Dude! Joe's Jottings, Mostly Junk

If you'd really like to support gays and lesbians in a world lousy with Chick-fil-As, how about this tactic instead: From now on, don't fucking eat at Chick-fil-A if you are a person who believes gays are equal to you and deserving of equal treatment under the law. No equivocating and no buying back karma with pity donations to gay-rights groups. Simply avoid the chain for as long as it upholds its homophobic ties. Full stop.

Is this really that hard to do? Is Chick-fil-A so delicious that people are willing to ignore their most cherished principles in order to eat a couple handfuls of its sodium-drenched chicken wads? I haven't eaten Chick-fil-A in about a decade, but the last time I did, I don't remember it being all that spectacular. The meat was average and the buns were soggy, soaked through with butter and brine from anemic pickle discs. It certainly wasn't good enough food to get me to forsake my belief that gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry. Which is why, when I found out Chick-fil-A's Southern Baptist leaders believed otherwise, I stopped eating there and started eating at the thousands of other places that serve greasy, hastily made, inexpensive sandwiches.

What else would one expect, anyway, when the candidates themselves fall into a weird sort of “Southern Tourette’s,” delivering inanities apparently gleaned from the visitor’s guide to “redneck” tropes?

“Mornin’, y’all,” said Mitt Romney recently to a Mississippi crowd. He started his day off right, he said, with “a biscuit and some cheesy grits.” That would be cheese grits, but never mind. Would Romney greet an audience at a Jewish Community Center with: “Oy vey, did I ever enjoy my loxies and bagels this morning!”? Or African Americans with: “Yo, dawg, wassup?”

Actually, yes, he might. Forever tattooed in the memory is the image of Romney approaching an African American baby at a 2008 Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade. Pointing to the baby’s necklace, he said: “What’s happening? You got some bling-bling here!”

Yo.

Which means “I” in Spanish, so why not go there, too? “Buenos dias, amigos. Love me some tacos and salsies.”

Romney isn’t the only guilty party, just the most recent. Even Barack Obama loses his last syllable south of the Mason-Dixon. For Romney, however, the more he tries to get down with the people, the more he highlights the perception that he can’t.

[...] on the list of groups I worry about taking over our government, the Mormon church falls somewhere between the Girl Scouts and the surviving cast members of the Apple Dumpling Gang.

But my query for "jon mitchell jury duty" didn't mean "Show me what my Friends+ are saying about 'jon mitchell jury duty.'" It meant "Show me Jon Mitchell's article about jury duty!" The Google of a year ago would have known that. All this personalization and real-time stuff surely helps Google organize its content, but it's breaking search.

For a person of faith, ID is not just an unnecessary choice; it is a harmful one. It reduces God to a kind of holy tinkerer. It locates the divine in places of ignorance and obscurity. And this gives it a defensive and fearful spirit that is out of place in Christian faith and theology.

Looking upon the new star in September 1604, could Kepler have envisioned stellar evolution, mass-transfer binary stars, and explosive carbon fusion? No, and so he remained silent. His humility, his belief in the richness of creation, and his expansive faith allowed him to admit ignorance while leaving the door of causal science wide open.

ID denies its proponents that freedom. Having opted to close the door on science, they steal from themselves the opportunity to see nature more deeply. In so doing they dig in their heels, refusing to be drawn, Kepler-style, closer to the creator God they all believe in. This is the great irony of ID.

Now who can argue with that? I think we're all indebted to Gabby Johnson for stating what needed to be said. I am particularly glad that these lovely children are here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, it expressed the courage little seen in this day and age.