the national media: reinforcing America's prejudices?

Muslims Murder, Christians Don’t: What Went Missing in Analysis of Tiller’s Executioner | Media/Culture | ReligionDispatches:

I do not know either Mr. Muhammad or Mr. Roeder, nor had I even heard of either man prior to several days ago, but I am reasonably confident that Roeder’s religious commitments supplied comparable motivation for his violent actions as did Muhammad’s for his. I am also confident, given the details unwittingly supplied in the various articles about Roeder, that he, like Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph, subscribed to Identity Christianity (in contrast to other high-profile Christian abortion activists discussed in RD here, who generally arrive at their vitriolic and dangerous brands of Christianity via the Christian Reconstructionist and Dominionist theologies). An exploration, however, of Roeder’s apparent immersion in the Christian Identity Movement does not fit the dominant story line that has emerged of Roeder in news articles about him. According to these articles, he is right wing, anti-government, and anti-abortionist, with a prior arrest history and perhaps mental problems. His faith, apparently, is irrelevant.

The Times and other major news outlets have done their readers a tremendous disservice by playing down Mr. Roeder’s faith as a motivating factor in his alleged crimes. But more is going on here than simply flawed journalism. The reporting of Mr. Roeder’s and Mr. Muhammad’s alleged violent crimes is a clear indication of the generally unspoken and likely unreflective assumptions held by many Americans about the world’s two largest religions, Christianity and Islam.

The former is generally taken to be a peaceful religion that promotes what is good and virtuous; the latter as a religion of violence. [...] The effect of these assumptions on recent journalism, however, is an excessive focus on the Muslim faith of one alleged killer, and an automatic disregard for the Christian faith of the other. The articles confirm what we already “know” about what turned Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Roeder into killers: the Muslim faith of the former is all the explanation required, while the Christian faith of the latter is not relevant to the explanation at all.

So it seems, you can be a crazy Muslim, but you have to be Muslim first, and only crazy second, but if you're a crazy Christian, you have to be crazy first, and Christian second?

(no subject)

Another museum in danger : Pharyngula:

You can tell when the anti-intellectuals are in charge: they start throwing away investments in knowledge that took generations to build, all in the name of short-term economy. The latest instance: the state of Wyoming wants to shut down the University of Wyoming Geological Museum. It's already been starved down to a minimal (well, more like inadequate) staffing level, and now the state just wants to erase it completely.

This doesn't make sense. A museum is a repository of accumulated information — if you discard it this year because you don't want to maintain it, you never get it back. It's gone. You can't decide at a later date when you're more flush that maybe you'll restore it, because you can't, you have to start anew, and hope that future legislatures are a little more far-sighted than present ones. It frustrates me immensely to see academic infrastructure demolished because some bean-counter would rather throw away money on some waste of resources like abstinence-only education or locking recreational marijuana smokers in jail.

Read more about this travesty at Dinochick and Science Buzz, and sign the petition to save this resource.

Happy Loving Day!

Loving v. Virginia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967)[1], was a landmark civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute, the "Racial Integrity Act of 1924", unconstitutional, thereby overturning Pace v. Alabama (1883) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.