Gay Marriage: It’s All About Religious Freedom
Posted in Politics, Religion | Tags: gay rights, Religion
Bob McDonnell is kind of stupid
So Bob McDonnell, the GOP candidate for Governor of Virginia, has decided that Notre Dame shouldn’t give the President an honorary degree.
Now, truth be known, I really don’t care if they give the President an honorary degree. He has a couple of real ones, and it’s really more of an honor for the school than for the guest. But McDonnell, like other folks on his side of the debate, makes a very weird argument:
McDonnell, a graduate of Notre Dame, said Obama should be allowed to speak but should not be given an honorary degree because his views “appear to be in great conflict with the Catholic social teaching.”
“Therefore I think conferring a degree confers certainly an imprimatur, or approval of these views,” he said on WTOP radio. “So I don’t think if it’s a uniquely Catholic University like a Georgetown or Boston College or Notre Dame.”
First of all, I’m not really sure that giving someone an honorary degree necessarily endorses their views as much as it says, “Hey you’re a notable person and we want a piece of that notoriety.”
But I’d also like to point out that Notre Dame has non-Catholic students and faculty. They give real degrees and tenured jobs to people who don’t accept the authority of the Church, some of whom undoubtedly are pro-choice and pro-gay rights. So, it’s not like the school just refuses to honor anyone who deviates from Church doctrine. This is just a political game, one that must be played whenever a pro-choice politician comes near a church.
Barack Obama is not receiving the imprimatur of Notre Dame, at least no more than the school’s faculty and students. But it is important for churches to avoid placing the seal of approval on politicians who blatently violate Christian social teaching. Trust me – as a Methodist, I know.
Posted in Obama Administration, Politics, Religion | Tags: abortion, bob mcdonnell, catholicism, christianity, education, gay rights, Virginia
The Torture Rundown
I’ve been meaning to post something on the latest torture revelations, but I frankly feel overwhelmed. There is a wealth of information out there, and people far more qualified than I have already written so much. So I’ll just give you some references here, and I may comment later:
- What did Dennis Blair actually say about torture?
- Tim Noah points out that torture had nothing to do with stopping the LA bombing plot
- Was the LA bombing plot even a plot?
- The Progressive Realist takes down three arguments in favor of torture
- Marcy Wheeler debunks the claim that torture has provided us with valuable information
- Vanity Fair has a big piece on the lie that torture “works”.
So many others have been doing great work on this story, including Andrew Sullivan, so get to reading.
P.S. When you hear crap like this, just remember my three talking points on torture:
- It’s wrong
- It doesn’t work
- It’s really *%@$ing wrong
Posted in Bush Administration, Foreign Policy, Obama Administration, War | Tags: lies, morality, terrorism, torture, War
Green Our Vaccines?
I don’t know why the “vaccines cause autism” movement annoys me so much. Maybe because those folks remind me so much of creationists and climate change deniers. Anyway, evidently there’s been a recent movement by anti-vaccination activists around this motto of “Green Our Vaccines” – whatever that means.
It’s essentially an attempt at green-washing the anti-vaccination movement – a movement that is, without a doubt, monumentally stupid. There’s a great post here that pretty comprehensively deals with the anti-vax crap. One of the more persistent canards these folks drag out is a complaint that “doctors are injecting little babies with TOXINS!”. Go here and here for competent takedowns of this hysteria.
Look, I’m not a scientist. When it comes to questions of science, I defer to those who have research experience outside of Google and Wikipedia. Scientists aren’t perfect – they get things wrong. But luckily, they have a pretty good process for checking themselves and exploring the evidence. And when there is a mainstream scientific consensus, whether it’s climate change, evolution, or vaccination, laypeople are probably better off listening and learning.
Whoa – ESPN is making sense
It’s not really surprising that ESPN has had a somewhat antagonistic relationship with the blogosphere in the past. Bloggers tend to see ESPN personalities as stuffy establishment types who have nothing in common with ordinary fans. It doesn’t help that ESPN’s programming is too often gimmicky and tiresome (see “Titletown”). ESPN has tended to see bloggers as armchair quarterbacks, lobbing criticisms from the relative security of the web. I love me some ESPN, but I’ve tended to side with the blogs on this one – some things are done better by fans than by media pros.
Now, SportsCenter has something called “Morning Blog Buzz”, in which ESPN summarizes the discussions on major sports blogs. After some initial (warranted) criticism, ESPN is signaling a real willingness to adapt and (gasp!) listen to criticism. Kudos to tWWL for doing the right thing – though only time will tell if this signals a change in direction or simply another gimmick.
I have to wonder now if other news organizations will pick up on this notion. If ESPN is willing to give airtime to critical voices in the blogosphere, why can’t we get this from the New York Times or the Washington Post? Traditional media tends to touch on blogs only in passing, very rarely allowing the blogosphere to participate actively in the public discourse. My guess is that incorporating “ground-level” viewpoints into standard elite-level journalism will actually result in a better product.
In the meantime, I agree with A.J. Daulerio and would like to see sports blogs band together to all talk about Hannah Storm’s clothes one day, forcing a very awkward SportsCenter indeed. Some other things I’d like to see find their way onto “Morning Blog Buzz”:
- Certain videos of a famous ESPN personality.
- Discussion of a certain episode involving the cellphone of another ESPN personality.
