Leonard Pitts on the difference between religious liberty and simple intolerance.
[Kim] Davis... made international headlines for her refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. She had, should it need saying, not a legal leg to stand on, the Supreme Court having ruled in June that states may not bar such couples from marrying. On Thursday, Davis was jailed for contempt. The thrice-divorced clerk had said she was acting upon “God’s authority” and fighting for “religious liberty.”
The political right has long had a genius for wrapping noxious notions in code that sounds benign and even noble. The “Patriot Act,” “family values,” and “right to work.” are fruits of that genius. “Religious liberty” is poised to become their latest masterpiece, the “states’ rights” of the battle for a more homophobic America. ...
Of course, like all good code, this one hides its true meaning in the banality of its words. ... “religious liberty” as defined by Davis and her supporters is about what happens in the wide world beyond those parameters, about whether there exists a right to deny ordinary, customary service and claim a religious basis for doing so. And there does not.
As usual, Pitts does an excellent job of slicing away the weasel words and coming to the core of the issue.
Who would welcome a future where you couldn’t just enter a place and expect service but, rather, must read the signs to determine if it caters to people of your sexual orientation, marital status, religion or race?
The "religious liberty" that Davis and her ilk seek is nothing more than the permission to be be prejudiced – a spiritual "get out of treating people fairly" card. And that's something we must not issue.
Now come on in. I picked up some donuts on the way over, and there's coffee brewing...
Dana Milbank finds two scofflaws.
What Kim Davis did was troubling. What Ted Cruz did was downright alarming.
Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky, refused to issue marriage certificates to gay couples. She said she was operating “under God’s authority,” but she now sits in jail for ignoring federal authority.
Davis, at least, is facing the consequences of her actions. Not so Cruz, senator from Texas and Republican presidential candidate.
“Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny,” he said. “Today, for the first time ever, the government arrested a Christian woman for living according to her faith. . . . I stand with Kim Davis. Unequivocally.”
Tyranny? Our system of government gives the Supreme Court final say over constitutional matters, and, though Cruz doesn’t like it, the court ordered states to recognize same-sex marriages. In fact, the high court specifically declined to give relief to Davis, and the federal judge who ordered her jailed for contempt of court is a George W. Bush appointee and son of a former Republican senator.
In an interview, Davis' husband said "just because five Judges on the Supreme Court say it's so, that doesn't make it law." I did not throw something at my television, but I wanted to. The difference between what Kim Davis is doing and what Ted Cruz is doing? Cruz is both more dangerous and more cowardly.
Colbert King on the blowback from the Iran deal.
Congressional votes on the nuclear accord are still days away, but now is the time to focus on the damage that’s being done. Left unchecked, the effects could be lasting. ...
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who opposes the deal, was lampooned on the Daily Kos Web site as a traitorous rodent.
Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.), who also opposed the nuclear deal, said she has “been accused of being treacherous, treasonous, even disloyal to the United States.”
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who announced his support for the deal, was called, on his Facebook page, “a kapo: a Jew who collaborated with Nazis in the World War II death camps. One writer said Nadler had ‘blood on his hands.’ Another said he had ‘facilitated Obama’s holocaust,’ ” the Times’s Jonathan Weisman and Alexander Burns reported.
That traitorous rodent lampooning from DK that was raised as the equivalent of the Nazi-sympathizer threats leveled toward Nadler? That would be
the edition of Animal Nuz, in which Schumer is shown as a woodchuck. Which, if you're wondering, is in fact a rodent. I looked it up.
The New York Times looks at the nature of segregation in the 21st century.
Fifty years after the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development — and nearly that long after the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — the fight against the interlinked scourges of housing discrimination and racial segregation in America is far from finished. Economic isolation is actually growing worse across the country, as more and more minority families find themselves trapped in high-poverty neighborhoods without decent housing, schools or jobs, and with few avenues of escape.
This did not happen by accident. It is a direct consequence of federal, state and local housing policies that encourage — indeed, subsidize — racial and economic segregation.
Rather than invest in protecting our cities, we actively provided aid to people who ran away. In the process we distorted the form and economies of both cities and the nation.
