Tag Archives: christian

More Americans Ditching Organized Religion

by MarquisLKA Posted on May 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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According to a new study published by the Pew Research Center today, the largest shift in religious demographics over the past seven years is in the number of Americans who don’t affiliate with any religion at all. The study, which started in 2007 and surveyed more than 35,000 people, saw this group jump from 16.1 to 22.8 percentage points—with young, college-educated Americans being the most religiously unaffiliated:

While many U.S. religious groups are aging, the unaffiliated are comparatively young – and getting younger, on average, over time. As a rising cohort of highly unaffiliated Millennials reaches adulthood, the median age of unaffiliated adults has dropped to 36, down from 38 in 2007 and far lower than the general (adult) population’s median age of 46.4 By contrast, the median age of mainline Protestant adults in the new survey is 52 (up from 50 in 2007), and the median age of Catholic adults is 49 (up from 45 seven years earlier).

The findings had some disappointing news for Christians. While the number of people who identify with the religion has been waning for decades, the drop in the Christian population has been the sharpest of all in recent years with fewer Americans than ever before identifying themselves as Christians.

Pew

Other interesting details include: Religious intermarriage is up. Christians are getting more diverse. And Muslims and Hindus are seeing significant increases in their numbers. For more, head over to the Pew Research Center here.

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More Americans Ditching Organized Religion

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Could the moral angle get Christian conservatives to care about climate change?

by BridgetBaccarini Posted on February 27, 2015

Could the moral angle get Christian conservatives to care about climate change?

By on 27 Feb 2015commentsShare

A majority of Americans think that fighting climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a “moral responsibility,” according to a new poll from Reuters. The news agency conducted the poll following a number of recent statements from Pope Francis casting climate change as a moral issue, since it will hit the world’s poor hardest. Reuters found:

Two-thirds of respondents (66 percent) said that world leaders are morally obligated to take action to reduce CO2 emissions. And 72 percent said they were “personally morally obligated” to do what they can in their daily lives to reduce emissions.

For comparison, that tracks with a recent report from the Yale Center for Climate Change Communication, which found that 64 percent of registered voters support imposing “strict carbon dioxide limits on existing coal-fired power plants to reduce global warming and improve public health.”

And, OK, “sure,” you might be saying. “This poll, like so many others, measures people’s willingness to talk the talk without walking the walk,” you might be saying. For, as Grist’s David Roberts reminds us, polls repeatedly find that Americans like stuff that sounds good. They may think that leaders are morally obligated to do stuff that sounds good too.

But here’s how this poll is useful: That Yale Center report found that even though 64 percent of voters support strict carbon regulations, only 40 percent of conservative Republicans and 23 percent of Tea Party Republicans do. Those folks also tend to be highly religious. If action on climate change can rise above knee-jerk politics to a religious — or moral — imperative, then there may be some chance of making progress. That seems to be what the Pope hopes, at least.

Of course, the Pope isn’t the only moral authority capable of making inroads with conservatives. Less than a quarter of Americans are Catholic (and half of American Catholics vote Democrat). But Evangelicals are gradually getting on board too. “The moral imperative is the way to reach out to conservatives,” Rev. Mitch Hescox of the Evangelical Environmental Network told Reuters. The issue may resonate in particular with young, religious conservatives, who, of course, will gradually replace the old ones.

“These are issues we’ve always grown up with and issues we’re used to hearing about,” 30-year-old evangelical leader Ben Lowe recently told Grist, saying his “creation care” movement, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, is growing faster than the group can handle. “There’s been a great amount of growth within the last 10 years or so that cares a lot about understanding our biblical role to be caretakers of this planet. And a lot of Christians have questions about climate change and where they fit in on all of that.”

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Could the moral angle get Christian conservatives to care about climate change?

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We May All Be Sinners, But Please Shut Up About Our Actual Sins

by EarthaRunyan Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Religious conservatives are mad at President Obama again. I suppose the appropriate reaction is a big yawn, since they’re always mad at President Obama. It hardly matters what new horror he’s ostensibly perpetrated, does it?

