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Look! Squirrel! Lawmakers tackle divisive social issues

Its become something of a tradition for the Mississippi Legislature which convenes Tuesday for its 2017 session to have at least one humdinger of a bill that gets the collective knickers of lawmakers and the commonwealth all in a twist and draws national attention of the What the heck? variety....

...Most such legislation is probably a bit of all of the above. And, it appears to be part of the legislative condition. One person's ridiculous or unneeded legislation is another's top priority.

Mississippis Legislature isnt alone in coming up with weird, divisive or socially or religiously charged proposals. We just seem to be better at it than most. And, given our history and the perception of us by others, we seem to get more national attention and criticism for it. "Saturday Night Live" once described Mississippis Legislature as 30 hissing possums in a barn in response to some bizarre pending legislation. PR like that is, again, priceless. Possum dolls still occasionally show up on the House or Senate floors....

...A couple of well-placed sources have told me that legislative, religious and other leaders have met and vowed to avoid such a barn burner this year, or as one put it, They said were not going to fight the culture wars this session.

Clarion Ledger 1/1/17

Posted January 2, 2017 - 11:06 am

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#msleg leaders seek to not fight the culture wars this session - Yall Politics

The park closed due to budget cuts in 2010, though it only had a $2,500 annual budget prior to that, and now sits mostly abandoned and entirely uncared for.

Officials held and questioned Muhammad Ali Jr. for nearly two hours, repeatedly asking him, Where did you get your name from? and Are you Muslim?'

The documents show that Pruitt, while Oklahoma attorney general, acted in close concert with oil and gas companies to challenge environmental regulations, even putting his letterhead to a complaint filed by one firm, Devon Energy.

Unfortunately, family planning is a political issue and science and data gets trumped by ideology.

I am not filled with confidence that Sessions or the department he oversees would view Newman and his cohorts as undesirable associates.

Facebooks contribution is worth more than $120,000, according to our sources. Half of that is cash, and the other half is in-kind support for CPACs operations.

At least two Army bases are suspending childcare programs, citing staff shortages related to the hiring freeze.

Falwell also wants to cut federal rules on investigating and reporting sexual assault under Title IX, the federal law that bars sexual discrimination in education.

You look at what Baylor was able to do during his tenure, it fits perfectly with where we see our sports programs going.

This report documents the very real human consequences of politicians like Trump, Orbn, Duterte, wielding a toxic agenda that hounds, scapegoats and dehumanizes entire groups of people.

There was a recent refugee-related attack in Sweden when Neo-Nazis from the Nordic Resistance Movement attacked a refugee centerin Gothenburg in January.

Wildersrecently described Moroccan immigrants as scum who make the streets of the Netherlands unsafe.

President Donald Trump told Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro that bomb threats at Jewish Community Centers may have been from the reverse to try to make others look bad.

The attack comes days after authorities say a Tampa mosque was intentionally set on fire, and nearly a week after 154 headstones at a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis were vandalized.

If youre 45 years old now, net illegal immigration stopped back when you were 35.

I heard things happening in that room happening to other people that made me ashamed to be human.

Frustrated by the failure of most Germans to participate in a boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933, Adolf Hitlers government began publicizing Jewish crime statistics as a way of stoking anti-Semitism.

The most striking finding from our research is that for murder, robbery, burglary and larceny, as immigration increased, crime decreased, on average, in American metropolitan areas.

The only thing the elite Washington press corps likes more than a bipartisan commission on debt reduction is a stack of flag-draped coffins.

The utter lack of imagination here is staggering and somehow disappointing.

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Postcards from the class & culture wars (3.2.17) - Patheos (blog)

"Portlandia" star and co-creator Carrie Brownstein is still invested in exploring the absurdities of hipster culture -- especially now that she feels we're living in "the vernacular of the absurd."

At the ever-popular IFC Emmy and Peabody Award-winning sketch comedy series nears to a close of its seventh season, Brownstein admits that the show's trademark off-kilter, often outrageous sensibility that both affectionately and savagely critiques a certain urban, socially sensitive lifestyle and philosophy may have an extra significance in the current historical moment characterized by culture wars marking the deep divide between left- and right-leaning Americans.

But the absurdist humor, perfected by Brownstein and Fred Armisen, she promises Moviefone, is here to stay, because as she sees it, "it's kind of the only way to make sense of everything."

Moviefone: So I'm curious: seven seasons in, I feel like maybe behind the scenes you do it either exactly the same as it's always been, or you threw yourself some curve balls. Which was it this time around?

