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Stray thoughts …

Stray thoughts …

Last updated on: July 15, 2012 at 2:21 pm by Fred Clark

Stray thoughts … 2012-07-15T14:21:49-04:00 Fred Clark

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Roy Moore may be the stupidest man ever to don a robe in Alabama. And Alabama has a long history of stupid men in robes.

Moore may even be dumb enough to one day be awarded “Statesman of the Year” honors from Florida’s Sarasota Republican Party.

The Slacktiverse just posted a terrifically handy collection of links to “documents central to the functioning of our own and other countries.” This “Political Documents 101” post is one of those things you should bookmark to save you from having to bookmark all of those things separately.

You could also think of it as a Collection of Links to Documents Roy Moore Hasn’t Ever Bothered to Read.

Here’s another post worth bookmarking for reference — and another collection of links that folks like Moore don’t want you to read. “Voter ID Requirements for All 50 States” (via). Look ’em up, learn ’em, and don’t let the plutocrats disenfranchise you.

Speaking of plutocrats and of really dumb people … Rick Perry has “proudly” rejected federal funds to provide health insurance for 1.2 million poor people who have the added misfortune of living in Texas.

The ideological explanation for that is a tortured claim that in Perry’s ideal dreamworld, Medicaid would be replaced with a hypothetically preferable conservative alternative. That alternative doesn’t exist in the real world (it barely even exists on paper — the alternative conservative vision for health care was signed into law two years ago as the Affordable Care Act). But if Perry can’t have his ideal dreamworld, then he figures the least he can do is kick poor people while they’re down — 1.2 million poor people.

As Josef Stalin supposedly said: “Deny one poor person life-saving health care, that’s a tragedy. Deny 1.2 million poor people life-saving health care, that’s a statistic.” That’s not politics, it’s just evil.

What does Rick Perry think of poor people who lack access to health care? Apparently the same thing that health-care-industry lobbying group Strategic Health Care thinks of them: Sneering condescension and contempt.

And speaking of politics and evil … Jesse Curtis asks if Jerry Falwell ever publicly repented of his enthusiastic support of racial segregation and the sermons he preached condemning Brown v. Board of Education.

Sure, years after it had become very clear he’d been on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of right and wrong, Falwell no longer spoke the way he spoke back in the 1950s and 1960s. But did he ever actually recant, repent, apologize or in any way suggest that he had changed his mind?

If Falwell did change his mind, he did it very quietly.

The ACLU goes there (via). And they’re right.

And if you’re at all tempted to cry “Godwin!” over that, then every teacher who every taught you American history deserves to be sued for malpractice.

Marvin Olasky is shocked — shocked! — to learn that many Protestants in the National Association of Evangelicals do not bow to the papal authority of Humanae Vitae.

Yes, it’s true: There are Protestants who don’t support the invented 20th-century Catholic doctrine condemning birth control.

Next hard-hitting exposé from Olasky’s World magazine: Protestants at the NAE who reject transubstantiation!

Manhattan Declaration declarer Robert George serves on the board of the Bradley Foundation, where he helps to fund “some of the worst anti-Islam extremists.” But George has found common cause with this international conspiracy of stealth sharia proponents to combat a common foe: Hotel porn.

The battle against pornography in hotels, George says, is just like the civil rights movement.

So for those keeping score at home, here is the world according to Dr. Robert P. George, McCormick professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University: Trying to get rid of hotel porn is analogous to the civil rights movement, but trying to secure civil rights for LGBT people is not analogous to the civil rights movement.

If this is what they teach at Princeton, they’re over-charging.

Speaking of social scientists saying dumb things … when Christian social scientists go tribal, they become willing to defend indefensibly shoddy work. Next up will be a statement from Christian spokespeople defending Mark Regnerus’ hideous chin-beard.

I worried I was pounding on the same note too often recently when I wound up writing a whole string of posts on Peter’s vision from the 10th chapter of Acts (see here, here, here and here). But I feel better about that now because Peter Enns points out that this passage is “Absolutely the Most Important Chapter in the Entire Bible.”

For those of us who are Gentiles, he makes a strong case. But again, when one argues that the same inclusive principle this chapter extends toward Gentiles ought to be extended toward LGBT people as well, then many Gentile Christians start to sound like Olson Johnson in Blazing Saddles: “All right … we’ll give some land to the [blacks] and the [Chinese]. But we don’t want the Irish!”

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