Finley, I am.

#links

He Gets Us

Big Jesus centered “ad” airing tonight. CNN has the drop.

The chain of influence behind “He Gets Us” can be followed through public records and information on the campaign’s own site. The campaign is a subsidiary of The Servant Foundation, also known as the Signatry.

According to research compiled by Jacobin, a left-leaning news outlet, The Servant Foundation has donated tens of millions to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group. The ADF has been involved in several legislative pushes to curtail LGBTQ rights and quash non-discrimination legislation in the Supreme Court.

I appreciate that they acknowledge Jacobin to be left-leaning. But no details on the “quash[ing of] non-discrimination legislation.” Maybe the taking on of Biden’s— and Obama’s— attempts to force doctors to perform abortions? Keep it vague or folks will ask more questions.

Hobby Lobby co-founder David Green claims to be a big contributor to the campaign’s multi-million-dollar coffers. Hobby Lobby has famously been at the center of several legal controversies, including the support of anti-LGBTQ legislation and a successful years-long legal fight that eventually led to the Supreme Court allowing companies to deny medical coverage for contraception on the basis of religious beliefs.

What contraception? Right, not contraception— contra- meaning before, thus meaning medicine that prevents conceiving— but medicine that specifically ends pregnancy— abortion. Because Obamacare forced private business to pay for such medicine without care for religious objection.

While “He Gets Us” says it is not intended to be connected to any particular Christian ideology, it has theological ties to evangelical practices as well as financial ones. In general, Christian evangelism is closely tied to conservatism and is an extremely influential force in American politics.

“He Gets Us has chosen to not have our own separate statement of beliefs. Each participating church/ministry will typically have its own language. Meanwhile, we generally recognize the Lausanne Covenant as reflective of the spirit and intent of this movement and churches that partner with explorers from He Gets Us affirm the Lausanne Covenant.” […] The 1974 Lausanne Covenant is an important unifying document in evangelical Christian churches, while the Lausanne movement itself was started by the prominent evangelical Christian leader Billy Graham. Documents and decisions that have come out of the movement’s summits have decried the “idolatry of disordered sexuality” and focused heavily on the impact of the devil and sin on national cultures.

Wait? So this ad is supported by evangelicals and evangelicals are historically, including Billy Graham, conservative about sex? And this means that this ad has no actual desire to unify and stop devisiveness? Yeah, that is what CNN wants you to believe.

Yeah, we evangelicals do believe that certain things are sinful. But so does CNN. Standing against abortion? Look at the quote above. They clearly believe that is inheritantly wrong without argument. Christians not providing cakes for ceremonies they disagree with? They clearly think that is wrong.

See everyone has a sense of right and wrong. Everyone has things they hold dogmatically. Yes, us evangelicals admit to doing so. No just admit, it is foundational. But we disagree with things and yet still serve. We disagree and we still feed, shelter, clothe those that are in need. We go into communities of cannibals and show them love. We enter hospitals during plagues and pray with people that have been left for dead. And why? Because our Lord said to.

Yes, we may disagree, but we love. Yes, we may think you are living in sin, but we love.

Folks like CNN point out the toothpick in the eye of those that say “love your neighbor, cross the divide, end echo chambers, and make community,” while ignoring the log in their own. They call for us to be banished from society in the name of tolerance. They rally the troops that call the employers of Christians and demand their firing.

And then they say that we are the divisive ones.

The Sick and Weary

Something that has struck me in the response of churches to “re-opening”— after having their doors locked by governments in fear of a global pandemic— has been the seeming pushing away of the oldest age bracket and those that are sick.

I’ve heard of churches in Chicago checking temperatures of attenders and turning away those with low-grade fevers. I’ve heard churches warn that the elderly, the weak, the immunocompromised should stay home for the time being.

And nothing about that sounds like Christ. Not for a second. And it’s masked in language of “loving our neighbor,” while sounding like the way the lepers were treated in Christ’s day.

So I am overjoyed to see that Tim Challies, a preacher and author I greatly respect, has seen the same and they are trying to address it within their church’s plan. He writes:

We weren’t far into the planning when we realized the temptation to make plans that were premised upon youth and health—plans that did not account for those who are at the highest risk for COVID-19. We could default to messaging like, “If you are elderly or high-risk, please stay home for the time being.” And while that might be the safe play, isn’t church meant to be the place that deliberately and specifically welcomes the weak?

Challies.com

So they have started to flip the question:

For that reason we’ve begun to prioritize this question: How can we welcome the weak? Instead of assuming the weak should not factor into our plans, we are asking how they might factor first in our plans.

That’s the thing about Christianity. It is counter-cultural. If your plan to re-open church excludes the old, sick, weak, and weary, I might recommend that you dive back into your Bible, because they should be coming first.

Does Gender Determine Whether You’re More Likely To Be Pro-Life?

Many U.S. political leaders may think of abortion as a key “women’s issue,” but it is not an issue about which women have substantially different attitudes than men.

Gallup, June 2018

44% of women identify as pro-life. Look at the comment threads on major news pages and you’ll see just as many women as men speaking out against abortion and in support of these recent heartbeat laws.

