Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Over at the Fargo FalconCam, mom or pop has just caught a bird and brought it in, deftly dissecting it and feeding it to the chicks. Don’t miss it. The chicks are still fluffballs but are getting big and noisy.
Don’t miss the two archived clips below the live stream.
I’m not sure that the citizens of Lebanon, Missouri realize that they’ve got a Constitution problem on their hands. Not only are they vociferously defending principal Lowery’s prayer to God at the Lebanon High School graduation, but they’ve started a Facebook page in his defense.
Now it’s fine for a community to support its beloved principal, but it’s not all right—with me, at least—to both openly praise his violation of the law, and do so defiantly. And, in the process, they continue to document that Lowery’s graduation speech was not a one-off thing, but part of a pattern of long-term religious proselytizing in that school. In so doing, they’re just providing potential ammunition for a lawsuit.
But take a look first at the “Standing strong with Kevin Lowery” Facebook page. Here’s the banner, complete with crosses and a sentence from Lowery’s graduation prayer (after his “moment of silence,” he proceeded to tell the students that he used his moment to pray to God).
The latest picture from the page:
And some new comments, selected pretty much at random. The first one’s a doozy:
They aren’t allowed to be openly Christian? Of course they are! They just can’t foist their beliefs on a captive audience while acting as an agent of the government. Somehow the distinction escapes them. . .
But wait! There’s more!:
Uh oh. . . look here:
Do these people realize what they’re doing? Are they too thick to see that they’re documenting an illegal pattern of behavior? Or don’t they care?
From another public Facebook page, “Lebanon underground breaking news”, sent by a resident who omitted last names. People are furious at the school board for supposedly making Lowery apologize, although he said he apologized on his own:
“Sad day for Lebanon I for one think this community would have stood behind our school and our principle. Just another case of caving …it’s no wonder we as Christians have no voice. As soon as pressure is put on we deny our God and our Freedoms. I already sent an email to R3 letting them know how I felt I encourage you to do the same. Matthew 10: 33”
-Stephanie“An APOLOGY?! SCREW THAT! I understand their reasoning I guess, but in no way will i EVER apologize for my faith! What a bunch of petty ridiculousness this is!”
-Jeff“So sad that we live in such a “politically correct” world that we would feel it necessary to publicly apologize for the mention of God in our schools. And we wonder why the world is the way it is……………….”
-Chriss“I was there as well & in no way should anyone be offended by what he said. Shame on R3 for not backing him up.”
-Barbara“Shame on the administration and whoever else made this decision”
-Doug“Wow….shame on you R3. Everyone can have a religious opinion except a Christian is that it??!”
-Carol“The school board must be against God then”
-Mike“Shame on the district for not standing behind him.
He didn’t force anyone else to pray or thank GOD.
So sick and tired of people getting up tight when GOD is mentioned.”
-Jessica“I knew a bunch of losers ran the Lebanon school district–I feel sorry for these people that are complaining when they have to stand before GOD when they leave this earth.”
-Jason
“Whoever on the R3 board that decided for this apology?? I would like OFF THE school board. I support the schools by paying taxes every year, I have two kids in school myself… And this speech was making a community proud of its schools. I am tired of Christians being discriminated upon, having no voice and expected to adhere to everyone else’s nasty and immoral ways so we don’t discriminate on them.
So whoever made this decision…. You’re not needed in this community on the school board… You’re hypocritical and unnecessary for our children’s needs”
-Ron
“Unreal… The R3 district should be ashamed of themselves for even considering an apology… They need to apologize to the community for the lack of services offered to our children, and the way they treat their staff…. NOT apologize for a staff memeber that was in his right to speak on behalf of himself, the graduating students and families. Someone needs to start a petition for a complete NEW SCHOOL BOARD in this town. I will be the first to sign. We can’t complain unless we are willing to make a stand!!!”
-Jennifer
I should add that there are one or two voices of sanity on that page, but they’re quickly overwhelmed by the goddies.
