Postcards from the culture wars (10.24)

“Tell me again how much God hates abortion. Here, he’s giving the recipe for a drink that induces one.”

“Some social conservatives will continue in their serious negotiations of culture-war surrender; others will probably persist in invoking ‘religious freedom’ when they mean something closer to its opposite.”

“School buses carrying African-American children were pelted with eggs, bricks and bottles, and police in combat gear fought to control angry white protesters besieging the schools.”

“I don’t see too many Congregationalists leaving this country because it’s too unhealthy or dangerous.”

“It strikes me as extremely odd that you have a dermatologist, an audiologist, a dentist who are billing for family planning services.”

“The purpose of Crutcher’s investigations was not to shed light on hidden truths, but instead to intimidate abortion providers in order to stop them from offering their services, with the goal of building Crutcher once called ‘an America where abortion may indeed be perfectly legal, but no one can get one.'”

“The idea that Jews in 1961 had an obligation to forgive Nazis is worth pondering.”

“This kind of heritage tourism is to ‘history’ what the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War was to history — a selective, distorted, but emotionally compelling story of the heroism of the sainted fathers (and mothers) of the past.”

“This moment reveals [Jimmy] Carter at his very best. It also reveals American conservatives at their venal worst — and provides one more precedent to help us understand and contend with their ongoing deformation of our democracy now.”

“Lawyers affiliated with the Reagan administration, like John Roberts, developed theories that made enforcing voting rights more difficult, and these theories began to hold sway in an increasingly conservative Supreme Court.”

“These allegations — of culpable silence or a ‘war on police’ — would be grave if they were not demonstrably false.”

“He’s ensnared the GOP Establishment in a classic Catch-22: It wants Trump voters — it can’t win elections without them — but doesn’t want Trump calling attention to what those voters actually believe.”

“Research by a group of scientists at Children’s Hospital in Boston using embryonic lung cells led to the 1954 development of the polio vaccine.”

“As a guy, I could go to many clinics locally that have all the machines that one would need, all these clinics as far as I know take Medicaid dollars, so you could go to any of those clinics to get any medical service you could.”

“Racism — like the constitutional persuasions sometimes practiced, wittingly or not, to defend it — never dies honestly.”