Brock’s post reminds me to share my (past) favorite name for Bellevue: “The God Complex.” But now I think I have a new favorite…

The controversial Ten Commandments monument is making a stop (reg. required) in the Memphis area today, at Six Flags over Jesus and at the First Assembly of God Church.

If you go, be sure to take special note of number 2.

It’s Monday, so that means same-sex marriage is on in the Bay State. For suitable discussion, see James Joyner, Steven Jens, OxBlog, and Kevin Drum. For apoplexy, go visit Clayton “Even Worse Volokh Conspirator than David Bernstein” Cramer.

I’ve arrived safe and sound in Chi-town. Illinois has to be the most boring state in the nation; the whole state is flat as a pancake as soon as you get north of Mount Vernon (where I-64 crosses the state on its way between Louisville and St. Louis), and it doesn’t get more exciting until you can see the Sears Tower about 300 miles (500 km) later.

I even tried going a different way than usual (“Surely this lake on the map means topography nearby,” I thought erroneously), and all I got for my effort was an extra hour of staring at endless farmland, although I at least got off I-57—in other words, at least the flat, boring farmland was different flat, boring farmland. (From Effingham, I took Ill. 32 to Ill. 121 to Decatur, then took U.S. 51 north to Bloomington, then I-55 into Chicago.)

Speaking of Effingham, that giant cross is just freaky. Say what you will about Southern Baptists, but at least they have the good taste not to inflict something so immensely gaudy on the motoring public (preferring, instead, giant fields of tiny crosses or trinities of smaller crosses that aren’t hazards to unsuspecting amateur pilots).

Now, off to get me a light dinner and to finish getting junk out of my car.

every schoolchild in America, every one who doesn't make a spectacle of him or herself by conscientiously objecting, is expected every schoolday to

pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America And to the Republic for which it stands One nation under God, indivisivible, with liberty and justice for all

which is, really, an awful lot like an oath of loyalty and citizenship.

Alex Tabarrok, however, goes a bit over the top in opposing the pledge for similar reasons. You've heard of Godwin's Law, haven't you, Prof. Tabarrok?

Jacob Levy has a very good post on the Pledge of Allegiance and its contemporary meaning. I tend to agree with Levy that “[i]f the words are not serious—and they’re not, anymore—if they’re just mindless blather, then they demean something that shouldn’t be demeaned.” When something is said by rote rather than with conviction—as the Pledge is, daily, in public schools—I think it is inherently devalued.

Not that this has much to do with the constitutionality of including “under God” in the pledge, mind you, as Jacob acknowledges. And I’m not sure what exactly to make of Jacob’s suggestion of “a one-time citizenship oath sworn at age 18” as an alternative to the Pledge. But I do think that people who take God seriously ought to wonder whether His name ought to be included as a footnote of something that our society treats as nothing more than a ritual incantation.

Amanda Butler has a first-hand report on the oral argument of Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow (a.k.a. the Pledge of Allegiance case). Like Amanda, I think Newdow has the better argument here; however, I doubt that will be enough to sway 5 justices to strip “under God” from the pledge.

Considering that I spent a good ten minutes of Black Hawk Down with my eyes closed and am still freaked out about the needle scene in Pulp Fiction almost a decade after it was released, I’ll probably take a pass on The Passion of the Christ. For those considering seeing it (including my mom’s Sunday School class, who are going this weekend), Robert Prather has a roundup of links, while Rev. Donald Sensing has a review.

PG at En Banc notes the case of a gay theology student who lost his scholarship after coming out at Baylor University. In completely unrelated news, Carlton Dotson will stand trial later this year for killing ex-Baylor-teammate Patrick Dennehy.

Brock below ponders the Shelby County School Board’s renaming of its inter-semester break to “Christmas break.” According to the 2003–04 calendar, it was previously known as “Winter Break (Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year’s),” which strikes me as a rather unwieldy, albeit accurate, description. Amusingly enough, the 2004–05 calendar on the same website uses the same description, eschewing the revised, “non-PC” nomenclature.

(About a decade ago I wrote a column for the Ocala Star-Banner on this very topic; feel free to flex your Lexis-Nexis skills trying to find it… I’m certainly not going to rewrite it for this blog.)

One thing many people elide, or perhaps just forget, when talking about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is that he was a minister—his faith, above all else, informed his actions. Rarely was that more clearly on display than in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, where he considers whether his leadership of protests against segregation in Birmingham was “extremist”:

But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that an men are created equal …” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremist for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime—-the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.*

As Michael Totten today points out, there is no shortage of extremists today on either side of the political spectrum. They ought to give pause to reconsider what kinds of extremists they will be.

Update: Big Jim notes that it’s someone else’s holiday too down heah, as they say.

