• Republican Rep. David Jolly of Florida makes an argument for same-sex marriage that ought to appeal to his fellow Republicans:
“As a matter of my Christian faith, I believe in traditional marriage,” said Jolly in a statement to The Post. “But as a matter of Constitutional principle I believe in a form of limited government that protects personal liberty. To me, that means that the sanctity of one’s marriage should be defined by their faith and by their church, not by their state. Accordingly, I believe it is fully appropriate for a state to recognize both traditional marriage as well as same-sex marriage.”
Religious conservatives and traditionalists ought to be able to support that reasoning as well. They won’t, though, and neither will most of Jolly’s party, because the current GOP coalition includes a “religious right” bloc whose messaging is controlled by the fund-raising agenda of direct-mail fearmongers and they’re not done milking the anti-gay gravy train yet.
• “I have to stand up for my principles,” said the Rev. T.W. Jenkins of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Tampa, Florida. Jenkins’ principles involve kicking those who mourn and shunning anyone he regards as sinful.
That’s a dangerous business, shunning sinners. That can come back to bite you. But Jenkins figures he’s safe by focusing entirely on what is probably the only “sin” he personally doesn’t find tempting.
• Daily Dirty Denier$. So far they’ve covered Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.), and former Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass., N.H., or wherever they’ll take him).
• As Cary Grant says in His Girl Friday, “Leave the rooster story alone, that’s human interest.”
But this is also true: “Businesses thrive by becoming popular. Journalists piss people off every day in order to sleep well at night — they are (or should be) engaged in an unpopularity contest.”
• The ReBoot: “Black Jesus gives the viewer a gritty savior that fails the tests of respectability and class. Truth is, the actual Jesus of Nazareth would have failed these tests as well.”
• At the Wild Hunt, Star Bustamonte offers a report from Moral Mondays in North Carolina from a Pagan perspective. Bustamonte tangles with some tricky questions about what it means or should mean to work together when we share a common purpose based on an array of unshared sectarian motivations. She’s got me thinking many things, which I’ll try to sort out enough to return to in a bit.
• Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford who previously studied Pentecostal religion, is now studying the role culture seems to play in the experience of people with schizophrenia:
The striking difference was that while many of the African and Indian subjects registered predominantly positive experiences with their voices, not one American did. Rather, the U.S. subjects were more likely to report experiences as violent and hateful – and evidence of a sick condition.
The article says Luhrmann’s findings may have implications for the clinical treatment of people with schizophrenia. I think it also suggests that something is amiss in American culture. Culture seems to play a role in shaping auditory hallucinations — voices give shape to the voices. And here in the U.S., something about our real voices seems to make those other voices hostile and harmful and frightening.
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