“Cosmos” Misrepresents Why Man Was Set on Fire, Claims Inquisition Apologist

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Every Who down in Whoville liked Cosmos a lot…
But the BillDo, who lived just north of who-cares, did NOT!

The tireless defender of all things Catholic (unless it’s things like 99% of Catholics practicing birth control, or being okay with not stoning teh gays) has spoken out against Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s and Seth McFarlane’s reboot of that show where Carl Sagan showed my generation just how beautiful our universe is.

The first episode, aired a couple of days ago, includes a segment about how Giordano Bruno was thrown in prison and finally burned at the stake by the Catholic church for imagining that the universe was infinite, with many suns and planets.

Mr. Dorkemada complains about the portrayal of the Inquisition as some sort of repressive thought-control tool wielded by an authoritarian Catholic church, and fails to stress its important work of petting puppy dogs and helping old ladies across the street. Oh, and it wasn’t really part of the Catholic church, either (emphasis added):

The ignorance is appalling. “The Catholic Church as an institution had almost nothing to do with [the Inquisition],” writes Dayton historian Thomas Madden. “One of the most enduring myths of the Inquisition,” he says, “is that it was a tool of oppression imposed on unwilling Europeans by a power-hungry Church. Nothing could be more wrong.” Because the Inquisition brought order and justice where there was none, it actually “saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.” (His emphasis.)

Bill is quoting from, but as usual can’t be bothered to link to, this article, which takes pains to distinguish the Spanish Inquisition, which he says had practically nothing to do with the Catholic church, from the Roman Inquisition, which presumably was more closely tied to Rome. Which is all fine and dandy, or would be, except that it was the Roman Inquisition that tried and executed Bruno. Take it away, Wikipedia:

Luigi Firpo lists these charges made against Bruno by the Roman Inquisition:[22]

  • holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith and speaking against it and its ministers;
  • holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about the Trinity, divinity of Christ, and Incarnation;
  • holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith pertaining to Jesus as Christ;
  • holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith regarding the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus;
  • holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about both Transubstantiation and Mass;
  • claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity;
  • believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes;
  • dealing in magics and divination.

So, mostly for holding opinions, then. But really naughty ones, apparently. So what did the nothing-to-do-with-the-Catholic-church Inquisition do?:

On January 20, 1600, Pope Clement VIII declared Bruno a heretic and the Inquisition issued a sentence of death.

Oh.

Set us straight, BillDo:

As for Bruno, he was a renegade monk who dabbled in astronomy; he was not a scientist. There is much dispute about what really happened to him. As sociologist Rodney Strong puts it, he got into trouble not for his “scientific” views, but because of his “heretical theology involving the existence of an infinite number of worlds—a work based entirely on imagination and speculation.”

In short, the science-fan show maligned the Catholic church by saying it set a man on fire for imagining the wrong things, whereas the truth is that it set a man on fire for imagining the wrong things. And they all lived happily ever after, except the ones who died in a fire.

Thank you, Catholic Crusader!

Water Is Wet. Dog Bites Man. Answers in Genesis Maligns Atheists.

Terry Mortenson has a blah blah blog post, ironically posted under “Thoughts“, and favorably linked to by loser-to-science Ken Ham, that opens thusly:

Over the years the American Atheists have been having some serious problems with social behavior at their national convention. So they have developed a code of conduct for the 2014 conference. It is interesting to observe the things they tolerate (e.g., many kinds of sexual immorality) and the things they will not tolerate (e.g., lack of social etiquette). It should also be noted that Christian conventions do not need to post such a code of conduct because the attendees have been redeemed by the grace of God and gladly submit to His code of conduct in the Bible.

But in an atheist worldview, these atheists have no basis for this code. In their view there is no God and therefore no moral absolutes.

This is straight from atheist bingo, right next to the one about atheists eating babies. The idea that you need an invisible father figure to tell you whom not to stick your baby-making bits into has been around since before this selfsame invisible father figure created the world 6,000 years ago. But these days, it’s usually considered ever so slightly gauche to so blatant about it.