Carrie Brownstein: I think there's a bit of both, because I think we value a certain insularity in the process of the show. We know that it functions with a certain kind of specificity, with a certain kind of clumsiness, with a certain marginal outsider feel that we try to maintain.

So yeah, we're very nurturing about that, and kind of keeping that process the same in terms of writing and really trying to not take it for granted, because we do so many other things throughout the year. But then I think it's important to have a sense of growth and dynamics, and bring a new perspective. You don't want stasis.

So it is kind of this balancing act of sort of keeping something that just feels solid, something from which to deviate, that is essentially your point of view or your sensibility, but then making sure that from that, that the choreography can change.

At this point, what's the ratio of concepts that are like, "That's a version of something that really happened," and "That's just an idea that we ran with because it made us laugh just talking about the notion?"

Often it starts with something that we've culled from real-life observations. But I think there is a real value that we place on imagination in the writers' room, and being able to get to a place of absurdity or surrealism. So that kind of illogical, sometimes irrational thought, I think we really try to let that flourish in the room.

I think there's a checks and balances system. Some of our writers are much more logic-, story-, narrative-based, and then you have Fred, who is a real champion of the tangent, and champion of the oddities. So I think it works. We try to do both.

Is there anything in the current season where the actual story that inspired it is maybe even funnier than the sketch version?

I don't know if it's funnier than the sketch version, per se. You could talk about our men's rights movement, and think that, I don't know if the real life is funnier, I think it's somewhat more tragic. That to me seems just almost stifling, and the reality of it is stifling and more dangerous, and kind of more far-reaching than I think anything that we were even grappling with.

And a totally opposite thing, Laurie Metcalf, who's such a brilliant, funny actor who did two sketches on our show, which is amazing -- that bathroom soundproofing thing, which is a weirdly relatable office culture situation, that was based on the office that we wrote in. Only Fred would get a writers' room with a bathroom in the middle of the room. So I think that in some ways was funnier.

I think if you could see inside of our brains, I bet we were thinking about the bathroom like three hours out of the day, just out of discomfort. Anyway, I don't even really love bathroom humor, but that really was ridiculous.

Over the course of the season, when you were working on writing this, we've seen all these crazy socio-political divisions that have come up. Certainly, people want to put "hipsters" and "liberals" and whatever they feel about that culture into a certain box. Did that affect the way you were writing in this particular season? Is it going to affect the way you're writing?

It's definitely something that Jonathan Krisel, our writer/director, brought up earlier. I do think that we've always thought of the show as having an earnestness, and not being mean-spirited, because we see ourselves within these characters. To me, it's an exploration of identity, exploration of place, and the ways people discord.

We do feel, I think, protective in some ways of just who we are and sort of seeing this weird, highly partisan kind of culture war right now, and you I think are more aware of vulnerable populations, and what people are fighting for, who feels disenfranchised. So I think there's that as kind of a thinking, feeling person, but in terms of comedy, I was just re-reading Sontag's "On Camp" and thinking about dethroning the serious, and just getting to a place where you can be serious about the frivolous, and frivolous about the serious, and it's OK to get in there.

And to be honest, I feel like we are in the vernacular of the absurd right now. So, to me, I don't necessarily want to let up on being pithy or let up on pointedness for the sake of sincerity, because we've always incorporated heart in the show. But perhaps the characters, through them we can elaborate on some of our own fears and anxieties right now. But I don't want to forego humor or absurdism now, because in some ways, it's kind of the only way to make sense of everything.

I imagine with that affectionate satirizing that you do of the "Portlandia" culture, you don't want the affection that you have to enable somebody else's anger towards it.

No, not at all. It's really hard to sort of keep that in consideration. I think in some ways, we just have to keep approaching it from a creative standpoint. Our mission is to make a good show. I don't necessarily think that we can completely upend what we do. I'm excited, I guess, for the journey.

With the guest stars you've got this season, how many were recruited by you guys, and how many came to you and said, "Can I please come play?"

It's always a mix of both, and unfortunately, it just comes down to logistics. I run into people all the time that say they would love to be on the show, and that we would be honored to have them, and then everyone's busy, everyone's on three shows. That's not even hyperbolic.

Yeah, but we've always been lucky in terms of guest stars and collaboration, and people wanting a milieu in which to improvise and play. We continue to just be fortunate in terms of who we get. Someone like Claire Danes or Laurie Metcalf. Or we have like Damian Lillard from The Blazers, or the band Run the Jewels. It's all over the place, but they all sort of make sense in our world.

