And then via Stephen Curry on Twitter I learn that Priss Choss has a veto on legislation that might affect his private interests. Say what? No really; he does. I don’t know how I managed to miss this last October.

Ministers have been forced to seek permission from Prince Charles to pass at least a dozen government bills, according to a Guardian investigation into a secretive constitutional loophole that gives him the right to veto legislation that might affect his private interests.

Since 2005, ministers from six departments have sought the Prince of Wales’ consent to draft bills on everything from road safety to gambling and the London Olympics, in an arrangement described by constitutional lawyers as a royal “nuclear deterrent” over public policy. Unlike royal assent to bills, which is exercised by the Queen as a matter of constitutional law, the prince’s power applies when a new bill might affect his own interests, in particular the Duchy of Cornwall, a private £700m property empire that last year provided him with an £18m income. [Read more…]

A horrible item out of Thailand a couple of days ago.

A Thai man in his 60s who became known as “Uncle SMS” after he was convicted of defaming Thailand’s royal family in mobile phone text messages, has died while serving his 20-year prison term, his lawyers said on Tuesday.

A 20-year prison term. For a guy in his 60s. For “defaming” a royal. It’s beyond belief in its brutality and pettiness.

Plus he was ill. Cherry on the sundae, that is.

The case of Amphon Tangnoppakul, a grandfather who had suffered from mouth cancer, drew attention to Thailand’s severe lese-majesty laws last November when he received one of the heaviest-ever sentences for someone accused of insulting the monarchy.

God damn human beings, with their hateful little taboos and idols and pieties coupled with enormous punishments and revenges and extortions. So he “insulted” the monarchy; so the hell what. Get over yourselves.

Amphon’s cause of death was not known, but he had complained of stomach pains on Friday and was transferred to a correctional department prison, his lawyer, Anon Numpa, said.

It was not immediately clear when he died, but Amphon’s wife learned the news on Tuesday during a visit to the Bangkok prison where he was being held, Anon said.

Oh, that’s nice. That’s a nice touch. They couldn’t let her know, they had to wait until she turned up for a visit.

Amphon was arrested in August 2010 and accused of sending four text messages to a government official that were deemed offensive to the queen. He denied sending them, claiming he did not  know how to use the SMS function on his telephone.

He wept during his court proceedings, saying: “I love the king.”…Before his arrest, Amphon had lived in retirement with his wife, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren in a rented room in Samut Prakan province on the outskirts of Bangkok.

In other words he was dirt-poor. Well done royal family of Thailand. We all think tremendously highly of you now, you can be sure.

Check out #libelreform on Twitter to find Simon Singh, Ben Goldacre, Richard Wilson, David Allen Green, Padraig Reidy, Sense About Science and all the rest of that crowd – the geek-political interface, as Ben calls it – high-fiving the Queen’s speech mention of libel reform. Booya.

Index on Censorship says booya.

Index is delighted to announce that thanks to our Libel Reform Campaign, the Queen has announced a defamation bill in the next parliament

This will be the first wholesale attempt at reform since 1843 and an amazing achievement for the campaign and its 60,000 supporters. The bill will open the way to ending libel tourism and protecting free expression for journalists, writers, bloggers and scientists around the world. However, there is still work to be done and we will carry on fighting to make sure that the detail in the final Bill will truly deliver reform.

Yay campaign. Yay 60,000 supporters. Yay geek power.

Over the coming months, the Libel Reform Campaign which represent the efforts of English PEN, Sense about Science and Index will continue to fight for:

• a public interest defence so people can defend themselves unless the claimant can show they have been malicious or reckless.
• a strong test of harm that strikes out claims unless the claimant can demonstrate serious and substantial harm and they have a real prospect of vindication.
• a restriction on corporations’ ability to use the libel laws to silence criticism.
• provisions for online hosts and intermediaries, who are not authors nor traditional publishers.

Sign the petition. I thought it was for UK citizens only, but it’s not (and it shouldn’t be, since libel tourism is a global threat, not just a UK one), so I signed it.

Wunderkind Ross Douthat has a book out, called Bad Religion. If the review in The New Republic is any guide, it’s about what you’d expect from Douthat.

