Jerry Boykin Can Math

Religious right speaker Jerry Boykin recently claimed that there is “no question” that the US Constitution was divinely inspired and that it cites the Bible four times more than any other document. It’s kind of weird that the authors of the Constitution never bothered to mention that it was divinely inspired. That’s the kind of thing you’d think they might remember, right? Oh, hey you guys, by the way all of this stuff came to me from a ghost… in a dream. Yeah, so there’s that.

And of course the Bible is cited exactly zero times in the Constitution. But since four times zero is zero, Boykin is not completely wrong here. Here’s the video:

Unions: Not As Progressive As You Think

In the past few years this myth has surfaced about unions. The myth is that they’re full of liberals. They’re not.

This is contrary to what the Glenn Becks of the world would have you believe. But those of us who are actually in labor unions (I’ve been a Teamster for the past 10 years) know otherwise. We know it because we go to work with people with Republican bumper stickers on their trucks and who wear T-shirts that say things like, “It’s not a bald spot, it’s a solar panel for a sex machine.” Some of them are even so conservative that they are against the union itself even though they’ve been voluntarily working there for decades and could easily have gone into management at any time.

David Barton Pwned by own Publisher

A Christian book publisher has answered the question of how much bullshit they’re willing to put up with. The answer lies somewhere between the dishonest apologist charlatan Lee Strobel and the dishonest historical revisionist David Barton.

Bumping Uglies: The Church, The State, Science, and Fiction… between the sheets

Religion, like sex, should be consensual. But sometimes the Church sneaks into our beds unwanted and unannounced. All too often, it jumps under the covers with government, and government’s desperate enough to give it a sad, pathetic snuggle.

In the meantime, while science is always welcome in my bedroom, sometimes fake science tries to slip in––sometimes in hilarious ways, and other times more insidiously.

When religion and woo poke their determined junk at our sex lives, things can get a little ugly. Welcome to my column.

God is Not a Fan of the Ladies

Earlier in the week I had the opportunity to interview Melody Hensley from CFI-DC about a conference she’s organizing about women’s issues and the secular movement. Hopefully we got a few more people to attend it but if nothing else it’s gotten me thinking about these issues a little more. So check out these weird sexist dudes I’ve learned about this week.

Melody Hensley Interview

Melody Hensley is the executive director of the Center for Inquiry in Washington, DC and is organizing the upcoming Women in Secularismconference. We talk about feminism, privilege, whether or not books should be left in the bathroom, and the conference. Also I try to coin a new term but then find out that it’s already been appropriated by racist immigrant-bashers.

Updates!

Jesus is the Most Dangerous Game

OK, here’s the deal. I’m off celebrating Easter by hunting down the returned Jesus. Beyonce’ and Jay-Z’s demon baby is paying me to kill him so that Christianity will die and our Illuminati Secret Religion can once again rule the world. Since Jesus supposedly spent a lot of time hanging out with prostitutes back in the day, hunting him now involves spending a lot of time in adult entertainment stores. Especially the kind that have private booths you pay for in quarters every 15 minutes.

So long story short, there’s no real column this week. Instead, you get a short list of updates of stories I’ve covered in this space over the past few months.

Sarah Posner Interview

Sarah Posner is the author of  God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters and senior editor at Religion Dispatches where she covers politics. We talk about Republicans, contraception, my gambling debts, religious code words, the possible problems Foster Friess had with girls in high school, and lots more.

Fuck Judge Mark Martin of Mechanicsburg, PA

Last October there was a Halloween parade in central Pennsylvania where a guy named Ernie Perce dressed up as Zombie Mohammed, as one does. Talaag Elbayomy, an outraged local Muslim attacked him and Perce reported to incident to police in the area. They then arrested Elbayomy for harassment. This is pretty much what one would expect to happen. It’s sad that Elbayomy reacted in the way he did, but at least justice was served in the end. Right?

Well, no. Jonathan Turley is bringing this case up because Judge Mark Martin threw the case out on the grounds that Elbayomy was the true victim here, not Perce. And to be clear, this doesn’t appear to be a case where the defense lawyer is obscuring the basic facts of what happened. A video of the incident itself was even admitted into evidence. Everyone agrees about what actually happened. Martin sided with Elbayomy because he thinks he was right to attack Perce in defense of his boyfriend Prophet Mohammed.

School’s Out (Of Their Minds)

So this column’s going back to the multi-topic format, and we’ve got a school-related theme this week. It’s funny how I started this thinking it would force me to write within a certain formula only to tweak it for each of the first three.