Under-reported Texas environmental developments

-- Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons was fined some pocket change (to him) for making illegal campaign contributions to Texas legislators on behalf of his nuclear waste management PAC.

The committee — WCS-Texas Solutions PAC – made $64,500 in unauthorized political donations to Texas lawmakers in late 2011. The problem was that the PAC didn’t qualify as a legal PAC. The law requires that PACs have at least 10 contributors. The WCS PAC had only one — Simmons, who deposited $100,000 and then dispensed money to favored political candidates. Waste Control Specialists operates a nuclear-waste dump in West Texas. Had Simmons, who heads the company, made the donations directly in his own name, it would have been okay. But the 10-contributor law is aimed at making sure big donors don’t try to disguise their giving by doing so through a political committee.

For someone who gives as much money as Simmons does -- at $16.5 million, he was the third-largest contributor to the Mitt Romney campaign, behind Sheldon Adelson and Bob Perry -- this is positively ignorant. As Craig McDonald, the director of Texans for Public Justice noted...

“Let’s all pray Simmons takes more care in handling atomic waste than he does in handling his campaign contributions.”

-- The Exxon Mobil employees locally who oversee the pipeline in Montana, the one that leaked oil into the Yellowstone River last summer, apparently fell asleep on the job.

Delays in Exxon Mobil Corp.’s response to a major pipeline break beneath Montana’s Yellowstone River made the spill far worse than it otherwise would have been, federal regulators said.

Department of Transportation investigators examining the spill said pipeline controllers in Houston could have reduced the volume of the 1,500-barrel spill by about two-thirds if they isolated the rupture as soon as problems emerged.

Instead, crude drained from the severed, 12-inch pipeline for another 46 minutes before a remote control valve near the river was finally closed.

The July 1, 2011, spill fouled 70 miles of the riverbank along the scenic Yellowstone.

Does everybody understand now why there is so much opposition to the Keystone XL? I suppose the best response from conservative radicals would have to be: "Pipelines don't kill people".

-- After Shell's Arctic drill ship broke loose from its tugboat and beached itself on an Alaskan coastline, the Internet meme-ists sprung the trap. Again.

A hoax website mounted by environmental activists to highlight the dangers of Arctic drilling and mock Shell’s search for oil in the region is getting fresh attention in the wake of the grounding of one of the oil company’s Kulluk rig near Alaska.

The arcticready.com website — designed to look exactly just like Shell Oil Co.’s real website — is welcoming a surge of traffic as people take to the Internet to search for more information about the Kulluk. Only most of them don’t know it’s a spoof.

Yes, it was so good it fooled other environmental activists...and an NPR affiliate.

For instance, one environmentalist emailed a quote attributed to Shell but pulled from the site to reporters Tuesday night before issuing a mea culpa few minutes later.

On Wednesday morning, a radio host on the NPR station KUOW in Seattle quoted directly from the site and attributed these comments to Shell:

“No oil company has ever operated in an environment as extreme as the Arctic, let alone with heritage equipment—yet that’s exactly the sort of challenge that makes the Arctic so appealing to many of us at Shell. On the slight chance that something does go wrong, Shell’s spill cleanup plan is second to none. No one has yet fully determined how to clean up an oil spill in pack ice or broken ice—but that too is exactly the sort of challenge we love.”

Classic. Here's a picture, courtesy EcoWatch, of the Greenpeace billboards connected to the effort opposing Arctic drilling that appeared in Houston last summer.

Flickr has a few more.

Update: It turns out that Shell was trying to move the drilling rig before the end of the year -- in the dead of the Alaskan winter -- in order to avoid paying Alaskan taxes on it. They remain liable for the taxes (because it grounded on New Year's Eve), and now also for a multi-million dollar rescue operation. And if it starts leaking oil...

Let's meet back here in a couple of months and do it all over again.

Fiscal roller coaster survived! Now let's run over to Debt Ceiling Mountain and ride that one!

Setting a looming deadline to avert self-created calamity has become a frequent device for the U.S. Congress to get things done in recent years. When all else fails, as it often does, it's supposed to frighten members into action.

That was the idea when Congress created the "fiscal cliff" in August, 2011 to resolve a partisan struggle, also with a deadline and also self-created, over raising the federal debt ceiling.

Catastrophic budget cuts, timed to coincide with the threat of hefty income tax increases, would finally produce big cuts in the soaring federal budget by December 31, 2012, or else.

