• Brian Pellot writes about “Why I stopped saying America’s Pledge of Allegiance”: “Freedom of religion and freedom of expression die when we fail to guarantee freedom from coercion and the freedom to remain silent.”
I would add, of course, that requiring school children to recite a loyalty oath is the kind of creepy dystopian thing I enjoy in sci-fi movies but don’t wish to see in real life.
The only way to make the Pledge anything other than creepy is to do what the good citizens of Ferguson, Missouri, did at last night’s citizen council meeting. They shouted the last five words and didn’t stop, chanting “all, all, all, all, all …”
• “I’ve put together a list here of reasons I seriously question the cult of civility,” Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig writes. It’s a very good list. Read the whole thing. (Atrios puts it a bit more succinctly.)
Related: The old standby of Philippians 4:8 as a silencing tool in defense of TPTB. (Silencing anyone who questions the status quo is not true, honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report, virtuous or praiseworthy.)
• Gov. Tom Corbett’s Department of Environmental Protection has been vigilantly protecting us Pennsylvania residents from learning about the 209 “instances” in which fracking has affected the state’s drinking water.
• “Who has the right to take what God’s given a state?”
• “I can honestly tell you, as someone who’s been doing this for 20 years, that I’ve never seen someone who has a serious mental illness that went to a biblical counselor and didn’t actually get worse and get hurt. … I’ve never seen them get better.”
Important, disturbing long read from Kathryn Joyce on “The Rise of Biblical Counseling.”
The central figure in this story is Jay Adams, a guy who once wrote a book on theodicy which he titled a “Biblical Study of the So-Called Problem of Evil.” Ponder for a moment what it might be like to go for “counseling” to someone who dismisses human suffering as a “so-called” problem that exists to provide a foil for divine goodness. Thus, Calvinism.
• Ronald Reagan on Roots, in 1977:
The millions of admirers of the TV presentation of Roots didn’t include Ronald Reagan, who said, “Very frankly, I thought the bias of all the good people being one color and all the bad people being another was rather destructive.” He added that he was impressed by the huge audience the series attained, but “I didn’t know there was anyone who could stay home eight nights in a row.”
• Streaming today at Time.com: Dead Man’s Town — a Nashville tribute to Born in the USA. Holly Williams’ acoustic “No Surrender” is a lovely thing.
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