Sometimes, you just gotta poke fun for the joy of it:

Show and Tell Music is “a site that serves as sort of an orphanage for thrift store music and album cover art”. It’s got lots of fun and yuks, and even some strange MP3s as well, but best of all are the galleries of strange cover art from Christian albums. Check them out here, here, here, and here.

Hard not to like “Mr. Bat Sings” and “Never Be Afraid” shown here. (Found via Boing-Boing.)

Excellent piece commenting on Just-Ass Scalia’s dissenting opinion in the case where the 10 C’s were kicked out of the courthouse by Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment and Director of The Information Society Project at Yale Law School: “Justice Scalia Puts His Cards on the Table“. Read it; here are a couple of the key quotes from Scalia’s opinion:

With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our Nation’s historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities [does he mean, Deists, like many of the Framers?– ed.] just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists…. The three most popular religions in the United States, Christianity, Judaism and Islam– which combined account for 97.7% of all believers…. are monotheistic … [and] believe that the Ten Commandments were given by God to Moses… Publicly honoring the Ten Commandments is thus indistinguishable, insofar as discriminating against other religions is concerned, from publicly honoring God. ..they cannot reasonably be understood as a government endorsement of a religious viewpoint…

As Balkin comments about this:

And there you have it. If you aren’t a monotheist who believes in a personal God, the government may disregard you. You don’t count. We won’t persecute you, of course, that would violate the Free Exercise of Religion. But we can disregard you. You are insignificant. You are not us.

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The Supremes perform a completely absurdist balancing act on the 10 Commandments case as one of the their final acts of the term (Split rulings on Ten Commandments displays: Courthouse exhibits crossed line, but outdoor tablet OK). In a pair of 5-4 decisions, with O’Connor the swing vote in both, they’ve ruled that the 10 C’s can be OK on government properties, but they can’t be inside courtrooms, because, you know, that’s going too far.

You want unprincipled tension? In the courthouse case, Souter writes for the good guys (who get the majority on this one by the grace of Sandy’s whim) that “the touchstone for our analysis is the principle that the First Amendment mandates government neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion… When the government acts with the ostensible and predominant purpose of advancing religion, it violates the central Establishment clause value of official religious neutrality”. I love him.

But in the State Capitol Case (where the Theocratic Bloc wins, again by Sandy blowing in the wind), half-dead theocrat Rehnquist writes that “Of course, the Ten Commandments are religious — they were so viewed at their inception and so remain. The monument therefore has religious significance… [but] Simply having religious content or promoting a message consistent with a religious doctrine does not run afoul of the Establishment clause.”

Fucking assholes. The good guys are hanging on by a thread here. We’re now depending when obvious, explicit and admitted promotion of religion goes “a little too far”.

UPDATE: Sorry, the first news I saw incorrectly reported the vote; as a commenter noted, Breyer actually swung to the dark side in the Texas case — which is, frankly, a bit odd in my view. Sorry, Sandy! I still love you! (OK, not really; but she got this one right.) Still, a fragile and absurd balancing act, with the majority opinions almost directly contradicting each other.

You’ve probably caught the reports of rampant harassment and discrimination at the U.S. Air Force Academy (see, for example, CNN’s Air Force probes religious bias charges at academy). Americans United for Separation of Church and State “concluded that both the specific violations and the promotion of a culture of official religious intolerance are pervasive, systematic and evident at the very highest levels of the academy’s command structure”; that non-Christian cadets are subjected to “religious harassment” by more senior cadets; and that cadets of other religions are subject to discrimination, such as being denied passes off-campus to attend religious services. And according to CNN, “allegations are that cadets are frequently pressured to attend chapel and take religious instruction, particularly in the evangelical Christian faith; that prayer is a part of mandatory events at the academy; and that in at least one case a teacher ordered students to pray before beginning their final examination.”

Now, the internal investigation has come out. Turns out there was just a “perception of ” and a “lack of awareness over where to draw the line”, as cadets have experienced “well-intended but wrong” professions of faith by instructors or senior officers. But of course none of this “well-intended harassment” amounted to actual “religious discrimination”. Again, from CNN (“Air Force Academy faulted over religion: Report finds ‘perception of intolerance’ but not discrimination”):

Lt. Gen. Roger Brady, the service’s deputy chief of staff for personnel, said the Air Force needs to instruct commanders on what religious expression is considered appropriate. “I have no reason to believe that people who are doing things that I think were inappropriate were doing so maliciously,” Brady said. “In fact, I think they thought they had the best intentions toward the cadets. I think in some cases, they were wrong.”

The report found that “a perception of religious intolerance” exists among some at the academy. “The root of this problem is not overt religious discrimination, but a failure to fully accommodate all members’ needs and a lack of awareness over where the line is drawn between permissible and impermissible expression of beliefs,” the report concluded….

He said some of those he talked to “feel it’s their duty to profess their faith,” but he said that such professions from instructors or senior officers “can be construed easily as coercive” by cadets who don’t share those beliefs.

See? It wasn’t “harassment”, or “discrimination”; like the warden said in Cool Hand Luke: What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.porn male teen amateurmature amateur pornographympeg porn amateurporn oral amateurporn pickup amateurporn free amateur 4amateur and porn menstruationaustralian porn amateur Map

Very decent piece in the current issue of The Nation about the bigoted flap (mentioned by Bob earlier here) over the vocal atheist becoming the chair of sociology at Brooklyn College: Brooklyn Prof in Godless Shocker

Crooked Timber reports and comments in the post “Separation of powers” on a bit of theocratic absurdity (which they apparently got via “A twisted approach to undermining the judiciary” from The Carpetbagger Report):

A state-sponsored 10 Commandments display in front of a courthouse in Indiana was ruled unconstitutional. But Indiana Republican Representative John Hostettler introduced an amendment to a Judiciary spending bill in the U.S. House of Representatives that banned using funds in enforcing the court ruling, thus banning the federal judiciary from enforcing its own order. This isn’t just the bullshit of ‘Publican theocracy again (although it’s certainly that); it’s a bizarre, incoherent, and dangerous undermining of the constitutional separation of powers.

The amendment passed, 242-182, with the support of 91% of voting Republican representatives and 19% of voting Democratic representatives.

The Weirdest Book I Ever Got.

Go angels! Kill those dinosaurs!

I’m sure you’ve all heard about Timothy Shortell fiasco. Really brings me back to Russell. If you want to read what he wrote, go here. An excerpt:

On a personal level, religiosity is merely annoying—like bad taste. This immaturity represents a significant social problem, however, because religious adherents fail to recognize their limitations. So, in the name of their faith, these moral retards are running around pointing fingers and doing real harm to others. One only has to read the newspaper to see the results of their handiwork. They discriminate, exclude and belittle. They make a virtue of closed-mindedness and virulent ignorance. They are an ugly, violent lot.American Christians like to think that religious violence is a problem only for other faiths. In the heart of every Christian, though, is a tiny voice preaching self-righteousness, paranoia and hatred. Christians claim that theirs is a faith based on love, but they’ll just as soon kill you. For your own good, of course. Those who believe that they are acting out the divine plan are the most dangerous sort in the contemporary world. Make no mistake.

So, like, what’s the problem?