Research shows growing influence of liberal Christians in politics.
By Nathan Crabbe
Staff writer
A new University of Florida study finds the religious left is emerging as an alternative to the Christian right.
Gainesville can be seen as a leading indicator of the trend. Faith-based liberal activism has long been a community tradition, from advocacy for the homeless to protests of executions.
“This is a town where there is certainly a religious left,” said UF political science professor Ken Wald, who collaborated with two other researchers on the study.
The research found that Christians who value being active members of a religious community tended to vote for Democratic candidates in 2006 and 2008. The research contradicts the “God gap” theory that white religious Christians are conservative and likely to vote Republican, Wald said.
He said the religious left is becoming more influential with the election of Barack Obama and his experience in community organizing and expansion of a White House office on faith-based initiatives. At the same time, Wald said, young evangelicals are placing more emphasis on traditionally liberal issues such as addressing climate change.
“I think you’re seeing the religious right erode a bit, and at the same time the religious left gets more aggressive,” Wald said.
In case you weren’t riveted to Snook’s comments this weekend, a discussion of Catholic homeless and soup kitchen services sprang up here, debating the social effects of believing in the higher moral authority of “church doctrine” that would refuse help to those living in sin. This story adds texture to Read the rest of this entry »
And that goes for Cocoa Krispies too, no matter what outrageous corporate “colors” the First Amendment might hold its nose and permit to be inflicted upon our evermore-poorly educated populace.
Cereal giant Kellogg said it’s dropping the eyebrow-raising claim that a box of Rice Krispies or Cocoa Krispies, “Now helps support your child’s IMMUNITY.”
. . .health guru Marion Nestle of New York University: “Yes, these nutrients are involved in immunity, but I can’t think of a nutrient that isn’t involved in the immune system,” she told USA Today. “. . . it’s cases like this that prove ‘in the absence of FDA action, food marketing is allowed to run rampant.’
Over the years, food makers complained that if supplements could use such claims, they could too. At first, the FDA issued warning letters to food companies using structure-function claims. It stopped after the courts ruled that food companies could make claims for the health benefits of their products on First Amendment grounds.
Dan Delong of Carlinville, Ill., at teacher at Southwestern High School in the nearby town of Piasa, will face a school board hearing November 2, after being suspended from teaching. A parent of one unidentified student thought the optional reading assignment was inappropriate for her child . . .
When this and this coincide in the same week, what are kids actually learning do you think, about the values woven into America’s power of story?
The teacher’s disciplinary hearing was Monday night, and perhaps there’s a better lesson in how it ended than in how it started, a fitting lesson of today’s American president as true to yesterday’s American precedent: Read the rest of this entry »
They have used the same arguments — for tradition and states rights, against “big government socialism” — in every era. In those past eras, history was not on their side. It is not in our time, either.
. . .These conservative arguments have always been tinged with more than a little hysteria, just like today. And no matter what, conservatives always insisted they owned the moral high ground.
Related news reinforces the Lux WorldView: the former governor of my state now accuses President Obama of attacking American capitalism. Jeb Bush does this not just publicly but apparently for calculated effect not on capitalism or the economy’s current crisis, but his own political prospects.
He needed to make the news he’s been so out of and must re-control if his plan to resurrect any of his traditional dynasties — the Bush family, GOP, Roman Catholic Church — with himself anointed to lead, has a prayer.
The latest round of thinking parents playing “What’s in a Name?” as a floating blog-game of religion and politics costumed as each other for Halloween, apparently started with Lynn and JJ and many commenters both places, riffing on Frank Schaeffer’s books and his new MSNBC repudiation of the evangelical radicalism he was weaned on, taught to use as a weapon of mass destruction in mainstream politics and governance, back in mid-century America. He used some very colorful and contentious language to make his case that this was a bad thing then and a worse thing now.
