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.
On Wednesday, CNN Host Don Lemon hosted a panel to discuss the Indiana and Arkansas “religious freedom” laws that have sparked so much national outrage. His guests were the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Kristen Waggoner, the ACLU’s Rita Sklar and magician (slash-atheist) Penn Jillette. The entire discussion was interesting, but some of the most insightful commentary came from Jillette. Read more
In an interview on CNN on Wednesday, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton was asked to share his opinion of the controversy surrounding the Arkansas and Indiana so-called “religious freedom” bills. The Republican senator tried to sidestep the reason for the controversy — namely, that the bills in question essentially gave a free pass to discrimination for religious reasons — by remarking that in his state, “we believe in religious freedom.” “Well everyone believes in religious freedom,” interviewer Wolf Blitzer responded. What, he pressed, was Cotton’s response to the “potential discrimination” that could stem from such laws? Read more
The state of Kentucky wants to prevent same-sex marriage. But it’s totally not a discriminatory move, because, you see, they absolutely want to stop gay weddings for straight people as much as they want to stop gay weddings for gay people. And this is the argument Democratic Governor Steve Beshear’s administration sent to the Supreme Court last Friday: Read more
Writing for The Week last Friday, Matt K. Lewis discussed what he considers the “troubling implications of believing our rights don’t come from God.” He says he’s “astounded” that people don’t believe our rights come from God or that people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” as indicated in the Declaration of Independence. But, it is not just astounding, in Lewis’ view; it’s worrying. Rejection of this foundational principle of God-given law would inexorably lead someone to… Read more
Anti-abortion legislators across the country have been very busy these past few years targeting abortion by limiting the procedure’s legality as well as availability. But since abortion is a legal procedure, they’ve cooked up a number of strategies to impose de facto bans on it, by regulating providers to the point where they go out of business, banning coverage even through privately purchased health insurance plans, etc. Planned Parenthood is, of course, one of the most frequent targets of anti-abortion moralists, to the extent where finding new ways to cut and block funding for Planned Parenthood is practically a sport among Republicans these days. But this comes with real life consequences far beyond the piecemeal dismantling of abortion rights and access, as Planned Parenthood offers many other important services. In order to demonstrate just how “pro-life” they are, anti-abortion legislators are often willing to cut off funding for services that have nothing to do with abortion — including life saving and critical preventative health care, like cancer screenings. One group of Texans is aiming to bring awareness to that fact — by featuring the stories of Texans whose lives were saved due to early cancer detection from Planned Parenthood. Read more
