Culture Warriors category archive

Via Job’s Anger.

Warning: NSFW.

In a long, thoughtful post at the Boston Review, David Sehat analyzes the history of conservative Christians’ assertion that that “freedom of religion” means “freedom to discrimination”; he concludes it’s about power, not piety.

A nugget (emphasis added):

But once Christian conservatives realized that they were not, in fact, in the majority, they turned RFRA (the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993–ed,) into a weapon. Complaining of a war on religion, they sought exemptions to otherwise-applicable laws. They also began to pass religious freedom acts on the state level, even before the Court’s rulings on gay rights in Lawrence and Obergefell. An extensive 2006 New York Times report found that, thanks in part to state-level RFRAs, religious organizations across the nation enjoyed exemptions to laws dealing with taxes, immigration, discrimination, employment, pensions, child care, and land use, among other issues. The objective has been to carve out ever-widening swaths of life in which places of worship, hospitals, schools, daycare centers, and—with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014)—for-profit businesses no longer have to abide by generally applicable law, if they can make a claim on the basis of religious freedom.

Read it.

Reg Henry marvels at the Tarheel Potty Police and their numerous auxiliaries who would make your business their business. A snippet:

Where did this absurd concern suddenly come from? Are there not enough terrorists to make people fearful and thus politically exploitable? Do we have to invent new bogeypersons to trouble our dreams? Well, of course.

A classic script of right-wing paranoia unfolds. Select a tiny minority to be demonized, act on weird feelings about sexuality and then drag in the Almighty as justification.

Yet it’s a strange sort of Christianity that punishes the powerless and has no comfort for sobbing and confused children.

Avoirdupois frolics.

Hate-full twits.

Via C&L.

Via Job’s Anger.

Via Juanita Jean.

I don’t remember anyone having been suspended when I was in school, and certainly not in elementary school. One fellow came close in high school: He grew his hair out into a “Beatles haircut,” which was quite scandalous at the time. When the principal told him cut his hair, he shaved his head. He was forced to wear a toboggan cap until his hair grew out . . . .

From the Roanoke Times (more at the link):

The Charlottesville-based nonprofit analyzed data that schools reported to the Virginia Department of Education for the 2014-15 school year. Schools must report the number students who receive either short-term or long-term suspensions and the number of students who are expelled.

Among the findings in the Legal Aid Justice Center’s report, “Suspended Progress”:

• One-fifth of all suspensions in the state went to students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade;
• Nonviolent offenses like “disruption,” “defiance” and “disrespect” accounted for the majority of suspensions;
• Black students and those with disabilities were suspended disproportionately to their peers.

Looks to me as if they are suspending kids for being uppity. Now, we can’t have any uppity, now, can we, not here in the South?

Perhaps this might have something to do with it.

Twits who are obsessed with sex.

Thom and a caller discuss some of the implications of North Carolina’s “It’s Okay To Hate the Gay” law, such as capping the minimum wage, implications that have received little notice in the furor over bodily functions.