A Democrat On His Disgust With Barack Obama

The Article: As a Democrat, I am disgusted with President Obama by Jeff Jarvis in The Guardian.

The Text: What are you thinking, Mr President?

Is this really the legacy you want for yourself: the chief executive who trampled rights, destroyed privacy, heightened secrecy, ruined trust, and worst of all, did not defend but instead detoured around so many of the fundamental principles on which this country is founded?

And I voted for you. I’ll confess you were a second choice. I supported Hillary Clinton first. I said at the time that your rhetoric about change was empty and that I feared you would be another Jimmy Carter: aggressively ineffectual.

Never did I imagine that you would instead become another Richard Nixon: imperial, secretive, vindictive, untrustworthy, inexplicable.

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How Millennials Became So Cool With “The Whole Gay Thing”

The Article: From ‘No Homo’ to ‘Yeah, Bro’: How Gen-Y Became So Cool With ‘the Whole Gay Thing’ by Jonathan Lovitz in The Huffington Post.

The Text: Think of your ten best guy friends: the dudes you grab a beer with, play ball with, get high with and have been there for some of the best nights of your life. You’ve probably known some of them since middle school, and probably had sleepovers with when you were kids — well, the truth is at least one of them is gay. If you were our age and reading this ten years ago, that would have probably hit you like a ton of bricks, and less like the gentle thud you probably felt.

You know you know gay people. You realize by now that they’re all around. You’ve been on baseball teams and in locker rooms and rushed frats together. Whatever your religious take on them, we, as the impossible to define bunch known as Gen-Y, have become increasingly cool with our gay brothers and friends. We’ve ditched “no homo” for “yeah, bro” when hanging with our openly gay friends, and we’re civilized enough to know that the “F” word makes us look even more absurd than when your crazy uncle throws the “N” word around after three drinks at Thanksgiving.

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Why We Should Tax Churches

The Article: We Should Be Taxing Churches by Matt Yglesias in Slate.

The Text: Amelia Thomson-Deveaux has a great piece about religious groups that are trying to remove restrictions on church-based electioneering. She suggests that rather than gutting the rules, there’s a simple fix, “Religious leaders who want the liberty to endorse candidates can give up their churches’ tax deduction.”

I would go one further. Let’s tax churches! All of them, in a non-discriminatory way that doesn’t consider faith or creed or level of political engagement. There’s simply no good reason to be giving large tax subsidies to the Church of Scientology or the Diocese of San Diego or Temple Rodef Shalom in Virginia or the John Wesley African Methodist Episcopal Zion church around the corner from me. Whichever faith you think is the one true faith, it’s undeniable that the majority of this church-spending is going to support false doctrines. Under the circumstances, tax subsidies for religion are highly inefficient.

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The Pro-Life Hypocrisy

The Article: Pro-life groups don’t really protect the unborn by Elizabeth Jahr in The Christian Science Monitor.

The Text: Religious and political groups that funnel tremendous resources into a legal war to limit and even ban abortion in America are at best, wasting time, and at worst, damaging efforts to protect the unborn. Texas’s new abortion law – one of the toughest in the country – is only the latest in a string of efforts to limit abortions in numerous states across the US.

Members of the pro-life movement spend countless dollars and hours on rallies and lobbying without providing adequate financial and emotional support for women to actually maintain pregnancies. And the majority of women who have abortions cite not being able to afford a child as one of the main reasons for their decision.

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John Kerry’s Morally And Historically Obscene Case for War In Syria

The Article: John Kerry’s Morally, Linguistically, and Historically Obscene Case for War in Syria by Matt Welch in Reason.

The Text: If we are to take our roles as citizens as “seriously” as members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee claim to take their decision to support the bombing of Syria (“very, very seriously,” said Bob Corker [R-Tennesse]; “seriously and solemnly,” added Dick Durbin [D-Illinois]), then we really ought to give full attention to the testimony yesterday by the war’s principal salesman, Secretary of State John Kerry.

Unfortunately for the politician who made famous the line “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”, Kerry’s case in front of the committee was more a textbook example of how acting as the world’s policeman for decades has warped the country’s values, judgment, and even language.

I counted at least seven moments that qualified in my judgment as obscene, exposing along the way the administration’s empty and contradictory arguments for air-mailing death upon a regime that does not pose a direct threat in the United States:

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