A couple years back there was a great non-fiction book written about how Kansas morphed from an outpost of liberalism into arguably the most conservative state in the country (take out Utah, Arizona, Montana, and Alabama and it isn’t so arguable). It also covered how residents of Kansas routinely vote against their own economic interests…
Category: Sunday
Sunday’s Sermons: With Jack Kevorkian Dead Where Do We Stand On Euthanasia?
In recent years it’s hard to imagine a person who has so personified a single issue as Dr. Kevorkian embodied the issue of Euthanasia or assisted suicide. He was an icon for the hard-to-talk about issue of patients that were terminally ill, suffering, and ready to die. The news media called him Dr. Death, the…
Sunday’s Sermons: Why Republicans Don’t Really Want to End Abortion
The abortion card. There is no one issue more controversial in the deck of cards that makes up American politics in 2011. You can’t reason with it, level with it, soothe it, or bury it. Knowing the irrationality of the issue, the side in favor of it just hopes it isn’t (for the 400th time)…
Sunday’s Sermons: Why Social Conservatives Need to Wake Up
The majority of Republican voters would be social conservatives (no abortion, no gay marriage, prayer in school, any religious issue), voting more about culture than the right wing’s economic policies, which many actually don’t like but barely pay attention to. BUT the people actually in charge of the party are fiscal conservatives (love of money…
Sunday’s Sermons: Armageddon, The Weird Sensation of Looking Forward to The End
So yesterday was May 21st and–if we believe some true believers–the world should have ended. It’s fair to note that most Christians didn’t actually believe this was the day, and that only one mega church (led by 89 year old doomsday-er Harold Camping) really pushed this date as the end. BUT it wasn’t just followers…
Sunday’s Sermons: WWJT (What Would Jesus Think about Modern Christianity?)
For the past few weeks we’ve talked about race, but on Easter Sunday it’s only right to refocus on religion. Years ago some ingenious marketer first created the WWJD bracelets. But instead of what he’d do I’m much more drawn to the interesting—but unanswerable—question of “What Would Jesus Think?” Currently in our national debate on…
Sunday’s Sermons: If Conservatives Don’t Want to Talk About Race, They Should Quit Bringing It Up
Race. There is nothing you can say to a conservative on this topic that will not inspire an immediate kneejerk reaction that race shouldn’t be the topic. Over and over again, conservatives tell us that race has nothing to do with it when they flip flop on Obama’s Libya actions (Newt Gingrich wanted bombing before…
Sunday’s Sermons: Conservatives See President Black Panther, I see President Huxtable
“I don’t hate Obama because he’s black…” So starts almost every argument by people that don’t like Obama before leading to the second half of that sentence which proves they almost definitely hate him because he’s black “…I hate him because he’s a Muslim.” Not true. “…I hate him because he’s not born in the…
Segregation Street is a Two Lane Highway
If you’re a Southern white guy who likes black women, you should probably move. It isn’t because there are no black women in the South, far from it, just that they most likely won’t date you. Paradoxically, Mississippi (37 percent), Louisiana (32 percent), Georgia (30 percent), South Carolina (28 percent), and Alabama (26) have the…
GOP Stirs Up White Middleclass Fears of Islam and Mexicans so Middleclass Pays no Attention to the Thing Actually Being Raped: Its Wallet
If you are a Hispanic voter or a Muslim living in the United States, it has been a bad couple of weeks. Hell, it’s really been a bad decade but it’s these latest developments I’m talking about: 1. Several states (including Alabama) have recently enacted laws that would ban Sharia Law from being practiced or…
Sunday’s Sermons: I Pose as a Black Woman on the Internet
I don’t think one can ever really know what it’s like to be another person. I might utterly despise someone like former President Bush, but I really don’t know what it’s like to be him. That being said, it’s very true that he absolutely doesn’t know what it’s like to be me, poor, or a…
Sunday’s Sermons: Why Jesus Would Support Unions
If you don’t know by now, Wisconsin’s unions (except for the police unions which supported Walker and are exempt from his changes) are in a fight for their life against Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker. It won’t surprise anyone reading a site called Alabama Liberal that I’m firmly on the side of the unions, but it…
The New Religious Right, Not Really That Religious
In the 1980’s, the Reagan Revolution swept the country. It was an awkward marriage of fiscal conservatives trying to deregulate or privatize as much as they could get their hands on (no matter the long term economic costs) and tricking dirt farmers in Kansas that they were holy rollers in order to do it. This…