Still, this latest brouhahah is kind of interesting. Obama was speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast and said this:

As we speak, around the world, we see faith inspiring people to lift up one another….But we also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge — or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon….So how do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities — the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends?

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history….This is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith. In today’s world, when hate groups have their own Twitter accounts and bigotry can fester in hidden places in cyberspace, it can be even harder to counteract such intolerance. But God compels us to try.

Hmmm. Nothing wrong with that. We are all sinners, and sometimes we don’t live up to our highest ideals. Still, God calls on us to keep trying. This is the kind of thing we hear from fundamentalist preachers all the time—except for one thing. Obama actually named names. Here’s the bit I left out in the second paragraph:

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

It’s one thing to agree that we are all sinners. But apparently it’s quite another to provide an example or two. America’s conservative Christians really, really don’t like that. They prefer to be make-believe sinners, not actual sinners who might have some actual sins to account for. Obama decided not to give them such an easy out, and that made them spitting mad.

It’s easy enough to laugh at this kind of cowardly refusal to acknowledge real sin. But that aside, Christopher Ingraham argues that Obama omitted a key nuance:

Some slave traders may indeed have sought justification for their actions in the Christian faith, but much of the trade was driven by economic reasons (a demand for cheap labor) and racism. The Crusades were just as much about political power as they were about religion.

….But the evidence also shows that religion has become a much more powerful motivator of terrorism in the past 15 years or so….And most religiously-motivated terrorism today is perpetrated by Islamist terrorists in the name of their misreading of Islam. Fully two-thirds of terror-related deaths in 2013 were caused by just four Islamist groups — Al Qaeda and its affiliates, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Islamic State, and the Taliban.

I’d be mighty careful about this. The fact that Islamic jihadists say they’re inspired by religion doesn’t mean that’s their sole motivation. Like the Crusades and slavery, the real motivations are much more varied. After all, Islam has been Islam for 14 centuries, but al-Qaeda style jihadi terrorism is a fairly recent phenomenon.

So what happened in the 70s and 80s that suddenly turned a relatively peaceful religion into a persistent wellspring of terrorist attacks? Probably not anything about religion itself. That’s just the public justification. Underneath, there’s a whole stew of anti-colonialism; hatred of occupation by foreign powers; lack of economic opportunity for young men; geopolitical maneuverings; tribal enmities; fear of cultural subjugation; hostility toward Israel; and dozens of other things. Religion is part of it, and religion may often be the hook that sucks angry young men into jihadi groups, but it’s far from the whole story. We make a big mistake if we look solely at the surface and go no further.

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We May All Be Sinners, But Please Shut Up About Our Actual Sins

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Christmas Movies Are Now Just As Horrible As Everything Else Related to Christmas

by bisericidinlemn Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Well, this answers a question for me. Dan Drezner describes the standard Jewish ritual for Christmas day:

Chinese food and a movie. Perfectly pleasant rituals, made special by the fact that the Gentiles are all at home or at church….

No longer.

I don’t know when it became a thing for Christian families to also go see a movie on the day commemorating the birth of Jesus, but personal experience tells me this is a relatively recent phenomenon — i.e., the past 15 years or so. All I know is that what used to be a pleasant movie-going experience is now extremely crowded.

Several years ago I naively decided that it might be nice to see a movie on Christmas. I figured the crowds would be really light and we could just slip right in. Needless to say, I was disabused of this notion quickly, and headed for home just as fast as my car would take me. At the time, I wondered what was going on. Had things changed? Was I just unaware that Christmas had always been a big movie day? Or what?

I guess it’s the former. There really was a golden era when Christmas movies were uncrowded, but it disappeared before I even knew it existed. Sic transit etc.

