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It was about a week ago that we saw the ruling throwing out California's Prop 8; that decision has now been appealed, and we will see, at some point in the future, how the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals handles the matter.
A couple of days later, I had a story up that walked through the ruling, describing the tactics used by the Prop 8 proponents, which, in the opinion of the Judge who looked at the evidence, were basically to try to scare Californians into thinking that gay people, once they're able to get gay married, will somehow now be free to evangelize your kids and make them gay, too.
In the course of answering comments on the several sites where the story is up, I noticed that there were those who felt the Bible should be guiding our thinking here...that if it did, we would be better off than where we are today, with all those immoral gay people running around free to do all those immoral gay things.
This led me to an obvious question: are those who have been using the Bible as a sort of "divining rod" to figure out who is immoral and who is not...actually any good at it?
Paired with Vermont because our sample size is too small as a stand-alone, we are, according to the Pew Forum, the least religious state in the nation. In two categories, "Importance of Religion," and "Belief in God," we rank dead last.
(I find it fascinating that we horribly unbelieving Granite Staters are also paired with Vermont in our achievement to allow committed, loving couples to be married, but I digress.)
I think the most obvious political ramification of this is on the GOP side for the 2012 primary. For example, presuming Facebook Governor Palin will come here without first collecting 100 grand, will she decide to modulate her patently fundamentalist beliefs?
Or, does T-Paw gain any here by visiting us while concurrently telling Newsweek: "Well, you know I'm an evangelical Christian. I believe that God created everything and that he is who he says he was. The Bible says that he created man and woman; it doesn't say that he created an amoeba and then they evolved into man and woman."
And on a non-political note: what's also so interesting about the Pew ranking is that one of the things I most like about living in Northern New England is the decency and good-natured civility of the people and the communities here. The quotidian goodness of small town New Hampshire life manifests more of what I learned at church than that of other places I've lived.
Yesterday State Democratic Party Chairman Raymond Buckley called on NHGOP Chairman John H. Sununu and Republican Legislators to support an amendment to the marriage equality bill which would protect religious freedom. But today John H. Sununu took to the airwaves and told WGIR AM listeners that the amendment to provide additional religious protections is "trivial."
"The amendment to the marriage equality bill goes a long way to protect religious freedom, but John Sununu has chosen politics over the rights of religious organizations and has even gone so far as to call their rights "trivial." Do Republican leaders really want to be on record opposing protections for churches and clergy?" said New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Raymond Buckley.
During the course of the debate surrounding marriage equality John H. Sununu referred to the legislation as "radical" while polls conducted at the same time made clear that 55 percent of all New Hampshire residents and one third of Granite State Republicans support marriage equality. Now after amendments to the bill were introduced which would go even farther to protect the views of religious groups, Chairman Sununu and Senate Republicans remain opposed and out of step with the people of New Hampshire.
(Posted by Victoria Bonney, Communications Director for the New Hampshire Democratic Party)
President Barack Obama recently announced his decision to speak at the commencement ceremony for the University of Notre Dame on May 17. He will also be the ninth U.S. president to receive an honorary doctor of laws degree from the university.
Several groups have signed petitions imploring the university's president, Reverend John Jenkins, to revoke the invitation and prevent President Obama from speaking, arguing that his policies conflict with Catholic principles, particularly those regarding abortion. With Obama's decision to lift the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research and his pro-choice stance, several groups have expressed their opposition, insisting that the selection is inappropriate.
Bill Maher is wrong about religious people when he says they are all either deluded, crazy, intellectually lazy or just plain stupid...
... and I say that as an atheist who thinks religion is responsible for more evil than anything else in human history, that all religions are plain fucking crazy and that most religious people are either deluded, crazy, intellectually lazy or just plain stupid.
