Scientists say global warming isn’t happening. Scientists say human activities are unrelated to climate change. We hear that all the time, but we push back against it because it’s bad science. Yet it is also true, at least nominally. Scientists do say these things. Actual terminal-degree scientists. They may be scientists whose field of study has nothing to do with climate, and who thus aren’t any more qualified to discuss the topic than someone with a Ph.D. in literature, but... Read more

Who in 1965 would have dreamed that the stuff of Griswold v. Connecticut would be coming back to haunt us almost 50 years later, in a time when the parties to the original lawsuit probably imagined we would be wearing rocket belts and commuting to Mars? — Arthur Goldwag Yesterday, Congressional Republicans organized a public hearing on women’s reproductive health. No women were called on to testify. No doctors were called on to testify. And one of the old men... Read more

Go read Dahlia Lithwick, “Virginia’s Proposed Ultrasound Law Is an Abomination“: This week, the Virginia state Legislature passed a bill that would require women to have an ultrasound before they may have an abortion. Because the great majority of abortions occur during the first 12 weeks, that means most women will be forced to have a transvaginal procedure, in which a probe is inserted into the vagina, and then moved around until an ultrasound image is produced. Since a proposed... Read more

Is there something in the water in Concord? Even by the 21st-century standards of weird, offensive state legislative wackiness, New Hampshire’s Republican delegation stands out. First you had Republican state Rep. Harry Accornero and Republican state Rep. Susan DeLemus going full-birther, demanding that President Barack Obama be removed from the state ballot because they have secret knowledge that his birth certificate is fake — throwing a crazy tantrum when the state’s election commission rejected their proposal. Then you had Republicans... Read more

“Pusillanimus” means “lacking courage and resolution; marked by contemptible timidity.” I had to look that up. So Garry Wills has expanded my vocabulary. The rest of his New York Review of Books essay, “Contraception’s Con Men” is also educational: Pusillanimous Catholics — Mark Shields and even, to a degree, the admirable E. J. Dionne — are saying that Catholics understandably resent an attack on “their” doctrine (even though they do not personally believe in it). Omnidirectional bad-faith arguments have clustered... Read more

OK, third try. I’ve collected a bunch of bookmarks and links to various items on “women in the church.” But twice today I’ve sat down to type those in here as a kind of thematic link-dump, and then gotten angry thinking about how this whole “controversial” topic shouldn’t be controversial at all. And then I started writing an intro to the link-dump that turned into a post of its own and never got around to the link-dump. This is an... Read more

That’s the title of a post from Left Cheek: “Gender apartheid in the body of Christ,” in which he writes: You want to see a masculine Christianity? That’s easy! It’s all around us. It’s the current state of the American Church — a gender apartheid in the body of Christ. If that language sounds too harsh, consider that Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently said something just as blunt. “We have been excluding women,” Tutu told the world’s elite gathered in Davos,... Read more

There are those who might argue that religious views upholding male superiority, male-only leadership in religious posts and female subservience within the religion are simply a pretense for a pre-existing misogyny. The religious claims, in this view, are a pretext or an excuse, rather than a genuine belief derived from the faith itself. In this view, the religious arguments are an after-the-fact effort to rationalize the prior misogyny and obsession with power, control and dominance. I think it’s important to... Read more

… but I don’t know what that is. Merill Perlman sorts out something I needed to have sorted out. Something improvised as a temporary fix is “jury-rigged.” … Something that is “jerry-built,” though, is shoddily built, usually out of inferior materials. … To be fair, things can be “jury-rigged” and “jerry-built,” meaning temporary and lousy, and it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. But if you conflate the two phrases and making something “jerry-rigged” or “jury-built,” you’re guilty of idiom... Read more

Charles Colson remains one of the most cynically dishonest creatures in American politics. Evangelical Christians love the guy for his prison-conversion story, but he is not an honest man and should not be trusted. Charles Colson says things that aren’t true. On purpose. With intent to deceive. This is a matter of public record. Colson says things that he knows are not true. Colson says things that he knows are not true in order to mislead others into supporting his... Read more