Oh,and Monty Python got involved because isn’t it axiomatic that satisfying intercourse between smart people just does revert to Monty Python sooner or later?
And here we are. My last comment at Cat’s is reproduced below as an invitation if you’re so inclined, to take on the Python persona of your choice and join the improv, here or there across artificial boundaries and dubious definitions as you prefer:
Well, let’s define terms immediately upon using them, or far better, stick to dictionary definitions. A good argument needs no redefinitions, right?
Or a good argument is almost entirely redefinitions. Need we first argue to define good argument?
To that point, I’m surprised you missed this Python definition of argument!
I laughed at that in the 70s because it was really absurd while Bill Buckley was doing Firing Line on PBS for real — breathing life into intellect and intellect into argument and argument into television.
Initially, Cleese simply contradicts everything that Palin says. Palin insists that it is not an argument but merely contradiction and asserts that “argument’s an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gain-saying of anything the other person says.” Cleese asserts that, to have an argument, he must “take up a contrary position.” Palin is frustrated until he realises that Cleese is actually engaging him in a sort of meta-argument about what constitutes an argument.
But it’s not so funny when television and real life become one big intellectually bankrupt contradiction clinic 24-7.
I think of “good argumentation” much like, ahem, other forms of healthy human intercourse.
It is meant as a creative force to uplift, connect and sustain virtues rather than do harm to anyone directly or indirectly through vice and self-indulgence. It is “good” intercourse and fun to share with the right person for the right reasons, when it’s Read the rest of this entry »
David Shenk is the author of five books; his next book, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong, will be published by Doubleday in March 2010.
We no longer believe that witches control the weather or inhabit the souls of adolescent girls. We no longer believe that the earth is flat, and we have even held our ground against the pseudoscience of “intelligent design.”
Now it is time for all who respect logic, rationality, and the scientific method to come together and say NO MORE to anti-vaccine demagoguery.
No one pretends that vaccines are perfect, or 100% risk-free. But approved vaccines work. They save lives. They do not cause mercury poisoning or autism. They carry very low risks — risks almost always worth taking. And, to top it off, vaccines have become something of a civic responsibility: they work best when everyone takes them.
Six recent helpful articles:
[see at story link]
Wired Magazine is out with its new cover story about a prominent vaccine scientist and historian/biographer, who is to vaccines what Richard Dawkins is to evolution — someone who gets death threats for his modern medicine the way doctors who courageously provide women’s family planning and reproductive health care do: An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All
Then I came across a progressive Indiana pediatrician at HuffPo blogging health care and insurance reform in a way that appeals to my intelligence: RATIONAL ARGUMENTS: a blog mainly (but not entirely) about health policy. . .his radio talk about intelligently negotiating health insurance reform is here.
The academic performance analyses indicate that home school graduates are as ready for college as traditional high school graduates and that they perform as well on national college assessment tests as traditional high school graduates.
The results of this study are also consistent with other studies on the academic performance of home school students compared to traditional high school graduates (Galloway 1995, Gray 1998, Jenkins 1998, Mexcur 1993). These results also suggest that a parent-guided K-12 education does not have a negative effect on a student’s college success.
For those of you needing traditional research to show an uneasy spouse, mother-in-law or the FSM forbid, a custody judge, keep this handy. I don’t need it though. I am my own case study, from a unique perspective as a school professional who unschools, also Mensa mom of Mensa kids including one proving the conclusion as we speak, on campus.
The conversation among Spunky readers is from a different angle than what I tend to see, so I thought I’d open it up here too. I’m not sure what any of this means (the study or the reactions to it) or what to think is smart or stupid or self-validating, except that being really intelligent is understanding that “what we know” — at any age — isn’t as important as “how we think.”
And that, as some of you already know, in 2000 when Favorite Daughter was nine-turning-ten, Mensa referred us to a mainstream but stupid “reality” show to find “the smartest kid in America.” (Since reality shows and kids are in the news this week, y’all might find it particularly interesting.)