It didn't work. 

I'm not much into the 'soaring federal budget deficit' part, as you might guess. End the wars, raise all the taxes on the wealthy, institute a federal jobs program similar to the New Deal, and we'd be running surpluses just as we did in the Clinton years by the end of 2016.

But a few on my side of the aisle still want to grumble.

So, we have a modest deal in place to avert the contrived crisis known as the fiscal cliff. Washington is celebrating the fact that Congress averted the disaster that it created out of thin air last year.

Some say that it's not a bad deal on its merits, but we'll have to await final judgment until we see what happens with the debt ceiling, which has to be raised in the next two months. If the White House stands firm on its refusal to negotiate over the debt ceiling again, and doesn't give any more concessions, then we can look back at this deal as a pretty good one, on balance. 

I suspect this will become the center-left conventional wisdom, and only dirty hippies will be bitching. So pass the patchouli, because I hate this deal. 

Though often regarded as a DFH despite my Neiman Marcus ties, I don't hate this deal. Yes, because the Social Security payroll tax goes up, the middle class gets to pay a bit more. But the benefit of that is that it resolves some of the "cut entitlements/we're going broke" bullshit coming out of the mouths of douchebags like Lindsey Graham.

Still, even Paul Krugman bitched about the deal.

So why the bad taste in progressives’ mouths? It has less to do with where Obama ended up than with how he got there. He kept drawing lines in the sand, then erasing them and retreating to a new position. And his evident desire to have a deal before hitting the essentially innocuous fiscal cliff bodes very badly for the confrontation looming in a few weeks over the debt ceiling.

If Obama stands his ground in that confrontation, this deal won’t look bad in retrospect. If he doesn’t, yesterday will be seen as the day he began throwing away his presidency and the hopes of everyone who supported him.

While I would not hesitate, normally, to give the president a kick in the shins over his negotiating acumen, even I find PK's criticism a little harsh. John Aravosis mocked Krugman over his recalcitrance.

I’m sorry, but this doesn’t make much sense.  We got what you wanted, but you still feel we lost because you don’t like the way the President got what we wanted.  What was wrong with the President’s approach, I ask?  He caved on his promises, you say.  But if the President caved on his promises, then how did we end up with what you wanted?

I’m the first to criticize the President for his “cave first, negotiate later” negotiating style – and we criticized him heavily during his first term on this very point.  But I think it’s significantly harder to argue that “he caved” if you also claim that he got what you wanted.

And while I am no defender of Obama's in this regard, the truth is what it has always been for him: his competitors imploded in wave after wave of infighting and vitriol among themselves.

Just check in on any conservative website. Big Jolly is so mad he's calling for a primary challenge to John Cornyn for voting 'yes' on the bill.

Fact: I would quit blogging about politics and never look back if the Republicans weren't such a hilarious clusterfuck. They are truly funnier than the simian habitat at the zoo during mating season.

Oh, the Texas Republicans still get my goat with their wanton and intolerable cruelty. But their "success" also has to do with the quality of their competition. The only response to the question of how Democrats keep losing to them is that Texas -- outside the big cities--  is full of gun-and Bible-clinging, Walmart-shopping, oilfield trash and drugstore cowboys.

(But that's a digression, probably worthy of getting me disinvited to ride on someone's bus for next week's opening session of the Texas Legislature. Meh. I'll catch a ride later on Lobby Day with some progressive organizations.)

Meanwhile, let's pop some corn, watch the TeaBaggers in Austin pick a fight next week with Joe Straus and lose, and ride the Debt Ceiling Tilt-a-Whirl in a couple of months.

Update: Why Everyone Hates the Fiscal Cliff Deal

Merry 2013

TPA's Texans of the Year are the Tar Sands Blockaders

The Texas Progressive Alliance, a consortium of Lone Star-based liberal weblogs, has selected the protesters of the Tar Sands Blockade as Texans of the Year for 2012.

The award has been given annually to the person, or persons or organization, who had the most significance influence -- for good or ill -- on the advancement of progressive interests and causes over the past twelve months.

"As with previous winners (like Fort Worth city council member Joel Burns in 2010, the Harris County Democratic Party's coordinated campaign in 2008, and Carolyn Boyle of Texas Parent PAC in 2006), the Tar Sands Blockaders represent what progressive Texans strive for: correcting injustices through direct action. Sometimes that takes place at the ballot box, sometimes in the courtroom, and once in a while it happens in the streets. In 2012, it happened in a handful of pine trees in East Texas," said Vince Leibowitz, president of the TPA.

