Civil Commotion

All of that is another way of saying that worldview matters, and it also points to the fact that modern, secular, Western liberals are enjoying freedoms and liberties that are entirely traceable to a Christian worldview that they now reject. They are rejecting the very foundational assumptions and principles and convictions that made the modern democratic experiment possible. They are undercutting the foundations of the very human rights and dignities they claim to represent. It’s really interesting that Tim Stanley here points to the fact that there is no accompanying Ottoman guilt in terms of the treatment of minorities, even as there is guilt in Western societies. Why is that so? It is because Western societies still have, to a decreasing degree, consciences formed by the Christian biblical worldview, and that provides an understanding of right and wrong, of justice and injustice that is part and parcel of Western civilization itself. Urgent in all this is the understanding that you cannot have a Christian civilization once you deny Christianity.

Albert Mohler

But, of course, it is the Enlightenment repudiation of religious governance that secured our liberties, including freedom of conscience. Until then, including right here in what became America, you could get yourself killed for not favoring the au courant view of Scripture.

I predict, with absolute seriousness, that Mohler’s grandchildren will someday lie to my grandchildren about Grampy’s heroic work securing gay rights. It’s, like, a no-brainer.

An (almost) unbelievable story about busybody anti-abortion activists intruding upon a teenaged girls privacy.

“The police explained that someone had called them saying that my daughter was there unwilling to have the procedure done,” AJ recalled in an interview with Rewire. “So when the police talked to me, they said that if I had forced her to do it they were going to bring fetal homicide charges against me. So we left, and came home.”

[ … ]

With assistance from her lawyer, over the course of the next few days, AJ would learn that in addition to the anonymous phone calls that had been made to the clinic while she and her daughter waited for her procedure, people unknown to AJ had faxed her daughter’s personal information—her name, medical information, and even her social security number—to countless numbers of doctors, police, and other strangers in at least two states, without AJ’s knowledge or consent. She would discover that her daughter had been picked up from school and driven across the state border by a person that AJ did not know. And before the saga was resolved, AJ would even find out that an attorney she’d never heard of had purported to represent her daughter, and had sent threatening letters to the abortion clinic, directly interfering with her daughter’s medical treatment.

I say again, as I have said so often in the past: Never, ever, trust the Godly to go messing with important, grown-up stuff.

What is laughable about the Christofascists complaints about “sexual licentiousness” is that it is they themselves (especially in the Bible Belt) who have the highest divorce rates, the highest Internet porn usage, the most teen pregnancies and a seemingly endless string of sex scandals. They want to police everyone else’s sex life, yet their own are lives are veritable soap operas with white trash characters.

Michael Hamar

Unhappily, this is true; every social and family pathology ever named is most acute in the Bible Belt, where the churches are strongest. This is a direct consequence of the teaching that the pleasure of Our Invisible Friend is more important than your wedding vows and your children, which undermines healthy marriages and families.

Who is the expert on what will please Our Invisible Friend? The Holy Man, who invariably finds that Our Invisible Friend wants what benefits and empowers him and enfeebles everybody else.

I’ve been wondering for months where the engineers and chemists were when the decision was taken to not include anti-corrosion additives in the Flint, Michigan water supply. Finally, after all the hearings and trashing of Governor Snyder, this Associated Press piece gets to the instant of the actual ethical failure.

Mike Glasgow, the plant’s laboratory supervisor at the time, says he asked district engineer Mike Prysby of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality how often staffers would need to check the water for proper levels of phosphate, a chemical they intended to add to prevent lead corrosion from the pipes. Prysby’s response, according to Glasgow: “You don’t need to monitor phosphate because you’re not required to add it.”

Recalling the meeting Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press, Glasgow said he was taken aback by the state regulator’s instruction; treating drinking water with anti-corrosive additives was routine practice. Glasgow said his gaze shifted to a consulting firm engineer in attendance, who also looked surprised.

“Then,” Glasgow said, “we went on to the next question.”

That is the moment when somebody on the water plant side of the table should have resisted, and the people in that room are the ones who should bear the responsibility for what happened. Engineers and plant operators are licensed by the public, for the benefit of the public, and their first responsibility is to public health and safety.

It is not allright to allow stupid and dangerous things to be done just because some incompetent regulatory person says you can.

Y’all will not be surprised to learn, I am sure, that Albert the Pious is having a regular old godawful conniption fit about Governor Nathan Deal’s veto of the Georgia bill stigmatizing gays et. al., and the blowback against Tarheel medievalism.

As a matter of fact, the thrust behind this legislation was for the state government in Georgia to recognize rights that are guaranteed yes, by the First Amendment, and conferred by God. But there’s also the recognition that in the current climate, those religious liberties are under threat and thus must specifically be defended by law. That’s what the legislators in Georgia did; that’s what the Governor has now vetoed. The head-on confrontation between sexual liberty on the one hand and religious liberty on the other hand is one that is inevitable, and it’s one that the forces for religious liberty are losing over and over again. The big point for us today is this: If it will lose in Georgia, it can lose anywhere. And the fact that it lost in Georgia is no small fact …

— SIGH — Relax, Albert — you can still be a Southern Baptist. You may say excruciatingly stupid things about Biblical inerrancy, you may say grace in restaurants, you may abstain from alcohol, you may go around telling people that the cult is more important than their wedding vows and children, you may put on your special Sunday suit every Sunday, you may mark-up your Bible with notes and yellow-stickies, and you may keep the others out of your church and home.

For-profit commercial enterprises that operate in public spaces at public sufferance may not act to exclude those people you so intensely dislike from participation in the public/economic life of the community, however. That is all; basically, businesses must treat everybody with ordinary decency. You don’t have to. Your religious liberty is intact.

As time goes by, I am increasingly convinced that the real story on most of these characters is that they’re just not very intelligent and utterly incapable of grasping nuance, and I don’t care how many earned and purchased Ph.D. degrees hang on their office walls. They don’t have thoughts, and they don’t have principles they reason from; they have mental catalogs of pre-vetted stories and responses and opinions for different situations, and they’re totally lost at sea when the cranial database search doesn’t produce a script.