It turns out that the National Rifle Association maintains an official list of organizations and individuals whom it perceives as being anti-gun. The has been quickly dubbed far and wide as an ‘enemies list’. [Read more…]
NBC News released today a leaked copy it had obtained of the memo that the Obama administration has created that it claims justifies its murdering of anyone whom it considers its enemies, including its own citizens, anywhere in the world . According to the BBC: [Read more…]
For nonbelievers like me, one of the most irritating aspects of the US tax system is the tax-exemption given to churches under the section of the code known as 501(c)(3) that is meant to provide tax relief for organizations that improve the general welfare. This topic has been discussed before in the context of whether churches that overtly take political stands should continue to receive that benefit and I concluded that it was unlikely that the IRS or the courts would eliminate it. [Read more…]
I wrote last week about the religious alternatives to watching yesterday’s Super Bowl halftime show. For those who were not thrilled by the prospect of hearing testimonies by athletes or lessons from the Torah or dislike football entirely, I just heard that Animal Planet channel has for some years been counter-programing the Super Bowl with something called the Puppy Bowl that is apparently quite popular. [Read more…]
I wrote recently that Lawrence Wright had released what looks like an interesting and pretty thorough book on the Church of Scientology that is titled Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. In an interview, he describes some of the weird things that he discovered. What they do to dissidents and young people is awful. [Read more…]
Janson Wu is a staff lawyer with GLAD (Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders) who last year won the David Carliner Public Interest Award given by the American Constitution Society for his work for equality. He played a key role in persuading the New Hampshire legislature to pass marriage equality legislation in 2010 and more recently worked with a 12-year old trangender girl named Nicole Maines in beating back an attempt to create an exemption to Maine’s anti-discrimination laws that, if passed, would require trangender people to use the bathroom that matched their sex at birth. [Read more…]
The recent revelations of the cover-up of priestly abuse in the Los Angeles diocese by now-retired Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has resulted in him being ‘punished’ by the current archbishop Jose Gomez. However, it does not seem like much of a punishment to outsiders, consisting of him being supposedly ‘stripped of his official duties’. Since Mahony is already retired, it is not exactly clear what he loses. [Read more…]
In addition to the Boy Scouts, the National Football League may be the only major organization with a male membership that seems to think that there are no gay people in its ranks, even thought it should be obvious by now to even the dimmest bulb that gay people are present in every area of work and life and the only difference is whether the climate allows them to be open or not. But just as the Boy Scouts are beginning to take tentative steps towards acceptance of gays, so is the NFL. In fact, things are moving quite rapidly over there, with players from both the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers, the teams playing in today’s Super Bowl game, calling for equal treatment of gays. [Read more…]
The US government routinely invokes its right to keep things secret and the courts are loath to overrule them whenever the government wraps itself with the cloak of national security. For example, consider a recent ruling by a federal appeals court. [Read more…]