\u201cBut regardless, IT is going to HAPPEN<\/span>. So you\u2019re allowed to think about IT<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 \u201cFormer MAGA Judge Josh Kindred Finally Gets the Disbarment He so Richly Deserves<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m posting about this mainly to take issue with this comment from Kathryn Rubino\u2019s piece on Kindred\u2019s self-destruction: \u201cNot to tell the Federalist Society how to run its orientation sessions, but \u2018don\u2019t accept explicit photos from someone litigating in your courtroom\u2019 should really be on page one.\u201d<\/p>\n Right, as Rubino says you wouldn\u2019t think anybody would need<\/em> to be told not to do that. But since apparently some<\/em> people do need to be told not to do that, it should be on page one of the ethics manual.<\/p>\n Alas, however, page one is only one page long. And one page is not nearly long enough to list all the specific things that you would need to tell someone not to do if they\u2019re the kind of person who needs to be told specifically not to do that.<\/p>\n And even if space one page one were limitless, you would never have sufficient time or imagination to list and enumerate all of the many creatively awful things this kind of person would need to have listed and enumerated for them. You can never come up with enough rules to govern the behavior of someone who has no principles.<\/p>\n I am not a lawyer, and my objection here comes from my theological outlook \u2014 the Isaiah\/Jesus\/Paul view that looks for overarching and underlying summaries of all of the law and the prophets in a Golden Rule\/\u201dlove is the fulfillment of the law\u201d kind of way. But it seems like this would also have important applications for a federal district judge seeking to interpret, say, the 10th or the 14th Amendments.<\/p>\n And also, while I am not a lawyer, I apparently was lawyer-ly<\/em> when I was a little kid, which is why my mother cut out an old Dennis the Menace cartoon and hung it on our refrigerator with a magnet for years. It showed Dennis sulking as he was being made to sit in the corner as punishment, angrily insisting that \u201cNobody ever SAID I couldn\u2019t paint the toilet bowl purple!\u201d That was her way of pointing out that she couldn\u2019t possibly list all of the rules on \u201cpage one\u201d that would need to be listed there if I insisted on being the kind of person who required all of the rules to be listed for me. Lesson learned (eventually).<\/p>\n \u2022 Ryan Burge frets about \u201cthe Political Divide Between Mainline Clergy and Laity<\/a>.\u201d Kinda dumb to be doing this for free when groups like IRD get tons of right-wing foundation money for covering this beat.<\/p>\n That piece is full of gee-whiz graphs designed to illustrate his superlative adjectives \u2014 \u201chuge,\u201d \u201cstriking,\u201d \u201can absolute chasm.\u201d This is how his graphs and analysis characterize data like this: \u201cAmong Episcopalians, 35% of members are Republicans compared to just 7% of their pastors.\u201d<\/p>\n Shocking. Now graph this: One third of all white evangelicals insist that abortion should be legal in most circumstances. That\u2019s a consistent finding over the last four decades of polling on the issue. Compare that with the percentage of white evangelical clergy willing to say that publicly (0%) and with the percentage of white evangelicals whose paychecks come from evangelical institutions who would be allowed to agree with that stance on the record (also 0%).<\/p>\n Seems like a huger, more striking, absolute chasm to me.<\/p>\n \u2022 \u201cNip, Pray, Tuck: Christians are clashing over whether faith and fillers (and much more) can ever align<\/a>,\u201d by Avery Stone.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a Christian living under grace,\u201d the 35-year-old says. \u201cEverything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. When we get plastic surgery, we shouldn\u2019t be doing that on our own. We have to talk to God first.\u201d<\/p>\n Take, for example, that God allowed Dupra to undergo an upper blepharoplasty \u2014 a surgical procedure that removes excess skin from the upper eyelids this year. Days after recovery and still swollen, stitched, and bandaged, she posted a TikTok for her 946,000 followers, breaking down her decision with her faith in mind. \u201cMy eyelids were, like, hanging down; I felt like 35 was hitting me hard,\u201d she tells me of her mindset. \u201cI thought, \u2018I do a lot of livestreams where I preach the gospel.\u2019 Maybe he\u2019s fine with me having a little more confidence in front of the camera.\u201d<\/p>\n Put another way: \u201cI\u2019m advancing the kingdom,\u201d she says of getting an upper bleph. \u201cBut how am I advancing the kingdom with my butt?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This piece may make you boggle a bit at the notion that getting plastic surgery is seen by some as a means of \u201cadvancing the kingdom,\u201d but we need to take a few steps back from that to first consider how boggling and boggled it is that these folks first regard proclamation evangelism via social media to be the entirety of \u201cadvancing the kingdom\u201d and all that is missed and mixed and messed by that.<\/p>\n \u2022 The title for this post comes from, among other places, \u201cFree Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow<\/a>,\u201d by Funkadelic.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2025\/11\/Menace.jpg\")
Kindred got a lifetime appointment to a federal district court seat in the first Trump administration, but he sex-pested his way out of that job in just a few years with a host of ethics violations. And since those violations involved lawyers with cases before his court, some of those cases will now have to be reconsidered.<\/p>\n