Can we put the immoral atheist, along with the lazy Mexican and the hook-nosed Jew, in some box marked “Bogus stereotypes: do not use”, and padlock the box and then encase it in cement and dump it in the ocean?

Apparently not.

Anyway, Mortenson continues:

In a related news item, the University of Virginia hosted a conference on February 10, 2014, involving top leaders of six secular colleges and universities to discuss the topic of sexual misconduct among college students. This is a vexing problem. Research shows that 20% of college women at secular schools have been sexually assaulted, but only 12% of the victims report the incident. But given the depravity of man and that these schools are dominated by evolutionary thinking that destroys any basis for moral absolutes, this behavior is not surprising.

My first thought was that while it’s appalling that 20% of women at these schools have been assaulted, and shameful that 88% of such assaults go unreported, Mortenson gives us no reason to think that Christian schools are any better. After all, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the ongoing Catholic pedophilia scandal is that if you got raped, it’s probably your fault for looking attractive and slutty and stuff, and that God hates people who rock the boat.

So if 20% of women at secular schools have been assaulted, what’s the figure for Christian schools, where demon evolution isn’t taught?

Let’s bear in mind also that in the past week or so, we’ve had the story of Bob Jones University shutting down an investigation about sexual assaults on campus, which certainly looks as though the investigators were about to uncover something that would make the school look very bad.

There was also the story of Patrick Henry College (“God’s Harvard”) blowing off allegations of sexual abuse.

And just for good measure, we’ve had the news of Archbishop Roger Mahony withholding information from police in an investigation into sexual abuse.

Mortenson can rail about evilution allowing child rape, but it doesn’t seem as though God’s law is much better.

If I have to choose between the tribe that says it’s not okay to rape women and also allows two men to have consensual anal sex in the privacy of their hotel room; or the tribe that pretends that rape doesn’t exist, and if it does exist, it’s the victim’s fault; then I know which one I’m going with.

The Monetary War on Smut Marches On

CBS affiliate WTVR on an important development in the Utah front on the War on Smut:

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (KUTV) – An Orem, Utah mom is not happy with a mall window display she calls “pornography.” The PacSun store in Orem refused to take the offending shirts off display. So she bought every last t-shirt to force the store into making a change.

Judy Cox spent $567 on t-shirts she will admittedly never wear and hopes no one will.

See, the way it works in America, land of capitalism, is that if you buy up all copies of a mass-produced product, like a T-shirt, that makes that product go away forever. That’s just Economics 101, right?

I don't know that this was one of the offending shirts. But it could be.
I don’t know that this was one of the offending shirts. But it could be.

Now, some of you might have noticed a teensy flaw in her plan: that there’s a slight chance that the store might just buy more of these ungodly, vapor-inducing T-shirts, and then where will Judy Cox be? (On the fainting couch, I’m guessing.) Of course, there’s no way she could have foreseen such a development.

The manager said you could buy them, but the store would just replace them. Since the store had 19 shirts, at $27.98 a piece, the purchase wasn’t cheap. Nearly $600 later Cox left, but it was not the end. If the store gets a new shipment this mom says she’ll go back and buy them out again.

Okay, so maybe she’s not that clueless:

Cox said she planned to return all the shirts once the city manager ruled on whether the graphic shirts can be legally displayed. She said she notified the store and PacSun corporate offices of her intentions to essentially hold the shirts hostage.

Maybe PacSun can refuse to refund her, on the grounds that the shirts can no longer be sold to someone with a religious-nut allergy.

The Blaze: Does the Bible Really Condone Stoning?

A while back, but you’ll forgive me for not posting this earlier because I’m lazy, the Glennbeckistan Times posted an article with the provocative title, Fact Check: Does the Bible Really Condone Stoning?.

Spoiler alert:

Theologian R.P. Nettelhorst added that capital punishment is seen in the Bible for a variety of offenses: Murder, adultery, rape, Sabbath breaking, disobedience to parents, witchcraft, and idolatry.

