Blogaround

Two cats hugging each other while they sleep, with their tails curled up to form a heart. It is THE MOST ADORABLE THING. Image source.

1. The Family Research Council and the Politics of Exclusion (posted May 23) "Here again with the call to “protect our children.” Well guess what? The transgender children the directive is intended to help are “our children” too."

2. Western do-gooders need to resist the allure of 'exotic problems' (posted April 23) "But if you ask that same 22-year-old American about some of the most pressing problems in a place like Uganda — rural hunger or girls’ secondary education or homophobia — she might see them as solvable. Maybe even easily solvable."

3. Can traditional sexuality exist without social control? (posted May 10) "What would happen if traditional sexuality were presented by people who didn’t have ironclad political control and thus had to think about how to make a persuasive presentation to those who disagreed?"

Wow. Now that is a question. What if the church taught "here are the reasons we think it's good to take this certain approach to sexuality, so you should think about if those reasons are important to you"? My experience has always been more like "here are God's rules for sex, and we have to follow them because that's what God said. Of course, God designed it, so following God's rules will be the most beneficial for us. For example, [gives examples of benefits of following those rules]. But even if those examples don't really seem relevant to your situation, even if you think God's rules seem like a really bad idea for you, TOO BAD, that's what God said, you don't know what's best for you."

I submit to you that this is the definition of legalism.

4. Meet the Woman Who Cared for Hundreds of Abandoned Gay Men Dying of AIDS (posted May 19) Wow. That is love.

5. Buying Coffee Every Day Isn’t Why You’re in Debt (posted May 26) "When Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff looked at the phenomenon of what they described and ultimately titled The Middle-Class Millionaire, those with a net worth between $1 million and $10 million, they found a group of people who didn’t exactly sweat the small stuff—who used high-priced concierge medical practices and utilized business coaches to help them get ahead. They were most emphatically not cutting back on small luxuries."

6. A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 (posted May 27) "They shut down the phone systems, the railway. . . . They wouldn’t let the Red Cross in. There was complicity between the city government and the mob. It was mob rule for two days, and the result was the complete devastation of the community."

7. These Ohio Women Want A Refund For The State’s ‘Discriminatory’ Tampon Tax (posted March 29) "The lawsuit claims that the unequal treatment amounts to discrimination against women, violating their rights under the state and federal constitutions, since Ohio exempts prescription drugs and medical equipment from sales tax."

8. Panama Papers: a massive document leak reveals a global web of corruption and tax avoidance (posted April 3) "Even as the world's wealthiest and most powerful nations have engaged in increasingly complex and intensive efforts at international cooperation to smooth the wheels of global commerce, they have willfully chosen to allow the wealthiest members of Western society to shield their financial assets from taxation (and in many cases divorce or bankruptcy settlement) by taking advantage of shell companies and tax havens."

9. "we put glasses on the floor at an art gallery" (posted May 26) LOLOLOLOLOLOL

10. Need to Explain Evolution to a 3-Year-old? No Problem! (posted May 24) Cool!

11. New Favorite Tumblr: Headless Women of Hollywood (posted May 13)

12. Trump University Told Recruiters to Target Single Parents With Hungry Kids (posted May 31) "The Republican nominee is literally, objectively, a con man."

13. The Oregon Trail Generation: Life Before And After Mainstream Tech (posted 2015) "Precisely at the time that you were becoming obsessed with celebrities, music and the opposite sex, you magically had access to “the internet,” a thing that few normal people even partially grasped the power of at the time." WOW I LOVE THIS ARTICLE! I relate to this so much! I was born in the late 80's though- the article says it's about people born in the late 70's and early 80's.

14. Clobber-texting isn’t a principled hermeneutic: A horrifying case study (posted May 26) "Or, in other words, it wasn’t designed to be a functioning hermeneutic. It was designed to distract us from the fact that we haven’t got one." Also, Slacktivist uses the term "ret-conned" to describe the "hermeneutic" that evangelicals use to say which Old-Testament laws CLEARLY apply to us now and which CLEARLY do not- and "ret-conned" is EXACTLY THE RIGHT WORD FOR THAT.