Finally, Principal Lowery has his own publicly-accessible Facebook page, and here’s the banner:
And a picture shared by the principal:
With comments:
I thought the following comments came from Lowery’s own Facebook page (I don’t have a record of where I got the screenshot), but they could be from one of the other two pages. (I believe Lowery has either removed comments from his page since yesterday or made them private, but I may be wrong). At any rate, they document both the community religiosity as well as the pattern of religiosity in the school. None of these came from “friends” of Lowery who have access to private comments, as I don’t post such things.
Notice the first comment:
It appears that these folks are so blinded by their affection for Mr. Lowery, or by their faith, that they’re shoveling coal into the boiler of The One-Way Train to Lawsuitville. But the damage is already done. There have been many comments and emails noting that Lowery repeatedly prayed not just at graduations, but at school assemblies. Any decent lawyer could document a pattern of illegal and unconstitutional behavior.
Unfortunately, Champion Jesus can’t save Lebanon from the law.
Over at Salon, liberal columnist Heather Digby Parton has a nice article on how the interpretation of the Second Amendment has morphed from what’s pretty clearly stated in the Constitution as the perquisites of a militia into today’s let-a-gazillion-guns-blossom attitude. Almost every week some disaffected person with a gun kills innocent people. I think this happened three times in the last two weeks. (For an earlier take on the National Rifle Association’s (NRA)—and many Americans’—misinterpretation of the Second Amendment, see Garry Wills’s article in the 2005 New York Review of Books, “To keep and bear arms.”)
Here’s the Second Amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
What part of “a well regulated Militia” doesn’t the Supreme Court understand? If James Madison or George Mason, or any of the people who drew up the Bill of Rights could see what it’s led to in this country, could see the school killings and gang violence and “stand your ground” laws, would they agree with the amendment’s current interpretation?
At any rate, I won’t reiterate Parton’s piece except to give two excerpts from it:
Justice John Paul Stephens discussed his long experience with Second Amendment jurisprudence in his book “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution,” and notes that when he came on the Supreme Court there was literally no debate among the justices, conservative or liberal, over the idea that the Second Amendment constituted a “fundamental right” to bear arms. Precedents going all the way back to the beginning of the republic had held that the state had an interest in regulating weapons and never once in all its years had declared a “fundamental right” in this regard.
So, what happened? Well, the NRA happened. Or more specifically, a change in leadership in the NRA happened. After all, the NRA had long been a benign sportsman’s organization devoted to hunting and gun safety. It wasn’t until 1977, that a group of radicals led by activists from the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms took control and changed the direction of the group to one dedicated to making the Second Amendment into a “fundamental right.”
What had been a fringe ideology was then systematically mainstreamed by the NRA, a program that prompted the retired arch conservative Chief Justice Warren Burger to say that the Second Amendment:
“Has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime”
The results are clear to see. Mass shootings are just the tip of the iceberg. Today we have people brandishing guns in public, daring people to try to stop them in the wake of new laws legalizing open carry law even in churches, bars and schools. People “bearing arms” show up at political events, silently intimidating their opponents, making it a physical risk to express one’s opinion in public. They are shooting people with impunity under loose “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” legal theories, which essentially allow gun owners to kill people solely on the ground that they “felt threatened.” Gun accidents are epidemic. And this, the gun proliferation activists insist, is “liberty.”
One of the scariest things to me is how NRA members and gun nuts sometimes descend en masse to public venues, demonstrating their right to “open carry” weapons. Here’s one in a Texas Wal-Mart. What you see below is perfectly legal:
Sometimes five or six guys—they’re always men—enter a store together, all with rifles. Only a country that’s deeply screwed up could allow something like this. And open carry, with or without a permit, is legal in 32 of the 50 states.
At any rate, in his book, Stevens, a retired Justice of the Supreme Court, proposes a clarification of the Second Amendment that would fix everything. He first gives the fix (my emphasis) and then analyzes it:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”
Emotional claims that the right to possess deadly weapons is so important that it is protected by the federal Constitution distort intelligent debate about the wisdom of particular aspects of proposed legislation designed to minimize the slaughter caused by the prevalence of guns in private hands. Those emotional arguments would be nullified by the adoption of my proposed amendment. The amendment certainly would not silence the powerful voice of the gun lobby; it would merely eliminate its ability to advance one mistaken argument.
