Rachel Ford is a programmer, and since 8:00 to 5:00 doesn't provide enough opportunity to bask in screen glare, she writes in her spare time. She was raised a very fundamentalist Christian, but eventually "saw the light." Rachel's personal blog is Rachel's Hobbit Hole, where she discusses everything from Tolkien to state politics.
With Donald Trump (still…) leading among conservative voters and second choice candidate Ted Cruz’s poll numbers climbing, Marco Rubio is the party’s current number three candidate. Which isn’t bad, but obviously Rubio needs to up his game if he’s going to capture the support of the Republican voter. With his own history of mishaps and radical policy positions, he’s got work to do. And, no, I don’t mean hardline opposition to reproductive care or LGBT rights or his dubious ideas about science; I’m talking about dangerous things like compromising on immigration. The appearance of moderation, however undeserved, may be good news in a general election, but it is probably pretty terrifying to a base that thinks theocratic rule is cool, banning Muslims is not a bad idea, and immigrants include a large number of rapists and terrorists. So what’s a Republican saddled with the unfortunate appearance of reasonableness to do? Simple: take a fresh swipe at the rights of a minority group. Since Trump and Cruz already have Muslims covered, Cruz recently went after atheists, and fearmongering about immigrants has already made way for fearmongering about refugees, it’s time to resurrect a classic Republican standby: attacking the rights of LGBT people to be married. Read more
With catchphrases like “life begins at conception,” the anti-abortion crowd has been relentlessly pushing the personhood of fertilized human eggs for some time now. The moment sperm and egg meet is a magical moment, creating a brand new, single celled baby — and the law simply must preference the interests of that fertilized egg over the woman whose body it resides in, because anything less is the destruction of a baby God was knitting together in the woman’s womb (whether she wanted it or not). It’s murder. Or slavery. Or worse than slavery. Dammit, it’s a new Holocaust. Scratch that — worse than the Holocaust! Of course, since some fifty percent of these egg-babies don’t even make it as far as implantation, but are naturally terminated before pregnancy officially begins, this has curious implications for the train of thought that “life begins at conception.” Not in the “here’s the starting point, from which eventually a person develops” sense, but in the sense pro-lifers mean it: “egg + sperm + magic = teeny tiny egg baby.” Particularly for religious pro-lifers. If life begins at conception, and any interference with that is murder; but God designed the human reproductive process, part of which includes the termination of half of all the fertilized human eggs, then God is either a really lousy engineer to come up with a mass-extermination-of-human-life bug (oops!) or he’s a killer on an epic scale. Read more
You may have heard about the new “Be good for goodness’ sake” atheist billboard that American Atheists has put up in Raleigh, North Carolina and Colorado Springs, Colorado. Well, so did Deborah Hamilton at Charisma News. And she wasn’t pleased. At all. This rather innocuous billboard, to Hamilton, is anything but innocuous: Read more
Another week, another hand-wringing screed at Salon about New Atheists. The headline this time declares “Sam Harris can’t be redeemed: Ben Carson, Noam Chomsky and the defining hypocrisy of the New Atheist movement,” and Ben Norton’s article details what he sees as the “anti-religious fundamentalist” views of New Atheists. Norton focuses on comments by Sam Harris, but he mentions Richard Dawkins, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Bill Maher as well; and from this rather small sampling of New Atheists, he decides that New Atheists are essentially just a bunch of anti-religious fanatics. Read more
