According to President Obama, I was solidly within the majority American opinion last Monday when I breathed a sigh of relief upon hearing his decision to lift the ban on federal funding for stem-cell research using destroyed human embryos. In his trademark careful and conscientious rhetoric, Obama acknowledged the deep moral difficulties this issue poses,…
Read MoreI forgot to mention that Angela Davis visited my institution a couple of weekends ago and delivered the keynote address for the Women’s and Gender Studies Conference that we hosted. (Aside: I’m not generally inclined to be star-struck, but I definitely was a little around Dr. Davis. I was charged with taking care of her…
Read MoreOne of the true crazies of the religious Right in this country is the Reverend Fred Phelps, bona fide hatemonger and pastor of the Westboro (Kansas) Baptist Church. He’s the man who claimed that 9/11 was God’s payback to America for its tolerance of feminists and homosexuals, as was Hurricane Katrina, and he regularly drags…
Read MoreAs compromises go, this doesn’t seem to be a good one: the State Board of Education in Texas recently approved its science curriculum standards, which Board members describe as “a compromise between those who are critical of teaching evolutionary theories without scrutiny and those who feared attacks on evolution would lead to the teaching of…
Read MoreI attended Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s lecture “Some Through the Fire! Some Through the Flood!” last night at the University of Memphis as part of the conference “The Obama Phenomenon: Race and Political Discourse in the United States Today.” I have to admit that I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Like most Americans, the only…
Read MoreI’m attending the much-anticipated conference at the University of Memphis this weekend, “The Obama Phenomenon: Race and Political Discourse in the United States Today.” The keynote address is this evening and is being delivered by Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Our local news broadcasts have done all they could in the past week to stir up controversy…
Read MoreAhhhh, Texas. Turns out their legislature is considering allowing students over 21 to carry concealed guns on campus. Supporters say that there’s good reason for this manifestly ridiculous idea, of course, citing the tragedy at Virginia Tech almost two years ago and, I suppose, the fact that there weren’t enough armed students to make that…
Read MoreThe image to the left is a postcard that someone sent to PostSecret, an online website that asks people to write their “secrets” on one side of a postcard and mail them in anonymously. (I’ve written about PostSecret before on this blog.) It is the brainchild of Frank Warren, who now travels all over the…
Read MoreJust go ahead and file this away in the “Amazing Adventures in Double Entendre” File. In an attempt to resuscitate the revolutionary patriotism of Bostonians circa 1773, FOXNews and the Republican Party are calling on their constituents to organize their own April 15th “Tea Party” to protest President Obama’s tax policies. What’s more, they’ve also…
Read MoreOver at Slate, Timothy Noah has begun an 8-part series called Why No More 9/11s?, in an attempt to answer the question that has probably stymied all of us at some point in the last eight years. Immediately following the September 11th attacks, most counterterrorism experts and others in the know predicted that it was…
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