Here are some of the week’s most notable quotes culled from news reports from across Texas, and beyond.
Texas State Board of Education member Thomas Ratliff, R-Mount Pleasant, on a science textbook adoption process that he described as “hijacked” for political purposes.
To ask me — a business degree major from Texas Tech University — to distinguish whether the Earth cooled 4 billion years ago or 4.2 billion years ago for purposes of approving a textbook at 10:15 on a Thursday night is laughable. To plop this at the 11th hour and say a book that is being used, as I understand it, in over half of the classrooms in the United States is now on the verge of 15 laypeople deciding finite and specific and specialized scientific information is hardly the best way to review a book for 5 million kids.
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The latest stunt by the UT-Austin chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas.
There will be several people walking around the UT campus with the label “illegal immigrant” on their clothing. Any UT student who catches one of these “illegal immigrants” and brings them back to our table will receive a $25 gift card.
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Family Research Council Executive Vice President Jerry Boykin, claiming that Jesus has been “feminized.”
You think his biceps weren’t big bulging biceps, big ole veins popping out of his arms, thin waist, strong shoulders from lifting? He smelled bad! Why? Because he sweated, he worked. You think I’m sacrilegious because I said Jesus smelled bad? No, he was a man! He was a man’s man.
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Comedian Sarah Silverman, described the recent assaults on reproductive rights.
I think vaginas really, really scare people, honestly.
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Ron Wetherington, an evolutionary anthropologist at Southern Methodist University, and Scott Egan, the Huxley Faculty Fellow in Ecology and Evolution at Rice University.
Nevertheless, we recognize that some religious beliefs reject evolution entirely, and we must respect the right of parents and congregations to teach their religiously based beliefs to their children. But the mission of public school science classrooms is to teach sound science. So we call on members of the State Board of Education not to pressure publishers into watering down or distorting instruction on evolution in their new textbooks. Instead, adopt these proposed textbooks and ensure that Texas students get a 21st-century education in their 21st-century classrooms.
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David Barton, explaining what it means if you go to Starbucks.
It’d be like an act of treason if this were a military term, but to do that spiritually, you can’t go join the enemies of God and expect God to bless you on all the values and all the things he said was right and wrong.
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Houston Mayor Annise Parker, announcing a move to extend health and life insurance benefits to same-sex legal spouses of city employees.
Based on the right to equal protection under the law, it is unconstitutional for the city to continue to deny benefits to the same-sex spouses of our employees who are legally married. This change is not only the legal thing to do, it is the right, just and fair thing to do.
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Texas Gov. Rick Perry, reaction to a suggestion that the Republican Party change the way it conducts presidential debates — perhaps because those changes would create fewer opportunities for candidates to make gaffes.
Hell, yeah
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Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, after signing legislation making his state the 16th to recognize same-sex marriage.
It’s official. #MarriageEquality is the law of the land in Illinois!
— Governor Pat Quinn (@GovernorQuinn) November 20, 2013
What is it with right-wingers’ attraction to violence, anyway? They seem to constantly speak in aggressive terms and how they will go to battle/war with any who disagree with them,
They probably reduce all of Jesus to two singular things
1) the cleansing of the holy temple
2) ‘I have not come to bring peace but the sword’
They have to ignore everything else of course and what the temple got actually cleansed of too (the trade and money guys).
Thanks, Hartmut. I somehow recognize your avatar. Greek, is it? Assyrian? Your first suggestion is specific, the second is general. I think their aggression is grounded in their belief in the approaching apocalypse. Also, Christians, in their beginnings, had to fight not only for recognition as a bonafide religion but for survival, as well. Finally, and most curious of all, they side with Israel yet are attempting to convert the Jews to Christianity. Maybe their Bible directs them to do so. I don’t know.
It’s Akkadian, formerly belived to show Sargon it’s likely his heir Naram-Sin.
As for the support of Israel, that’s from an extreme interpretation of the book of Revelations. Those following it believe that the trigger for the apocalypse is the building of the third temple by the Jews. But this can only be done when Israel is reestablished in its original Davidian borders (Grand Israel). So, the Jews are useful idiots G*d will dispose of the moment the Temple is finished (some get converted to Christianity, the rest to fuel for the fiery pit). Thus the support for the extreme Isreali Right and the total opposition to any peaceful solution with the Palestinians.
In Israel the Right is aware of that but since THEY do not believe that stuff, they consider the Christian Right as THEIR useful idiots. Ariel Sharon was rather explicit: “When the Messiah comes, we will ask him, whether it is his second coming”. According to some US preachers his stroke was G*d’s punishment for him getting out of Gaza (which is nonsense even within the theory since the Gaza strip is NOT part of Biblical Israel).
Robert Carneiro and other famous cultural anthropologists say that human culture and subsculture are man’s means of adapting to the natural and social environment, just as the canine tooth and claw is adaptive for a lion. Thus, with any nation of people, an attempt to water down, weaken, or take away valued elements of their adaptive culture—or the whole culture—is viewed the same as taking away a man’s guns in the fever pitch of battle. It is viewed as an instant death sentence.
The Religious Right and old Republican white people who are about to die (say within the next 10-15 years) see everything that they have ever worked for and valued culturally being taken away from them here in the United States. They are frightened by it and angry about it. Rather than recognize that this happens to every older generation at death’s door and that times in history always change with advancing technology and new environmental challenges (and that people need to adapt in culturally revised ways to these inevitable changes), they want every aspect of the old and familiar culture to remain frozen in time—specifically the 1950s—a time they regard as the “ideal American culture.”
They feel so endangered that many of them are not just ready to go to war with words but also with guns that shoot real bullets, hence their obsession with Second Amendment gun rights. To them, right now, they truly do believe that they are the vanguard of everything that is right, good, and adaptively preserving in this world, and they are really and truly at war with anyone who does not think, say, and believe exactly as they do. They also believe that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are the authors of their culture. Therefore, any enemy of their culture is also an enemy of the Holy Trinity—and the enemies of God must be destroyed.
In addition to failing to understand that times change inevitably as they always have in human history, they fail to understand that much of their culture is man-created rather than God-created. For example, if a man slaps you on the face, Jesus says to turn the other cheek. Their culture tells them to turn around, grab the nearest lead-filled pipe, and beat the guy that slapped you into a pulverized mass of red goo.
Bottom line: These people and their rabid ideologues (like Ted Cruz and the Tea Party) are dangerous people. At one time, I thought we might eventually have a second (1861-1865) shooting Civil War between these people and “normal people.” While that still could happen, I am beginning to think that the chances are growing ever smaller now. More and more people are waking up to the realization that these people are just plain crazy and want nothing to do with them. The trouble the Tea Party is in right now is a reflection of it. The growing hispanic population and its cultural influence will drown them out. Perhaps most importantly of all, all of those old white people faces you see at Republican rallies will be dead and gone from natural causes— and quite soon. The world changes inevitably, but their extremist conservative world is going to die with a whimper.
Keep the pressure on through organizations like TFN so any microscopic chance they might have left will be closed off completely. Git ‘r done!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Go to search and type in …. Rick Perry Blames Satan For The Separation of Church and State. Hey, was Satan tempting Travis the chimpanzee when he stole his owners car?? Rick Perry was an all C grades animal scientist. Chad Garrett