- Compliments for ESPN’s most popular personality.
Give me some more time, I’ll think of others.
Posted in Fun Things, media | Tags: Blogosphere, ESPN, media, sports
Don’t Tax Me, Bro!
Conor Clarke over at the Atlantic has a great post on an under-reported fact: the vast majority of these tea party protesters are upset about tax increases they’ll never see. And it’s important to remember that Obama is merely reverting back to Clinton-era tax rates, an idea I’d hardly call revolutionary or fascist.
Indeed, I have to wonder how many of the protesters considered the notion that the President’s stimulus package just might include the largest tax cut ever. All of this kind of fuels my suspicion that this is driven primarily by conservative entertainers (Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, et al.) who trade in sensationalism, not facts.
Posted in Economics, Politics | Tags: conservative, protests, republican idiocy, Tax Policy
More Tea Party Wingnuttiness
In my earlier litany of standard right-wing outrages being trotted out at these tea parties, I forgot to include this old chestnut: homophobia. Remind me again how these things are about taxes?
Posted in General News, Politics | Tags: conservative, gay rights, homophobia, protests
Thoughts on Tea Parties
The Washington Independent has some great photos from yesterday’s tea party protest things.
For me, the pictures underscore a couple of points. First, it’s still not clear to me what the protests are about. Sure, there’s lots of mention of taxes and spending, but it also seems like a kind of hodge-podge collection of right-wing rage. There’s some anti-immigrant sentiment, anger towards media, suspicion that the President is a secret foreigner and/or Nazi, and some Federal Reserve conspiracy theories. So, I don’t really know what these folks are all about. This reinforces my suspicion that this is less of an issue-oriented protest and more of an outpouring of anger from conservatives who lost the election.
This kind of supports my second observation, which is that these aren’t exactly diverse crowds. It’s not like Americans of all stripes are banding together against their government. These protests are made up of white conservatives who are ideologically frustrated – again, because they just lost a big election. Combine this with the fact that Barack Obama is still the most popular political figure in the country, and you get the impression that these are just large crowds of angry Republicans.
There’s nothing wrong with that – people who are out of power will inevitably feel the urge to vent their frustration. But this does make it difficult to claim that this is a citizen’s revolt against an undemocratic government. The truth is, most people support the President – which makes sense, considering they elected him.
As an additional aside, it’s difficult for Fox News to pretend that they’re simply providing objective coverage of these things when they’re actively promoting them.
Posted in General News, Politics | Tags: conservative, Fox News, protests, right wingers, spending, Tax Policy
On ‘Liberals’ and Racial Profiling
There was a recent letter in the Times-News going after Laura Roselle, who this past week presented empirical proof that the Sheriff’s Department has been lying about how many Hispanic people it has been pulling over. The Times-News headline writer ingeniously titled the letter “Here we go: Liberals telling us how to live again”, which is a weird title. Aren’t all public policy proposals aimed at telling people how to live?
Anyway, the gist of the letter is that “liberals” are attempting to give immigrants rights they shouldn’t have, despite the fact that immigrants hurt our community. This, of course, is demonstrably false. The Constitution is what it is – a codification of the rights and liberties of people in the United States. It has more to do with the U.S. government (limitations and responsibilities) than with the people in the U.S.
But the argument is pretty strange: the author first complains about the idea that illegal immigrants have rights. Then he asserts that the Sheriff hasn’t violated the rights of illegal immigrants.
And this is the fundamental problem with the anti-immigrant crowd. At its core, the argument they are making is an appeal to racism. But since they know racism is unpalatable to most people, they have to tie themselves in knots to avoid appearing racist. This should say something about the virtues of their case.
The letter closes with a menacing line:
I suggest that, if the liberals and the Hispanics, are not happy living in Alamance County, they should move to Chapel Hill where they will be welcome. (emphasis added)
Note that the author is speaking not to illegal immigrants, but to all Hispanic people. This ugly sentiment, all too reminiscent of the more disgraceful parts of Southern history, should not be tolerated in our community. One need look no further than Winston-Salem to see the violent consequences of this kind of threatening rhetoric.
So, I would suggest that if you can’t live up to basic standards of human decency and morality, you should move to a community that doesn’t mind your polluting bigotry.
(Full disclosure: Dr. Roselle is a personal friend and my faculty advisor at Elon)
Posted in Local News, Race | Tags: Alamance County, immigration, Racism
The Evolution of Fox News
I vaguely remember Fox News predicating its appeal on this idea that it was free of the traditional media bias. “Fair and balanced” has become something of a joke amongst lefty types, but its important to remember that it originated as a serious idea. I think Fox still claims to be “unbiased” but I think that definition has shifted. Whereas I think it previously meant “free from left-wing bias”, I think it now means “biased for the right wing.”
Maybe that’s what it’s always meant, but it seems especially clear with the launch of FOX Nation. Evidently, this is a kind of conservative Huffington Post, concentrated on aggregating content in support of right wing view points. Additionally, Fox is also endorsing and supporting these moronic “tea parties” protesting against something or other.
I guess some people figure that this is just the kind of thing that a conservative news outlet would do. But it occurs to me that this really isn’t the kind of thing that any news outlet does. It’s more fitting for an advocacy organization. So I have a modest proposal for the future of Fox News: drop the “News” thing and just go by “Fox Nation” or some such idiocy.
Left On Haggard 