I still believe that guns should be banned for private ownership, with the possible exception of shooting sports like target shooting (in which case they can be locked up at gun clubs), and perhaps to protect yourself in the wilderness from bears, or to cull animals when it’s absolutely necessary to control their populations. But not for anything else.
This is all a fantasy, of course, for Americans are deeply enamored of their firearms. But things would be a whole lot better if we handled the issue like the British do.
The NRA is evil—pure, unadulterated evil. There is no massacre so horrible that it would make them reconsider their policy. In fact, massacres of innocents only stimulate them to tell us that we need more guns.
ZeFrank1, the producer of the hilarious but informative “True facts about the [name animal here]”, has apparently sold his soul to to Big Cat Food, just like Henri and Grumpy Cat before him. It’s inevitable. However, this three-minute video for Friskies—while not identified as the product of ZeFrank1, but which resembles his videos and has a voiceover that sounds identical—is the best sell-out ever.
Watch as a resident cat instructs a new kitten on the ways of the staff.
Bonus: the kitten looks a lot like Jerry Coyne the Cat!
This is a bit gruesome, but on the whole very touching, so if you don’t want to see pictures of a dead cat, or of its cremated remains, read no further.
What began as a reddit post about a Buddhist funeral for a cat, held in Tokyo in 2009, turned into an imgur series showing the funeral from corpse to urn to shrine. It’s pretty amazing, and testifies to the love in which these people held their moggie.
I won’t show all the pictures, as there are many, but here are a few, beginning with a photo of a pet funeral home. The Japanese do love their animals!
The altar in front of the cremation slab:
h/t: Florian
We have two species and three photos from Stephen Barnard in Idaho.
The first is an pair of cinnamon teal (Anas cyanoptera), nicely showing the dimorphism:
And a mallard taking wing (Anas platyrhynchos):
x
Hili: What is it rustling in the lilies of the valley?
A: I don’t know, your hearing is better than mine. I can only hear the nightingale singing in the walnut tree.Hili: So, I better climb up in the apple tree.
Hili: Co tam szeleści w konwaliach?
Ja: Nie wiem, ty masz lepszy słuch, ja słyszę tylko słowika na orzechu.
Hili: No to włażę na tę jabłonkę.
By Matthew Cobb
This gif (pronounced. . . ) appeared on my Tw*tter feed from @JohnRHutchinson . I think it must have ended badly for the snake. Anyone care to ID the reptile?
. . . with a capital “T” and that stands for “theism.”
Reader Bob J. pointed out, in a comment, this article from today’s Lebanon Daily Record. It starts like this:
It goes on to reiterate Lowery’s “apology” that I reproduced in the previous post.
Like the Dover Area School Board in Pennsylvania, I don’t think the Lebanon School District realizes what it’s getting into. There is not a whisper of an apology by the school board for what Lowery did, nor the slightest hint that changes will be made. I wonder if “the great things [Lowery] has done” include praying at graduation and continually praying before school assemblies. . .
As lagniappe, reader Steve Kern sent me an email he just dispatched to Principal Lowery, the Lebanon School board, and the Superintendent of Schools. I thought it was too good not to share, and I post it with his permission (and willingness to use his name):
Principal Lowery refers to his most recent statement as an apology. However, he is still unwilling to directly admit that what he did was wrong and to apologize for that action. When I wrote to you the first time I noted that my message was directed to his arrogance rather than the constitutional issue. That is still the case. I’ll try to make my message clearer… in black and white.If Principal Lowery were to stand before the graduating class and boast about how wonderful it is to be Caucasian, without actually criticizing people of any other race, would it have been wrong for him to do that? “Arrogant” would be too gentle of a term to describe such an act. But there was a time in our country when that wouldn’t have been subject to as much criticism as it would be today. We have come a long way in dealing with racial discrimination and arrogance. We have a long way to go in dealing with religious discrimination and arrogance.Respectfully,Steve Kern