A Tenable Belief

Juan Cole has put up a thoughtful piece on Martin Luther King Jr.’s response to the Vietnam War. Dr. King was not saying that war cannot solve military problems, you will note. He was saying that it cannot solve social problems. He would have scoffed at the Neoconservative idea that you can spread democracy by… Continue reading »

Something unusual has happened at Family.org, the web site of Focus on the Family. In its latest incarnation, its home page isn’t all about sex! The typical home page I remember, as shown at Archive.org, Was headlined with a story about parents talking to their adolescents about sex. One of the FAQs asked about a… Continue reading »

This just sounds too bizarre to be true, but apparently not: Dear Parents/Guardians: I want to inform you of an incident that occurred January 8 in your child’s comprehensive health education class. It has been brought to my attention that an outside speaker encouraged students to chew a piece of gum already chewed by other… Continue reading »

At the end of November I noted that Stephen Bennett Ministries was calling for $100K in year-end donations to retire its $25K debt and pay its expenses for the first 3 months of 2007. As December progressed, the debt-retirement number dropped to $18K and according to Google cache from December 28th, to $10K. The call… Continue reading »

Here’s an old-fashioned social conservative perspective: I don’t just mean that each person can do what they want to do, I mean that our society should allow people the freedom to make their own choices and live by their own beliefs. People of integrity don’t force their beliefs on others, they make sure that others… Continue reading »

It’s been months since I’ve looked at hit counts or referral info to gauge who is coming to A Tenable Belief, or why. (How many visitors come here? At best it’s been less than a dozen on an average day, which works for me. I started this project with an awareness of how blogs have… Continue reading »

A question: How homophobic to do you have to be to have Penguin Gaydar? Great line. Lewis Black just said it on The Daily Show. And his satiric closing, the title of the next book by friends of of those with Penguin Gaydar: Raped By The Death Tax, A Tulip’s Tale Oh, my.

At Ex-Gay Watch, Daniel quotes the book God’s Grace and the Homosexual Next Door, authored by Alan Chambers and the Exodus Leadership Team: Anyone, no matter his or her background, should be carefully screened before being entrusted with precious children. As with any childcare worker, criminal background checks should be done to ensure that the… Continue reading »

She insisted, mostly, that security was more important than marriage in this election. I was still surprised to see that, among the 500+ pages at Marilyn Musgrave’s congressional web site, I can’t confirm a single hit on marriage amendment, traditional marriage, or cultural war. Did the lead sponsor of the anti-gay marriage amendment in the 108th… Continue reading »

John Oliver, on The Daily Show as “Senior Foreign Policy Analyst,” was mocking the recently leaked Rumsfeld memo in which the word lose was put in quotes. Jon Stewart replied: Putting it in airquotes doesn’t make it any less true! An apt response, it seems to me. I’ll keep it in mind the next time… Continue reading »