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Christmas Movies Are Now Just As Horrible As Everything Else Related to Christmas

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Röyksopp and Robyn Meet the Inevitable End

by Finley Kay Posted on November 10, 2014

Mother Jones

Most bands don’t announce their final album in advance. That designation is typically applied post-facto, when once-harmonious bandmates descend into irreparable squabbles on the road. But Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp has declared that its aptly named new LP, The Inevitable End, out this week, its last.

But Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland aren’t disbanding. Instead, they simply plan to ditch the old long-play format. “We feel like this is a goodbye to the traditional album,” the duo wrote on their website.

I caught up with Berge and Brundtland alongside Swedish pop star Robyn, as the three toured to promote their collective EP, Do It Again. The three performers opened up about how they got together, how the internet has changed the game, and the joys of not being beholden to record executives.

Mother Jones: Your first song together was 2009’s “Girl and The Robot,” on a Röyksopp album. Had you known each other before that?

Robyn: Nope. We met the first day we went into the studio and wrote that song.

MJ: Röyksopp had sent you some tracks in advance, though? Did you turn anything down?

Robyn: No, I turned some things up. Laughs. I don’t turn anything down. There were so many things they sent that I really liked, but just liking something doesn’t always mean that you can use it. Some things just evoke ideas and feelings in you, and that has nothing to do with good or bad—it’s just what resonates at the time.

MJ: Were you trading ideas back and forth beforehand?

Brundtland: Robyn had heard some instrumental bits, beats and stuff like that, but I don’t think that was necessary. Either way, it can be slightly—I wouldn’t say scary—but you can crash and burn. That’s what it can feel like when you’re meeting up with someone and you’re supposed to make something that’s really good. But when we met up it wasn’t like that at all.

Robyn: No. And all my past experiences are like that. ‘Cause I had a period when I working and writing with professional songwriters, and I always dreaded it. It was so horrible to work that way.

MJ: What made it so horrible?

Robyn: It was early on in my career when I was in another type of world. It was never really people that I liked what they did. It’s never like, “Oh, I don’t really like this guy, but maybe, maybe if we work together some more we’ll start to like each other.” It’s either you click or you don’t.

MJ: I’ve read that each of you was each at an impasse before deciding to do this current album. How so?

Robyn: I don’t know how detailed I would like to be, but I was definitely exhausted after touring a long time. I was not in a good place at all. I was really looking forward to making more music, but I just didn’t feel like I had had enough time off after the Body Talk albums to make my own album. And I was looking to start collaborating with other people in a different way, where I didn’t want the music to become an album. I just wanted to make music and see what happened.

Brundtland: Looking back, I think that we subconsciously thought that we’ve had a nice run with our albums. They represent something different, all of them, and conceptually it’s just progressed. So I guess we were looking for something to break up that thing a little bit.

Berge: I think doing what we did with Robyn felt—this sounds a bit cheesy—but a bit cathartic. To make it even more cheesy, it gives life a bit of purpose. I personally was in a place that I wasn’t too comfortable with.

Brundtland: It felt new, because we didn’t really set out with that plan or anything like that. But just creating this album, which is referred to as an EP, you get a feeling of “I want more.” We have heard people say that they wish it was longer, and that’s so much better than “I wish the album was shorter.”

MJ: And people skipping past tracks.

Brundtland: Yeah. That exists—18-song albums with a lot of unnecessary stuff.

MJ: Robyn’s Body Talk was a series of three shorter releases. Do you think that sort of capital-A album—where you pack in as many songs as possible—has lost relevance?

Robyn: I hope so. It’s a horrible way of working, actually. I mean, I don’t mind taking time off to make an album. If it takes a long time, it does. But then to spend two or three years promoting it? It’s fucking insane. I’d rather spend that time making new music. I think back in the day when pop music started, people made albums every year, and you played music live that people hadn’t heard before you released the album. It was like a constant production period. Everything was slower and you could sell more records, of course, but it kind of worked in a different way then.

Then the ’90s came, and everything changed and became really heavy marketing. It totally destroyed everything. We all started our careers around that time. The way it is now is so much better creatively. You can set your own pace. It’s not weird to release short albums anymore, and people get better music too.