The Tar Sands Blockade began when TransCanada, the company constructing the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, began seizing property from East Texans via eminent domain to connect the pipeline, which will transport tar sands oil from Canada to refineries in Houston and Port Arthur. Despite the fact that the pipeline hasn't yet been approved by the US Department of State,TransCanada and other operators have been busily cutting down swaths of forest, appropriating the land along the route as necessary, and when challenged by the small group of people protesting, responded with threatening measures and occasionally brute force.

When petitioning, lobbying, and public hearings failed to slow the construction of the pipeline, concerned citizens took to non-violent protests, risking arrest in order to demonstrate the will and demands of Texans concerned about the environment, about the nation's continuing dependence on dirty fuels, and the collaboration of government officials with the corporate interests. A group of protestors climbed into a stand constructed in a grove of pine trees and halted construction for weeks.

The movement began in June of 2012 with the formation of the Tar Sands Blockade, and the first lawsuit was filed in July.

As construction began in August, protestors began putting themselves on the line. Seven protestors were arrested in Livingston, Texas just before the Labor Day holiday. Even as a judge allowed TransCanada to seize a swath of farmland in Paris, Texas, more protestors chained themselves to construction equipment in rural Hopkins County.

The New York Times and the Washington Post picked up the story in October.

Along with the property owner, actress and activist Daryl Hannah was arrested as the two women physically blocked a piece of heavy equipment and its operator from clearing land for the pipeline. Even as the number of arrests climbed past thirty, the protests grew. A few days before the November election, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was arrested at the construction site in Winnsboro. In Cherokee County, sheriff's deputies pepper-sprayed protesters. All of this occurred while the legal battle went back and forth -- in December, a judge granted, then vacated, his temporary restraining order on pipeline construction.

And the efforts to stop the pipeline continue today, even as its construction proceeds apace. On November 29, Bob Lindsey and prominent environmental activist Diane Wilson were arrested by Harris County sheriff's deputies outside Valero's refinery in the Manchester neighborhood of Houston, where the pipeline will terminate. They chained themselves to tanker trucks outside the gates, were promptly taken into custody, and continue a hunger strike to this day that adds the humiliating and disgusting conditions of Harris County's jail to the list of outrages.

With training and mobilization of additional protests and protestors scheduled for early January, 2013, there will be more to report on this action.

The Texas Progressive Alliance salutes those who have sacrificed so much of themselves to underscore the seriousness of America's fossil fuel addiction, and how the system of corporate and political corruption has come to manifest itself in the controversy surrounding the Keystone XL pipeline.

Runners-up for this year's Texan of the Year included the following...

-- The emerging scandal of the Texas cancer research organization, CPRIT;

-- The spectacular failure of Governor Rick Perry's presidential campaign;

-- Attorney General Greg Abbott's woeful losing record in court in his many lawsuits related to the federal government, including redistricting, voter ID, Obamacare, etc.;

-- Senator Wendy Davis of Fort Worth, who defied conventional wisdom and was re-elected to the Texas Senate despite the best efforts of Republicans to deny her;

-- The expansion of the Texas Congressional delegation to 36 as a result of the 2010 census and apportionment of extra seats based on population growth in the Lone Star State. New Texans in Washington DC include former Democratic state representatives Pete Gallego and Marc Veazey, but also -- and unfortunately -- ultraconservatives Randy Weber and Steve Stockman.

Last of the 2012 Wrangles

The Texas Progressive Alliance wishes everyone a safe, happy, and prosperous New Year as it brings you this week's roundup.

The filing deadline has passed for the special election in SD06, and Off the Kuff discusses the eight candidates that have filed to run in that race.

Texas' budget decisions have always been made with what is best for corporations, big business, and the wealthy at the top of the list. WCNews at Eye on Williamson says it's time we had a budget in Texas that puts the people of Texas first.  

BossKitty at TruthHugger is relieved that this years is over: Good Riddance 2012.

The race to replace the late Sen. Mario Gallegos in the Texas Senate will have eight contestants. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs prognosticates.

