Civil Commotion

Kim Davis has been, or very soon will be, released from jail on the condition that she “shall not interfere in any way, directly or indirectly, with the efforts of her deputy clerks to issue marriage licenses to all legally eligible couples.”

Well.

What isn’t clear is this: Is this according to a deal worked-out between the court and her lawyers — Has she basically capitulated? — or is the judge being a nice guy and offering her an escape hatch if she is smart enough to take it?

There is no indication that her name will not remain on the licenses.

The rhetoric surrounding this has been so outlandish — Huckabee’s latest is that Guantanamo detainees have more religious freedom than Americans — so grotesque, that I wonder if the loony evangelical right has finally self-destructed; nobody of ordinary intelligence could possibly fail to see them for the unstable, overwrought, anti-social nutjobs that they actually are.

The hard-corps will grow more dangerous, undoubtedly, but this probably finishes movement/evangelical conservatism as an important political force.

Though their pastor is in church for raping their children, it’s business-as-usual for congregants at North Clackamas Bible Community.

Despite Pastor Mike Sperou occupying a cell at the Oregon State Penitentiary, the church is committed to carry on.

“Really, there haven’t been any fundamental difference for us,” said Associate Pastor Kevin Mitchell. “We’re still doing what we’ve always done.”

What they’ve always done is rare — if not unique — among churches in the Portland area. Core members live communally in a network of rental homes that straddle the city limits of Happy Valley and Portland. Sunday services, along with weekly Bible study and language classes, are held in the homes.

The church members are drawing strength in their belief, Mitchell said, that Sperou didn’t molest the daughter of church members.

Call them ‘sheeple’ though; I bet that would upset them.

It has long been known that social and family pathologies are most acute where religiosity is strongest; Jerry Coyne rounds-up a nice collection of the graphics.

Typical:

Coyne has compiled, published and presented a lot of data over the years which appear to point toward the conclusion that social stresses precede intense religiosity, that religion grows best where there is a sick, stressed, decadent culture. He’s got the data, so I don’t want to pick a fight with him, but I don’t think that’s the entire story. Once rooted, religious communities conspire against the progress that would relieve those stresses; Christianity needs sickness to flourish.

A gen-u-ine theologian explains that not only are faith and science not at odds, it is Christianity which laid the groundwork for the emergence of science. Yay!

This is, to put the matter kindly, glib. After all, the Chinese had charted the heavens and were predicting eclipses 1000-years before the birth of Jesus, and it was Arabic scholars who invented algebra as medieval Europe slumbered under the rule of the Roman church.

Never forget: Y’all are no damn good.