It’s Time to Debunk the Churchill Myth, Simon Heffer, New Republic, January 16, 2015
His was a political career that, apart from what happened during the Second World War, was of a length and scope that was, and remains, difficult to comprehend. Politics was in Churchill’s blood. He was a grandson of the Duke of Marlborough. His father, Lord Randolph, had been a controversial Tory MP and, even more controversially, briefly chancellor of the exchequer in the 1880s. After an undistinguished career at Harrow—which at least had the crucial effect of making young Winston realize that failure was something to be overcome and not to be crushed by—he was, following a spell in the army, first elected to the House of Commons in 1900, during the reign of Queen Victoria, and first served in the cabinet as president of the Board of Trade under Edward VII in 1908; yet he endured to be the present Queen’s first prime minister, and did not resign as an MP until the 1964 general election, held just three months before he died and a few weeks before his 90th birthday. Those facts of chronology, and the list of the great offices he held—not just prime minister, but chancellor and home secretary, among many others—further inspire the awe in which he, or rather his memory, is held, and help to create a picture of the unstoppable romance of his life.
But it is his indispensable and nation-saving achievement in 1940 that obscures so much else about him, with myth-suffocating reality. It diverts attention from all else that Churchill did before and after, and even discourages analysis of it. Worst of all, it discourages reflection on his management of the war, which, as anyone who has read the accounts of some of his closest colleagues—notably Sir Alan Brooke and Anthony Eden—will know, was much more hit and miss than conventional history usually has it. The effect of the often unquestioning idolatry with which he is widely regarded not only hinders us from evaluating Churchill properly but from forming an accurate assessment of the times in which he lived, and that he did so much to shape.
Obama would like us all to stop being such idiots, Alex Moore, Death and Taxes, January 21, 2015
It’s not our politicians who are idiots—it’s us. We’re slaves to the Facebook algorithm, and we vote idiots into office because we’re addicted to making their idiot soundbytes viral.
Obama took office on the heels of a president who could barely speak English, and he’s seemed hell-bent on restoring some depth to the post. Like most everything else in the guy’s two terms it has been an impossible task. But it was refreshing to see him stand up in front of the nation and ask us all to be a little better in 2015. To think a little harder, to ask bigger questions. To stop being such idiots.
Why we can’t get religious freedom right, Rob Donaldson, LGBTQ Nation, January 12, 2015
Religious belief doesn’t confer the right to pick and choose which laws to obey.
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Even US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, no friend of liberal causes he, said so in his 1990 majority opinion in Employment Division v. Smith (484 U.S. 872).
He cited the Supreme Court’s 1879 decision in Reynolds v. United States (98 U.S. 145) which said that while laws “cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices” and that to allow anyone to excuse their actions solely because of religious belief “would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself,” something which could not be allowed.
Later Supreme Court decisions, said Justice Scalia, “have consistently held that the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes).”
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Because that principle has been clear throughout American legal history, one wonders why conservative Christians who disagree seem so impervious and unmoved by it.
Eloquent as Mr. Bruni and others have been, obviously they’ve failed to persuade millions of Americans. The two camps seem to be consistently talking past each other. Why?
The reason is that nobody agrees on the definition of “religious freedom.”
To Mr. Bruni, or to Robert Boston, author of “Taking Liberties: Why Religious Freedom Doesn’t Give You the Right to Tell Other People What To Do,” it is the “right of people to believe what they do and say what they wish — in their pews, homes and hearts.”
But conservative Christians disagree. To them, it goes much further.
One good example is the Mormon church’s definition: “religious freedom is not merely interior and private, to be enjoyed internally in our minds and in the privacy of personal life. It also incorporates the right to act according to one’s moral beliefs and convictions.”
But why, one asks, does baking a cake for a gay couple, or photographing their wedding, violate the baker’s or photographer’s religious freedom? If you don’t like gay marriage, the saying goes, then don’t get one.
Conservative Christians aren’t persuaded. They believe (with no Biblical foundation I can find) that to provide the cake, or take the pictures, or do anything else in support of that gay wedding, taints the baker or photographer with the sin of approving a “sinful” act and relationship.
Thus, any law that might compel them to engage in an act which violates their religious beliefs essentially compels them to sin, and thus “violates their religious freedom” to act in a way that, to them, avoids such “sin.”
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The problem with this view is that, taken to its logical conclusion, it becomes precisely what the Supreme Court warned against in 1879: it would make religious belief “superior to the law of the land, and . . . permit every citizen to become a law unto [themselves].”
It shouldn’t take much imagination to see what chaos would result.
How Religion Can Let Loose Humanity’s Most Violent Impulses, Valerie Tarico, AlterNet, January 14, 2015
The human inclination toward peacemaking or violence exists on a continuum. Happy, healthy people who are inherently inclined toward peacemaking focus on sacred texts and spiritual practices that encourage peace. Those who are bitter, angry, fearful or prone to self-righteousness are attracted to texts that sanction violence and teachers who encourage the same. People along the middle of this continuum can be drawn in either direction by charismatic religious leaders who selectively focus on one or the other.
Each person’s individual violence risk is shaped by a host of factors: genetics, early learning, health, culture, social networks, life circumstances, and acute triggers. To blame any act of violence on religion alone is as silly as blaming an act of violence on guns or alcohol. But to deny that religion plays a role is as silly as denying that alcohol and guns play a role. It is to pretend that religions are inert, that our deepest values and beliefs about reality and morality have no impact on our behavior.
