ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 285

Store Owner Posts ‘No Gays Allowed’ Sign After Cake Decision

By Michael Stone

Christian love: Tennessee hardware store owner puts up “No Gays Allowed” sign after the recent Masterpiece Cakeshop decision.

In yet another example of anti-gay, Christian hate, an East Tennessee hardware store owner celebrated the recent Supreme Court Masterpiece Cakeshop decision by posting a “No Gays Allowed” sign in the front window of his rural hardware store.

Jeff Amyx, who owns Amyx Hardware & Roofing Supplies in Grainger County, Tennessee, about an hour outside of Knoxville, is also a Baptist minister with a long and well documented hatred for LGBT people.

In 2015 Amyx first posted a sign in his store declaring “No Gays Allowed” after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage.

And after the Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision was announced earlier this week, Amyx once again posted a “No Gays Allowed” sign in his store window, according to a report from WBIR.

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‘Masterpiece Cakeshop’ just totally blew up in the face of the hate group that argued it

By Zack Ford

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the anti-LGBTQ hate group that defended the Colorado baker Jack Phillips in the U.S. Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop, was just handed a big defeat for one of their other clients. And the decision cited Masterpiece Cakeshop throughout to actually make the point that the anti-LGBTQ discrimination the group is advocating for is impermissible.

The Arizona Court of Appeals for Division One ruled Thursday that Brush & Nib, a calligraphy studio in Phoenix, could not violate the city’s nondiscrimination protections because of the owners’ religious beliefs. The case was one of ADF’s several preemptive challenges challenging LGBTQ protections in states and cities across the country. The studio did not discriminate against any clients, but it wants to, and it believes Phoenix’s ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation should either be overturned or should simply not apply because of their religious beliefs.

And though ADF has been claiming victory all week in Masterpiece Cakeshop, the Court actually referred repeatedly to that decision to explain why Brush & Nib should not be permitted to discriminate. “We recognize that a law allowing Appellants to refuse service to customers based on sexual orientation would constitute a ‘grave and continuing harm,’” the decision states, referencing Obergefell, the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision. The judges then cite a rather long excerpt from Masterpiece Cakeshop that reasons that while some may have religious objections to same-sex couples marrying, “it is a general rule that such objections do not allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law.”

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Why scientists are upset about a dinosaur fossil’s sale — and $2.4 million price tag

By Cleve R. Wootson Jr.

By the time the scientists had catalogued the last bone, they realized they might be staring at the discovery of a lifetime — the 70 percent intact fossil of a carnivorous creature as long as a telephone pole that may represent a new kind of dinosaur.

But that is not all that they unearthed.

Five years after it was discovered in Wyoming, the bones of the creature — it still has no name — have been sold at auction to a private art collector for $2.36 million on Monday, exhuming a debate that is at once economic, political and ethical.

Should the fate of a 150-million-year-old fossil lie in the hands of one deep-pocketed person who happens to be the highest bidder? Or should it be controlled by a museum or another authority who can ensure that it can be studied by scientists and preserved for posterity?

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Testing Philosophy Through Experiments

By Abraham Loeb

For thousands of years, philosophers pondered deep questions, such as whether the mind goes beyond the makeup of our body and allows free will, and whether moral values reflect universal truth similar to the laws of physics. Could we put their proposed answers to the test of modern science? Could we use experimental data to advance our knowledge on these questions?

Historically, psychological or anthropological studies of people addressed the possible illusion of free will (for example, by Dan Wegner in his book The Illusion of Conscious Will) or cultural variations in moral values. But observing a complex system like a human without having its blueprint or without the ability to dissect its constituents and reconstruct them from scratch, is far more challenging than figuring out how the hardware of an iPhone works by just interacting with it.

There are at least three new experimental frontiers that offer prospects for advances.

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South Dakota GOP Lawmaker: Business Owners Shouldn’t Have to Serve Black People

By Hemant Mehta

South Dakota State Rep. Michael Clark had a strong reaction to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case: Not only did he celebrate the Court’s narrow ruling that a Colorado commission went was hostile to the baker’s faith, he said all business owners should have the right to discriminate, even if we’re talking about bakers refusing to sell cakes to black customers.

“He should have the opportunity to run his business the way he wants,” Clark wrote. “If he wants to turn away people of color, then that(‘s) his choice.”

…

In an interview with the Argus Leader, Clark said that business owners with strongly-held beliefs should be able to turn away customers.

“If it’s truly his strongly based belief, he should be able to turn them away,” Clark said. “People shouldn’t be able to use their minority status to bully a business.”

And if the community doesn’t support a store or restaurant that bars customers for that reason or others, it will put them out of business.

“The vote of the dollar is very strong,” he said.

And if the community doesn’t put them out of business? Then, Clark implied, racism is acceptable.

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Did the Supreme Court Fall for a Stunt?