That answers the question posed in the title: yes, the Bible does condone stoning. Glad we’ve cleared that up. Oh, wait, did someone have any excuses theology to offer? (Emphasis added)

Rabbi Aryeh Spero, author of “Push Back: Reclaiming Our American Judeo-Christian Spirit,” told TheBlaze that the Bible speaks openly about stoning, however he said that the Judeo-Christian texts differ greatly from “the procedures we see today in Islamic countries.”[…]

“Any Biblical death penalty procedure had to be accomplished in one instantaneous stroke,” he explained. “For while the death penalty may have been administered, it was not done in a way to prolong agony or suffering, nor in a manner of public humiliation that degraded the human being created in the image of God.”

Okay, so the Bible condones stoning for a number of offenses, but not the way the Taliban does it, so that’s okay.

Back to Nettelhorst:

“The laws are applied equally to all members of society.  There are not different laws for different classes,” he told TheBlaze. “Second, the laws were intended to be proportional. The lex talionis ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth’ was designed to limit punishments to being no worse than the offense.”

Proportional? Really? This is the guy who said that the Bible prescribes the death penalty for things like adultery, Sabbath breaking, and disobedience to parents.

Which of these merits the death penalty? Show me the kind of aggravated premeditated first-degree Sabbath-breaking that warrants death. Here’s what Nettelhorst gives us:

“An individual who breaks the Sabbath (by gathering firewood on Saturday) shortly after the Sabbath was instituted by the Ten Commandments, is soon dispatched after a brief consultation with God.  It is the only instance in the Bible of someone being executed for violating the Sabbath.

The article provides several more instances of this: cases in the Bible where people weren’t execute for trivial crimes. So the argument seems to be “the law is rarely enforced, so it’s not a bad law.”

What else?

He also detailed 2 Kings 10:18-28, noting that, while it appears that God’s blessing is upon Jehu, who gathers servants, priests and prophets of Baal and executes them for worshipping other gods, this may not actually be the case. After these deaths — and a coup against the former king and royal family — God seemed anything but pleased.

So Jehu does what God wants, as far as he can tell, and then it turns out that’t not what God wanted after all. I’m not sure what the lesson is, here: that God sucks at communicating his desires, maybe? At any rate, if this explanation is correct, then how can you be sure that anything you do has God’s blessing? With your finite human brain, you might be misreading things entirely.

Anything else?

For those who struggle with the notion that everything in the Bible is God’s word and should be taken literally, Spero explained that the Old Testament includes certain societal practices and occurrences that were meant to — and have — changed as mankind has matured and evolved.

Ah. This is a Jewish variant of “oh, but that’s the Old Testament!” Spero probably goes into more length in his book, but in this article, he gives no reason to think that he hasn’t just pulled this excuse out of thin air. Especially since the problem with divine law seems to be that it can’t be changed.

Just recently, for instance, we’ve learned about a ring of Jewish kidnappers: under Jewish law, a couple can only get divorced if the husband okays it. So a woman could give these guys $70,000-$80,000 and they’d kidnap her husband and beat him up or torture him until he agreed to the divorce. It would be far better for everyone to just change the law so that the husband’s consent isn’t mandatory. Except that if it’s God’s law — or perceived to be God’s law — then the law is very hard to change. (And if you can’t even repeal stoning, then what chance is there of repealing God’s no-cheeseburgers rule?)

Finally:

The contradiction, the theologian [Nettelhorst] says, might be rooted in the notion that there was a disconnect between what ancient Israelites thought God wanted verses what the Lord really requested of them.

So to sum up, yes, the Bible condones stoning people to death for minor offenses, but it’s okay because:

  • It wasn’t done for fun.
  • It was intended to be a quick death.
  • It usually wasn’t enforced.
  • It’s the Old Testament. Nobody does that anymore.
  • It may not have been God’s law to begin with.

Have I missed anything? Because it looks to me as though pile of apologetics doesn’t address the central problem, which is that THE BIBLE CONDONES AND EVEN COMMANDS STONING FOR TRIVIAL OFFENSES.

