For anyone who’s interested: there is MORE than just a presidential election this year. 35 seats in the Senate and all 435 seats in the House are up for grabs in 2016.
Think of this as a bigger version of the midterms. Everything’s at stake. If you or your party mess this up, you mess everything up.
Argument by pro-CSA flag person: “we did not agree with big business and government intervening with our daily lives. We wanted to live for family, our faith, and a simpler way of life. ”
Because *of course* it would be better to live under a stratified aristocracy in which the majority of people of European (read: British) descent lived in severe rural poverty, a few owned most property, and economic mobility was slow like molasses. But hey, at least they weren’t black like those slaves and trouble-making freed Negroes over there, so we’re alright, Jack!
Really, I would LOL at this sympathy for the “simpler way of life” of the South if the sympathy weren’t so… you know… sad.
Reading this post by Winnifred Sullivan on the Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College decisions, I got the gist of her argument: that we, no matter our political persuasion, have extended the legal “religious freedom” idea to its logical point of absurdity.
But something caught my eye in this paragraph:
But when the church and the state went their separate ways—when the church was disestablished—the intimate articulation of political, legal, and religious fictions lost their logic on a national scale. They no longer recognize one another. The legal and religious fictions of religious freedom have become lies designed to extend the life of the impossible idea that church and state can still work together after disestablishment. There is no neutral place from which to distinguish the religious from the non-religious. There is no shared understanding of what religion, big “R” religion, is. Let’s stop talking about big “R” religion.
This perhaps best articulates the disconnect between religion and the state in which organized religion – and the various means of power which it can assume – is much more free to run amuck over the rights of individual human beings.
I think that, rather than being content with this current separation of religion and state, in which the two “agree” to separate from each other (which has stopped applying in many places), something should stand in the gap between the two. Some sort of fiction – not just an institution, but an entire legal fiction – should act as a buffer between religion and the secular state, in such a way that the state would be able to eliminate any reference to the words “religion” or “faith” from documented law and jurisprudence.
In fact, for any institution or fiction which considers itself secular or nonsectarian (such as education), something should stand in the gap between religion and such-and-such nonsectarian institution.
But what could be strong enough, conducive enough to hold together that wall of separation?
Can the interfaith/intervalues coalitions – those organizations which classify themselves specifically as explicitly welcoming of multiple religions – be part of that wall?
Perhaps
So its very important that some questions be answered! I am making this blog post to ask our LGBT activists, organizations and LGBT media to be that loud voice asking several questions of several people.
1. What are State Representative Allen Peake’s views on the legislation? Does he support it? Will he vote for its passage?
2. Will State Representative Allen Peake abstain from voting for this legislation and realize the conflict of interest because his business will be affected by the new law if it passes.
3. IF State representate Allen Peake does support this legislation and votes for its passage, what are the views and what would the course of action be by any of the parent companies that franchise restaurants to Allen Peake’s company, C&P Restaurants.
“No sequel will ever get made unless the directors want one and feel strongly that there is a story that needs to be told. No sequel will ever get made unless the directors want one and feel strongly that there is a story that needs to be told.” Hopefully, with all that they had to cut out in order to center the film, Disney Animation will have enough left to be a platform for a sequel. I just wonder what it will be titled.
An alternative map of Africa to consider, particularly if European colonization/settlement hadn’t happened. #SwordAndSoul
One of the questions I’m often asked by friends who haven’t studied African history is what might have happened to the continent if it hadn’t been colonized. It’s interesting to look at the following map of African politico-tribal units circa 1844 by Swedish artist Nikolaj Cyon in the light of this question:
[click for full size – it’s worth it!]
I haven’t been able to find any firm documentation on the origin of the name Alkebu-lan, although a variety of questionably sourced websites suggest that it’s an Arabic phrase meaning “land of the blacks” – supposedly an original name for Africa. Cyon notes in a presentation that the map represents the culmination of an alternate history where the Black Plague killed significantly more Europeans than was actually the case, presumably reducing the amount of early colonization which would have occurred. Thus, while many of these territorial groupings appear feasible to…
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Within a few minutes of online research, though, I discovered two more photos taken on the same day in 1916 by Harris & Ewing at an Emancipation reunion. As the official White House photographers of the early 1900s and then the nation’s largest photo news service, they rarely snapped shots of African Americans.
But on that sunny fall afternoon, they posed a group of black mostly octogenarians and nonagenarians in front of Cosmopolitan Baptist Temple at Tenth and N Streets, NW.
Now propped on canes and dressed in their finest clothes, these men and women had spent the first four to five decades of their lives in slavery. That the four women in the initial photo all were centenarians—and strong enough and determined enough to stand—made the image all the more remarkable.
via Four Free Women: 1916 Emancipation Reunion « A’Lelia Bundles.
Loving this song! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHIQ2ins9sQ
This is something that I have come across which was gifted to me from a friend and has inspired me immensely. The music is quite powerful, and I had always seen it as an omen that this perfect example of my musical taste had come into my life. This evening, I found this recording after forgetting about it for a long time, and decided to look up the lyrics. Having now read them, I understand why I always felt this piece of music to be an omen.
And, to anyone who actually reads this blog, even looking forward to new writings, bear with me. I am transitioning greatly in my life at the moment and I am practicing silence (somewhat) in working to understand it.
Serenata Immortale
Music and Lyrics by The Immediate
La flama fortuna The fortune of burning love
La terra murmure …
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From rapper Sean Forbes, who happens to be deaf from childhood. Nice flow.
