• My wife Elizabeth is raising funds for the National Abortion Access Bowl-a-Thon, and has just one week left and less than $200 to raise to get to her goal of $1,000. Help out!
• And if you need some motivation, anti-choicers are harassing and terrorizing the staff of the newly reopened family-planning clinic in Wichita once owned by the murdered Dr. George Tiller. One of them, David Leach from the group Army of God, calls the clinic’s existence “a gauntlet thrown down by someone who wants a fight”.
• Here’s something I didn’t know: the New York City school district rents buildings owned from the Catholic church, to the tune of $27 million per year. And in exchange for that badly needed money, the church doesn’t permit sex ed to be taught in the public school classes that are taught in those buildings. How can it possibly be constitutional for a private entity to exercise veto power over a public school curriculum?
• For most churches, their 150th anniversary would be a day for rejoicing. Unless you’re the Seventh-Day Adventists, which descended from the Millerite Great Disappointment and were founded on a belief in the imminence of the Second Coming… making their upcoming 150th anniversary an awkward and embarrassing occasion:
“If you took a time machine and visited our founders in May 1863, they’d be disconcerted, to say the least, that weโre still here,” said David Trim, the churchโs director of archives and research.
They haven’t given up their apocalyptic belief, in case you were wondering.
• Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox church (he who’s fond of wearing $30,000 wristwatches) says that feminism is extremely dangerous, because if women turn away from their “exceptionally important role” of childbearing and homemaking, “everything will be destroyed as a consequence – family and, if you wish, the homeland.”
• Via fellow Patheos blogger Libby Anne, we find that Ron Paul is publishing a K-12 curriculum for homeschoolers focused on liberty and capitalism. No surprise there… except it turns out that Paul’s director of curriculum development is Gary North, a Christian Reconstructionist who advocates public stoning for gay people, adulterers and children who talk back to their parents. Freedom!