George Pataki, the Republican who won the governorship three times in heavily Democratic New York, is running for President in 2016.
“My vision was not a partisan vision. It was a vision about people, about what we could accomplish together,” Pataki said as he narrated a four-minute announcement video released Thursday morning. “If we are to flourish as a people, we have to fall in love with America again.”
I don’t think he’s crazy enough to be a bona fide Republican.
Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
IV: How Virtue Is Made to Dominate§314 Our most sacred convictions, those unchanging elements in our highest values, are judgments of our muscles.
The ongoing fracas between Karen Hinkley and The Village Church is the exemplar for the sick subculture of evangelicals.
This poor woman was married to a missionary whom she discovered to be a pedophile, she arranged for their marriage to be annulled — and now their former home church is “poor baby”-ing him and smearing her. Nuts. Just … nuts.
I know a thing or two about pious idiots, and I knew it was only a matter of time before some moron obligingly explained that Josh Duggar just couldn’t help himself because, you know … (dum-da-dum-dum) … Original Sin.
“But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.” Isaiah 64:6. While not all of our sins find a way to manifest themselves externally we all know the corruption that is present in each of our hearts. It is a mercy of God that he restrains the evil of mankind otherwise we would have destroyed ourselves long ago. Many times it is simply lack of opportunity or fear of consequences that keep us from falling into grievous sin even though our fallen hearts would love to indulge the flesh. We should not be shocked that this occurred in the Duggar’s home, we should rather be thankful to God if we have been spared such, and pray that he would keep us and our children from falling.
God save us from His publicists.
What kind of morality is quick to forgive predatory behavior against children but deeply troubled by consensual activity between adults?
As I’ve said for years, the way that congregations invariably rally to the support of Pastor Bubba when it is learned that he has been raping their children gives the lie to the claim that religion promotes morality.
It’s more complicated than that, however. Most of the people now defending Josh Duggar disapprove of same-sex relationships, sex between unmarried heterosexuals, and people who rape their children. But their need to belong to, and defend, their club — cult, more accurately — is stronger than their disapproval; an attack against their club is personal, an assault upon their identity and worth and value as human beings. To a great many of the damaged people sitting in the pews, unkind words about poor ol’ Josh are heard as an existential threat to themselves.