UPDATE 1:55 pm EDT – just heard the entire sheriff’s news conference on CNN live, extraordinary. All three boys are said to have had “100% involvement” in the hoax, and what the sheriff called “guilty knowledge” — so one of the felonies with which the the parent/s will be charged is “contributing to the delinquency of minors.”
I don’t judge whether your sons swear, pick their noses, fart, burp or jump over banisters. I have two little boys. Glass houses. . .
That said, Mayumi, get a clue.
As of press time Saturday it seems you have either been dragged or agreed to participate in a stunt by a husband who is a child and a women- bashing gasbag. What’s more, he apparently wants your boys to be raging, women-hating gasbags. . .
These are your real live children with their own humiliations and their own storms to chase. Hold on tightly to them. They need at least one parent to keep them from flying too close to the sun.
Including Church. Including School. Including journalism and media coverage. Including “entrepreneurial” or “abstinence” or “extraterrestrial” or “family values” beliefs. Including political arguments about saving liberty or avoiding debt for the next generation.
Just for today, never mind the real horrors and outright tragedies — maybe if we stop to sweat some smaller stuff, we’ll adjust our eyes to better see how the big stuff got so big that we no longer even see it, and when we do catch a glimpse, why we usually can’t believe our own eyes.
If I write a blog essay on this topic today, I think I’ll somehow weave together these power of story posts:
“So easy a caveman could do it” sells insurance on tv as laissez faire capitalism good for us all. A new congressman boldly goes where no Dem has gone before, calling out GOP obstructionists and greedy antisocial insurance companies as “foot-dragging, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals” this week. [see six-minute mark into video]
Are humans hard-wired to be ruthlessly competitive or supportive of one another?
. . .The once-popular killer ape theory is crumbling under its own lack of evidence . . . towards increasing evidence for humans as cooperative and empathic. . . people do not always adhere to the profit principle.
We care about fairness and justice and sometimes let these concerns override the desire to make as much money as possible.
“It’s really wrong to assume that there is an inconsistency between seeing complexity and taking a strong position. . .In a society committed to free speech . . . we are called on to maintain our courage to confront bad words with better words. That is the hallmark of a university and of our democratic society.”
Suppose religious freedom and education freedom — indeed real education of any kind — are not only not the same thing, but can be shown to be in conflict.
A point that needs to be made more often is that religious schools suppress freedom of religion.
“Three in five (60%) of the general population and two in three (66%) of those in ethnic minority groups think religion is more divisive than race today.”
Fat kids, skinny kids, their heads are full of rocks?
What do kids get taught by public universities these days, particularly political science, history, journalism (and religion?) majors, about how human power of story plays out in real life?
Thinking Parents are quick to see family decision-making freedom at the center of both education and religion, to draw Venn diagrams with giant overlap or intersection between the two freedom sets.
But are we as clear-thinking as our own good minds should require, when it comes to accurately representing and defending society’s sets, those freedom circles we all move in and cannot move between except when that’s how we’re drawn?
Jessica Rabbit: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way!”
We live in a 21st century, multicultural society, and yet we allow a significant proportion of our school system to be run by followers of supernatural faiths.
If this had no impact on our society then it would be fine, albeit unsettling on principle. But the evidence shown here Read the rest of this entry »
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Religious Left Emerges, Religious Right Erodes
15 11 2009From my hometown newspaper this morning at the heart of Gator Nation, in the South! — even though it’s something I can be proud of this time rather than apologize for, like what passes for good communal citizenship just down the road from UF, in a giant corporate enclave of relatively wealthy, morally pious old folks called the Villages.
In case you weren’t riveted to Snook’s comments this weekend, a discussion of Catholic homeless and soup kitchen services sprang up here, debating the social effects of believing in the higher moral authority of “church doctrine” that would refuse help to those living in sin. This story adds texture to Read the rest of this entry »
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