Culturegeeks

Oregon was rated dead last by Americans United for Life, a pro-life group. Yay!

Overview Oregon has a dismal record of failing to protect women, the unborn, the sick, and the dying. For example, Oregon does not mandate informed consent or parental involvement for abortion, does not recognize an unborn child as a potential victim of homicide or assault, and does not limit destructive embryo research or human cloning. Most disturbing is Oregon’s law permitting physician-assisted suicide.

I wish I could embed this one, except (surprise) the $cientologists made a copyright claim against YouTube and had it pulled.

Click here for a working version, as of 9PM PT.

Turning Homosexuality on and off

Within hours of the treatment, previously heterosexual male fruit flies would be courting other males, and treatment could also cause flies who had been engaging in homosexual behavior to become exclusively heterosexual…

With the upcoming release of the film version, Catholics and apparently now Mormons too have been getting their knickers in a twist over Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. According to the Telegraph, the Catholic Herald has said that the book should be burned, and now school boards in Canada and the U.S. are self-righteously pulling it off the shelves. I might have just been asleep for all these years, but where was all this outrage when the books were first published? The trilogy has been at the top of just about every recommended reading list for kids, and many for adults as well, for years now. It seems rather intellectually lazy to suddenly be upset about the themes of the story now that it will be in a visual medium instead of a written one.

“We respectfully pray up a storm,” Perdue told a crowd that gathered on Tuesday outside the Capitol, which houses the state legislature.

“It is time to appeal to Him who can and will make a difference.”

Sadly, Him didn’t.

Governor Sonny Perdue’s prayer gathering stirred up controversy, but on the weather front it was followed by little more than thin drizzles in parts of Georgia.

(Via Cynical-C)

“Indeed, the tale of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its followers cuts to the heart of the one of the thorniest questions in religious studies: What defines a religion? Does it require a genuine theological belief? Or simply a set of rituals and a community joining together as a way of signaling their cultural alliances to others? In short, is an anti-religion like Flying Spaghetti Monsterism actually a religion?”

link

The Bible according to LOLcats.

Somehow, I’m pretty sure the decrepit old gasbag doesn’t have $11, let alone $11 million.

While there are probably some pretty valid free speech issues here,  I can’t find a whole lot to argue with a law that prevents protesting funerals specifically.