According to the AP Conservative leaders voiced dismay Wednesday at news that Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Dick Cheney, is pregnant, while a gay-rights group said the vice president faces "a lifetime of sleepless nights" for serving in an administration that has opposed recognition of same-sex couples. How bad is…
Take a look at the front page of today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
You can see the photo of an Iraqi man grieving over the body of his three-year-old daughter outside of the Baghdad hospital. According to the paper, “the girl was killed and three other family members injured when they were caught in crossfire as clashes erupted between gunmen and US forces.”
The lead story starts with this assertion:
The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. The current approach is not working, and the ability of the United States to influence events is diminishing.
This story line and this photograph clearly impugn the integrity of the United States. Publishing such information is unpatriotic. Or, at least, those are the sorts of things we’ve been told, until recently.
It was always OK to publish pictures of our proud soldiers and our high-tech missiles taking off, of course. It was up to Al Jazeera and the Europeans to publish pictures of what happened when those missiles exploded on the ground, however. And when those non-American media sources published those photos of Iraqi civilian carnage, it infuriated “America.” It’s not that American soldiers weren’t also credible witnesses to the civilian killings on the ground. The evidence was there to be published, if anyone cared to know.
For most of the past 3 1/2 years, the Post-Dispatch (along with most mainstream newspapers across the United States) did not publish pictures like this, certainly not in prominent places. It simply wasn’t deemed news …
Here's the story. But, of course, it is more important to get rid of gay military translators than to communicate with residents of Iraq.
To continue with a posting trend we started a couple days ago, I wanted to recommend a terrific book called Powers of Ten: About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, by Philip Morrison and Phylis Morrison, originally published in 1982 by scientific American Library. [It appears that new…
How do people who believe the Bible to be inerrant reconcile the Old Testmament version of God with the New Testament's version? They don't often try. Rather, they cherry pick. They tell the Noah story by focusing on God's "saving" of Noah's family, rather than firmly acknowledging God's decision to commit cold senseless genocide…