By Stephanie Mencimer

In its decision this week in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Supreme Court wanted a way to rule narrowly in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex couple, without upsetting decades of civil rights law. It seems to have found the answer to its conundrum in a stunt pulled by a religious-right activist. The effectiveness of the stunt, and its embrace by the court’s conservative justices, illustrates the extent to which Christian legal organizations are influencing the law, all the way to the Supreme Court.

In 2014, a man named William Jack paid a visit to Azucar Bakery in Denver. There, Jack demanded two cakes, both in the shape of an open Bible. On one, he wanted “Homosexuality is a detestable sin – Leviticus 18:22” written on one side of the Bible and “God hates sin Psalm 45:7” on the other. On the second cake, he asked the bakery to inscribe “God loves sinners” and “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Romans 5:8” and to include an iced illustration of two men holding hands in front of a cross, covered with what Jack described as a “Ghostbusters symbol,” a red circle with a line through it to indicate that such unions are “un-Biblical.”

The bakery’s owner, Marjorie Silva, told Jack she’d sell him the Bible cakes but wouldn’t write the words on them. She offered to sell him a decorating bag, tip, and icing so he could put the message on himself. Jack returned two more times that day, at one point asking if she’d conferred with a lawyer, but she continued to refuse to sell him the cakes he wanted. When he left for the last time, he told her, “You will hear from me!” Silva told Out Front magazine.

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Jupiter’s Lightning Is Somehow More and Less Like Earth’s Than Scientists Thought

By Ryan F. Mandelbaum

As unearthly as it may be, Jupiter shares a phenomenon with our own planet that you might find very familiar: lightning strikes. And lightning on Jupiter is somehow both more (and less) like the lightning on Earth than scientists previously thought.

Every spacecraft to have visited Jupiter, as far back as Voyager in 1979, has spotted flashes of lightning. So it makes sense that the Juno orbiter, which arrived at the gas giant in 2016, would spot it, too. Some newly published results greatly expand our knowledge of these Jovian lightning strikes.

“We succeeded in collecting the largest set of lightning detections known up to now,” study author Ivana Kolmašová from the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague told Gizmodo.

Voyager scientists first discovered lightning on Jupiter in the form of radio waves they generated called “whistlers.” When played as audio, they have a slowly descending whistling pitch that sounds like a bomb falling, distortions caused by their passing through the planet’s plasma.

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Most Americans do not support businesses citing religion to deny service to LGBT people

By Eugene Scott

The Supreme Court ruled Monday in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a gay couple in a 7 to 2 decision. That decision is in contrast to popular opinion: Most Americans don’t support allowing gay Americans to be denied services because of the religious convictions of a business owner.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had not adequately taken into account the religious beliefs of Jack Phillips, a baker and cake artist who refused to make a wedding cake for the upcoming nuptials of two gay men.

“The Court’s precedents make clear that the baker, in his capacity as the owner of a business serving the public, might have his right to the free exercise of religion limited by generally applicable laws,” Kennedy wrote. “Still, the delicate question of when the free exercise of his religion must yield to an otherwise valid exercise of state power” needed to be done in a setting where “religious hostility on the part of the State itself would not be a factor.”

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Hurricanes slow their roll around the world

By Giorgia Guglielmi

Sluggish hurricanes have become increasingly common over the past 70 years, according to a new study. Storms that linger over a given area for longer periods, such as Hurricane Harvey, which stalled over eastern Texas for almost a week in August 2017, bring more rain and have greater potential to cause damage than ones that pass quickly. Scientists aren’t sure why this is happening, but if the trend continues, future hurricanes could be even more disastrous.

The study1, published on 6 June in Nature, is the first to analyse hurricane speeds globally. It finds that the speed at which tropical cyclones moved across the planet slowed by about 10% between 1949 and 2016. The storms travelled at more than 19 kilometres an hour on average in 1949, compared with an average speed of about 17 kilometres an hour in 2016. The effect was significant over land, with cyclones affecting regions along the western North Pacific slowing by 30% and by about 20% over Australia and landmasses in or near the North Atlantic.

“That’s a big signal,” says study author James Kossin, a climate scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies in Madison, Wisconsin. After studies suggested that atmospheric circulation patterns in the tropics might be slowing as a result of global warming2, Kossin set out to see whether hurricanes, which are carried along by these wind currents, also put on the brakes. “I’m not sure that I was quite prepared for the amount of slowing that I did find,” he says.

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The Only Openly Non-Religious Member of Congress Easily Won His Primary

By Hemant Mehta

This wasn’t one of the races anyone was paying close attention to last night, but I think it still merits mention.

In California’s 2nd congressional district, Rep. Jared Huffman, the only openly non-theistic member of Congress, coasted through his top-two-advance-to-November primary. He’ll face Republican Dale Mensing in what should be a (thankfully) uneventful race.

What’s notable is that this is the first election Huffman has been in since coming out as a humanist last November, and it’s obvious that his announcement didn’t affect his re-election campaign one bit.

When he was thinking about declaring himself a humanist last year, the Washington Post reported that, while the private responses he received were overwhelmingly positive, there was one friend who thought it was a bad idea because “it could hurt him politically.”

It didn’t hurt him politically.

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