MJ: So you’re are no longer beholden to big record labels?

Robyn: Yeah. I don’t make any records anymore in collaboration with the record company. I make them on my own, and deliver them when they’re done. There’s this way of thinking about an album like it’s something that doesn’t exist anymore, but I don’t think it’s true. It’s just chopped up into different parts. You might release it in parts like I did with Body Talk, or do a mixtape and album, or a mixtape and an EP. For me, an album is more like a period of time where you’re thinking in a special way, exploring something. It doesn’t have to be one release.

MJ: Do you guys have a similar setup?

Berge: We’ve always done it so that we make the album and then sort of say, take it or leave it. We have our own label, same setup as Robyn. When we’ve said what we want to say, we’re finished. No fillers. It’s not like your 1998 hip-hop album, which is 80 minutes long and 48 tracks.

MJ: Did you have a bigger collaboration in mind when you started working on these songs?

Brundtland: We just enjoyed getting together. When we’re together we do things like we’re a band, so then we are a band I guess.

Berge: And although there is Robyn and there is Röyksopp, the tracks are neither Robyn nor Röyksopp; it’s something else.

MJ: You’ve referred to “Do It Again” as an accidental song. How is a song accidental?

Robyn: It wasn’t accidental in that “Wow, I wrote a song without knowing it.”

Brundtland: Well, the monkeys and the typewriters.

Berge: Shakespeare. Sometimes we have an idea: Let’s write a song about sadness, whatever, and it’s going to be 94 beats per minute. Let’s go. But in this instance the track sort of dictated itself. We didn’t know where to take it.

Robyn: We followed it, kind of.

MJ: How often do you start taking something in one direction and have to pull back?

Berge: We’re so professional and good that we don’t do that anymore.

Robyn: We don’t make mistakes.

Berge: Never. Laughter. Sometimes we would try a few things you know will absolutely not work, but you have to do it. Just like I had to see the latest Spiderman movie. I knew it would be shit, but I had to just see it anyway. It’s a bit like that.

Robyn: But I also think when you’ve made music a long time—I’m not trying to sound like a prick—but you kind of know. Like, let’s not try anything that isn’t good enough.

MJ: How does The Inevitable End compare to Senior, your previous album?

Berge: It’s not like Senior. It’s got a dark energy and I think it’s very sincere in many ways.

MJ: It feels closer to the heart?

Berge: They all do; it’s like comparing children.

Robyn: It’s very inviting. It’s sad, but it’s not cold. It’s very warm.

Berge: That’s very well put. I’m going to steal that.

MJ: How about you, Robyn?

Robyn: Markus Jägerstedt from her touring band and I are working on an album that we’ve made together with a producer.

Berge: And it’s fucking awesome.

Robyn: Will be. The album is made with producer Christian Falk. I worked with him on my first album that I recorded when I was 16. So I’ve known him half of my life. We became good friends and we kept working in different ways and he passed away a couple of weeks ago from cancer. We’re finishing without him, which is a really strange experience, but also a really beautiful thing because we get to be around the memory of him and the music a little bit longer. It was something we started before he knew he was sick. So it was a real collaboration between me and Christian, and then Markus came in as well. It was like a band effort.

MJ: How does it compare with Body Talk?

Robyn: We’ll see. I think it’s messier than what I usually do, because Christian was messy. It’s a raw energy and it’s based on a club world. I think it’s going to be fantastic, I’m really happy about it.

MJ: Do you think you’ll join up again for a sequel to Do It Again?

Robyn: Never ever.

Berge: We say be-bop-a-lula she’s my baby, Scooby Doo, Daddy-o. We don’t have any plans. That’s the way we operate.

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Röyksopp and Robyn Meet the Inevitable End

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Man Who Believes God Speaks to Us Through "Duck Dynasty" Is About to Be Texas’ Second-in-Command

by Sheena25Szik Posted on October 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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As a Texas state senator, Dan Patrick has conducted himself in a manner consistent with the shock jock he once was. Patrick—who is now the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor—has railed against everything from separation of church and state to Mexican coyotes who supposedly speak Urdu. He’s even advised his followers that God is speaking to them through Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson.