Did it used to be okay to stone people for breaking the Sabbath, but now it isn’t? Then God’s moral law isn’t absolute, but changes over time.

Did God’s law change, but God forgot to edit his rulebook to reflect this fact? Then he sucks at communicating his wishes.

Was that not God’s law to begin with, but mere humans’? Then there are probably other mere-human laws in the Bible as well. How do you know which is which? (And if we can’t tell them apart, why bother consulting the Bible to begin with?) And why didn’t God make it clearer that he’s opposed to killing people who break the sabbath?

This reminds me of Bryan Fischer’s commentary on slavery in the Bible. He uses a lot of words, but it basically boils down to “the US did slavery wrong”, the obvious implication being that there’s a right way to do slavery: by following God’s rules and regulations for how to correctly own another human being.

One irony here is that I think this sort of thing is more of a problem for liberal, enlightened theists than for knuckle-draggers. The crazy Taliban types will just accept that God condones stoning, or slavery, or whatever. They’ll nod and do these horrible things.

A Christian can look at the Koran — or a Muslim can look at the Bible — and say “Meh. That’s clearly not a consistently-good set of moral rules. I’ll just ignore it and seek enlightenment elsewhere”.

But it’s the liberal Christian who looks at the Bible, sees that it condones things that are clearly immoral; but it’s supposed to be God’s word, so you can’t just ignore it; who then has to spend time and mental effort trying to reconcile what’s right with what’s in the Bible.

Orson Scott Card Wants You to Forget How Much He Hates Gays

Remember the heady days of 2008, when Orson Scott Card wrote:

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

:

The dark secret of homosexual society — the one that dares not speak its name — is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.

If America becomes a place where the laws of the nation declare that marriage no longer exists — which is what the Massachusetts decision actually does — then our allegiance to America will become zero. We will transfer our allegiance to a society that does protect marriage.

:

homosexuality is a pathological condition of the sexual system.

And back in 1990:

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those whoflagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.

The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly, so as not to shake the confidence of the community in the polity’s ability to provide rules for safe, stable, dependable marriage and family relationships.

Good times. No, wait, not good times at all. What’s the expression I’m looking for? What a gigantic douchebag. Yeah, that’s it. And he’s been at it vocally and for a long time.

So anyway, for those who hadn’t heard, a movie version of Card’s novel Ender’s Game is coming out, and a group is calling for a boycott, what with Card being such a raging homophobe and all.

So here’s what Orson Scott Card told Entertainment Weekly (emphasis added):

Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984.

With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state.

Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.

For one thing, while I think the tide has turned on gay marriage, the issue is far from “moot”, as Card says. I’ll give him credit for recognizing that he’s on the losing side; I’ll even give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he’s motivated by wanting people to see a piece of art that he had a hand in, and not because he stands to make money from it.

But really. That last paragraph. No. Just no. He doesn’t get to fight against gay rights for more than a decade, and then, when it’s clear that his side is losing, try to pretend like it never happened.

I’d argue that since gay-rights activists aren’t calling for him to be thrown in jail for having sex the way he likes it, they’re already showing him more tolerance than he himself has shown.

I’m sorry, but “why aren’t you more tolerant of my intolerance?” won’t wash. If you want people to play nice with you, you first have to play nice with them. And just for the record, “playing nice” includes things like not saying they must be the way they are because they were abused as children, and also not calling for them to be thrown in jail because you don’t approve of their partners.

(via Towleroad)

Now, I confess that I’m somewhat torn: I did enjoy Ender’s Game tremendously (first the novel, and then the short story that it was based on). It’s not all that political (as I recall, it leans more toward libertarianism than what’s called “conservative” in modern American politics), and I don’t remember any gay issues, or any sex-related issues at all. That book was written by pre-brain-eater Orson Scott Card.

And normally, I’d be content to leave it at that: I try to keep the artist separate from the work, and accept that people with political views I strongly disagree with can still write stories that I like.

