Civil Commotion

Uhhh … right.

The Trump campaign has blasted out an email falsely claiming that Mueller “confirmed” there was “no collusion, no obstruction, totally unprecedented treatment.”

Maggie Haberman, New York Times

Once again, this is Trump and his enablers promoting blatant, self-serving lies, creating an alternate reality right in plain sight of the entire world. His cult will accept it, and Republican lawmakers, who have degenerated into a claque of whores servicing malicious ignoramuses, will politely turn a blind eye.

I began the day with some hope for these hearings. After all, the Mueller Report is dispositive: Donald Trump is a criminal, and the stringent-minded are within their rights to conclude he is a traitor as well. The Republicans, I imagined, would be somber, grave, serious.

But … No. It’s been nothing but a circus of cheap theatrics; they don’t care.

After almost 100-years of publication, it appears that Writer’s Market — a sort of Yellow Pages for freelance writers — has folded.

The Web site was there just yesterday; I know that, because I stopped by to see whether the publishing news feed was being updated. Now, there are just links to bookseller Web sites and no links to site content; it looks like one of those barren, abandoned URLs that is for sale.

This saddens more than surprises, I suppose. Not only is there a steadily diminishing number of venues for freelancers, even honored, well-known names pay so little now that it’s hardly worth the effort to introduce onself. Even so, Writer’s Market is a venerable name that I, and a great many others, used profitably for a long, long time.

I guess there is no avoiding that the traditional publishing infrastructure is gone, now, and we are all our own brands.

Andrew Walker is a faculty member at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the seminary headed by Albert the Pious, so it’s difficult to avoid a whiff of sucking-up here. But never mind; Mohler’s essay, and Walker’s rhapsodizing over the essay, are embarrassing in their own right.

It is simply ridiculous to complain that religious liberty is under assault; the complaint arises out of a failure of nuanced thinking. Has anybody, anywhere, infringed upon Mohler’s religious freedom? No. He remains free to be a Southern Baptist, to dress-up on Sunday morning and go to church, to insist without let that his children, neighbors, students, pew-mates, fellow educators are all no damn good and fit only for an eternal bonfire. Was he obliged to sneak past armed guards to deliver this speech, to hide his 3×5-cards in his suitcoat lining, to disguise his contraband Bible as a battered copy of Fifty Shades of Gray? He was not. One more thing: Are mimeographed copies of his speech being surreptitiously passed in alleyways from trembling hand to trembling hand? No. It is available on the Internet and widely publicized, as is the name of its author.

The problem, then? Why, non-ministerial and non-religious businesses operated by Christians must treat those people who do icky things with their whatsits just as if they have rights, too! Unthinkable!

Ho-hum. How is it even possible that so-called educators don’t know that this complaint was clubbed into the ground w-a-a-a-y back in the 60s, when such as Lester Maddox claimed a right to not serve blacks in his restaurants because they are descended from Ham, or maybe Cain?

Albert’s religious freedom is secure. But thanks to widespread public education, his religion is well- and widely-known to be utter and degrading nonsense — and it is dying a very public death. That’s the real complaint.