Originalism: Why is the US Constitution being held hostage in 1788?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Whenever the deeply conservative ideology of “originalism” versus “living constitutionalism” is raised, we should remind ourselves of the sordid history of American slavery that the US Constitution once purposefully accommodated. More on that later. Because five current relig
Survey: How authentic are Christian evangelicals? Not very
Reading Time: 2 minutes “American evangelicals, it turns out, have a Jesus problem.” This quote by self-described evangelical Christian Republican David French came in a September 23 post of his newsletter, “The Third Rail” in The Atlantic. Referencing a report released last week on a biannual surve
‘The completely legal GOP plot to destroy American democracy’
Reading Time: 2 minutes The New York Times wants you to know that, even while you’re sleeping, MAGA Republicans are hard at work subverting the country’s 2022 and 2024 elections infrastructure so that the GOP will win even if it loses. A chilling new Times-produced video released Sept. 21—“Inside th
Voters hammered Trump in 2016. So how did he end up president?
Reading Time: 4 minutes You may be unaware of it, but the Democratic Party has been on quite a win streak of late, capturing the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections (1992-2020), including when Donald Trump won the White House in 2016. The question is, how was Trump able to
Are fundamentalist religious schools retarding America’s future?
Reading Time: 5 minutes After firmly resisting New York state oversight for years, a private fundamentalist Hasidic Jewish academy in Long Island—one of the state’s largest schools—finally in 2019 agreed to give standardized state tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students. Every single s
From Hitler to Trump, strongmen’s lies have devastated the world
Reading Time: 3 minutes At the risk of exaggerating a connection to today’s American political environment, bald-faced lies disingenuously and persistently applied over time destroyed Germany’s pre-World War II Weimar Republic. The lies were spread by the racist Nazi Party’s fascist leader, Adolf Hi
Does the sexual revolution need a do-over?
Reading Time: 4 minutes I came of age on the cusp of the ’70s when, much to my excitement, I discovered the so-called “sexual revolution” was in full, shall we say, deflower. It was a revolution, of course, but it also actually wasn’t. At least it wasn’t for women, it seems to me, viewed in admitted
The internet is lethal. That class I took in 1995 didn’t mention it.
Reading Time: 6 minutes I remember way back in 1995 I took a nontraditional local college class on “the Internet,” then a curious new tech phenomenon emerging from the womb in barely post-fetal form. I had no idea then that this seemingly miraculous invention would become as exponentially huge—and p
Judge backs untrustworthy Trump, further eroding trust in democracy
Reading Time: 5 minutes For now, let’s just focus on this word: trust. Justice, as we all know, is supposed to be metaphorically blind to everything but facts and evidence in courts of law. That’s why, when lacking solid evidence to the contrary, we generally believe American courts are trustworthy.
What makes ‘skeptical’ kids grow up to be God-believing adults?
Reading Time: 8 minutes If kids are the savvy, skeptical creatures that Will Gervais proposes in his recent essay, why do endless hordes of them in each generation turn into conservative American adults who uncritically worship invisible gods with zero objective verification? And what makes these sa
The GOP has become the party of liars
Reading Time: 6 minutes I’ve watched with morbid fascination as an entire American political party—the GOP—has slid, apparently irretrievably, into a deep well of ethical relativism and easily debunked lies. The vast majority of Republicans have clearly decided that virtually nothing is wrong if it
The GOP wants you to believe 87,000 armed IRS agents are coming after you
Reading Time: 3 minutes Have you heard that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is creating a new, “armed,” 87,000-agent strong “IRS super-police force … willing to kill” that will be targeting regular Americans to audit and investigate? In his August 25 Washington Post column—“Another Republican Lie