Onyx Lynx

New York Times obits.

1. American "right-wing" "Christianity" misses the Iron Age.

   In sum, it is much easier to extrapolate from the biblical worldview to the idea that a parent has the right to beat his child or withhold medical care, or that a teenage sex slave should be forced to bear a child, than to derive the idea that we have a responsibility to bring children into the world under the best of circumstances and to acknowledge their rights as individuals once they arrive. These are fundamentally post-biblical ideas, as is the notion that empowering women to delay or limit childbearing is a positive social good.

2. This is the 2,500th post!  

That would be "Determined Denial of Service," and I'm applying it to Indiana, whose governor signed a bill legalizing discrimination against gay people on religious grounds.

Now I've never quite understood this desperate need of businesses to discriminate against customers people who have different colors/genders/religions/ways of living.  Theodore Sturgeon suggested that humans need to feel superior and therefore need to feel that others are inferior, but that really has nothing to do with the transactional relationship:  I give you money, you take my money and part with the product or service, I take the product or service, and as long as there is no coercion or fraud involved, there should not be any problem.  (Hmmm, that almost sounds...libertarian.)

And yes, wedding planners and the like do have to work closely with the spouses-to-be, and may be made uncomfortable by organizing nuptials for people of the *gasp* same gender.  They would also be made uncomfortable by "Bridezillas," folks who intend to have liquor at the reception, and people for whom "jumping the broom" is part of the ceremony.  You'd think, what with the divorce rate, that these business people with religious scruples would refuse to deal with second-plus marriages unless the prior spouse was certified dead, but no.  The wedding industrial complex mostly recognized that there was money to be made, and money over time has trumped religious objections to much (does anyone refuse service to financiers or bankers on religious grounds?  Usury is specifically decried in the Bible.  "Illegitimate" persons?  Thieves?  Murderers?  Politicians Liars?  Those who disrespect their parents?  No sweat).

The bill seems to cover all businesses, though.

According to Melissa McEwan at Shakesville,

Although the Republican-controlled state legislature, nor the Republican governor, won't say it plainly, this reprehensible bill is their fuck-you to the federal government for thwarting their efforts to continue to ban same-sex marriage in Indiana. They want the right to make LGBTQIA Hoosiers second-class citizens, and they couldn't do it by banning same-sex marriage, so they'll do it this way.  [Emphasis added.]

Souls the size of walnuts. Anyway.  Repercussions have already begun.  Gen Con, a (huge) gaming convention, is talking about moving out after their contract expires in 2020, and has the support of the host city.  Salesforce is cancelling business trips to Indiana.  Other organizations, including the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) have objected forcefully to the law.  Southern Beale as usual gets right to the point:

Let me also say, if your religion requires you to be a bigoted asshole, then I have no use for your religion. Can you just imagine? Whatever happened to “Love one another as I have loved you”? Of course, it’s not about the Bible. It’s about belonging to a club that needs to breed hatred and fear of “the other” to justify its lack of cultural impact. You people are supposed to go out and be salt and light in the world, that’s your Great Commission, and yet all you can do is fight for the right of a bakery to not make a gay couple’s wedding cake.

Blessedly, there is the Open for Service campaign for non-bigot businesses (via Jean Ann Esselink at the New Civil Rights Movement, via skippy the bush kangaroo a comment at Making Light [my mistake]).  It would please me if service-to-all firms prospered and the discriminators went bankrupt, but that probably won't happen; the state of Indiana has economic problems that it's just made worse, and it will take a while to see that clearly.  But the NFL is watching the situation closely, and they moved the Super Bowl from Arizona in 1993 when that state's voters refused a Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.

ETA:  Tim Cook decries the law.  The NCAA is "concerned."

Text of the Bill.  In case.

Via Comrade Misfits:  Due to circumstances of politics and stuff, Ted Cruz has had to sign up for Obamacare (it's CNN and video plays at link):

Cruz denied that there was anything ironic about him going on Obamacare, saying he was simply following the law.

