Ross Douthat's Response to Marriage Equality in New York: Let's Find New Ways to Blame the Gays

I've said before on this blog that I don't usually pay much attention to what Ross Douthat writes.  I read Douthat the same way I read David Brooks.  Though centrist conservatives--an ever-waning and now infinitesimal minority within the movement that calls itself conservative in the U.S. (which has no solid foundation in traditional conversatism at all)--profess to find both of these spokespersons refreshingly moderate and deep, I find both embarrassingly shallow.  Both have succeeded in passing themselves off as profound thinkers offering cover to intellectuals who still find it respectable to affiliate themselves with a Republican party long since gone off the tracks intellectually, morally, in just about any sense one can imagine.

Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin Predicts Divine Wrath after Rhode Island Enacts Same-Sex Civil Unions

Responding to Rhode Island's new law permitting civil unions for same-sex couples, Bishop Thomas Tobin forbids Catholics to support or participate in any way in these unions.  "To do so is a very grave violation of the moral law and, thus, seriously sinful," Tobin maintains.

Remembering a Beloved Aunt on the Occasion of Her Birthday

Today is the 97th birthday of an aunt about whom I've blogged a number of times here, and I've vacillated all day long about whether to post a remembrance of her here--and this picture.  Those who don't know the folks in the picture will naturally have far less interest than I do in remembering them, and I don't want my own solipsistic musings about long-dead family members to be a bore to others. 

Monday, with a Bit of Snark

Andrew Leonard writes at Salon:

Proud to Be a Flag-Waving American: Southern Baptist Churches as Republican Voting Machine

An on-the-ground report on religion and politics from Texas: yesterday, my cousin returns from church (he is a faithful Southern Baptist) to his father's care facility, toting a bag of little American flags.  He has brought them to decorate the tables in the dining room in which the residents eat.  And he says the flags came from his church, where they were handed out yesterday for the congregation to wave as they sang a song about being proud flag-waving Americans.

James Moore on Mark Halperin: The Myth of Liberal Mainstream Media

Texas communications analyst James Moore writing in the tradition of Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower, on Mark Helperin's recent faux slip of the tongue about Mr. Obama, and how it reveals the non-liberal slant of the mainstream (read: beltway) media: 

Alice Tells Her Chickens about Dharamsala: The Song on Which Everything Depends

Alice Walker, writing (to her chickens) about what she encountered when she went to the monastery of Dharamsala, in The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned with My Memories: Glorious, Rufus, Gertrude Stein, Splendor, Hortensia, Agnes of God, the Gladyses & Babe: A Memoir (NY: New Press, 2011):