Neil at Texas Liberal wrote about the silly Merry Christmas bill proposed by Texas state Rep. Dwayne Bohac. If Christmas and Jesus need a boost even here in Texas, then is it really Dwayne Bohac who will be coming to the rescue?

Sunday Funnies

Eight for SD-6

Four Democrats, two Republicans, one Green, and one 'I'm not telling'.

Sylvia Garcia, Carol Alvarado, Joaquin Martinez, and real estate broker Susan Delgado (who ran third in the '08 general election as a Libertarian against Mario Gallegos) are the Ds. RW Bray and Dorothy Olmos are the Rs. Maria Selva is the G, and Rudy Reyes left the party affiliation space blank on his application.

As Charles has already pointed out, Selva has the wrong election date on her site*. Olmos needs to update her webpage for this contest (it shows her campaign for SBOE in the last cycle).

I would continue to handicap this contest with Garcia and Bray most likely to make a runoff. Garcia, for her aggressive out-of-the-gate effort and a million-dollar campaign budget; Bray for having been on SD-6 voters' ballot seven weeks ago and earning 29% in the process. That's not meant to discount the campaign of Alvarado, who has a puncher's chance against Garcia in this scrum for the second round. With 71% of Gallegos' re-election vote divided unequally among four, Bray challenged with a conservative Latina option for those so inclined, and Selva and Reyes (apparently) making an appeal to independents, the open primary will be difficult to predict.

Like all specials, this one will be about the ground game. Whoever can mobilize their supporters to turn out in 30 days will move on to February, where the Democrat is likely to prevail.

Previously...

Alvarado declares for SD-6

Sylvia Garcia jumps in 

No Noriega(s) for SD-6 *with updates

Governor finally calls SD-6 special election 

Update: Charles thinks there will be a runoff between Alvarado and Garcia. I don't necessarily disagree with his premise as I interpret it -- that conservatives don't have much reason to turn out in the first round -- but I think some of RW Bray's support in November could have come from African-American Dems crossing over to vote for one of their own. A case can be made that twenty-nine percent of a protest vote against a deceased candidate is a good thing... or a bad thing. The bottom line is that SD-6 is solidly Democratic, and they'll either send a slightly conservative one (Garcia) or a more liberal one (Alvarado) to the Senate. If both make the runoff, it's going to get brutal.

*Now corrected.

Update II (Monday 12/31): Stace has Joaquin Martinez' snapshot of the ballot positions.

Salon's media hack list

They get a few wrong -- like the Atlantic, MSNBC, and Andy Borowitz -- but generally this assembly is definitive of why you should stop watching, reading, and listening. Here, let's check #4, the Sunday Talking Heads...

Every Sunday morning, the big four broadcast networks all air their FCC-mandated “public affairs” programming, which consists of a host (a white guy) interviewing the same dozen lawmakers, journalists and pundits in a rotating order. The lawmakers are usually not the most powerful members of Congress — often they’re somewhat marginal figures in terms of influence, in fact — and the pundits and journalists all generally share the same, or very similar, worldviews. The only people I actually know who watch these things do so out of professional obligation.

But people watch these shows. Millions of people. More people watch “Meet the Press” than “The Daily Show.” Most of those people are quite old, but it’s still the case that a significant portion of the American people are learning the contours of the great public debates of our time from David Gregory interviewing Lindsey Graham.

Maybe the DC police will bust Gregory for possession of a high-capacity magazine. The frying pan/fire progression means we'd probably get Luke Russert, however.

Press the Meat is only on in my house if Rachel Maddow makes the panel, which is too rarely. I only watch Facepalm the Nation because it comes on after CBS Sunday Morning, the only thing worth watching on Sunday mornings. This Weak with George Snuffleluffagus is simply hideous. I usually go back to Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry if I need to have some chattering in the background. MSNBC's breakfast television frequently has some intelligent conversation happening.

Number One on Salon's list is Politicko. That's dead solid perfect. Now you may be asking yourself, "what about Fox"? Well, Fox no longer qualifies as media.

I considered putting off my 2013 New Year's resolutions until 2014 (because I kinda feel like being an asshole for another year) but I am most certainly going to watch less of all the above, starting yesterday.

A slow boat to nowhere

If you haven't read this New York Magazine report of the National Review's post-election cruise, it's worth every bit of your time. Here's a few excerpts to whet your tastebuds.

