Civil Commotion

As anybody who pays attention to Southern Baptist politics must know by now, Southern Baptist biggie Paige Patterson, the head of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a leader of the so-called Conservative Resurgence, was under intense fire last week for callous advice he gave to women being beat-up by their husbands. There were strong rumors that the seminary’s Board was seriously considering firing him but, in the event, Patterson claimed it was all lies and survived.

For the record, I think Patterson’s take-it-and-pray advice is very bad and renders him wholly unfit for the company of decent adults. He belongs on the outskirts of polite society — with the wife-beaters and The Donald, say.

But a grad student who issued a tweet sympathizing with an article critical of Patterson lost his seminary job.

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, which does not ordain women but offers them classes in homemaking, this week fired a PhD seminary student from his $40,000 job for simply tweeting about the Patterson debate, telling him he was “indiscreet” and that his decision to speak publicly about the dispute “does not exhibit conduct becoming a follower of Jesus” and shows he was not properly deferring to “those placed in authority over you.”

Well … I dunno. Granted, I am extremely wicked, so perhaps I have misunderstood the Inerrant Bible, or there is some nuance in the story that’s accessible to only theologians, but doesn’t it say that Jesus overturned the moneychangers’ tables in the Temple? Because they were mulcting the pious?

So I’m having a hard time seeing how a rather bland criticism of Patterson is indiscreet and not following Jesus, who seems to sometimes have been annoyingly outspoken, though I guess I’d have to agree that it fails to show the deference due a Mighty Stained-Glass Holy Man such as Patterson.

The Guardian is out with a story that exhibits the squalor of the Trump administration. The gist of it is this: The Trump administration hired a private Israeli spy firm to coordinate a campaign of dirty tricks against the Obama administration personnel who negotiated the Iran deal.

Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal.

People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.

It should not need saying that serving your country should not result in the next administration organizing a smear campaign against you because of policy differences. It’s probably not grounds for impeachment, but it sure tells you what sort of human sewage now occupies the Oval Office.

Notice: “and he’s probably lying”. The Donald is a national embarrassment, and not taken seriously by other countries.

Once upon a time I would have thought this was unbelievable — but not any more. Trump’s serial lies, corruption, vulgarity … these things are the truth about evangelicals.

The blunt, simple, direct, straightforward answer is that Wiccans do not have First Amendment rights. Nor do Muslims, nor do Jews, nor do Native Americans, nor do Rastafarians, nor do any practitioners of any other religion other than Christianity. Whatever the First Amendment is about, whatever protections it extends in the federal Constitution, those were just for Christianity. Christianity has First Amendment rights under the federal Constitution, no other religion does.

Bryan Fischer

Fischer is crazy, but it needs to be understood that he is not uniquely crazy; many, many, evangelicals believe the same thing, and are stoked in that belief by such as the fake historian David Barton.

You cannot reason with these people, because they don’t have a firm grip on reality. They must be defeated and driven back under their rocks.