Most troubling of all are the mistakes that bear directly on his central argument. And what is that argument? “A chart of the American religious past would look like a vast delta, with tributaries, streams, and channels winding in and out, diverging and reconverging—but all of them fed, ultimately, by a central stream, an original current, a place where the waters start. This river is Christian orthodoxy.” In the 1950s, Reinhold Niebuhr and Bishop Fulton Sheen carried the arguments for orthodoxy while Bing Crosby and Karl Malden brought the presbyterate onto the Hollywood screen and Charlton Heston came down from Sinai with God’s Holy Law. Everyone went to Church and understood the value of chastity. Then came the 1960s and liberal theology, the pill, and Vietnam, and America went to hell.

Oh for the days of yore, when everyone went to church and nobody was unorthodox.

Tom Flynn has a good word for civil unions as opposed to marriage.

What secular humanists especially liked about civil unions was that they would be a wholly new institution, conceived entirely within the domain of secular law. They’d be free of matrimony’s tangled roots as both a legal and a religious construct, and they’d be free of matrimony’s historical baggage as an institution for transferring what amounted to ownership of the bride from her father to her husband. In twenty or twenty-five years, the thinking went, a robust form of civil union would be legal for same-sex couples across the land.

What was wrong with that vision? Today, many activists view civil unions as insufficient, a second-class “gay ghetto” institution that still separates same-sex couples from more favored opposite-sex couples. But don’t judge so quickly. Let’s jump back to fifteen years ago, and consider what many civil-union supporters (myself included) expected to happen next. Once robust civil unions were the law of the land for same-sex couples, this thinking went, the next step would be legal activism by opposite-sex couples seeking a way to give their unions the protection of law without having to resort to traditional matrimony with all its negatives.

I suppose that’s the real root of the horror of same-sex marriage to the reactionaries: it’s marriage between equals, and that’s not real marriage.

Depressing, isn’t it. I bet it’s true though. Straight marriage is reassuring because whatever those pesky feminists may say, everybody knows that the husband gets top billing. Non-straight marriage is terrifying because it means that inequality doesn’t have to be built into marriage.

They should get over it though. There are plenty of inequality-enforcers still operating and flourishing, and straight marriage will still be around to remind everyone of the hierarchy.

Wait…

Candace Chellew-Hodge is the founder/editor of Whosoever: An Online Magazine for GLBT Christians and a Christian pastor. She wrote a post about Teresa MacBain for Religion Dispatches.

MacBain recently attended the American Atheist’s convention in Maryland, where she came out as an Atheist pastor and has found a home in a new coalition helping such disbelieving clergy called “The Clergy Project: “a safe haven for active and former clergy who do not hold supernatural beliefs.”

As a member of the clergy, I totally get it, but what I think is wrong with this situation is the false dichotomy at play here. Specifically, either you’re a Christian or you’re an Atheist. [Read more…]

Justin interviewed the “crack that wrist” “no no no sweetheart, you will walk like a girl and smell like a girl” pastor.

Justin: Why do you have signs telling your members how to vote?

Sean Harris: Oh because we believe that this issue is not a political issue, we believe that this is a bible issue; we’re not endorsing any candidates. You won’t find that anywhere in this church. But this marriage issue, as far as we’re concerned, is a bible issue.

So that’s why they tell their members how to vote…despite their tax exemption.

Justin also extracted one key bit about exactly how a parent is supposed to hit a child. Not with a rod. Oh god no. But with an instrument. That’s quite different.

This time Greta talked to Roy Speckhardt, who is Executive Director of the American Humanist Association and on the SCA board, about the hiring of Edwina Rogers and what she’s been saying and how it’s all panning out.

He said she had a particular combination of skills and experience that no other candidate had. I can easily believe that (and see it as a compelling reason to hire her, and so on). Skills and experience matter; no question.

But. There is a problem, nevertheless. Greta sums it up in one question:

…were there any concerns raised during the hiring process having to do with the fact that, you know, frankly, for several years, she’s been working for a party that has been working very much against the values of most people in the secular and atheist movement, you know, not just in terms of the separation of church and state, but on issues such as gay rights, issues such as, you know, abortion rights, birth control rights, etc.? [Read more…]

Jesus and Mo are appalled that witchcraft and Druidry are on the curriculum for Religious Education in Cornwall. They are not proper religions, Jesus stiffly says. He’s reading Cristina Odone’s recent column in the Telegraph.

I’ve already mocked that column briefly, but why not mock it again at a more leisured pace. These things repay doing thoroughly.

Fear of being judgmental is so ingrained today that no one dares distinguish between occult and Christian values, the tarot and the Torah, the animist and the imam. [Read more…]