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An exhaustive new study by media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting shows that the Sunday morning talk shows have been dominated over the last eight months by white, Republican men.
Consider the following statement for a moment:
“I would not vote for a man who was Black.”
Aside from a handful of teabaggers, I suspect that most people would recognize this statement as bigotry. Why? The statement implies that all people who belong to the specified category (i.e., Black) are unfit to hold office simply because of their membership in this category. Since the category is irrelevant to this judgment, we have both a falsehood and an unwarranted generalization. This is bigotry, and most people correctly identify it as such.
Now let’s examine the actual quote from the Rev. Billy Graham’s daughter, Anne Graham Lotz:
“I would not vote for a man who was atheist.”
On the rainy night of Sunday, Feb. 26, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walked to a convenience store in Sanford, Fla. On his way home, with his Skittles and iced tea, the African-American teenager was shot and killed. The gunman, George Zimmerman, didn’t run. He claimed that he killed the young man in self-defense. The Sanford Police agreed and let him go. . . .
So, while the police and State Attorney Norm Wolfinger have defended their inaction, a democratic demand for justice has ricocheted around the country, prompting a U.S. Justice Department investigation and leading Wolfinger to promise to convene a grand jury.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has called for the removal of Sanford Police Chief Lee. NAACP President Ben Jealous, recounting a mass meeting in a Sanford-area church Tuesday night, quoted a local resident who stood up and said, “‘If you kill a dog in this town, you’d be in jail the next day.’ Trayvon Martin was killed four weeks ago, and his killer is still walking the streets.”
With his gun.
“Rick Santorum thinks that women who have been raped should be compelled—by force of law—to carry the babies of their rapists to term, he thinks birth control should be illegal, he wants to prosecute pornographers, etc., etc., basically the guy wants to be president so that he can micromanage the sex lives of all Americans…and I’m the one with issues? Because I made a dirty joke at his expense eight or nine years ago and it stuck? I’m the one with issues?”
Savage concluded, “Rick can pray for me. I’ll gay for him. And we can call it even.”
And the Lord said, “Thou shalt not charge priests who rape and molest children because after all, they do some good stuff sometimes too, and besides, those brats should just get over it already because it happened years ago.”This story is just gonna break your heart:Cardinal [Timothy M.] Dolan criticized a legislative proposal that would, for a year, drop the statute of limitations for filing civil claims for sexual offenses, allowing for lawsuits by people who say they were abused long ago. The cardinal said he was concerned that a flood of lawsuits over abuse by priests could drain the church of money it is using for charitable purposes.
“I think we bishops have been very contrite in admitting that the church did not handle this well at all in the past,” he said. “But we bristle sometimes in that the church doesn’t get the credit, now being in the vanguard of reform. It does bother us that the church continues to be a whipping boy.”
Aw. Poor bishops. They are just so sick and tired of being blamed for that whole covering-up-the-widespread-rape-and-molestation-of-children thing. Don’t you secular ingrates understand that they can’t do really important stuff—like . . .
. . . Despite Rush Limbaugh’s campaign against what he possibly fantasized Sandra Fluke’s personal life to be, it is very important to remember that none of her testimony centered around the primarily intended use of hormonal contraception—that is to say, pregnancy prevention. Instead, Ms. Fluke’s testimony mainly centered around a friend who needed hormonal contraception as a method of controlling symptoms related to ovarian cysts. . . .
If the defense of the contraceptive mandate, and of contraception in general, focuses heavily on its use for treatment of other medical conditions, it risks creating a bifurcation between uses that are “legitimate” for the purposes of an employer mandate—such as treatment of cysts or menorrhagia—and the use that is not: namely, allowing a woman to control her own fertility. . . .
Examples of the other uses of contraception are very effective at showing the pathetic shortsightedness and tragic indifference of the right, but they cannot distract from the key prize: fighting for a woman’s right to self-determination.
Unbelievable. Another strong-armed bully tactic from the Catholic Church.
The Sacramento Bee is reporting the Catholic Diocese of Sacramento has pulled the plug on funding the Francis House homeless services agency in Sacramento. Described as “largest homeless services agencies in the Sacramento region, serving upward of 25,000 people,” the non-denominational agency has enjoyed grants as large as $10,000 from the diocese for decades.
What changed? They hired a new director in April, Rev. Faith Whitmore.
Whitmore, a United Methodist minister, took over leadership of Francis House in April after the sudden death of longtime executive director Gregory Bunker. Within her own denomination, she has been a strong advocate of same-sex marriage. In 2008, during a short period in which gay marriage was legal in California, Whitmore openly defied church law by marrying same-sex couples. She has said publicly that she supports a woman’s right to obtain an abortion. In an interview Wednesday, she called the diocese’s decision to discontinue its support “surprising and disappointing.”
. . . It’s time for the Church to admit they are not a charity, but a political action committee[!]
Banks are foreclosing on America’s churches in record numbers as lenders increasingly lose patience with religious facilities that have defaulted on their mortgages, according to new data.
Since 2010, 270 churches have been sold after defaulting on their loans, with 90 percent of those sales coming after a lender-triggered foreclosure, according to the real estate information company CoStar Group.
Since Christians pray for me, and in return, I think for them, I thought it considerate to leave them with a passage written in a book by subliterate desert dwellers for an audience that is illiterate at worst, limited and literal-minded at best. This should bring solace to those that find themselves without a tax-exempt house of worship due to a foreclosure that an apparently incompetent, omnipresent, omnipotent celestial dictator was unable to prevent.
My poor non-thinking fellow homo . . . sapiens, I leave you with Matthew 6:5-6:
5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
According to The Book for Dummies, the foreclosing of one’s church is really a non issue.[MSH]
Always Question Authority 