The Boston Globe suggests that Howard Dean isn’t really a secularlist after all; instead:

Presidential contender Howard B. Dean, who has said little about religion while campaigning except to emphasize the separation of church and state, described himself in an interview with the Globe as a committed believer in Jesus Christ and said he expects to increasingly include references to Jesus and God in his speeches as he stumps in the South.

Dean, 55, who practices Congregationalism but does not often attend church and whose wife and children are Jewish, explained the move as a desire to share his beliefs with audiences willing to listen. [emphasis mine]

Well, it’s nice to see Dean takes his faith so seriously that he considers it to be a strategic asset in his campaign. Me, I’d rather he be honest with the public than start engaging in calculated pandering to voters—but, then again, I already find Dean loathsome on so many levels that I’m probably not in his target demographic.

I also tend to agree with Jeff Jarvis and Matt Stinson that people of faith will find Dean’s attempts to speak on faith deeply insulting—particularly if they know that it is part of a calculated strategy by Dean. And I don’t think regionalized campaigning can really work in the modern era—Bush probably lost as many votes as he won by visiting Bob Jones University in 2000, for example.

Incidentally, I saw a shorter version of the article in today’s Memphis Commercial Appeal, so it must be getting wide play.

One other thing: like Matt, I don’t think the fact that his wife and kids are Jewish should make any in how Dean’s religiosity is perceived (if anything, the faith of the people I know in families with mixed religions seems stronger than the norm). His other behavior alone is sufficient to make his sincerity about the nature of his faith questionable.

Link via email from Erick Erickson.

Jacob Levy says pretty much everything I had to say about the French government’s decision to go ahead with efforts to ban the display of religious symbols by students in public schools.

Russell Fox is none to impressed by the proposal either.

Mike Hollihan at Half-Bakered has a post on discriminiation against atheists in the Tennessee Constitution. The relevant paragraph is Article IX, Section 2, which reads

No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this State.

Earlier, however, in Article I, Section 4, the Tennessee Constitution declares

That no political or religious test, other than an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and of this State, shall never be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under this State.

Now how exactly can requiring that someone not deny the existence of God, or “future state of rewards and punishments,” not amount to a religious test? It would seem to even exclude Christian Universalists, who hold that everyone will be saved and no one will go to Hell.

And I wonder how broad the phrase “any office in the civil department of this State” is supposed to be. Are atheists not allowed to be Tennessee State Troopers?

It seems that discussion of the proposed “Defense of Marriage” amendment makes Andrew Sullivan take leave of his senses. He spends a lot of time ranting about “celibacy,” a term that appears nowhere in the amendment’s text. Here’s the text, as presented by Sullivan:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups. Neither the federal government nor any state shall predicate benefits, privileges, rights, or immunities on the existence, recognition, or presumption of sexual conduct or relationships.

Now, let’s deconstruct that paragraph. Sentence one is plain English, so that’s easy. Let’s take a looksee at #2:

Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups. [emphasis mine]

Note the “shall” clause. This, in a nutshell, means that anything that doesn’t explicitly say “gay people may marry each other” cannot be construed to mean, well, “gay people may marry each other.” Sounds simple enough. Now onto #3:

Neither the federal government nor any state shall predicate benefits, privileges, rights, or immunities on the existence, recognition, or presumption of sexual conduct or relationships.

This is apparently where Sullivan goes off on his bizarro rant about celibacy. To put it crudely, this sentence—in English—means, “you aren’t entitled to anything just because you’re fucking someone else.” How on earth Sullivan makes the leap to this sentence creating the precedent for some sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” police force just boggles the mind; if anything, it would seem to preclude it, because having a sexual relationship cannot have any effect on your “benefits, privileges, rights, or immunities.” This sentence says, whether Sully’s fucking his boyfriend or sleeping down the hall in the spare bedroom, it makes absolutely no difference.

Frankly, I agree that this amendment is fundamentally silly, although, unlike Sullivan, I’d rather have the state out of the business of marriage as completely as possible, leaving it to contract law and civil society—hence why he’s a conservative, while I’m a libertarian. And if Sullivan wants to marry his boyfriend, or the hypothetical lesbian commune down the street wants to organize a group marital arrangement, it’s nothing that’s going to cause the end of the universe; even if God cares, I suspect He has more important things to worry about. But I’d expect someone who, you know, writes for a living might actually be capable of reading what’s in front of his face. And, in this case, I think Sullivan’s dislike for the proposal has blinded him to what the actual text says.

And Sullivan’s still obsessing; apparently, what’s important to him aren’t the benefits of marriage; it’s the societal imprimateur that government recognition of gay marriage would convey. The conservative’s complete, and misguided, faith in government as a qualified social engineer emerges yet again.

Tom Maguire , Robert Musil, and Dan Drezner are not particularly impressed with Paul Krugman’s latest missive to the readers of The New York Times, in which he defends explains blames George W. Bush for Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad’s anti-Semitic diatribe in front of the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s recent summit.

