• Scotland votes no, 55 percent to 45 percent. Voter turnout was way over 80 percent. America would be a very different place if 80 percent turnout were the norm here.
• Here’s another bunch of Family Research Council wanna-bes — yet another new religious right organization warning that your children might wind up with a gay teacher. Yada, yada, yada … we’ve heard this scary story before and it’s the same tired whine we’re familiar with from what Focus on the Family and Liberty Counsel and Charisma and all the other right-wing religious groups have been claiming for years. This group’s agenda isn’t much different.
• If the New York Mets decide to trade starter Dillon Gee, they’ll potentially enter next season with an all-biblically named rotation featuring impressive testamental balance: O.T. Jacob and Jonathan (and maybe Noah), N.T. Matthew and Bartolo, plus two-testamenter Zach (and the aprocryphal Rafael in the bullpen). Not bad — and potentially their best since the Mets’ completely unbiblical championship staff in ’86.
• The New York Times turns 163 years old today. The Times celebratory tweet this morning was appropriate, but there is a tiny whiff of the kind of thing one sees in struggling churches that make a big deal out of celebrating their 185th anniversary because they’ve done the math and don’t see it as likely that either the congregation, or most of its members, will still be around in 15 years.
I’m fairly sure the Times will still be around to celebrate its 200th, but not nearly as sure as I was back when it marked its 150th anniversary. By 2041, I think daily print edition newspapers will be like the symphony or the ballet. Big cities will still have them thanks to the support of wealthy patrons who will subsidize them as charitable causes because they seem like the sort of thing that big cities ought to have.
• The “Abortion, Inc.” conspiracy theory — it’s all about the lucrative profit! — is one of the sillier lies that Christians routinely spread about Planned Parenthood. But conspiracy theories need to be consistent. That’s the charm and elegance of the art form — the ability to wind a single, twisting thread of nefarious logic that seems to account for many disparate things.
All of which is to say that I’m having a hard time following Cleveland Right to Life director Molly Smith and right-wing Christianist radio host Linda Harvey as they attempt to incorporate anti-gay ideology into the Abortion Inc. conspiracy theory. The money-chasing abortion industry, they say, is promoting homosexuality because more gay sex means more abortions. I’m trying to follow the money, but I can’t follow the logic.
Likewise, I’m confused by where it is that Todd Starnes sees a huge profit stream in “free condoms.”
• “Many are getting excited as Left Behind is fast approaching theaters on Oct. 1 based on the best-selling books by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye,” BeliefNet reports.
So that’s big news. Not the Left Behind movie. I mean thatt BeliefNet is still a thing. Who knew?
• “Perry said football made him the man he was, that it taught him what he needed to know to become the governor of Texas. It was our express privilege to be compared to football players. We all knew we didn’t really deserve it, that this was a gift to us. We’d all scatter at the end of the event and go back to our schools, where we would be vaguely ashamed of having won in our dorky events, which seemed not only stuffily lame but selfish in their inhospitality to spectators. It just isn’t entertaining to sit and watch someone write an award winning essay.”
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