"I believe we should follow the text of every law, even laws I disagree with," Cruz told CNN. "It's one of the real differences -- if you look at President Obama and the lawlessness, if he disagrees with a law he simply refuses to follow it or claims the authority to unilaterally change."

After the publication of this story, Cruz advisers said there was nothing unusual about the senator signing up for insurance coverage through his employer. They argued that Obamacare has wiped out the individual market, leaving Cruz with few options.

Cruz said he will continue advocating for repealing the law.

Andy Borowitz has too much fun with this news.

(Thank you, Peter Gabriel.)

Rafael Edward (Ted) Cruz, a Republican Senator from Texas, has thrown his hat (no, not a sombrero) into the 2016 Presidential running, according to the Washington Post (by way of Shakesville).

(Yes, a cheap shot.  Trust me, there'll be worse, OK?)

So everyone is taking this seriously because mustn't upset the tea party someone has to start the horses.

Buried in the penultimate graf of the story is an innocent-looking sentence:

While he was born in Canada, two lawyers who represented presidents from both parties at the Supreme Court recently wrote in the Harvard Law Review that they think Cruz meets the constitutional standard to run.

This is actually somewhat important because Article II, Section 1, of the United States Constitution states

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.

And Senator Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta. That's in Canada. That large English/French-speaking country to the north? That's not and has never been part of the United States of America?  War of 1812?  Canada.  This "natural born" stuff has been stretched to cover overseas embassies, bases, protectorates, and territories, but not, so far, neighboring countries.

Of course, the Republicans could start now on annexation proceedings amending the Constitution to eliminate that requirement.  (I'm mildly surprised [not!] that doing that wasn't considered when Arnold Schwarzenegger was a rising Republican star.)  Although then they'd have to admit to lying about President Obama's birthplace.  Because they'd have to admit that being foreign-born was OK for Republicans (also that they can't find Hawai'i on a map, since they think it's in Africa somewhere).

Also, I don't think "He's the right kind of Hispanic" is going to sit all that well with non-Cuban Hispanics, some of whom have escaped from regimes as awful as Castro's.

ETA:  Southern Beale also noticed and has a suggestion.  Also, the full auditorium at Mr. Cruz's announcement at Liberty University was because attendance is mandatory.

You thought I was kidding about that, didn't you?

When you hear [Tom] Cotton call for the building of more and more prisons – by far the most expensive and least effective means of addressing poverty — or declare that food stamps (which feed roughly one in six of his fellow Arkansans) nurture a slothful underclass of criminals and drug addicts, something deeper is at work than the obvious level of dog-whistle racist pandering. He is also channeling the Victorian establishment’s ideology on poverty, virtually without alteration.

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon, reposted in AlterNet.

ETA:  Via Mercury Rising, Hermano Juancito on the same budget.

What have I been saying?

WHAT HAVE I BEEN SAYING?

...it’s clear as day that the actual intention here is to remove the main obstacle—filing paperwork—that prevents employers from telling you that you work 7 days a week or you lose your job.

Amanda Marcotte (yes, I know), Pandagon at Raw Story.  Wisconsin is only the beginning.  <Don Imus>WAAAAAAAAKKE UUUUUUUUUUPPP!!!!!!!</Don Imus>

Well, maybe a few.

An Orange County (of course) lawyer has proposed to submit an initiative to the voters of the State of California:

Declaring it is “better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God’s just wrath,” it would require that anyone who touches a person of the same gender for sexual gratification be put to death by “bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”

This is all fairly nutbar reactionary stuff, and, last I heard, murder and killing were against the rules of the religion allegedly being co-opted for this purpose.  Which is why I am not going to suggest that  somebody advocating (see what I did there?) this sort of extreme reaction is, perhaps, guilty in his heart of gay feelings; someone might shoot him.

