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November 2, 2018
Mississippi’s Republican Governor Promoted an Evangelical Pastors’ Summit
By David Gee
It’s no surprise that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause prevents the government from promoting a specific religion. At least it’s not surprising to anyone who’s read the Constitution. Apparently that excludes Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant.
The Republican recorded a promotional video for a “Pastors Summit” that took place in early October while acting in his official capacity as the state’s leader. He also promoted an event for evangelical Christians, scheduled for April, in that same video.
Our state-wide faith event is on the 27th of April. So come, we want all of the churches, we pray that all of the churches and all of the denominations will come together for that one special evening, the encouraging messages. And we will be there doing God’s work here in Jackson, Mississippi.
…
Let’s start a movement here that will go not only across Mississippi, but across the nation, to make again this One Nation, Under God, beginning here in Jackson, Mississippi.
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US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science
By Nature Journal Editorial Board
According to a draft memo leaked to The New York Times, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposes to establish a legal definition of whether someone is male or female based solely and immutably on the genitals they are born with. Genetic testing, it says, could be used to resolve any ambiguity about external appearance. The move would make it easier for institutions receiving federal funds, such as universities and health programmes, to discriminate against people on the basis of their gender identity.
The memo claims that processes for deciding the sex on a birth certificate will be “clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable”.
The proposal — on which HHS officials have refused to comment — is a terrible idea that should be killed off. It has no foundation in science and would undo decades of progress on understanding sex — a classification based on internal and external bodily characteristics — and gender, a social construct related to biological differences but also rooted in culture, societal norms and individual behaviour. Worse, it would undermine efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people and those who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female.
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GOP Lawmaker Matt Shea Releases Christian Manifesto Calling For Biblical Law
By Michael Stone
GOP lawmaker calls for Biblical law: Washington state Rep. Matt Shea publishes manifesto calling for the execution of all males who refuse to follow “Biblical law.”
In a disturbing development, Washington state Rep. Matt Shea releases a four-page Christian manifesto titled “Biblical Basis for War.” The document calls for “Biblical law”, and suggests that those men who support gay marriage and abortion rights should be executed.
NBC News reports on the four page manifesto released by Shea:
It’s a radical Christian call to arms, outlining 14 steps for seizing power and what to do afterward in explicit detail. It calls for an end to abortions, an end to same-sex marriage, and if enemies do not yield and everyone obey biblical law, all males will be killed.
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November 1, 2018
Sessions details next steps for Justice Department’s religious liberty task force
By Dartunorro Clark
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday announced next steps for the Justice Department’s Religious Liberty Task Force, inspired by one of the Supreme Court’s most important rulings on religious rights in decades.
After the nation’s highest court ruled last year that states cannot refuse all financial aid to churches, Sessions said Monday that the task force would focus on rooting out “other instances” of discrimination at the federal level.
“Today I am ordering the religious liberty task force to examine — in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling — whether there are other instances in which this kind of discrimination is occurring at the federal level,” Sessions, speaking to the Boston chapter of the conservative legal group The Federalist Society, said. “If so, it must, and will, stop.”
Sessions claimed that “respect for religious liberty” has eroded in recent years, and the task force is necessary to defend people of faith and confront a growing cultural and political threat to the free practice of religion.
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OPEN DISCUSSION – NOVEMBER 2018
This thread has been created for open discussion on themes relevant to Reason and Science for which there are not currently any dedicated threads.
Please note it is NOT for general chat, and that all Terms of Use apply as usual.
If you would like to refer back to previous open discussion threads, the three most recent ones can be accessed via the links below (but please continue any discussions from them here rather than on the original threads):
October 31, 2018
Alabamians Will Soon Vote on Putting the Ten Commandments on Public Property
By Andrew Seidel
The god of the Bible is on the Nov. 6 ballot in Alabama. A proposed constitutional amendment would allow the government to display his so-called divine law — the Ten Commandments — on every piece of public property in the state.
Amendment 1 unnecessarily rewrites the religious liberty provisions of the Alabama Constitution in alarming ways. There’s actually some good language in the amendment — for instance, prohibiting taxes from going to churches — but that’s already protected under the law so there’s no need for a change.
This amendment is not meant to protect religious liberty or ensure that the state doesn’t meddle in the administration of churches. It is meant to decorate every piece of government property, especially in public schools, with a biblical law that begins, “I am the Lord your God… You shall have no other gods before me.”
That divine command, while central to Judeo-Christianity, is, to be blunt, un-American. The First Commandment embodies principles that directly conflict with the principles on which the United States was founded. No law can tell an American to worship a god, let alone which god. Americans are free to be godless (and a growing number are), or, if they wish, to worship every god from every holy book.
