Category: Definitions

August 26, 2019
Ohio Attorney General David Yost happy to crap on the LGBTQA community

Typically when elected people want to tell you bad news but don’t want to have to deal with it publicly, they will say the bad news on a Friday when the news media won’t spend much time on it since the weekend is the next day. The politician then hopes the whole thing blows over by Monday. Ohio Attorney General David Yost waited until Friday to announce that Ohio will sign-on to a brief for three US Supreme Court cases that will decide if the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQA people. The brief and Yost don’t support protection of course.

January 8, 2018
December 12, 2017

Religious texts are powerful rhetorical devices because they are subject to interpretation. America has no state religion, but the right wing has strongly endorsed what it preaches are a set of Christian values, making the movement more approachable to the seventy percent of Americans who identify as Christians.

You might think that for people who hold this set of values, Alabama’s Republican candidate for Senate, Roy Moore, would be stoned after five women came forward and made claims that Moore came on to them or worse when they were teenagers. The Christian right, however, seems to have taken a position of denial.

Moore’s not the only one setting a bad example for Christians in politics, either. There’s also our president.

Where Organized Religion and Politics Meet

August 3, 2017
June 9, 2017
image of Dr. Paul de Vries
Dr. Paul de Vries

Dr. Paul de Vries, a columnist at The Christian Post, tries to make an argument that the Secular Left and Radical Islam have the same aims even if they go about it in different ways. He poses the question, ‘What could these two divergent groups have in common that enables their frequent, seeming public harmony?’. Although de Vries tries to compare the two he can’t help but offer a false equivalence and looking at his points leads to a different conclusion.

de Vries starts off his Op-Ed by trying to say that Kathy Griffin’s photo holding a bloody head “in ISIS style solemnity” is similar to the efforts to build a mosque in lower Manhattan which was labeled a “victory mosque” at Ground Zero by opponents.

January 19, 2012
screencap from a newsreport

I was doing some “spring” cleaning by finally digitizing some old VHS tapes I had. These contained TV show clips and news stories I saved over the years. One of the news stories was about a controversy over a Nativity scene in Lancaster Ohio back in 1999. I wrote about it for my website back then but had no way of embedding a video clip. I watched it again and found a perfect example of Christian privilege and persecution complex in the space of a short 15 second comment from someone interviewed by the reporter. I now have a short clip I can show people who don’t know what Christian privilege is or don’t understand their expressed irrational persecution complex.