This day is not imagination’s child

This day is not imagination’s child May 1, 2015

• Republicans saying non-Republican things: Former Texas state legislator Todd Smith writes to the state’s current Republican governor, Greg Abbott, regarding Abbott’s recent pandering to the far-right tinfoil-hat crowd.

As a 16-year Republican member of the Texas House and a patriotic American, I am horrified that I have to choose between the possibility that my governor actually believes this stuff and the possibility that my governor doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to those who do. I’m not sure which is worse. … This bone that you have thrown to those who believe that the U.S. military is a threat to the state of Texas is an embarrassing distance beyond the pale. … It is important to rational governance that thinking Republicans call you out on it.

It would be nice to see “thinking Republicans” similarly calling out governors and members of Congress and other prominent members of their party for other horrifyingly beyond-the-pale claims — birtherism, science-denial, thinly euphemized racism — but I won’t hold my breath waiting for that, even though it’s just as necessary for “rational governance.”

• Here’s a sharp piece of enterprising journalism by a local TV news team from Denver’s KDVR Fox31: “Heating and cooling company refuses service to ‘colored people’ in ‘Mount Ghetto.’

This isn’t news to any of the people who live in Montbello — or to anyone who lives in similar neighborhoods pretty much anywhere in America. The big news here is that this made the news at all.

Memo to our local news teams here in Philadelphia: You could do a variation of this same report with hundreds of local businesses in Delaware County. What’s stopping you?

• Theologian/blogger Bill Lindsey explains the difference between earlier forms of biblical literalism — such as the Galileo incident — and the peculiarly American form of proof-texting illiteralist fundamentalism that arose here concurrent with slavery.

Meet Wanksy — a vigilante superhero for our time.

And here is the handiwork of a 16th-century Wanksy, from 1555:

IDontKnowEither

 

• “Hi, I’d like to complain about as many things as possible before the moderator realizes I’m not building up to a question of any kind and cuts me off.”

• Colorado had a remarkably effective contraception program that reduced teen pregnancy by 40 percent and reduced the abortion rate by 42 percent.

If “pro-lifers” were “pro-life,” they would be celebrating results like that. But that’s not what they’re doing.

Instead, purportedly “anti-abortion” Republicans have scrapped the program because they say IUDs might somehow be “abortifacients.” Colorado’s “pro-lifers,” in other words, have just engineered what will likely result in a huge increase in the state’s abortion rate.

We cannot make any sense of this perverse step by accepting the premise that these “pro-lifers” are concerned with “protecting the lives of the unborn.” But — yet again, for the 10,000th example of this — if we start with the premise that they’re actually more interested in controlling women’s sexuality, then their killing this program suddenly appears more logical.

And, by the way, no — IUDs are not abortifacients. I am horrified that I have to choose between the possibility that my fellow evangelicals actually believe such nonsense and the possibility that my fellow evangelicals don’t have the backbone to stand up to those who do. I’m not sure which is worse.


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