News Weakly - 6/2/2018

Racial Bias
So, apparently Starbucks has figured out the answer to one of the truly huge problems facing mankind for ... ever -- racial bias. We've talked about it and legislated about it and prosecuted it and deemed it a hate crime, but Starbucks has figured out that if you close all 8,000+ stores in the U.S. for an afternoon so you can give all your employees "racial bias training," the problem is fixed. Okay, no, says CEO Schultz, it's "just a beginning" (a $12 million beginning), but it is a beginning! Now, if we can just close all schools for an afternoon so we can give all teachers and students some "no shooting people training" and maybe "no drug-taking training" we could begin to eliminate so many other problems in America today. Oh, hey, maybe we can get ISIS into some of these "sensitivity" classrooms. Think of the peace that would bring!

If I could offer a little hint, the problem is not a lack of education. You'd think we'd have learned that by now, but ... see? The problem is not a lack of education.

In Other News
It just warms your heart to hear these kinds of stories. "A nine-year-old South Carolina boy has made a whopping $6,000 selling lemonade to help cover his sick baby brother's medical bills." He sold lemonade and t-shirts at a used truck dealership and raised $5,860 to help cover the medical bills for his sick baby brother. In addition, another $1,300 from a benefit concert and $5,600 from a GoFundMe site were added to his efforts for the baby boy. See? Just heartwarming.

Equal Rights Amendment
Back in 1972 Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment. It was to be the 27th Amendment to the Constitution. It was fairly simple.

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Well, it didn't get the required 38 votes from the states, so it has been on hold ever since. Now, 46 years after the fact, Illinois has voted to ratify the amendment.

You'd have thought it would be a slam dunk. I mean, do we really want to deny rights on the basis of sex? No. Except I need to point out how this goes. First, who gets to define "rights"? Not God. Who? Because if you look at the United Nations version of "human rights", it is a much longer listing than you might have thought, and we would be making them law. Then there is the problem where the 14th Amendment required "equal protection", which was completely eliminated for the unborn in favor of abortion. Applying these amendments is almost random. Then the problem of definition. "Sex" has been redefined to mean a lot of things, like "the sex in which I like to participate" and "sexual orientation" and even "the gender I feel like I am ... and none of your simplistic 'binary gender' garbage!" I am pretty sure that, if passed, this innocuous, seemingly obvious, simple little amendment will be twisted in the very near future to crush whole groups of people and ideas by the sleight of hand our language and our culture has been growing so accustomed to. Should women have the same rights men do? Duh! Of course! Is that where this will end? Not at all.

Bad News for the Home Team
It has been a rough couple of weeks for conservative Christianity. Last week the Washington Post ran a piece about Paige Patterson, president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, TX. He was accused of covering up a rape of a student and he was accused of being a sexist by encouraging wives who were abused to forgive and pray for their husbands. The rape allegation was devastating; the seminary's trustees asked him to step down and named him president emeritus, leaving him a residence and retirement pay. The trustees indicated that there was evidence that Patterson had complied with reporting laws on the rape accusation and no evidence of misconduct in the treatment of a student worker who was fired from the campus dining services after he tweeted a critical article about Patterson.

The outrage was loud. He shouldn't be retired; he should be fired. He shouldn't be allowed a pension; he should be gone. People like Lauren Chandler, wife of Dallas megachurch pastor Matt Chandler, petitioned furiously to have him eliminated and they succeeded. Patterson is now fired, without residence or pension, and all the sisters in Christ rejoice.

I don't defend a Paige Patterson who may (or may not) have attempted to cover up a rape; these things ought not be. I do bemoan the "Christian" outrage that runs roughshod over their own Scriptures that say, "Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted." (Gal 6:1) It's sad that Jesus's "By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:35) is to be overwritten by #MeToo. That is, it's not Paige Patterson's demise that bothers me; it's the demise of the primary Christian virtue -- love for fellow believers. (Compare, for instance, with the resignation for moral failure of another prominent pastor.)

Reverse Logic
I'm scratching my head, I suppose. Can't figure it out. It doesn't take a genius to recognize that life in the San Francisco area is expensive, but that's because it's a tech center of mega proportions. All manner of tech is there including monsters like Apple, Facebook, Google, and beyond. Lots of jobs, lots of income, lots of people with money to spend. Only in San Francisco, then, would protesters work to block the tech jobs in favor of the unemployed and homeless. "Sweep tech, not tents" the signs said as they threw scooters (which, by the way, are tech) in front of Google buses during the morning commute.

Sure, makes sense to me. Eliminate all those jobs and all those workers and all their money and you will certainly have both plenty of homeless and plenty of space for them to set up tent cities. But is that what you see as an actual "good idea"? Like I said, can't figure it out.

Heartless
Iowa's "restrictive" fetal heartbeat abortion law was halted Friday by Federal Judge Michael Huppert. The law recognized a heartbeat as "life" and a baby as "human", thus, logically, concluding that a baby with a heartbeat was human life deserving equal protection under the law. Planned Parenthood, The ACLU of Iowa, and women everywhere demonstrated that, although the baby had a heartbeat, they had no heart.