Gender is not an indicator of whether one will support abortion or not. Worldview is. Religion is.

Don’t let the talking heads stir up a division that doesn’t exist.

Missouri’s Abortion Bill and Down Syndrome

This morning I’m reading more about our neighbor state’s abortion bill, which passed the Senate last night. This part makes me so happy to see:

Other provisions in the wide-ranging abortion bill include a ban on abortions based on race, sex or a “prenatal diagnosis, test, or screening indicating Down Syndrome or the potential of Down Syndrome.”

KMOV

Outlawing the systematic eradication of children with Down Syndrome is one of the most appalling things going on in the US. We literally have tests early in a pregnancy to detect potential “defects” that then the doctors use to persuade mothers to kill their children. This bill outlaws that practice. I couldn’t be happier.

Outrage Over Alabama

Seeing the outrage reminds me of how outraged individuals were over losing the right to own slaves.

A lawless president has inspired lawless legislatures. Our laws are crystal clear the government cannot come between a [man] & [his property].

[This] will cost Alabama [men] their [livelihood], and threatens the [property] rights of [men] across the country. We must fight back, and our next president must act to enshrine [slavery] into law.

57% of voters think [slavery] should stay in place, poll says

CNN

You know what? Sometimes the law is morally wrong.

Slavery was legal. 100%. No question. It was legal. But it was morally wrong. So we fought to overturn that and free slaves to give them the same rights we held to be self-evident.

Those are the same rights that the unborn have. Not the same rights they deserve, not the same rights they will one day get: the same rights that they have. We are infringing on their pre-existing— not made-by-the-government— rights. Just as we were the slaves. Exactly the same.

Tribalism and Roy Moore

Roy Moore lost, not because Alabamans are stupid. Roy Moore lost because Roy Moore was a terrible candidate with child molestation allegations hanging round his neck. Moore should’ve been better vetted, one. But also abandoned when credible allegations came forth. Because it turns out some Republicans couldn’t stomach voting for a man accused of getting handsy with an underage girl. Yet this is somehow surprising to red-eyed morons convinced just being against the Democrats is a winning strategy. Roy Moore lost because too many egotistical Republicans in high places overestimated the power of tribalism: “Moore has an (R) after his name, ergo #MAGA and screw the libtards!”

Just “being against the other tribe” didn’t work in Alabama. It won’t work nationwide in 2018 either. Or 2020.

Courtney Kirchoff

Conservatives, you had better hear this. I know many that voted for Roy Moore did so because of the two-party system, because of the “lesser of two evils”. But many more did so because he was a Republican. But running as a Republican shouldn’t be enough.

We are a party of ideas. We are a party of ideals. This man had heavy allegations hanging from his neck. Same with Trump. It’s why Trump was close to not winning. Literally anyone could have beat Hillary. But we picked the most polarizing, most offensive, worst candidate in recent history.

We need to learn to vet our candidates better and when shit comes out, we need to push them aside. Trump’s famous recording should have been that moment for him. These allegations, once credible, should have been the moment we pushed Roy aside.

We will lose in 2018 and 2020 if we do not get away from tribalism.

Fascism: Is it Right or Left?

The Web, at Its Best, Should Be Resilient

The web, at its best, should be resilient. Nothing warms my heart more than a 20 year old page that’s still kicking, a 10 year old link that redirects properly onto a completely new domain or platform or a modern site that can serve something useful to a 15 year old browser. To me, that’s the web at its best.

HTML + CSS + Javascript

Someone replied to my big #bbd17 post yesterday about my advocating for sites that work in IE 6. To note, it’s the quote above that this is in reference to.

As a front-end web developer, I do not test regularly in IE 6. I haven’t tested in IE 6 in a very long time. However, I write structured HTML that can be displayed without CSS. I write JS that isn’t necessary for the display and functionality of the page. So these things gracefully degrade.

No, my pages are not pixel-perfect in 15 year old browsers. But the content is accessible.

What the hell are we doing here?

I don’t want to be the neophobe in the room but I sometimes wonder if we’re living in a collective delusion that the current toolchain is great when it’s really just morbidly complex. More JavaScript to fix JavaScript concerns the hell out of me.

Dave Rupert

I’ve been feeling this hard lately. When we are talking something like WordPress, we care about a few metrics. Page load speed and size being the primary. Memory usage and performance on server matter, but often — sadly – much less.

However, when we are talking the client, the browser, much more should matter.

I am responsible for the code that goes into the machine, I do not want to shirk the responsibility of what comes out. Blind faith in tools to fix our problems is a risky choice. Maybe “risky” is the wrong word, but it certainly seems that we move the cost of our compromises to the client and we, speaking from personal experience, rarely inspect the results.

Yeah, we also rarely analyze the browser memory usage or repaint counts of our pages. I had my laptop fan turn in this morning as I quickly opened a half a dozen tabs from ComicBook.com and they all auto-loaded dozens of trackers and started playing video. Each tab. Safari instantly ran up gigs of memory and my CPU hated me.

But this is modern web development. Who gives a shit anymore?

How to Make Friends

Damn. That hit close to home.

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