Dan points out that Mahathir has basically made a career of using anti-Semitic rhetoric to bolster his reign as head of Malaysia’s one-party state*, a career that well-precedes George Bush’s presidency, has generally been chummy with the Bush administration (as Mark Kleiman pointed out a few days ago, rather unhelpfully if you’re trying to defend Krugman’s ignorance of contemporary U.S. foreign policy), and has “no domestic flank to protect” seeing as he’s leaving office in November—although it’s unclear whether Mahathir will continue to pull the strings in Malaysia, as his neighbor Lee Kuan Yew continues to do in Singapore.

Tom, on the other hand, engages in full-scale fisking of Krugman, wondering if Krugman actually read the speech in question. Robert Musil does some fisking of his own, suggesting we could find quite a few alternatives to Mahathir as a “forward-looking” Muslim leader, and isn’t all that impressed by Krugman’s attempt to whitewash Malaysia’s brutal policies imposed on its ethnic Chinese minority as some sort of high-minded affirmative action program.

David Bernstein likes the Darwin fish. Sasha Volokh doesn’t, and laments that there’s not a separate symbol for creationists, so that we evolutionists could just make fun of them, without casting aspersions on more enlightened Christians.

But there is a separate symbol for creationists: the Truth eats Darwin fish, which I see a lot of here in Memphis, and which qualifies as my least favorite car decoration. (Close second: those decals with Calvin peeing on a Ford logo, or a Chevy logo, or anything else for that matter.)

I used to have a Darwin fish on my car, until I concluded that it was responsible for several instances of vandalism. (This was in Rochester, NY.) That is to say, some person or persons who were offended by it were responsible for several instances of vandalism. The fish itself did not throw a brick through my car window, nor did it bend my antenna and stomp all over the roof of my car.

My personal favorite is the Cthulu Fish. “Cthulhu for President: why vote for the lesser of two evils?”

In a major breaking news story from the Commercial Appeal, former atheist Chuck Davis finds Jesus.

Davis says some of his old friends still don’t understand his conversion and some don’t accept it.

But Davis explained, “Jesus is like a fried peanut butter and jelly sandwich. People can tell you what it is, but you don’t know what’s it’s like until you try it.”

Bobby A-G, subbing for Alex Knapp at Heretical Ideas, tries to defuse the complaints about President Bush’s use of the word sin in reference to homosexuality.

One thing that has stuck with me since our family reunion in May was what one of my relatives-by-marriage* said about sin: in God’s eyes, all sin is equal, whether it’s murder, taking His name in vain, or telling a lie. (In some ways this resembles Orthodox Judiasm’s approach to Torah law; it’s all or nothing.)

One can legitimately debate whether or not homosexuality is objectively a sin, or whether it ought to be one. But in the belief systems of most Christian sects, it is considered one, the opinions of non-believers notwithstanding. I think Bush’s point was that the severity of the sin doesn’t matter, again because God doesn’t care about the severity (or even acknowledge it)—He only cares about the sin. And everyone sins. So those who would condemn gays for being sinful without condemning themselves too for their own sins would be hypocritical.

Of course, since Bush allegedly doesn’t nuance [sic], I may be reading far too much into this.

My friend Scott emails to note that there is one unpardonable sin: blasphemy of the Holy Spirit (or Holy Ghost, if your denomination swings that way).

Mark 3:29 But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation (King James Version)

Matthew 12:31 Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. (King James Version)

This lapsed Methodist learns something new every day…

In the midst of a serious post from Jane Galt’s Asymmetrical Information on whether Tom Daschle should stop calling himself a Roman Catholic, I found this laugh-out-loud statement (emphasis added):

Think of it like this: if you’re a Methodist, you don’t have to like the wedding service, and you can even tell everyone you don’t like it, even not use it, and you’re still a Methodist. But if you tell everyone the Bible is bunk and that Jesus guy was a real jerk, you may tell people you’re a Methodist, but you’re not one, and it would be reasonable for your clergy to ask you to stop so identifying, except that Methodists are far too polite to ever dream of such a thing.

I think Jane’s identified about the only part of Methodist teaching that might earn one who spoke in opposition to it opprobrium from the church. But I’m not sure that reproach would be much more than a stern talking to (if that). I suppose you can be thrown out of the United Methodist Church, but I’ve never heard of it happening.

Out of curiosity, I looked up what the United Methodist Church says Methodists believe; it was quite an interesting read for this semi-lapsed Methodist who has only taken Communion once in the past decade or so.

(As far as Daschle is concerned, I’m not a Catholic so I could care less what the Roman Church decides to do with him. But if you’re a Catholic and want to be excommunicated for whatever reason, I found this handy guide with a Google search.)