Is your collaboration with Fred, is it a safe constant, or does it evolve? Have you found an evolution in the way you guys work together?

I think any partnership has to evolve. Change has to be part of the equation. I don't know. Stagnation just feels pernicious in terms of oneself, or any kind of relationship. But again, I think you're always trying to sort of solidify the foundation.

So you kind of have to go back and make sure that's solid, and then from there, I think it's a real trust fall to get to experiment and grow with someone. So we definitely try to evolve, but only because we kind of keep going back and making sure that we're good. OK, there's solid ground there. It's an interesting balancing act.

Is there something that you know you can do to make him laugh hard, and vice versa?

Yes, any time I raise my voice or scream, he finds that very funny. I don't know -- I feel like Fred can make me laugh almost all the time. But he has some fallback bits that he does, that I think he knows I laugh at because I'm half annoyed that they still get me to laugh, yeah.

What's been taking up your time away from this show? Has there been something front and center on your plate?

I wrote a memoir the other year, and now I'm writing a series of essays. And I've been directing more. I just finished one TV show, and I'm about to direct "Casual" at the end of this month. So I've really been enjoying that process as an extension of what my sort of writer/producer sort of skill set or interest. Directing to me is really wonderful and challenging.

Have you ever gotten any hint that you might come back to "Transparent"?

I don't think so. Who knows? I feel like the Pfeffermans, they really bring people through their meat grinder and spit you out the other side. Who knows? But I would love to. But I also feel like Jill [Soloway] and all the writers are all so good at being true to the narrative of that show, and the growth of the characters. Sometimes I think when they say goodbye to people, that's a permanent door-close.

Have you had much room for music?

Yeah. Sleater-Kinney put out a record I guess in 2015. We did a handful of shows in 2016, but mostly now I'll just start writing. So I always try to keep that as part of my life.

Is that a simple pleasure in your creative life?

Oh, it's definitely not simple! Playing live maybe has a sort of ease to it, even though the stakes always feel high. But writing is just as challenging as anything I do.

"Portlandia" airs Thursdays on IFC.

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Even During the Current Culture Wars, Carrie Brownstein Says 'Portlandia' Will Put Absurdity First - Moviefone

By Katelyn Beaty By Katelyn Beaty March 2 at 7:00 AM

Conservative Christians in America are enjoying fresh winds of political favor. In his first month in office, President Trump upheld his promise to nominate a conservative Supreme Court justice. Last week, his administration rescinded former guidelines allowing transgender students to use the public school bathrooms of their choice. And evangelical leaders report having direct access to the Oval Office. For all his clear foibles, Trump seems to be heeding concerns that drew much white evangelical and Catholic support during the 2016 election.

So its an interesting time for conservative Christians traditional Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Protestants to consider withdrawing from American public life.

And yet in the coming weeks and months, expect to hear a lot about the Benedict Option. Its a provocative vision for Christians outlined in a new book by Rod Dreher, who has explored it for the past decade on his lively American Conservative blog. To Dreher, Trumps presidency has only given conservative Christians a bit more time to prepare for the inevitable. He predicts for traditional Christians loss of jobs, influence, First Amendment protections and goodwill among neighbors and co-workers. Even under Trump, says Dreher, the future is very dark.

The Benedict Option derives its name from a 6th-century monk who left the crumbling Roman Empire to form a separate community of prayer and worship. Benedict of Nursia founded monasteries and a well-known Rule to govern Christian life together. By many accounts, Benedictine monasteries seeded the growth of a new civilization to blossom throughout Western Europe after Romes fall. In his book for a mainstream publisher (Penguins Sentinel), Dreher insists that conservative Christians today should likewise withdraw from the crumbling American empire to preserve the faith, lest it be choked out by secularism, individualism and LGBT activism.

Dreher draws on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher who said the modern West is in the new dark ages and that those who want to lead a traditional life of virtue will have to form countercultural communities. We are waiting . . . for another doubtless very different St. Benedict, MacIntyre famously wrote in After Virtue (1981). In many ways, says Dreher, conservative Christians today should be little Benedicts, investing in churches, schools, and other institutions that will incubate their faith against a corrosive mainstream culture.

In many ways, the Benedict Option is simply a call for Christians to invest in the communities that sustain historical faith, or the church. Leah Libresco Sargent, an atheist turned Catholic, is quoted in the book: This is just the church being the church. But if you dont call it the Benedict Option, people arent going to do it. Dreher laments that many contemporary churches act in attendees lives like a mall or a pep rally: God exists to make you feel happy and good about yourself. This is what sociologist Christian Smith described as moralistic therapeutic deism in 2005. The Benedict Option calls Christians to root themselves in time-honored theology and spiritual disciplines, such as prayer, fasting and confession.

