’ teat can do pretty much as he or she likes, provided those activities fall on the safe and self-righteous side of the Thin Chalk Line. Teachers don’t rat on teachers, friend, and a school district is an incestuous, potentially vicious community with a siege mentality and a hellishly long collective memory. Veterans educate new recruits with apocryphal tales muttered around the faculty lounge - surprisingly accurate accountings of what will and will not be tolerated by the powers that sign the paychecks. It’s a labyrinthine collection of accumulated experience tinged with paranoia that can bewilder the new teacher… until he learns the underlying principle behind every decision made by an administrator, from the ranks of lowly assistant principals to the exalted, rarely-glimpsed superintendent to the hallowed halls of the state board:

What happens in the system, stays in the system.

Full Story »

NOTE: If you can’t see the video above, click here.

First off, let’s not shed any tears for Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher sentenced to 15 days in a Sudanese prison for naming a teddy bear “Mohammed.” Any woman who chooses to go live in a nation with Sharia Law, where you can be jailed for allowing yourself to be raped, deserves no sympathy.

More interesting to me are the curious responses from a couple of prominent Christian spokespeople. First, the Archbishop of Canterbury condemns the Sudanese court’s decision: Full Story »

The gig is up for Warren Jeffs.

ST. GEORGE, Utah (Reuters) - U.S. polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, the self-proclaimed “prophet” of a sect of breakaway Mormons, was sentenced on Tuesday to 10 years to life in prison for having forced a 14-year-old girl to marry her first cousin.The leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or FLDS, received five years to life for each of two felony convictions on charges he was an accomplice to rape. The sentences will be served consecutively and a state board of pardons will ultimately determine how much time he spends in prison. (Story.)

The FLDS features all kinds of oddness, including “blood atonement” (”the extrajudicial killings of certain sinners”), “child brides, rabid racism, multiple wives, and a secretive, religious dictator” (that’d be our boy Warren, by the way). Full Story »

Report Summary on First Contact Suitability

Ten stigus ago, the Council commissioned a task force of sociologists, anthropologists, historians, linguists, inter-species ethnologists, and first-contact psychologists to study the newly found sentient species of Bat’algah 3. The task force was given a mandate to make a recommendation regarding contact with this species that calls itself “Homo’sapiens. ”This is the task force’s report.

Background
After many millions of stigus of study, the basic psychology of sentient races is well-known. All successful and surviving sentient races have two characteristics:

1: They have a psychological mechanism that allows them to take action even in the face of conflicting data. Full Story »

I recently offended some people, quite unintentionally, with my modest suggestion that perhaps it wasn’t in the best interests of the nation to hand over so much decision-making power to people who aren’t informed about the issues and their own system of government. (Responses ranged from “thoughtful disagreement” to what I believe is referred to as a “galloping hissy fit.”) Honestly, I was a bit shocked by the reaction - when I penned those remarks it hardly occurred to me that I was saying something controversial. On the other hand, it seemed to me that I was merely stating common sense.

Since that post I’ve been ruminating about the assumption embedded in the premise - that a goodly number of Americans aren’t intelligent enough to be safely entrusted with the vote. In order to bring a little more depth to this debate I thought I’d do some research to discover whether or not the nation’s citizens are under-informed, and if so, to what degree. Full Story »

The World Series starts tomorrow night and people around here have gone Rockies crazy. I’m getting asked a lot if I’m excited, and the answer is yes - Go Red Sox! They all want to know “why aren’t you rooting for Colorado?” So I’m answering them:

First off, the Red Sox are my favorite team. Second, I cannot abide the arrogance and stupidity of an organization that makes decisions according to a religious litmus test. It’s offensive, and would be so if they were using my beliefs as the test just as much as it is using evangelical Christianity, which is how they operate now.

Full Story »

Today we introduce our newest writer, Sidicious Bonesparkle, PhD. Dr. Bonesparkle currently serves as Hell’s Ambassador to the United States, and he will periodically post on issues relating to politics, religion, and culture.

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I often think the only thing sillier than the average American is the person he elects to represent him.In John 18:36 Jesus Christ says to Pontius Pilate that “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.” And in Matthew 22:21, he says “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” Full Story »

No, not by his own hand. Nor was it that God. First, let’s preface the story with his most recent pronouncement. In a New York Times op-ed on Thursday about a recent meeting of the fundamentalist Council for National Policy, he wrote: “If neither of the two major political parties nominates an individual who pledges himself or herself to the sanctity of human life, we will join others in voting for a minor-party candidate.

“They also deliberated on “the advisability of creating a third party if Democrats and Republicans do indeed abandon the sanctity of human life and other traditional family values.”

It sounds suspiciously like James Dobson fancies himself a kingmaker. Or does he himself, like Pat Robertson once did, plan to run himself? Full Story »