Civil Commotion

A tow truck fell on the guy? And I’m guessing that DEMS is probably Detroit Emergency Medical Service, not a bunch of Democrats to make sure he gets health care (though that might be a sensible request).

The Republican health care effort is a fiasco beyond even my wildest imagination.

Kevin Drum, Mother Jones

Detroit has been setting records for murder and overall decrepitude for so long that it can be hard to remember that, decades ago, it was actually a habitable and (mostly) safe place. There was a highly regarded art museum; a zoo that was famous all over the world for its progressive animal habitat designs; a sophisticated, extensive, and heavily-used public library. The high school I attended was analogous to the famous Boston Latin School and regularly visited by world-famous scientists and politicians; graduates, basically, had completed their first year of college. There was a lively underground music and arts culture. There were many spacious public parks, and they were both safe and well maintained.

Dawn and I visited Detroit in the summer of the year we got married, and drove down Grand River avenue from Telegraph Rd. on the city’s western edge to downtown, near the river. There was nothing to see but mile after mile of boarded-up storefronts — the route I rode every day for years, on a city bus, when I went to high school in downtown — and the future I had seen coming. I have never understood why anybody stayed.

Y’all are probably already acquainted with these stories:

• A mosque near Ypsilanti, Michigan was destroyed by fire on Saturday; the feds are investigating for arson.

• A Florida store owned by Indians was set on fire by a man who believed the owners were Muslim and he wanted to “run the Arabs out of our country.”

• Anti-Muslim incidents have increased sharply since the election of Donald Trump. I linked to many of those stories here, and numerous anti-discrimination organizations have documented that.

You will probably be (modestly) surprised, then, to learn that Christians feel that discrimination against them is vastly greater than that experienced by Muslims.

White Evangelicals Believe They Face More Discrimination Than Muslims

Overall, people were twice as likely to say Muslims face discrimination as they were to say the same thing about Christians. Democrats were four times more likely to see Muslim vs. Christian discrimination, and non-religious people more than three. White Catholics and white mainline Protestants were both in line with the American average: Each group was roughly twice as likely to say Muslims face discrimination compared to how they see the Christian experience.

The people who stuck out, whose perceptions were radically different from others in the survey, were white evangelical Protestants. Among this group, 57 percent said there’s a lot of discrimination against Christians in the U.S. today. Only 44 percent said the same thing about Muslims. They were the only religious group more likely to believe Christians face discrimination compared to Muslims.

I suppose we shouldn’t expect too much of people who believe everything went south when a talking snake tricked a ditzy blonde into stealing a bad piece of fruit, but this finding bespeaks a truly stupefying and self-centered ignorance of the world and events around them. They really do live in a shoebox.

Bruce Gerencser’s Christians Say the Darndest Things unearths another gem.

Most likely if you are living together, you are also sleeping together. But the thing is, sex is not just physical, but also spiritual. When you have sex with someone who is not your spouse, you are not only taking something from that person that isn’t yours and sinning against your own body, but you are ultimately sinning against God. He created sex to be an act of worship to Him, representing the union of a man and woman who love each other the way that God loves the church and has covenanted with her. Outside of marriage, you can’t reflect that picture; in fact, you actually defile it. So my purpose in saving my virginity is not to simply give a nice gift to my husband on my wedding night, but to please my greatest love — the Lord God who made my body and my soul.

Your spouse shouldn’t be expected to stand in line behind an Invisible Friend. If pleasing an Invisible Wizard In The Sky is your first priority in life, then you’re not married at all.