We dig our heels in and wonder who’s gonna win

We dig our heels in and wonder who’s gonna win July 24, 2015

• I’m a little freaked out to realize that at the very same time I was sitting here yesterday writing a post about the aggrieved entitlement of American men who feel their male privilege being challenged and respond with lethal violence, a gun-toting white man was buying a movie ticket in Louisiana. The next American mass shooting began just a few minutes later.

Here’s what we’ve learned since last night about the man who killed two women and injured nine other people in a Lafayette theater:

John Russell Houser, who fatally shot himself after police thwarted his apparent escape plans, appeared at least a dozen times on a television talk show in the 1990s, where he would make outrageous comments against women and feminism.

“Whatever he wanted to talk about, it would generate calls,” said Calvin Floyd, who hosted WLTZ-TV’s “Rise & Shine” program. “He was anti-abortion. The best I can recall, Rusty had an issue with feminine rights. He was opposed to women having a say in anything. …

Floyd said he was not surprised when Houser, who argued against women in the workplace and advocated violence against abortion providers, was identified as the gunman. … He described Houser, who posted an article on Facebook about limiting women’s participation in church, as an angry and radical person.

• After day nine of the 10-straight-days at the Big Box, I’m leaning toward an uncharacteristically literal interpretation of the Bible. Or, at least, of Exodus 20:9.

“Six days you shall labor and do all your work,” it says, “But the seventh day … you shall not do any work.” So right now, for a biblical literalist, I’m living in sin. I’m flouting the authority of the Bible — just like anyone who works a 9-to-5 week in an office is.

• Speaking of flagrant violations of biblical commandments:

If you besiege a town for a long time, making war against it in order to take it, you must not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them. Although you may take food from them, you must not cut them down. … You may destroy only the trees that you know do not produce food. (Deuteronomy 20:19-20)

I call bal tashhit.

• Ed Yong writes about Tetrapodophis, “A Fossil Snake With Four Legs.”

Tetrapodophis

I’m interested to see what our young-Earth creationist friends like Al Mohler and Ken Ham will make of this. Their initial take, I’m guessing, will be to declare that this is a triumph for their (imaginatively) literal reading of Genesis 1-11 because the Bible says the serpent in Eden originally had four legs.

The problem there, though, is that after the unfortunate business with the fruit-eating, the Edenic serpent lost its legs. For “biblical literalists” like Mohler and Ham, four-legged serpents are creatures that only existed in Eden. But they also believe there was no death in Eden. So this fossil of a dead four-legged snake is probably something they don’t want to celebrate after all.

(Note: YECs believe that the curse put on serpents in Genesis didn’t only take away their legs, but also their power of speech. That’s one way of interpreting the story. I prefer to think, rather, that losing the ability to understand Parseltongue was part of the curse put on humans.)

• “No, it’s not your opinion. You’re just wrong.” As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts. And even opinions can be well- or ill-informed.

The final graf of Jef Rouner’s viral column is particularly apt:

You can be wrong or ignorant. It will happen. Reality does not care about your feelings. Education does not exist to persecute you. The misinformed are not an ethnic minority being oppressed. What’s that? Planned Parenthood is chopping up dead babies and selling them for phat cash? No, that’s not what actually happened. No, it’s not your opinion. You’re just wrong.

• Related: Operation Rescue activist Troy Newman, basking in his newfound support and respectability among “mainstream” white evangelicals, condemned Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for supporting abortion rights in order to “‘Exterminate the people that we don’t want to have too many of,’ which is a quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a sitting Supreme Court justice.”

No, it isn’t. It’s a lie that Troy Newman made up. Ginsburg never said that and it’s the exact opposite of what she has said, and argued, and advocated.

But after getting so many Christians to believe the lies in and around his recent videos, and seeing their boundless appetite for believing slanderous falsehoods about all women, Newman probably figured his Christian audience couldn’t be bothered to check out his Ginsburg quote either.


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