It’s a simple question. Here’s a simple answer: The advertising industry doesn’t care what you want.[Emphasis in original]

The ads following one writer about and what happens when he tries to opt out.  Jeff Fox, State of the Net, reposted at AlterNet.

The ads that follow me around mostly don't relate to me, and I plan to keep it that way.  (We do not speak of the business whose ads kept turning up on all the news sites even though it has no local presence and sells nothing of interest to me.  As for the anti-Obama spots I've seen everywhere:  You got the wrong vempire.)  That's why I refuse to countenance AdWords and AdSense.  Although I'm thinking of cooking something up with CafePress...

Pi Day.

I'm going for coconut creme, myself.

(I don't expect to get the seconds right.  Tough.)

Yahrzeit

Father Seamus Genovese


ETA:  Also, Sir Terry Pratchett.

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection commands the sea level not to rise has an unwritten policy forbidding the use of the terms "global warming" and "climate change." Story (not written by Dave Barry) originally from the Miami Herald.

• The worshippers of Mars are offended:

  Sadly, it appears that MNU [MidAmerica Nazarene University] may have given into the furor and decided that a Christian clergyman preaching the peace the founder of the faith stood for is simply too controversial for their campus.

  The chaplain suggested that American Christians in particular are violence junkies. By Zaid Jilani, AlterNet.
  
• Daisy's Dead Air reports on the upstate South Carolina march commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights March in Selma.
• Yes, I have seen Selma.

Via Comrade Misfit, General Petraeus' plea bargain.

Disclaimer:  No Doctor Whos were harmed in the making of this post.

• "What ISIS Really Wants," the article that appeared in The Atlantic last month for the March issue, is long and, I believe, intended to frighten.  The scholar who provided some of the information has since explained what he meant.  (I saw it here -- Fred Clark makes a further point about extremism and perceived authenticity.) 
• Gordon Atkinson (formerly Real Live Preacher) has an irregular series of essays on Lent, of which this is the most recent (as of today, that is); last year's Lenten essays are here.  (I'd meant to post that link last year.  Better late than never.)  His spiritual journey is never less than fascinating.
• Racism 101.  ETA:
• "Why We Must Call White Supremacy By Its Name" by Jesse Curtis.
• "Addicted to White Victimology:  Artie Lange Doubles Down..."by Chauncey DeVega.
• Sponsors of California's now-voided Proposition 8 are not exempt from the state's campaign finance disclosure laws, said the US Supreme Court.
• Doubling down on stupid.  My own experience with this sort of thing is that I did not believe any of that stuff about President Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, or the dress until overwhelmed with the evidence (and confessions).  I blame years of Perry Mason et al.
• Olive oil falsification.  (via twistedchick at Dreamwidth)

  ...69% of all store-bought extra virgin olive oils in the US are probably fake. This study reported that the following brands failed to meet extra virgin olive oil standards:
  
  Bertolli
  Carapelli
  Colavita
  Filippo Berio
  Mazzola
  Mezzetta
  Newman’s Own
  Safeway
  Star
  Whole Foods
  Seeing brands that pride themselves on being healthy and natural like Newman’s Own and Whole Foods is very disappointing. However, it’s very likely that the fault goes back to the supplier.

• Honduras as libertarian "paradise" and why the Galt-goers aren't relocating there in droves.

Log Cabin Republicans chartered as official volunteer party organization in California.  Of course, not without a fight...

• Minnie Minoso, ballplayer (Chicago)
• Orrin Keepnews, jazz producer

Why the lies.

When Governor Walker replaced “the search for truth” with “meet the state’s workforce needs” in the charge to the University of Wisconsin, he did not make an error. He was articulating the principle that has driven Movement Conservatives since their earliest days: Facts and arguments can only lead Americans toward a government that regulates business and supports working Americans, and they must be squelched. The search for truth must be replaced by an ideology that preserves Christianity and big-business individualism. Religion and freedom for mega-business, Movement Conservatives insist, is what America is all about.

Heather Cox Richardson, Salon, reprinted at AlterNet