The whole thing was white, and broken, that much was clear. A week after the presidential election, when the dreams of Republicans were dashed with President Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney, we were snorkeling in the blue waters of the Caribbean. In the distance was a shipwreck. “You could make out the pieces of it,” said Ralph Reed, the right-wing political operator who had bolstered the Evangelical Christian vote for Romney. “It was deep and murky.”

[...]

The cruise, featuring the star columnists of William Buckley’s 57-year-old conservative biweekly, had been planned long in advance, and everybody had believed it would be a victory party. An ­e-mail from the magazine’s publisher arrived a few days before we embarked: “Do not despair or fret. At least not next week.”

Onboard the Nieuw Amsterdam, no one could follow his advice. “Who sent Obama here to destroy America?” a fiftysomething woman asked me one evening over dinner, as if it were a perfectly reasonable question. 

Just when I thought I had gotten all the schadenfreude out of my system... they pull me back in.

After drinks, we moved to the Manhattan Dining Room, an elegant two-story restaurant at the ship’s stern, where we would meet each evening, tabled with a different assortment of cruisers, sometimes hosted by writers and pundits from the National Review. Kevin Hassett, a former economic adviser to Mitt Romney, hosted my table of eight that night, arriving in a bright-green golf shirt and rimless glasses. He announced that this would be a “family” conversation in which he was the moderator. 

[...]

Hassett, with an oddly cheerful, Oh-What-My-Country-Has-Done-Now mien, predicted economic doom under Obama, the most likely scenario being another Great Depression, which would make 2008 look like a joyride.

That prompted a tall, extremely tanned blonde named Kay, from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to ask Hassett, the co-­author of the 1999 book Dow 36,000, “So what do we do with our money?”

He recommended investing in real estate in another country, maybe in Central America somewhere. A woman to Kay’s right wrinkled her nose: How about a Western country? “Okay, if Europe is what you want, go to Poland,” he said optimistically. “Go to Krakow, buy a house for $50,000, and it’s going to be like Paris in a few years.”

As we drained the Pinot Noir, Hassett gave his audience the insider’s view of the Romney campaign, describing how its election-monitoring software crashed on November 6 and Obama was probably behind it, “because those guys are so evil.”

The table grumbled in assent.

“The thing we have to understand is, these are people who don’t have any morals,” said Hassett. “They’ll do anything. I’m one of their No. 1 targets. I mean, they really want me bad.”

“Well, you’re safe on this ship!” said Bobbie boldly.

Then Hassett pivoted to the liberal media. “I actually think that Goebbels was more critical of Hitler than the New York Times is of Obama,” said Hassett, tucking into a piece of strudel. “I was in the middle of the fight against the propaganda, and I have stories like you wouldn’t believe. These people are so evil. They’re basically Fascists. It’s unbelievable.” 

Read the whole thing. They don't get it (and they're still mad about it), and they're not ever going to get it.

Merry Christmas from a nonbeliever

T'was-the-day-before Wrangle

... and all through the blogosphere, not a creature was stirring. So here's the roundup from the best of the Texas Progressive Alliance from last week.

Off the Kuff discusses where the redistricting and voter ID lawsuits stand with the Supreme Court.

BossKitty at TruthHugger enjoyed a fiery sunrise on Apocalypse Morning. But the Sunday morning talk shows laid the cat's ears back in anger; she has a few NRA Whack-A-Mole Questions.
 
WCNews at Eye on Williamson says that Rick Perry and the wingnuts' latest privatization scheme to be exposed is just the latest instance of the scam that's always been there for everyone to see.

The legal and moral justification for homophobia, as expressed by Father and Son Scalia, is relayed by PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants you to know that the odious Aaron Peña is an official sellout and Rick Perry is no longer universally loved by the Tea Party.

With Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina set to become the fifth Black post-reconstruction U.S. Senator, Neil at Texas Liberal posted photos and links about Mr. Scott and the four who came before him.

The legal and moral justification for homophobia

As related to us by the Scalias, Antonin and his son Paul. First, the father...

Now that the Supreme Court will be weighing in on the issue of same-sex marriage, the Justices’ biases on the basic principles of sexual orientation are under scrutiny — none perhaps moreso than Justice Antonin Scalia. Recently, he defended his comparison between homosexuality and murder, arguing simply that either can be morally condemned. He obtusely couldn’t understand why the gay Princeton student who asked the question wasn’t convinced by his response.

More on this exchange.

