- War in Illinois
- War on the family farm.
- War on Evangelicals.
- War on Marriage at Slate.
- Are Evangelicals “Conservative”?
- Polling sensationalism instead of sobriety.
- Another WaPo columnist gets the vapors.
- Walking.
- Repentance.
(No time for careful proofreading today.)
1
There’s a war between Church and State in Illinois, and Church didn’t start it.
Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l’attaque, il se defend. (This animal is very wicked; when you attack it, it defends itself.)
2
You don’t hear politicians talking about “defending family farms” much lately, do you? At least we can exonerate them of hypocrisy, because the reality is that war — how hot may be subject to debate — is being waged on family farms by government on behalf of corporate farms and megamarkets.
3
For the record, Newspaper of Record, Rick Santorum is not “affiliated with [a] fervid subset[] of evangelical Christianity, which has raised concerns about [his] respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.”
Thus wrote the Executive Editor of the New York Times earlier today, so it will presumably be in minor papers and Unitarian Universalist bulletins by Sunday. He has blandly corrected his error, but presumably Santorum still has the church/state, fact/fiction problem, despite being Roman Catholic. (Details, details, details!)
I hate it when they do that. I hated it when some supercilious jerk penned or uttered “poor, uneducated and easily led” or whatever the exact slander was a decade or two ago. It made me feel, for a moment, undue sympathy for those attacked.
Be it duly noted that Evangelicals are not the only people who preach demagogic sermons to the choir.
4
Hanna Rosin and colleagues at Slate apparently have written the obituary of marriage and are arguing now for more responsible cohabitation. Bradford Wilcox responds with a very interesting analogy (buried in citations to others; I got it from Father Gregory Jensen).
5
You say Dominion, I say Kingdom
Let’s call the whole thing Christ’s
Thus does Darryl Hart at Front Porch Republic introduce Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker piece on Michele Bachmann, which predictably tried to tie her to a theocratic theory of Dominionism.
The charge, or perhaps it’s just a suspicion, is not entirely unwarranted, but Hart’s after the bigger (?!) point that “Lizza’s … coverage reveals … the state of evangelical Protestantism.”
These people sincerely believe they are conservative. But they have almost no understanding of the various shades of American conservatism and its different thinkers. They think they are conservative simply because they are Christian, never realizing that at least since the publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, a lively debate has been going on about the Right and its borders. They think they are conservative because their Bible tells them they are conservative. Yet, they don’t know the world of American conservatism beyond restoring the Decalogue in public life. This conclusion seems to apply … to Bachmann ….
It’s worth a read — although the evidence against Bachmann remains largely circumstantial and based on who she is acquainted with. But the folks who’ve been trying to hang Bill Ayers on Obama lack standing to complain about that.
6
Has Barna ceased being a reliable source on religious trends and gone all sensationalist on us?
7
Greg Sargent at Washington Post joins Jonathan Capehart (see yesterday’s tidbits) in needing smelling salts after hearing what tens of millions of people outside the beltway believe.
- There’s something kind of odd about homosexuality even if the attraction is involuntary.
- Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme (so truth-telling is now extremist?!) and maybe was unconstitutional.
- Repealing the 16th amendment is worth considering.
Read the column, not the silly headline about “extremism,” which the column fails to support. (This, by the way, is an item on dumb jounalists, not on who should be GOP nominee.)
8
“I like walking because it is slow, and the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour,” says Rebecca Solnit. “Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.” (From Arts & Letters Daily)
9
Nice poem at Writer’s Almanac — on repentance, I’d say.
* * * * *
If you’re missing political rants, I’m sorry, but I was giving the impression that I cared, so I stopped blogging politics. “They” are all idiots except for the ones who are rogues. But RogerWmBennett Tweets about politics and stuff over in the right-hand column. I generally agree with the guy.
Tipsy
Bon appetit!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 