A former sportscaster who once defended a football player who’d thrown a reporter through a door (Patrick believed it wasn’t the journalist’s job to do “negative reporting”), Patrick became a conservative talk radio host in the early 1990s—Houston’s answer to Rush Limbaugh. In 2006, he parlayed his radio fame into a state Senate seat—and kept the talk show going. In office, he proposed paying women $500 to turn over newborn babies to the state (to reduce abortions), led the charge against creeping liberalism in state textbooks, and pushed wave after wave of new abortion restrictions. For his efforts, Texas Monthly named Patrick one of the worst legislators of 2013.

With a victory on November 4, Patrick, who is leading Democratic state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte in the polls, would find himself next in line for the governor’s mansion of the nation’s second-largest state. (Rick Perry, the current Republican governor, was previously lieutenant governor.) But even if Patrick advances no further, he’d be in a position to shape public policy—Texas’ lieutenant governor is sometimes called the “most powerful office in Texas” because of the influence it has on both the legislative and executive branches.

Here are a few of Patrick’s greatest hits:

On Islam: Patrick walked out of the Senate chamber in 2007 rather than listen to a Muslim deliver the opening prayer. “I think that it’s important that we are tolerant as a people of all faiths, but that doesn’t mean we have to endorse all faiths, and that was my decision,” he told the Houston Chronicle. “I surely believe that everyone should have the right to speak, but I didn’t want my attendance on the floor to appear that I was endorsing that.”

Five years later, he did it again. “We are a nation that allows a Muslim to come in with a Koran but does not allow a Christian to take a Bible to school,” Patrick explained, after walking out on another prayer, delivered this time by Imam Yusuf Kavacki. “We are a Judeo-Christian nation, primarily a Christian nation.”

On the border: “While ISIS terrorists threaten to cross our border and kill Americans, my opponent falsely attacks me to hide her failed record on illegal immigration,” he says in his first general-election campaign. Patrick’s website, meanwhile, warns that Pakistanis are crossing the border as well, presumably to do bad things to Americans. “This is an Urdu dictionary found by border volunteers that was dropped by a human smuggler,” Patrick writes beneath a photo of an Urdu-English dictionary. “It is concerning that Mexican coyotes are learning Urdu in order to smuggle illegal immigrants?” sic

On migrants: “They are bringing Third World diseases with them,” he said in 2006, warning that immigrants could bring leprosy and polio to Texas. (This was news to Texas public health officials.) Patrick hired an undocumented worker when he ran a Houston sports bar, and when the worker revealed last spring that he had talked candidly with Patrick about his situation, the candidate insisted: “The worker says I was personally very kind to him and goes on to allege other preposterous events that are not true and for which he offers no evidence.”

On his first book, actually titled The Second Most Important Book You Will Ever Read: “As the author, I am obviously biased,” Patrick wrote in an Amazon review of his own book. But “since God inspired me to write this book,” he added, “He automatically gets 5 stars and the CREDIT!'”

On squashing Wendy Davis’ filibuster: Patrick told Mike Huckabee he had a Christian obligation to ignore Senate rules if the lives of fetuses were at risk. “I spoke to my colleagues and said, ‘When Jesus criticized the Pharisees, he criticized them because their laws and their rules were more important than actually taking care of people,'” he said. “And in my view, stopping a debate to save thousands of lives, well, saving the thousands of lives is more important than our tradition of, well, you should never stop someone. I said, ‘Well, are we gonna become the modern-day Pharisees as Republicans of the Senate and just let her talk this bill to death and thousands that could have been saved a horrendous death and also improving health care?'”

On critics of his 2011 bill, which passed, mandating women see a sonogram before getting an abortion: “If those aborted souls were in the gallery right now, what would you say to them?”