But Card has been so extreme, so vitriolic, for so long, that he’s retroactively tainted my enjoyment of what he wrote back when he wasn’t yet a hate-filled ugly bag of mostly bile.

Horrible Acts Too Horrible to Release

In the AP’s story about the Milwaukee diocese having to release its records of priestly sex abuse and shuffling priests around to protect Holy Mother Church, one part jumped out at me:

Listecki, who succeeded Dolan in Milwaukee, said Tuesday in his weekly email to priests, parish leaders and others that he hoped releasing the documents would allow the church to move forward. But he also warned that descriptions of abuse can be “ugly.”

“I worry about the reactions of abuse survivors when confronted again with this material and pray it doesn’t have a negative effect on them,” he wrote.

which I think translates to “the things we did to those people are so horrible, we don’t want to hurt them further by releasing the details of our horrible actions to the public.”

This deserves to be the the prime textbook example of a self-serving rationalization.

And here I thought confession was supposed to be good for the soul.

Paul Taylor’s Fickle Exactness

Paul Taylor, who helps Eric Hovind run the family misinformation mill in the absence of his father Kent, accuses people who think Noah’s Ark was just a story of not having done our homework:

Question 1: How did they all fit on the boat and who put them in there? Don’t forget that there were two of each specie(sic) (male & female) 

[…] The questioner makes a more serious error, however, by not actually reading the Bible. If he had read the account in Genesis, then he would have realized that the biblical account does not even refer to “species.” Instead, it refers to kind. The Hebrew word for kind is mîn. For this reason, creation biologists have started to use their own technical term for this grouping of creatures—baramin. The Hebrew bara means “created,” so baramin is a created kind.

Got that, scoffers? Specific words have specific meanings, and unless you’re careful to use just the right word, you’re arguing against a straw man!

For example:

Question 4: Didn’t Noah have to wait for many years to get the snail on-board?

Noah did not take invertebrates onto the Ark, only animals with lungs (Genesis 7:15). Invertebrates can survive such conditions.

Spineless, lungless, eh, what’s the dif’?

Anatomical snail diagram
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Aside from the absence of a spine, note the presence of a rather large lung, which Taylor says doesn’t exist.

Of course, that’s just a diagram. That snail lung could be as fictitious as dragons and unicorns. How about a photo?

Snail lung. Photo by salyangoz, from here.

Yeah, but that’s ‘shopped. I can tell by the pixels. Pixels are scoffers. Well-known fact, that.

CNSNews Doesn’t Like Girls Learning About Their Naughty Parts

This tweet from @Defund_PP

led me to this article at CNSnews.com about girlshealth.gov, an HHS site offering information about sex, aimed at girls ages 10-16. They disapprove of it.

But the site also includes a glossary that explains anal sex and “mutual masturbation” and includes information about birth control and how to access everything from condoms to “emergency contraceptives.”

Let’s see what it says:

anal sex (say: AYN-uhl seks) = sex that involves putting the penis in the anus, or butt.

and

mutual masturbation (say: MYOO-chuh-wuhl mas-tur-BAY-shuhn) = when two people touch each other’s sex organs or genitals for sexual pleasure.

Maybe I’m being obtuse here, but I don’t see the part where HHS is telling girls to go on a spree lesbian anal orgy-ness and how their parents can write off the KY as an educational expense. Likewise, on the page on contraception, I don’t see a 10%-off coupon on birth control pills, I see an explanation of the facts that tries to be clear and not tiptoe around the subject with twee euphemisms.

But apparently the author of this piece — and many times more so some of the commenters — doesn’t seem to understand the difference between sex ed and porn. Apparently it all goes into a big mental bucket marked “Sex. Don’t touch.”

I suspect that something like this also contributes to the popularity of the “abstinence-only” movement: many religions treat sex as a taboo subject, so if you just tell kids not to do it, then maybe you won’t have to talk about it.

