In another sign of desperation at the increasing secularization of society that is resulting in religion being relegated to its proper sphere of the private domain, the legislature of North Carolina is proposing a bill that would allow the state to declare an official religion as well as “nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide”. The bill reads in part: [Read more…]
Kate Sheppard wrote last year about Mildred and Richard Loving, the couple whose 1967 case before the US Supreme Court ended forever the restrictions on inter-racial marriage in the US.
Even as they changed America, the Lovings were never a household name. After getting married in Washington, DC, in June 1958, they simply returned to their home in Central Point, Virginia. Mildred was unaware, she said, of her state’s “Racial Integrity Act,” a 1924 law forbidding interracial marriage—although she later added that she thought her husband knew about it but didn’t figure they’d be persecuted. [Read more…]
Stephen Colbert does an analysis of the GOP’s new report on why they think they lost the last election and what they plan to do about it. One strategy is to use celebrities to court the youth vote and Colbert and suggests some names of conservative celebrities that will be surefire hits with the young. [Read more…]
In his search for a ‘grand bargain’ on the budget, president Obama has repeatedly signaled his willingness to cut earned benefits such as Social Security, a long-standing goal of the oligarchy. The way it is proposed is to replace the current Consumer Price Index or CPI, the current way of measuring the rate of inflation, with something called the ‘chained CPI‘, which would have the effect of lowering the reported rate of inflation. This is important because Social Security payments (as well as disabled veterans benefits and food stamps) are tied to the rate of inflation so lowering the ‘official’ rate would result in reduced payments to all those groups. [Read more…]
The Church of the Latter Day Saints has very similar views to the Catholic Church on homosexuality and along with it seems to be determined to try and hold back the tide of approval of same sex marriage that is sweeping the country. You may recall that it was one of the strongest backers of California’s Proposition 8 initiative, pouring money and personnel into getting that measure passed. [Read more…]
Once again I had the experience of talking with a steadfast ‘liberal’ Obama supporter and we got into the issue of whether the president had the right to order the deaths of people without any due process. It was extraordinary the lengths he went to to say that Obama must have set up this extremely careful system to make sure that only guilty people are targeted, even though he had no evidence whatsoever to make such an assertion. He said that we had to give Obama the benefit of the doubt and that if there was the occasional mistake and an innocent person died, it must be due to faulty information that he received from others. [Read more…]
I fully expected to see The Daily Show and The Colbert Report devote considerable time to the oral arguments on same-sex marriage before the US Supreme Court and they did not disappoint. Here they are. [Read more…]
In Sri Lanka, a poor person who gets arrested on suspicion of a crime can expect to be beaten up by the police in an effort to extract a confession. But better off people or those who might have connections to politically powerful people suffer no such assaults because the police are adept at recognizing such people. This is pretty well known and is seen as unexceptional. [Read more…]
Jonathan Chait writes that the opponents of same-sex marriage see the writing on the wall, that they have lost the battle in the public mind and likely in the courts too and that some of them are now looking for ways to change their stance without looking too opportunistic while others want to avoid being targeted as bigots. [Read more…]
Noam Chomsky is one of the world’s great public intellectuals.
Growing up in Sri Lanka, I would find his articles and essays in the mainstream media quite regularly. But when I first came to the US in 1975, I found him completely absent from the major print and TV media and discovered that his writings were confined to niche publications. This is of course because the Vietnam war galvanized Chomsky from being a towering figure in the field of linguistics into also being a severe critic of injustices everywhere, especially of his own government. In addition, he has shown how the mainstream media in the US has been complicit in the crimes committed by the US government and those of its client states. [Read more…]