On Connie Chung’s TV show, Eye to Eye: Patrick quipped in 1992 that the Asian American journalist’s show should be called “Slanted Eye to Eye.” Although Patrick’s remarks sparked a local media firestorm, he did not change his ways. In 1999, a Houston Press profile noted that “Patrick lapsed into a faux-Chinese accent when he thought he heard a network correspondent call Clinton, in the midst of the Chinese-espionage scandal, ‘President Crinton,'” and later joked that Clinton should get surgery to “make his eyes slanted.”

On MTV: Patrick issued a call to arms against the cable channel in 2004, in an online bulletin:

STAND UP AND FIGHT BACK AGAINST MTV…LET’S TURN OFF MTV IN HOUSTON….JUST TAKE YOUR REMOTE AND GO TO DELETE CHANNELS….DELETE MTV AND CHANGE THE PASSWORD SO YOUR KIDS CAN’T WATCH….STAND UP TO YOUR KIDS…THEY WON’T BE HAPPY,BUT YOU MUST HOLD FIRM…. DO YOU WANT YOUR SONS AND ESPECIALLY YOUR DAUGHTERS EXPOSED TO THIS CONSTANT BARRAGE OF ATTACKS ON YOUR VALUES……..THEN SCROLL BELOW AND CONTACT THE NFL AND CBS….ALSO CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSMAN AND SENATOR AND DEMAND THAT THE FCC GET TOUGH WITH THOSE WHO WANT TO COME INTO YOUR HOME AND DESTROY YOUR FAMILY VALUES

On creationism: “Our students…must really be confused,” Patrick said at a GOP primary debate last spring. “They go to Sunday School on Sunday and then they go into school on Monday and we tell them they can’t talk about God. I’m sick and tired of a minority in our country who want us to turn our back on God.”

On the separation of church and state: “There is no such thing as separation of church and state.”

On Duck Dynasty: Patrick tried to raise money off of Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson’s comments about homosexuality in GQ, boasting that the bearded reality star was channeling another bearded visionary. “This is an exciting time for Christians,” he wrote on Facebook. “God is speaking to us from the most unlikely voice, Phil Robertson, about God’s Word. God is using pop culture and a highly successful cable TV show to remind us about His teaching.”

On his inspiration for this painting of Christ’s face on the Statue of Liberty:

In teaching myself how to watercolor I was trying different styles. After a beach scene, I decided to try a Peter Max type of painting of the Statue of Liberty. I could not get the fact right and used water to remove the paint on her face. When it dried and I tried to clean it up suddently sic the face of Jesus appeared so clearly. It struck me that Jesus face on the Statue of Liberty sends an incredible message that the real light that our country has sent in the past, and needs to send once again today, is we are a nation that stands on His Word This was only my 4th try at a painting I had no idea of how to paint the face of Jesus, nor was I trying to do so.

On film: “A very popular movie starring Mel Gibson, Signs, has a theme dealing with the concept of coincidence,” Patrick wrote in his book. “If you haven’t seen it, it’s a terrific flick (albeit a little scary). I recommend it.”

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Man Who Believes God Speaks to Us Through "Duck Dynasty" Is About to Be Texas’ Second-in-Command

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Republicans Are Far More Critical of American Schools Than Democrats

by LeilaniOgden Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Over at Vox, Libby Nelson interviews Jack Schneider, a history professor at College of the Holy Cross, about why Americans think schools are in decline despite the evidence that they’re actually better than they used to be. Here’s Schneider:

The first reason that people think schools are in decline is because they hear it all the time. If you hear something often enough, it becomes received wisdom, even if you can’t identify the source. That rhetoric is coming from a policy machine where savvy policy leaders have figured out that the way that you get momentum is to scare the hell out of people. So reformers have gotten really good at this sky is falling rhetoric….The rhetoric there is the schools are in crisis, we are competing against nations that are going to somehow destroy us if our test scores aren’t high enough, and lo and behold, policymakers have a solution.