No, I don’t think ten-year-olds should be having sex, and neither should sixteen-year-olds be getting pregnant. (And neither, probably, should they be reading that site without parental guidance.) But “don’t do it” sex ed is about as effective as “don’t do it” driver’s ed. And the prudish attitude exhibited above isn’t helping.

In Arkansas, You Can’t Spell “Graduation” Without G-O-D

From KAIT, an ABC affiliate in Jonesboro, AR (via Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, of all places):

It starts out in pretty standard fashion (skip if you’ve seen this before): the Riverside school district has been having prayer at sixth-grade graduation ceremonies for a while. This year, a parent complained, the ACLU sent a letter telling the district what’s what, the district dropped prayer from the school ceremony, and the parents coordinated with area churches to have ceremonies before and/or after the one at the school, complete with prayer and pot-luck lunch.

Ha-ha! Just kidding about that last part. I meant to say that the district decided to be dicks:

LAKE CITY, AR (KAIT)- The Riverside School district has decided not to have a 6th grade graduation this year after a parent protested against prayer during the ceremony.

Local mom Kelly Adams presents the case for allowing prayer:

“As Christians and a mainly Christian town I think, there were a lot of people hurt that our rights were taken away,” Adams said.

“My daughter graduated last year from 6th grade and my son is graduating this year from 6th grade, and we had a pastor open our ceremony and my daughter actually closed the ceremony in prayer,” she said.

So there you go: “We’re in the majority, and we’ve always done it this way. Checkmate, civil-libertistas!”

The current plan is now to pile dickery upon dickery and have the graduation ceremony at a church. Never mind the students and parents who aren’t Christians, because Jesus loves them too. Adams again:

“A lot of the parents, the Christian parents decided to get together and do it at the church,” she said.

“We're not trying to be pushy or ugly to anybody, we just want them to know there is a God who loves them,” she said.

Because when you’re recognizing students’ achievements and ushering them into the next phase of their education, you can’t possibly do that without also proselytizing to everyone. That’s just common sense!

Wait, I think I hear a small voice from the back, some rabbi from way back when:

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

That’s cute, but clearly this guy knows nothing about Christianity.

Bigoted Amendment Is Bigoted

Today, according to the Dallas Morning News, Greg Abbott, the Attorney General of Texas ruled that

Domestic partners can’t receive health benefits from counties, cities or school districts because doing so defies Texas law on traditional marriage, Attorney General Greg Abbott said in an opinion made public Monday.

This fuckery was made possible by Texas’s 2005 amendment to its constitution that said that

This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

(Others have already pointed out that marriage is identical to itself, and therefore this amendment bans one-man-one-woman marriage. Go read them for yucks, then come back.)

A Dallas Fort Worth CBS affiliate writes:

Tea party-backed state Sen. Dan Patrick of Houston asked Abbott, a fellow Republican, to review the matter in November. […]

In a statement, Patrick said the measure, known as the Marriage Amendment, was passed by “an overwhelming majority of the Texas Legislature and ratified by more than 75 percent of Texas voters.

“This opinion clearly outlines that cities, counties and school districts cannot subvert the will of Texans,” Patrick said.

At first I thought that maybe AG Abbott’s hands were tied: after all, the 2005 amendment is—and by all appearances was always intended as—a big ol’ fuck-you to the gay community. As much “we don’ like your kind ’round here” as they could get away with. In which case the AG may not have had a lot of legal leeway.

At the same time, he could have said, “Look, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on DOMA in the near future. Depending how they rule, the 14th Amendment might come into play and invalidate Proposition 2. So let’s wait and see.” But he didn’t. Presumably either because he prefers the conclusion he came to, or because he thinks the Texas constitution is so clear that it doesn’t matter how SCOTUS rules.

At any rate, it looks as though an amendment introduced to make doubly sure that only straight people get to enjoy the benefits of marriage—it’s a well-known principle that what makes a thing enjoyable is knowing that someone else can’t have it, right?—is working as expected. Congratulations, Texas! Just don’t come whining when you’re not allowed to change voting laws without getting an okay from the feds because you have a history of discrimination, okay?