But beyond a call for Christians to be Christians, the Benedict Option is also, it appears, a call for Christians to be culture warriors, albeit via stealth defense tactics. Dreher at once laments that the culture war as we knew it is over. He says conservatives are being swept to the political margins by activists who want them to be treated the same as racists under law.

Yet Dreher also encourages readers to get active at the local and state level. He writes, Dont fight the culture war . . . on meaningless and needlessly inflammatory gestures, and elsewhere, We can no longer rely on politicians and activists to fight the culture war alone on our behalf. Elsewhere, Dreher calls Christians to build Christian institutions that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation. The Benedict Option is nothing if not embattled. Readers are left to wonder if military metaphors are the best way for Christians to think of relating to non-Christians that is, their neighbors.

On the national level, at least, the political engagement Dreher advocates for extends primarily to the concerns of conservative Christians. He is pessimistic about such Christians having much influence in Washington and despairs that Washingtonpolitics can stop America from sliding farther into post-Christian decadence. Yet he insists that conservative Christians must keep defending religious liberty. Religious liberty here is framed as important insofar as it lets traditional Christians be traditional Christians, not because its core to American democracy or because Muslims, say, deserve the same freedom as Christians to practice their faith in peace.

Meanwhile, Dreher overlooks the importance of Christians working in mediating institutions that protect the most vulnerable from being crushed by violence or greed. Take groups such as World Relief, an evangelical relief agency that has resettled more than a quarter million refugees in the United States since 1975. Most of the refugees are women and children who have uprooted their lives to flee violence and persecution. World Relief and other faith-based resettlement agencies receive grants from the State Department to do the difficult work of compassion that few Americans can do.

And conservative Christian leaders have been some of the most prominent to speak out against Trumps recent executive order on travel. Dreher writes, Nothing matters more than guarding the freedom of Christian institutions to nurture future generations in the faith . . . other objectives have to take a back seat. But what if other objectives are protecting and defending members of marginalized groups who cant speak for themselves?

To be sure, the Benedict Option encourages Christians to show hospitality and charity to those outside the faith. But in many cases, vulnerable people need more than charity they need advocacy. They need not a handout but a hand up toward a life of economic and cultural flourishing. And they need traditional Christians investing in national politics, not just to protect their own rightful freedoms, but also to protect the livelihoods of those who cannot speak up for themselves.

And this leads to the most glaring omission of the Benedict Option: its utter lack of engagement with the African American church. (Of note: Throughout the book, Dreher quotes only one person of color, an Indonesian monk living in Italy.) White traditional Christians who have lost cultural power can look back through history for models of resistance. But they also have models in their very midst: black Christians, who have lived for hundreds of years under state-sanctioned violence, who have their houses of worship vandalized, who continue to be victims of racially motivated shootings and who attest to the enduring power of the gospel to heal divisions, forgive and live with countercultural hope.

Black Christians today share many of the same concerns as their white counterparts on matters of sexual ethics and religious liberty. But they are generally not mourning the loss of cultural power, and entertaining withdrawal, because they have never enjoyed much cultural power to begin with. The witness of the black church in this country has always come from the margins. And yet from the margins, black Christianity has provided the wind in the sails of civil rights gains in American history.

There is a reason that faith-based groups such as International Justice Mission, Catholic Charities, Bread for the World and countless others choose to be headquartered in Washington. They recognize that national politics, however imperfect, messy and frustrating, are sometimes the most effective means for loving neighbors on a scalable level. All Christians should certainly take up the Benedict Options vision of loving and serving flesh-and-blood people in their neighborhoods, through acts of charity and hospitality. But some Christians are wise to remain engaged in post-Christian politics, lest victims of sex trafficking, chronic hunger and a broken foster-care system fall through the cracks.

The image Dreher uses most to talk about Christian life in our modern dark age is that of the Ark (you know, Noahs big boat). In the Bible, in the Book of Genesis, the Ark is where the righteous survive as the whole world is destroyed in a great flood. To extend the metaphor, Christians today may very well need to build Arks, or institutions, that help them preserve the faith in a culture that easily washes it away. The difference between now and the days of Noah centers on Gods promise in the Bible: He will never let a great flood destroy all of life.