Schneider points to a couple of pieces of evidence to back up his contention that schools today are better than in the past. The first is NAEP test scores, which have been generally rising, not falling, over the past few decades. The second is the well-known fact that people tend to think their own neighborhood schools are fine but that schools nationally are terrible. A Gallup/PDK poll confirms this perception gap.

But here’s an interesting thing. Although it’s true that this gap in perceptions is widespread, it’s far more widespread among Republicans than Democrats. Take a look at the chart on the right, constructed from the poll numbers. When it comes to rating local schools, there’s barely any difference between Democrats and Republicans. Only a small number give their local schools a poor grade. But nationally it’s a whole different story. Republicans are far more likely to rate schools as disaster areas nationally.

I’m reluctant to draw too many conclusions about this without giving it some serious thought. Still, there’s at least one thing we can say. This difference doesn’t seem to arise from different personal perceptions of education. Both groups have similar perceptions of their own schools.1 So why are Republicans so much more likely to think that other schools are terrible? If it doesn’t come from personal experience, then the most likely culprit is the media, which suggests that conservative media does far more scaremongering about education than liberal or mainstream media. That’s pretty unsettling given the fact that, as near as I can tell, the mainstream media is almost unrelentingly hostile toward education.

But the truth is that I don’t watch enough Fox or listen to enough Limbaugh to really know how they treat education. Is this where the partisan divide comes from? Or is it from Christian Right newsletter circuit? Or the home school lobby? Or what?

In any case, there’s more interesting stuff at the link, and Neerav Kingsland has a response here, including the basic NAEP data that shows steadily positive trends in American education since 1971.

1Or so it seems. One other possibility is that far more Republicans than Democrats send their kids to private schools. They rate these schools highly when Gallup asks, but rate other schools poorly because those are the schools they pulled their kids out of. A more detailed dive into the poll numbers might shed some light on this.

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Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy, Part 2: Its Retirement Plan STILL Invests in Contraception Manufacturers

by JosetteSeely Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Obamacare compelled Hobby Lobby to buy employee health insurance plans that covered emergency contraception, the Green family, who own the national chain of craft stores, fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court. So what happened when Mother Jones reported that Hobby Lobby contributed millions of dollars to employee retirement plans with stock in companies that make emergency contraception?

According to Hobby Lobby president Steve Green, nothing.

That revelation came on Friday, when MSNBC reporter Irin Carmon published parts of an interview with Green, whose Supreme Court case resulted in the partial dismantling of Obamacare’s contraception mandate.

Carmon asked Green for his response to the Mother Jones report, which noted that Hobby Lobby’s employee retirement plans had stock holdings in companies manufacturing the very drugs and devices at the center of the Supreme Court case: PlanB, Ella, and two types of intrauterine devices. Green doesn’t often speak to the press, so it was the first time he had publicly responded to this information since I first reported it in early April.

In the interview with Carmon, Green dismissed the idea that it mattered where his employee’s 401(k) plans had indirect investments, telling her it was “several steps removed.”

Of course, the Greens were also several steps removed from any emergency contraception Hobby Lobby’s female employees may or may not have obtained through the company’s insurance plan. And as I pointed out in April, divestment from certain companies does matter to many Christian business owners, who have fueled a cottage industry of mutual funds that screen for morally objectionable stocks.

But Green indicates he wasn’t troubled enough by Mother Jones‘ report to investigate for himself or make any changes to Hobby Lobby’s employee retirement plan:

Whether they do or not invest in these drugs and devices, I couldn’t confirm or deny it. I don’t know if it’s even true. Of course, the other question I would ask is, do those companies also provide a lot of life-saving products that our employees are dependent on? I don’t know that either. But we’ve not made any changes.

Carmon also confronted Green with the overwhelming scientific evidence that using emergency contraception does not cause abortions. The Greens’ contention that emergency contraception was a form of abortion was key to their argument that Obamacare violated their free exercise of religion. Read Carmon’s whole story here.