The quotations from Scalia opinions that so dismayed  Princeton freshman Duncan Hosie all referred to homosexual conduct. For example, in a 1996 case the majority of the court held that voters in Colorado had exhibited “animus” toward gays by making it impossible for the state or municipalities to pass laws protecting them from discrimination. Scalia responded: “I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible — murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals — and could exhibit even 'animus' toward such conduct."   In his dissent Scalia did refer to “homosexuals” (he assiduously avoided the word “gay” except in quoted material), but he used that term interchangeably with “those who engage in homosexual conduct.”

And what of the notion of "sexual orientation"? Scalia did acknowledge in his Colorado opinion that such a thing might exist. For example, he wrote that it was permissible for states to criminalize homosexual conduct  (as it was in 1996) "surely it is rational to deny special favor and protection to those with a self avowed tendency or desire to engage in the conduct. In the next sentence he suggests that "'homosexual-orientation' is an acceptable stand-in for homosexual conduct."

And now the son.

Insights into Scalia’s understanding of homosexuality (or lack thereof) can perhaps be found through his son, Rev. Paul Scalia, a Catholic priest in Arlington, Virginia. The younger Scalia has worked with the Church’s Courage ministry, which promotes “chastity” for gay Catholics using principles from ex-gay therapy. He has also spoken openly on the topic, and though he’s proven quite capable of reiterating the Church’s anti-gay teachings, a 2005 article reveals just how distorted the family’s view on homosexuality may be.

You need to go on over there, or you can click this link. Once you have taken in as much of that as you can stomach, continue here.

Contrast  the Scalias’ approach to this passage in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in the 2003 case of Lawrence vs. Texas, which overturned a Texas law against same-sex sodomy. Kennedy wrote:  “The case does involve two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other, engaged in sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle. The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.” Some gay activists blanched at Kennedy’s use of the term “homosexual lifestyle,” but applauded his larger point: that what was at issue was the lives of gays and lesbians, not isolated sexual acts.

Scalia dissented in that case, too, arguing that Texas’ sodomy law “seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual behavior are 'immoral and unacceptable' — the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity."

The conventional interpretation of  Scalia’s opinions in gay-rights cases is that he doesn’t like gays; but maybe the more accurate gloss is that he doesn’t believe they exist -- except when they are engaging in (or thinking about) "immoral and unacceptable" sexual acts.

And then finish at the original with this.

For the Scalias, moral condemnation of homosexuality is just assumed, and the consequences of that judgment are par for the course. The consequences of family rejection for LGBT youth have been thoroughly documented, but for these men, rejecting “homosexual inclination” takes priority. Rev. Scalia relies on genetic uncertainty to conclude that homosexuality is not a “fixed, inborn orientation,” even though science does not doubt that is exactly how sexual orientation presents, regardless of its causes. He seeks to reject people for something that is wholly part of who they are and how they will lead their lives, ignoring that such an approach unquestioningly deprives them of life’s most basic sources of happiness and support: a loving partner and the opportunity to raise a family.

The phenomenon of “coming out” only exists because a culture that shuns homosexuality has demanded gay invisibility. The concept of “gay pride” came about not as flamboyant flaunting, but to counter the expectation of “gay shame.” These unique aspects to gay identities reflect the consequences of condemnation, not an impetus for them. Moral condemnation is not inherent; in the court of law, it must be justified beyond tradition and religious belief. Unfortunately, it seems Justice Scalia is not interested in such intellectual justice.

So by my reading, homosexuality -- according to the Scalias -- is an 'urge', i.e. a choice; since it is a sin against God's law it is also a sin against man's; and no serious thinker can disagree with that. (It is worth noting that no less serious a thinker than Gore Vidal advanced a similar premise, albeit without the moral judgment.)

These religious interpretations, followed by constructing premises based upon the foundation of conservative Christian values -- dogma, in other words -- is what leads to less serious thinkers saying things like "Life is God's gift to women, and so by extension is a fertilized egg as byproduct of rape or incest."

When science is dismissed in favor of faith, the rationale for any argument collapses. But the comforting fallback for those less serious thinking folks is always some version of 'what does the Bible say'. This makes as much sense to me as watching one television news network, one which only reinforces your prevailing point of view, never engaging one in critical thinking, never prompting a question as to whether the thoughts involved might be misguided.

The very definition and practice of ignorance (and a few other things).