CNN: Going to church makes you more likely to love torture

Well, the article's choice of words implies this; it doesn't explicitly say it. Here's what is says: "The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey." (That would be the Pew Forum analysis of a Pew Research Center for People & the Press survey released yesterday.)

Two comments. First the obvious one: there's a correlation-not-causation problem here. Everyone knows that political conservatives are more likely to be regular churchgoers than liberals. Political conservatives are more likely to offer at least qualified support for the use of torture. No reason for CNN to suggest the faith is to blame, that each additional midweek service you attend makes you embrace sadism all the more. (According to the Pew data, mainline Protestants, many of whom attend weekly worship like clockwork [whether this makes us Real Christians is for the purposes of this post neither here nor there], offer less support for torture than do occasional church attenders generally. It's just that the mainline's overall numbers are so much smaller than those of evangelicals, so they're less represented in the statistic CNN trumpets here.)

Second, the ornery-skeptical one: Contrary to popular belief, by and large, conservative Christians aren't going out of their way to buck the Republican party line on torture much more than most liberal Christians are doing so with the Democrats on, well, anything. On both sides, a lot of churchgoing folks are not political renegades who consistently follow their faith-based ethical imperatives as they understand them, parties be damned. They're Republicans or Democrats who go to church at least once a week. Their faith may well be serious and sincere; so are their--admittedly, OUR--largely secular cultural-political affiliations. Like it or not (I, naturally, do not), many more of them are conservative than liberal.

Which principles and which compromises?

I missed this the other day, but Nat alerted me to it: Daniel Larison on

The profoundly dispiriting realization (really, it is just a reminder) that it is torture and aggressive war that today’s mainstream right will go to the wall to defend, while any and every other view can be negotiated, debated, compromised or abandoned.

The Stone boy sayseth

It seems my college roommate Nathaniel is back at the blogging. Actually, I'm quite certain of it--this is not a half-assed sort of fellow we're dealing with here.

That's 574 selectively bred huge breasts per second, with plenty of dark meat to put in pet food or throw away or whatever

Disclaimer: No, I don't think that eating meat is intrinsically bad, nor do I think that people who eat meat are bad people. I came off my vegetarian high horse years ago...and have since replaced it with a nice food-movement horse. (He's a good horse. Kind of hip but not too aloof, kind of earthy but not a total hippy, you know? Eats strictly perennial grasses.)

In other words, I DO think that industrial livestock farming is among the most devastatingly harmful industrial practices in this country, one that should be, if not abolished outright, at least heavily regulated like a factory with clear social-environmental-public health negative outcomes, rather than subsidized and propped up as if we'd starve without it or something. And I do think that, whether your meat's from Tyson or some fancy farmer's market vendor, Americans in general eat entirely too MUCH of it for our own good or that of the rest of creation. Exhibit A: the difference between a dinner plate here and one in pretty much any other country, especially if you're dining with the bottom 70 percent or so of the income bracket.

Anyway...this is a cool graphic that illustrates well just how many (energy-sucking, water-wasting, air-polluting, and yes, sentient) animals we slaughter in this country:

Don't go right or left, go deeper...left?

This is weird: it turns out Jim Wallis, who has consistently dodged the label "religious left" for a long, long time, is a religious left leader after all. Huh.

Pastordan's reaction is a bit stronger than "huh."

"When the gay community is granted personal freedoms, ours get taken away. How? Shhh."

I don't think Colbert's all that funny, but I loved his summation of the anti-same-sex-marriage movement's messaging, so I put it in the title. Now I guess I'll embed the whole clip:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

High-speed rail? High-speed rail.

So it looks like the president's got some pretty serious high-speed rail plans. Here's a map of planned service routes:

Some light reading

This is cool: Michael Westmoreland-White has a handy short bibliography on the subject of Christianity vs. empire. I've only read a few of these so far (mostly biblical studies stuff), but going deeper into the literature on this subject is high on my list.

Here, have some nice risk-free debt on us

I recently finished paying off a student loan I'd been chipping away at for years. It felt good, but not very--it was just the first of several; I'd prioritized it because of the obscenely high interest rates. So I was glad to hear that the president is pushing to get rid of the middleman banks in federally guaranteed student loans--a pretty straightforward tax-dollar giveaway, useless (or worse) to actual students who need the aid, and a program that's seen some recent scandal.

I still owe thousands to Sallie Mae. Lousy bums.