Original source:  

Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy, Part 2: Its Retirement Plan STILL Invests in Contraception Manufacturers

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10 of the Worst Congressional Acronyms Ever

by Palma1985tj Posted on August 25, 2014

Mother Jones

Ten of the worst (or possibly greatest) congressional backronyms—intentional acronyms created by attention-seeking lawmakers, or more likely, their poor staffers:

CHOMP: Consumers Have Options for Molar Protection Act, sponsored by former Rep. Diane Watson (D-Calif.)

STALKERS: Simplifying The Ambiguous Law, Keeping Everyone Reliably Safe Act, sponsored by Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.)

HELLO: Help Eliminate the Levy on Locution Act, sponsored by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)

SWEETEST: Saccharin Warning Elimination via Environmental Testing Employing Science and Technology Act, sponsored by former Rep. Joseph Knollenberg (R-Mich.)

CHURCH: Congressional Hope for Uniform Recognition of Christian Heritage Act, sponsored by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas)

DRONES: Designating Requirements On Notification of Executive-ordered Strikes Act, sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)

PROSTATE: Prostate Research, Outreach, Screening, Testing, Access, and Treatment Effectiveness Act, sponsored by Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.)

STOP SMUT: Special Taxation On Pornographic Services and Marketing Using Telephones Act, sponsored by former Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.)

CAN SPAM: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act, sponsored by ex-Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.)

DAIRY: Dairy Augmentation for Increased Retail in Yogurt Products Act, sponsored by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)

HONORABLE MENTION
SAFETEA-LU: Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, sponsored by Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) in honor of his wife, Lu

For many more wonderfully bad backronyms, check out Noah Veltman’s “congressional acronym abuse” tracker.

Credit:

10 of the Worst Congressional Acronyms Ever

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Burn Your Beatles Records!

by MargherBearden Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Early August 1966, Christian groups, primarily in the Southern United States took to the streets to burn the sin out of their beloved Beatles records in response to John Lennon’s remark that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”

Birmingham disc jockeys Tommy Charles, left, and Doug Layton of Radio Station WAQY, rip and break materials representing the British pop group The Beatles, in Birmingham, Ala., Aug. 8, 1966. The broadcasters started a “Ban The Beatles” campaign. AP

Like all good moments of mass hysteria, getting a little context helps put things in perspective.

The quote originally appeared in March 1966, in part of an interview with Lennon published in the London Evening Standard. The interviewer, Maureen Cleave, commented that Lennon was at the time reading about religion. Here is the full, original quote from Lennon:

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

In late July, five months after its original publication, a U.S. teen mag called Datebook republished the interview with Lennon. Turning to the tried and true method of generating scandal to gin up sales, Datebook put the “We’re more popular than Jesus” part of the quote on the cover. Woo-boy. Two Birmingham DJs picked up on the quote, vowing to never play the Beatles and on August 8th, started a “Ban the Beatles” campaign. Christian groups across the South rose up to protest the Beatles who, as it happened, were just about embark on what would be their last U.S. tour. Beatles records were burned, crushed, broken. Never a group to miss out on a good bonfire, the Ku Klux Klan got involved.

South Carolina Grand Dragon, Bob Scoggin of the Klu Klux Klan tosses Beatle records into the flames of a burning cross, in Chester, South Carolina, Aug. 11, 1966. The “Beatle Bonfire” was staged to take exception to a statement attributed to John Lennon, when he was quoted as saying that his group was more popular than Jesus. AP

On August 12, 1966 the Beatles set out on tour, meeting protests and stupid questions about the quote all along the way. It would be the last tour the Beatles would ever do in the United States, ending on August 29 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

Young churchfolk from Sunnyvale on the San Francisco peninsula protest against the Beatles and John Lennon’s remark that The Beatles are “more popular than Jesus” outside Candlestick Park where the Beatles are holding a concert in San Francisco, Ca., Aug. 29, 1966. The picketers were seen by many of the teenagers but missed by the entertainers, who arrived and departed from a different direction. Some 25,000 fans went through the gates for The Beatles’ final U.S. performance on their tour. AP

Source – 

Burn Your Beatles Records!

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