Boy Scouts shut down local troop with gay scoutmaster. Specifically: a local Methodist church needed a scoutmaster, they looked for candidates, hired this 49-year-old now openly gay former Eagle Scout, knowing he was gay. He’s led the troop, the Boy Scouts told the church they couldn’t do that, the congregation decided to stick by their scoutmaster, and the BSA has now kicked the church out of the Boy Scouts. I’ve been following the story, but was surprised when a couple of my straight co-workers brought it up at work. One of them lives near the church, his wife is friends with some of the parents (who all want to keep the scoutmaster).
Religious Liberty Or Anti-Gay Animus?. Money quote: “…with devout Catholics, the acid test is divorce. The bar on divorce – which, unlike the gay issue, is upheld directly by Jesus in the Gospels – is just as integral to the Catholic meaning of marriage as the prohibition on gay couples. So why no laws including that potential violation of religious liberty? Both kinds of marriage are equally verboten in Catholicism. So where is the political movement to insist that devout Catholics do not have to cater the second weddings of previously divorced people? … Do we enshrine the right of, say, an Orthodox Jewish hotel-owner to discriminate against couples who might be inter-married across faiths?”
If you have somehow managed to miss the Guardian’s of the Galaxy trailor:
When I first heard they were adapting this Marvel comic as a movie, I was confused as to how it could possibly work. The problem was that I was thinking of the Guardians of the Galaxy comic book as published from 1969-95, which was a weird sort of resistance group made of of characters that had originally appeared in one-shot Marvel sci-fi titles of the 50s and early 60s, each of whom was the last survivor of a planet that had been destroyed by a n alien empire. I didn’t realize that in 2008 Marvel gathered a bunch of odd characters from some of their weirder 70s sci fi titles and created a very different group of misfits that seems to share more than a bit in common with the crew of both the Farscape and Serenity. Anyway, now that I know which characters they’re going with (and these guys were all involved in fighting Thanos, who was the “mysterious” bad guy in the after credit sequence of The Avengers), it makes a whole lot more sense. (And how can you go wrong with the Blue Swede cover of “Hooked on a Feeling”???)
The original was a hit in 1968 by B.J. Thomas (and yes, yes, I’m old enough to remember that, too). The only videos I found of him singing are from much more recent shows where he looks he doesn’t look quite as ancient as I feared. However I found this awesome clip from the Ed Sullivan Show, 1969, of B.J. Thomas singing his much bigger hit. And you really ought to watch it. Put up with the very cheesy background choregraphy, because a bit after the 2:00 minute mark it gets too silly:
It’s Raining Men becomes anti-Ukip protest song. Three decades after its original release, the single re-enters the charts thanks to a social media campaign launched in response to David Silvester’s remarks that the bad weather is a punishment for its gay marriage laws
Stop Beating a Dead Fox. I disagree with Rich’s conclusion for reasons I may go into elsewhere, but: “With a median viewer age now at 68 according to Nielsen data through mid-January… Fox is in essence a retirement community.” and “Hard as it may be to fathom, Fox Nation is even more monochromatically white than the GOP is, let alone the American nation. Two percent of Mitt Romney’s voters were black. According to new Nielsen data, only 1.1 percent of Fox News’s prime-time viewership is (as opposed to 25 percent for MSNBC, 14 percent for CNN, and an average of roughly 12 percent for the three broadcast networks’ evening news programs).”
The Problem with “Don’t Feed the Trolls”: Steph Guthrie at TEDxTor (Thanks to Sheryl for the link!):
The five best punctuation marks in literature. More specifically, the author explains five instances where famous writers used punctuation in a particularly interesting/important way.
That would explain the aim… (Click to embiggen)It’s Friday, already? Well, here’s a collection of news and other things that struck me as worthy of being shared:
What year is it? KKK Battles With Town Over Renaming School Named For Klan Founder (Our local alt-weekly paper headlined it’s covered of this story, “If the KKK Doesn’t Want You to Change the Name of Your School, You Should Probably Change the Name of Your School” my thought is, if someone thinks refering to people uncomfortable with the name as “many bestial blacks and other criminal elements out for revenge” should seal the deal)
This, Right Here, Is The Problem. “…this is why women are routinely mocked by sexist, skeezy shits who think that finding us attractive must necessarily invalidate whatever point we’re making…”
I don’t even know where to begin: Landlord discovers 11-foot python in rental property: undernourished, abandoned, burned because it had wrapped itself around a water heater for warmth. “the second time in a month that law enforcement has asked for assistance from WSU to catch a large snake according to College of Veterinary Medicine officials.”
Font Folly 