It's official: the church has gotten into the Twitters

And not just the cool-kids church but the stodgy one, too.

RD reports on this goofy stunt and offers an obligatory think piece to boot.

Rep. Ryan: Spending doesn't end a recession, spending does

By now you've probably heard that the GOP alternative to the president's proposed budget is a little thin on details. (Though word is they'll be coming back soon with something with some actual numbers amid the ideological boilerplate.)

This morning I woke to the sound of my former congressman, Rep. Paul Ryan (WI-1), shilling for the Republican so-called plan on Morning Edition. I was frustrated that the reporter declined to follow up on a couple of standard-nonsense talking points. From the npr.gov write-up:

But Ryan says unemployment during the New Deal ranged from 12 to 25 percent. "Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury secretary, came to the Ways and Means Committee at the end of that period and said, 'This was a disaster.' It didn't work. We borrowed so much money; we ran up the debt. We didn't get out of the Depression until World War II came along."

First of all, unemployment went down, not up, during the New Deal. (As Jonathan Chait put it awhile back, blaming FDR for the fact that unemployment was higher than it was LATER is like blaming Jefferson for leaving office with a smaller country than we have now.)

Second, you can't criticize the idea of spending your way out of recession by saying that the war, not the New Deal, got us out of the Great Depression--because whichever of those two things made the difference, it was because the government spent money. The relative merit of spending on guns vs. butter is a different question, as much as conservatives might want to conflate the two.

In other news, it's clear that, as during the election, we've reduced our understanding of distinct, different-in-kind political ideologies to a single, one-dimensional continuum: from Mussolini to Mao, with U.S. politicians defined by how close they get to either pole. So here's a good corrective from Alan Wolfe, who reminds us that socialism isn't liberalism-but-more-so. Actually they're fundamentally different things.

Everyone's favorite possibly-slightly-better-than grocery option

Whole Foods: the delicious taste of over-priced, greenwashed, big-organic food.

Now with even more union-busting.

A defense contractor that isn't afraid of commitment

And loves me for whom I am.

Aryeh Cohen: "Has Israel jumped the shark?" Exhibit A: this Bollywood-style number by arms manufacturer Rafael:

This Red Scare Doesn't Really Make Sense: bank nationalization edition

Kevin Drum makes a good argument that the banks should be nationalized because of, not in spite of, our capitalist economic system.

Torturing for nothing

Lawrence Wilkerson (Secretary of State Powell's CoS): debates about morality aside, Gitmo Bay has been fairly useless to intelligence efforts.

That's right: even if you grant that the concrete reality of torture is a lesser evil than the possibility of a terrorist attack--an idea I have a hard time even taking seriously, much less granting--Gitmo is an immense failure even on these fairly frightening terms.

Benedict and the TAC

AP:

Absorbing the breakaway Traditional Anglican Communion would be a small but notable victory for Pope Benedict XVI, who has made unifying Christians a goal of his papacy.

Really? By absorbing these people, who find not just the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada but the entire Anglican Communion too liberal to stay in communion with them?

Md. Senate: Declining to kill people who are no longer a threat to anyone is more change than we can believe in right now

Gov. O'Malley concedes defeat.

"Is there a semiotician in the house?"

Mark asks a good question: what, if anything, does the little cross mean in the recovery.gov logo?

Correlation vs. causation

Talking with lots of folks about the economics crisis lately--which few of us understand particularly well--I've been thinking about the old correlation=causation fallacy.

So has Randall:

Albany Park's foreclosed homes

A couple blocks from where I live, right across the river, is the 33rd Ward, which has the dubious distinction of being the foreclosure capital of Chicago. Sen. Durbin did a press conference there the other day, at which he promoted the bill he introduced back in the last Congress to help homeowners in bankruptcy proceedings avoid foreclosure by allowing bankruptcy courts to reduce their payments. Joining the senator in holding the press conference was the Albany Park Neighborhood Council, a community-organizing group that has done much great work on behalf of the area and its many low-income people.

My church is in the 33rd, and my friend and pastor Tom Terrell, shown above with the senator, spoke at the event. As a pastor and community leader, Tom sees the effects the financial crisis has on real people in his daily work. I'm a renter with limited expenses (and an apparently responsible landlord), so it can be a bit less tangible to me (so far). I've tended to think about the crisis mostly in the aggregate terms of public policy. But the people losing their homes are actual people, real individuals and families and neighbors.

Photo used by permission of APNC.