This Week in the News: From Mercy Sisters Shunning Mercy, to Sodomy Laws Outlawing Everything

This week in the news: Mercy sisters forget mercy, GOP gets worse, religious liberty inverts itself, Bachmann holds up white baby, when it became an emergency for Zimmerman, people get worked up and most vulnerable suffer, religious progressives eclipsing conservatives among millennials, and what sodomy laws outlaw (hint: everything, almost).

"Some load-bearing beam has surely buckled and collapsed within the Catholic Church."

"I kept saying that things would get worse in the GOP before things got better. I didn’t fully realize how much worse it could get – and how unlikely it now seems that it will ever get better."

"It would be much better for people who don't want to recognize same sex marriages to simply state that they specifically want the right to exclude gays than to make general arguments based on religious liberty."

"Last month, another hard-right rally featured Representative Michele Bachmann holding up a white baby and talking about the 'future of America'—not quite as explicit, but mainly a difference in degree."

"It was a non-emergency for Zimmerman at 7:09."

"Any time people get worked up about a menace they believe in but can’t actually see – demons, Commies, jihadis, hordes of hoodie-wearing thugs — they’re likely to take it out on the weakest and most vulnerable people in society."

"The percentage of religious conservatives shrinks in each successive generation, with religious progressives outnumbering religious conservatives in the Millennial generation."

"In fact, the only sex act that remains legal is heterosexual vaginal intercourse."

The graphic: a typesetter in a newsroom in San Augustine, Texas, in 1939, from the Library of Congress website.