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How “Religious Freedom” Laws Became a Flash Point in the Georgia Governor’s Race
By Charles Bethea
John Latenser is a location manager: when a director needs to shoot scenes with a particular backdrop, he’ll find some options, sign agreements with property owners, figure out safety measures and what to do if it rains. Latenser has worked on “Black Panther,” “Transformers,” “Deep Impact,” and other projects, going back decades. A few years ago, he moved from Washington, D.C., to Georgia, which was on its way to becoming “the Hollywood of the South.” The industry has reportedly created nearly a hundred thousand jobs in the state and generated an estimated $2.7 billion in direct spending in Georgia during the last fiscal year. Georgia is home to a major international airport and a variety of filmable landscapes—mountains, beaches, a big city, countryside—but what really made it a top filming location are the tax credits. Since 2008, production companies working in Georgia have earned credits equaling thirty per cent of most of their expenses simply by flashing the state’s peach logo at the end of movies and TV shows.
But, in January, Latenser told me recently, many of his colleagues began to get anxious. “There was a weird lull in production here at the beginning of the year,” he said. “No one could quite put their finger on it. We didn’t know what was going on. It seemed logical that people were waiting to see what happened politically.” Tom Pierce, a colleague who works in location management, told me the same. “One of the rumors was that they were kind of waiting to see how it would settle out with the governor’s race,” he said.
It was just a rumor, as far as they know, but there was a logic behind it: four of the Republicans running for governor, including the party’s eventual nominee, Brian Kemp, had promised to sign a Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law if they were elected. There are versions of RFRA legislation in some twenty states; these laws often aim to protect businesses and individuals who wish to deny services to gay couples on the basis of religious belief. Georgia passed RFRA legislation in 2016—but, before it had been signed into law, Disney, Netflix, CBS, M-G-M, Steven Spielberg, and others in the film industry publicly condemned it, and many threatened to take their projects elsewhere. Ultimately, the state’s Republican governor, Nathan Deal, vetoed the legislation, defying the more conservative members of his party. “I do not think we have to discriminate against anyone to protect the faith-based community,” he said at the time. (Deal, having served the state’s limit of two consecutive terms, will step down in January.)
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Pence sets off firestorm with campaign prayer by ‘Christian rabbi’
By Alex Johnson
Vice President Mike Pence was roundly criticized on Monday for appearing at a campaign rally in Michigan at which a “Messianic rabbi” invoked Jesus in mourning the deaths of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Messianic Judaism, which believes that Jesus is the messiah and considers the New Testament to be authentic, is not recognized as Jewish by any mainstream Jewish movement in the United States or by the Chief Rabbinate, the supreme spiritual authority for Judaism in Israel.
Pence, who has often proclaimed himself to be a born-again evangelical Christian, invited Rabbi Loren Jacobs to the stage at a rally in Waterford Township, a suburb of Detroit, for Lena Epstein, a Republican candidate for the open congressional seat in Michigan’s 11th District.
Jacobs, the founder and senior rabbi of Congregation Shema Yisrael in nearby Bloomfield Hills, a Messianic congregation, opened by invoking “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God and father of my lord and savior Yeshua, Jesus the Messiah, and my God and father, too.”
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Pakistani Court Acquits Christian Woman in Capital Blasphemy Case
By Salman Masood
She has been isolated on death row for eight years after an accusation with little evidence that she had spoken against the Prophet Muhammad. A prominent governor who spoke out in her defense was killed by his own bodyguard, and mobs have rallied against the suggestion that leniency might be in order.
But for the first time since her arrest in 2009, Asia Bibi, the Christian Pakistani woman whose blasphemy conviction the following year rallied international condemnation of a law that has inspired violence again and again, is free.
Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Wednesday fully acquitted her and ordered her “released forthwith,” in an exceptionally rare ruling against a blasphemy verdict. The ruling, by a three-member bench of the court, was announced by Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar.
“This is a landmark verdict,” said Omar Waraich, the deputy South Asia director at Amnesty International. “Despite her protest of innocence, and despite the lack of evidence against her, this case was used to rouse angry mobs, justify the assassinations of two senior officials, and intimidate the Pakistani state into capitulation. Justice has finally prevailed.”
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October 30, 2018
‘Why didn’t we think to do this earlier?’ Chemists thrilled by speedy atomic structures
By Matthew Warren
Organic chemists, make sure you’re sitting comfortably. The structure of small organic molecules, such as those used in drugs, can be deduced in minutes rather than weeks, thanks to a technique that uses beams of electrons to quickly reveal how atoms are arranged.
The technique, called 3D electron diffraction, has been used by some inorganic chemists and material scientists since the mid-2000s to deduce the structure of molecules. But organic chemists, for whom the implications could be transformative, did not adopt it widely.
In mid-October, two papers appeared online describing a way to use the same technique for drugs, making it much faster and easier to work out the structure of these small organic molecules than current techniques allow.
“I think there are a lot of people smacking their heads, saying, “Why didn’t we think to do this earlier?” says John Rubinstein, a structural biologist at the University of Toronto who uses related techniques to study large molecules such as proteins.
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