Sara Hirschhorn talks about the threat of home-grown terrorists.
On July 31, in the West Bank village of Duma, 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh was burned alive in a fire. All available evidence suggests that the blaze was a deliberate act of settler terrorism. More disturbingly, several of the alleged instigators, currently being detained indefinitely, are not native-born Israelis — they have American roots. ...
After years of impunity for settlers who commit violent crimes, Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet, has now supposedly cracked down by rounding up a grand total of four youths believed to be connected to recent acts of settler terrorism — three of whom trace their origins to the United States.
Strange. I don't think I've heard a single mention of these American born terrorists on the evening news.
Kathleen Parker carries on the good fight of the reasonable Republican vs the modern GOP.
Donald Trump has a point when he talks about the need for immigrants to learn English.
“That’s how we assimilate,” he says. Which is true, as any visitor to Miami’s Little Havana has observed.
You can spend an entire day in this mostly Cuban section of the city and hear nary a word of English. Many never bothered to learn English because, mainly, they didn’t have to. They’ve gotten by just fine in their tiny nation within a city.
... To Trump and those he appeals to, these population trends pose an existential threat to the country. A nation divided by language is a nation divided.
Yes. But the trouble is that the people that Trump appeals to appear to be more than a loony handful. For the moment at least, they're a loony plurality of the GOP, and a frighteningly high percentage of the nation.
Bruce Bartlett provides the comedy relief of the season.
It’s safe to say that virtually all political professionals think Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is doomed. The odds of him winning the Republican nomination are long, and the odds of him winning the general election are nonexistent, they say. The key reason is that Trump’s campaign is based on alienating Latinos, a large and fast-growing voter bloc, by supporting the deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants and building a wall along the border with Mexico to prevent further emigration. If the eventual Republican nominee needs 47 percent of the Latino vote to win the general election — the threshold set by two political scientists in a study for Latino Decisions — what chance does Trump have?
But if Trump could replace Latino votes with those of another large minority group that traditionally votes Democratic, he might have a fighting chance at victory. And even without changing his message, black voters could be that group.
Donald Trump, who in the most recent polls has a -51% favorability with Hispanic voters need not worry. He can replace them with black voters! With whom, by the way, Trump has a -48% favorability in the latest poll. Hillary Clinton has a +40% favorability with Hispanics and a +68% favorability with African-Americans.
But hey, Bartlett is convinced that all it will take for Donald to win is to convince blacks that the biggest threat they face is another underprivileged minority group. Bartlett must think that message is an easy sell. After all, Republicans have been convincing working class whites that blacks are their problem for decades.
Zach Handlen with a recap of the best episode of the most profoundly challenging show on TV.
Tonight’s story had Rick and Morty shrinking down to investigate the micro-verse Rick created to power his ship battery. Over the course of the story, multiple people (or aliens, whatever) die, and each death is presented as both a horrific event and a great joke. You can’t separate the two ideas. ... There are reasons why all this is funny, and why Rick and Morty’s journey deeper and deeper into the micoverse battery wormhole is funny, but what’s really striking is how the show manages to treat gruesome death as both a punchline and a legitimately impactful event, and how both sides work together to enhance the other.
... What makes Rick such a fascinating anti-hero is that the more we see of the realities of this show, the less he seems like an “anti-hero” at all. Morty’s constant lectures about moral behavior aren’t a necessary balance to Ricks’ amoral behavior. They’re more a way to question the value of morality in an existence where life can literally end at any second.
Do I honestly think that a thirty minute cartoon that started as drunken pastiche of
Back to the Future is the most profound bit of entertainment in the nation at the moment? Yes. Yes, I do. And this episode in particular encapsulates what makes
Rick and Morty such a fabulously watchable moral horror show. Not only does Rick's every action poke holes in the very notion of acceptable behavior, the writing never fails to honor what's been established about the characters, it rarely drops a crumb of information without later incorporating it into the story line. Even the "B" story line in the latest episode is filled with its own set of ethical quandaries that leave you both laughing and squirming uncomfortably. By the time we establish that "Summer is safe," you'll be as glassy-eyed as the character. What I'm saying here is... I like the show.