Stephan: I don't really see a lot of difference between the Taliban or Isis and the White Supremacy Male Dominance Christian evangelicals. They are not really Christians any more than the Taliban are really Muslims. They talk the words, but their actions would leave Jesus or Mohammed appalled. Both have an obsession with controlling women and everyone's sexuality. They are also the source of social violence.
During my undergrad years at U Mass Dartmouth I had the great privilege of being mentored by Dr Juli Parker, who was director of the Women’s center, now called the Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality. It was there, more than 20 years ago, that I was shown a small piece of what so many women face in this country. As the only football player volunteer at the center, I observed two very different worlds. The football locker room, with men saying some pretty awful things, and Dr Parker explaining the truth around sexual assault, abortion rights and the regular fight for equality that women face every day.
I felt a strong calling to ministry and I attended seminary, which, oddly enough, was an environment that sounded a little like the football locker room. I was hoping to change minds within the evangelical church. I failed, and 20 years later the evangelical church is stronger and more committed to prohibiting women the most basic right to decide what happens to their own bodies.
Evangelicals won a great and terrible victory with […]
Stephan: Personally, I have always found it very weird and more than a little creepy to listen to people obsessing over what other people are doing sexually. As long as it is two consenting adults and neither of them is you why do you care? But all male-dominant religions obsess constantly over this issue. It is this evangelical faux-Christian obsession that is behind what is happening in Texas, as this article lays out.
Demonstrator join the second annual Women’s March in New York City on January 20, 2018. Credit: Ira L. Black/Corbis/Getty
Advocates for reproductive freedom and LGTBQ+ equality on Saturday pointed to a legal brief filed in a U.S. Supreme Court case that could soon overturn Roe v. Wade as a crucial example of the broader goals of those fighting to end abortion rights across the United States.
“ALL anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice views stem from the same desire to control bodies.” —Zack Ford, Alliance for Justice
“It’s never just been about fetuses. It’s about controlling sex,” tweeted Muhlenberg College assistant professor Jacqueline Antonovich, a historian of health and medicine.
Both Antonovich and Elie Mystal, The Nation’s justice correspondent, responded to a portion of the brief flagged by New York University School of Law professor Melissa Murray that challenges previous rulings from the country’s highest court on not only abortion but also LGBTQ+ rights.
“Of course” the so-called “right to life” movement is also coming after cases that established key LGBTQ+ protections, said Mystal, “because it’s never about ‘life’ and always about ‘Christian fundamentalism.’”
Zack Ford of the progressive group Alliance for Justice said Saturday […]
Stephan: In this report, you can see clearly the corruption that pervades the U.S. Congress and perverts both parties. This is why you don't see obvious policies that foster wellbeing passing into law. Lobbyists and corporatists have buckets of money and other priorities, and bribery is legal in the United States. You can't call it that, of course, but that is what it is.
The Democratic agenda is getting eaten alive by lobbyists.
President Joe Biden
Joe Biden began with a perfect plan for his domestic agenda: He would create popular new health-care, education, and child-care programs for broad swaths of the public and finance them by making the wealthy pay for it.
The flaw in the plan is that the wealthy don’t want to have less money. Swarms of lobbyists set loose in Washington have eaten Biden’s proposals alive. His plan to end the notorious “angel of death” loophole allowing capital gains to escape any tax? Dead. His proposals to allow the government to negotiate prescription drug costs, saving taxpayers and consumers hundreds of billions of dollars? Eviscerated.
Perhaps most amazingly of all, even his plan to crack down on wealthy tax cheats is hanging on for dear life in Congress. Over the next decade, because of rampant tax cheating and lax enforcement, the federal government will collect roughly $7 trillion less in revenue than taxpayers owe. The Biden administration conservatively believes it can reduce that gap by about one-tenth, collecting an additional $700 billion. […]
Stephan: I hope my readers will take this very seriously. The two things I hope all of you do daily is meditate for 20 minutes, using whatever technique, religious or just mindful you like, and get out and walk. That and eat organic food, and cleanse your house of the chemical toxins found in most commercial cleansers, soaps, deodorants, and sprays. It will change your life for the better.
People walking in New York City Credit: Adam Dean/The New York Times
To increase our chances for a long life, we probably should take at least 7,000 steps a day or play sports such as tennis, cycling, swimming, jogging or badminton for more than 2.5 hours per week, according to two, large-scale new studies of the relationship between physical activity and longevity. The two studies, which, together, followed more than 10,000 men and women for decades, show that the right types and amounts of physical activity reduce the risk of premature death by as much as 70 percent.
But they also suggest that there can be an upper limit to the longevity benefits of being active, and pushing beyond that ceiling is unlikely to add years to our life spans and, in extreme cases, might be detrimental.
Plenty of research already suggests that people who are active outlive those who seldom move. A 2018 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for instance, concluded that about 10 percent of all deaths among Americans 40 to 70 years […]
