1. NPR’s First Listen: Sam Phillips, “Push Any Button.”
2. “Like Santa for Your Vagina” — this ad for tampon subscription service Hello Flo is getting a lot of attention. The service itself makes a lot of sense too.
3. Joel L. Watts points out the irony of Gentile Christians who use Romans 1:26-27 as a clobber verse against LGBT Christians, given that it’s part of Paul’s summary of the view he’s disagreeing with in order to set up his own fierce argument that anyone who would condemn Those People is thereby condemning themself. Alas, Watts’ plea to stop misusing this passage as a clobber verse will likely go unheeded because: A) he uses words like “protreptic,” which makes him a pointy-headed intellectual and therefore probably can be classified as a liberal who can be safely ignored; and B) the folks who want to use Romans 1:26-27 as a clobber text don’t really care what any passage means, only how it can be used.
4. The feud between Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Republican Gov. Chris Christie is getting nasty. I suppose Paul thinks calling Christie the “King of Bacon” was a clever fat joke, but nobody is going to lose votes in America for loving bacon. Plus, Paul’s political prospects are already limited by his efforts to alienate anyone who isn’t a straight, white, Christian male — it doesn’t help him any to further limit his appeal to only straight, white, Christian male ectomorphs.
The factual basis for Paul’s swipe is even worse since, as Steve Benen notes, blue-states like New Jersey subsidize red-states like Kentucky:
Kentucky, unlike New Jersey, receives far more money from Washington than it sends. Paul said that’s because of the military bases in Kentucky, but that doesn’t make any sense — New Jersey has more bases than Kentucky, but receives less per capita federal spending. In fact, for every dollar Kentucky sends to D.C., it receives $1.51 back; for every dollar New Jersey sends to D.C., it receives 61 cents back.
5. This is a fascinating interview with Doug Mesner, a.k.a. “Lucien Greaves,” leader of the Satanic Temple, which made waves recently with a performance-art “ritual” — a “Pink Mass” performed at the grave of anti-gay activist Fred Phelps’ mother. Mesner seems to be an earnest ironist who wants to use his Temple to challenge and deconstruct the “Satanist” legends and conspiracy theories that lead the self-righteous to “malign, demonize and marginalize” others. Mesner has studied the Satanic panic that began in the late 20th Century, and he wants to fight back against it and the harm it continues to do to innocent people.
Mesner/Greaves is sort of like the anti-Mike Warnke. Warnke pretended that he used to be a Satanic priest in order to deceive others into believing that a Satanist conspiracy was real. Mesner is pretending that he is a Satanic priest in order to convince others that this Satanist conspiracy is ridiculous. I’m not sure if his theatrical irony will work — it could well wind up reinforcing the very mythologies and conspiracy theories it aims to deconstruct. But then my own attempts to fight against those harmful mythologies by urging everyone to read Jeffrey S. Victor’s Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend probably isn’t working either.
6. Actual apologies are rare. Here’s a pretty good one — an actual mea culpa that doesn’t hedge on either the mea or the culpa. And here’s David Roberts doing what he does best: “We are consigning hundreds of coastal cities to destruction. Who cares?”
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