New name, same old crap

OneNewsNow reports that the Alliance Defense Fund, whose defense of bigotry and discrimination has suffered serious setbacks in recent years, is hoping to win some new support by adopting a new name. And in the best conservative Christian tradition, they’ve decided to pick a name that completely misrepresents what it is that they actually do.

The new name is Alliance Defending Freedom — but president and CEO Alan Sears tells OneNewsNow the group’s purpose remains the same.

“Defending religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family. Only the name has changed,” says Sears.

“The change is to help more people easily understand the work that we do and why it matters…”

You know, that kind of reminds me of another C. S. Lewis quote.

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So will Christians quit using the Internet now?

This strikes me as mind-bogglingly welcome news:

Google is stepping up its activism on gay rights issues in nations with anti-homosexuality laws on the books, a company official announced Saturday as he kicked off Google’s new “Legalize Love” campaign.

The campaign will focus on countries like Singapore, where certain homosexual activities are illegal, and Poland, which has no legal recognition of same-sex couples.

Whether this is motivated by genuine humanitarianism or crass public relations, Google deserves major props for recognizing which side is the right side to be on, and for going beyond the passive approach of standing on the sidelines and nodding their heads when people talk about gay rights.

Now they just need to set up a PC recycling program for all the conservative bigots who will be throwing away their computers now that the Internet has come out.

NSA: It would violate your privacy to report how many privacy violations we’re committing.

The surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won’t tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up by the agency as part of its sweeping new counterterrorism powers. The reason: it would violate your privacy to say so.

via NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say if We Spied on You | Danger Room | Wired.com.

PA Christians continue to flout the law

A lot of people have a fundamental misconception about the First Amendment, stemming from the phrase “church and state”—they think that as long as you don’t favor any particular individual church, you can establish religion as much as you want. Even if you’re a state legislator.

At least two recent Pennsylvania House of Representatives sessions have opened with sectarian Christian prayers — those exclusive to Christianity as opposed to general prayers — despite many surrounding legal issues and scrutiny from at least one prominent national organization concerned with the mixing of religion and government

The First Amendment states that Congress (and by extension the states as well) shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. As individual citizens, of course, state lawmakers are perfectly free to pray as much or as little as they like to whoever or whatever they like. In their capacity as lawmakers, however, they are prohibited from exploiting their position of power for the purpose of establishing religion. It’s not a hard point to grasp, and in fact I don’t think it’s any lack of understanding that prevents them from keeping their behavior within the bounds of law. It’s simply that they do not respect the law itself.

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“Liberty Institute” unclear on what “establishment” means

The Liberty Institute, a self-described “nonprofit legal group dedicated to defending and restoring religious liberty across America,” is asking a Texas district court to dismiss a lawsuit against the Wood County Commissioners Court for opening their public meetings with prayer, and for displaying the motto “In God We Trust.”

“Higher courts have already determined that legislative prayers and our nation’s national motto are constitutional,” said Jeff Mateer, General Counsel of Liberty Institute. “Our nation has a longstanding tradition of opening governmental meetings with prayer as well as publicly acknowledging the role of God in our governmental institutions. Such traditions and acknowledgments do not violate the First Amendment.”

In other words, we have a long-established history of putting religion in government, and therefore we have not violated the First Amendment prohibition against establishing religion in government. And in related news, there’s no racism in America because we have a long history of preferential treatment for whites.

via MarketWatch.

Second-degree terrorism

Over at Pharyngula, PZ has a nice wrap-up of the debate between Bruce Schneier and Sam Harris on the topic of whether or not we ought to implement a 2-tiered screening system that subjects “Muslims or anyone who looks Muslim” to extra scrutiny at airports. Bruce points out some very good reasons why this is a bad idea, but there’s one somewhat tangential argument that he doesn’t mention. The biggest problem with screening for Muslims at the airport is that some of our biggest terrorists aren’t at the airport. They’re in the media, in Congress, and in the White House.

Of course, I’m not talking about first-degree terrorism, i.e. blowing things up and killing people directly. I’m talking about second-degree terrorism: keeping people in a constant state of fear in order to manipulate them. We’ve had going on 12 years of being told that we need to voluntarily surrender our liberties and constitutional rights because—gasp—there’s bad guys out there. And yes, there are, but there always have been. Our problem isn’t the terrorism that attacks us with bombs and guns, our problem is the terrorism that attacks us with legislation and unwarranted spying and other clandestine, illegal activities hidden behind the autocratic dictum of “state secrets.”

Bruce summed it up well:

But perhaps most importantly, we should refuse to be terrorized. Terrorism isn’t really a crime against people or property; it’s a crime against our minds. If we are terrorized, then the terrorists win even if their plots fail. If we refuse to be terrorized, then the terrorists lose even if their plots succeed.

Unless and until we stand up and refuse to be terrorized, unless and until we stop cowering and bleating like sheep every time a politician or media personality cries “security!”, these abuses of our liberty will continue to get worse. “Maximum security” is a prison, not a Utopia.

Improving the pledge

Maybe you’ve seen this, or even participated in it: the occasion is a public meeting of the local PTA, school board, town council, or what have you, and someone gets up and leads everyone in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Everyone, that is, except the local atheist/agnostic, who stands there quietly but visibly NOT reciting the pledge, in silent protest over the addition of the words “under God.” He or she might also object to the whole idea of a loyalty oath on general principles, but let me skip over that for the moment, because I want to zero in on the words “under God,” and suggest a way we can make a huge improvement.

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Who’s attacking marriage?

You hear a lot from the religious right about how marriage is under attack and how Christians need to band together to defend marriage. And yet, nobody is really attacking people’s right to get married—except people like Jayman.

I don’t view marriage as a civil right (i.e., it is not like the right to life, the right to free speech, and the like).

Pardon me whilst I attach my own Defense of Marriage Amendment to that particular argument.

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Defending bad definitions

I got a lot of good comments on yesterday’s post about the definition of marriage, but not everybody was happy with my description. In particular, Jayman777 wants to take me to task.

It makes sense, therefore, to define marriage in terms of what the relationship between those individuals is and/or should be.

Which is it? What marriage is or what marriage should be?

I think he’s missing an important point here. There are many definitions of marriage, some good and some bad, and some of those definitions describe what marriage is, and some describe what marriage ought to be. By what definition of “marriage” has Newt Gingrich had 3 wives? By the definition of what marriage is, or the definition of what marriage should be? By what definition of marriage did King Solomon have 300 wives (and 600 concubines)? Is marriage a union of one man and up to 900 women? Should it be? Well, we could talk, but the point is, if you have a definition of what marriage is, that does not preclude you from having a different definition of what marriage should be.

That’s why it’s silly to talk about anyone “changing THE definition of marriage.” There is no one, single, exclusive definition that covers all the cases. Even in purely heterosexual relationships there’s frequently (if not inevitably) a gap between what it is and what people think/want/expect it to be.

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Not all definitions of marriage are equal

The other day I was listening to yet another Christian conservative parrot the tired mantra about how liberals are trying to change the definition of marriage. My first thought was that if marriage equality changes your definition of marriage, you’ve been using a bad definition of marriage. And that got me thinking about the various definitions of marriage, and how they compare with one another.

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