I am sure Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito perceives himself to be a moral person. Indeed, he sees his religious sect-specific morality as so important that he has dedicated his career to changing long-held legal precedent in the nation’s enforcement of societal order. But there is no doubt that Alito’s direct actions have spawned evil consequences from his rulings on… Read more »
We await the Supreme Court likely undoing decades of jurisprudence on the topic of women’s reproductive rights and we simultaneously see new state-by-state battles over LGBTQ+ rights. It has become obvious to me that our culture’s long insistence on binary choices on morality issues does not help us navigate Mother Nature’s (and democracy’s) love of continuum and complexity. Even among… Read more »
It has been three years since some major gun massacre or another (unfortunately they all run together these days) prompted me to write about the real math behind the “Great Replacement” hypothesis that again has Tucker Carlson, plus a teen killer in Buffalo, New York, and other Fox News hosts in a tizzy. It is time to revisit. In short,… Read more »
The recent controversy over a leaked Supreme Court opinion perhaps overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision highlights how even Supreme Court justices, when blinded by sectarian religious fervor, can get Ethics 101 wrong. In a pluralistic society, issues of public morality may overlap with issues of legal practice, but only in places like Taliban-controlled Afghanistan do judges make… Read more »
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds declared the Covid pandemic over in her state yesterday, saying the state’s feeble measures to contain the coronavirus and address hospital needs are “no longer feasible or necessary.” Meanwhile, many Iowa hospitals remained stretched to the max, relying on “traveler” staff and “locums” to maintain services. Reynolds has no apparent plans for preparing for any future… Read more »
The word olio survives in English usage, I suspect, because the New York Times crossword puzzle frequently resorts to using it when it needs three vowels, but not using an “e” as in the similarly-spelled synonym for margarine. The original olio was an Iberian stew consisting of “whatever’s around,” and thus today the word refers to any collection of barely… Read more »
Note: This post was previously published at the Iowa blog Bleeding Heartland. Before a planned international trip for a humanitarian non-governmental organization a few years ago, I received cholera and typhoid vaccinations as part of a set of several jabs administered by Iowa’s Polk County Health Department. Despite some transient ill effects, I survived to tell the tale, one more… Read more »
In Part One of this post I posited that “good Christians disagree” about important things for reasons heavily correlated to two 2000-year-old variants in the faith that still foster both diversity and division. When you envision God primarily as Michelangelo’s bearded white male on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and think of a mighty Christ “sitting on God’s right… Read more »
The leading Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, Josh Mandel, has already laid down a key marker for the 2022 election, saying on Twitter, “Evangelical Christians, Jewish conservatives and devout Catholics are our army.” I know so many people whom I would consider “good Christians” and they are of all denominational and political stripes. I also have met some really nasty… Read more »
An interesting tidbit from a recent DNA study documented by researchers in the Netherlands, translated for a general audience in Science News: Overall, as many as 12% of human pregnancies may start as multiple pregnancies, but under 2% carry to term, resulting in a vanishing twin. To think that a new science book can contribute positively to the hot-again issue… Read more »