Christians living in a post-Christian nation could withdraw to their Arks, waiting for their neighbors and their cultures to be destroyed in a flood of moral chaos. But if they believe Gods promises in Scripture, then theyll get busy building communities that throw their neighbors a line of real hope amid the coming tide.

Katelyn Beaty is editor at large at Christianity Today magazine and author of A Womans Place: A Christian Vision for Your Calling in the Office, the Home, and the World (Simon & Schuster).

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Christians have lost the culture wars. Should they withdraw from the mainstream? - Washington Post

Politicians claims that universities are systematically prejudiced against researchers and students with conservative views raise the prospect that Western institutions could become key battlegrounds in a new age of culture wars.

Betsy DeVos, Donald Trumps education secretary, lit a fire under the long-standing debate over supposed liberal bias last week in her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland. After asking how many in the audience at the biggest conservative conference in the US were college students, she said: The fight against the education establishment extends to you, too. The faculty, from adjunct professors to deans, tell you what to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think.

They say that if you voted for Donald Trump, youre a threat to the university community. But the real threat is silencing the First Amendment rights [including free speech] of people with whom you disagree.

In the Netherlands, parties of the Right recently passed a motion in Parliament thatasks the government to request advice and consideration from the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences about whether self-censorship and limitation of diversity of perspectives is rife in the countrys universities and research institutes.

Pieter Duisenberg, the member of the House of Representatives for the centre-right VVD who proposed the motion, told Times Higher Educationthat he put forward the plan after being approached by conservative academics who felt discriminated against in being denied senior posts and in research funding.

The American-born politician also cited the Heterodox Academy, a group of US professors that warns of loss of viewpoint diversity and advocates for a more intellectually diverse academy.

Mr Duisenberg added: That combination of people approaching me plus the debate that is [happening] in other countries has led me to the question, is this an issue in our academies, yes or no?

He continued: What Im not advocating is quotas on political viewsWhat Im advocating is freedom in the academy.

The motion won backing not just from the VVD, but also from Geert Wilders anti-immigration PVV, the party that is leading in many polls ahead of the Netherlands 15 March general election and that is regarded by many as having pushed the VVD in a populist direction.

Jet Bussemaker, the education minister whose Labour Party opposed the motion, will decide whether the inquiry should be taken forward. Although she might reject it, Mr Duisenberg suggested that a new government could still take it forward post-election.

While the Dutch Parliament motion shows debates about claims of liberal bias in universities spreading beyond the US, in America those debates are reaching a new intensity under Mr Trumps presidency.

Before Ms DeVos intervention, the president had already issued a Twitter threat to strip the University of California, Berkeley of federal funding over its perceived failure to safeguard the free speech of right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos when it cancelled his speech on safety grounds following violent protests.

Meanwhile, a Republican state senator in Iowa, Mark Chelgren, recently filed a bill that aims to force the states public universities to take into account the registered political party affiliations of prospective professors when hiring, to ensure a partisan balance.

A. Lee Fritschler, one of the authors of the 2008 book Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities, said: I think the rhetoric is going to increase in this country about universities beingcentres of opposition.

Professor Fritschler, emeritus in George Mason Universitys Schar School of Policy and Government and a former assistant secretary of education under Bill Clinton, said that while there was almost unanimity in science on evidence for climate change, you have a president of the United States come along and say its all nonsense. Weve never had that kind of confrontation in the past.

The Closed Minds? survey found that while there was a clear liberal weighting to the politics of US academics, conservative professors do not, generally, believe they are discriminated against.

Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn, authors of Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive Academy, surveyed conservative academics and found that while a third had concealed their politics before gaining tenure, this was a temporary hardship and they did not find universities implacably hostile to their ideas.

The authors have argued that conservatives should deescalate their rhetorical war against the progressive university, as such attacks are discouraging young conservatives from becoming professors.

Andrew Hartman, author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars and professor of history at Illinois State University, suggested that culture wars about the universities will be intense during the Trump years.

I think the Trump administration, following the trajectory of the GOP [Republican Party], is likely to be the most anti-intellectual since perhaps the 1920s, he said. So the debate will be about whether society should subsidise humanities learning.

Professor Hartman said that while local control of education and the role of evangelical Christians were distinctive to US culture wars over universities, other Western nations could shadow some developments.

If right-wing populist parties gain political power, and if universities remain committed to the values of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, it seems only logical that culture wars will result, he said.

john.morgan@tesglobal.com

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Campus culture wars over 'anti-right bias' threaten to spread - Times Higher Education (THE)