Her transformation from Bruce to Caitlyn isn’t going to harm you (no matter what Fox News says), but the police’s transformation from constabulary to paramilitary just might.
Month: June 2015
The Vatican recently announced that Pope Francis will deliver an encyclical — a letter covering some aspect of Catholic doctrine, and the second highest-ranking kind of document a present-day Pope can produce — on the environment, anthropogenic climate change, and the moral issue of good planetary stewardship. Some people, like those at Yale University’s Forum on Religion and Ecology, are pleased. Others, most notable super-conservative (and namesake of the icky aftermath of certain sex acts) Rick Santorum is less so.
Here’s what Santorum said in a recent interview on a Philadelphia radio station:
The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science. We probably are better off leaving science to the scientists, and focusing on what we’re really good at, which is theology and morality.
When we get involved with controversial and scientific theories, I think the Church is not as forceful and not as credible. I’ve said this to the Catholic bishops many times — when they get involved in agriculture policy, or things like that, that are really outside of the scope of what the Church’s main message is, that we’re better off sticking to the things that are really the core teachings of the Church as opposed to getting involved in every other kind of issue that happens to be popular at the time.
While he’s right that the church has often been wrong on science, Santorum’s “leave science to the scientists” stance rings more than a little false given that his party tends to resist science in the most ridiculous ways. Remember, they recently voted to prevent scientists from advising the Environmental Protection Agency on their own environmental research.
It also ignores the fact that Pope Francis, neé Jorge Bergoglio, has a master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Buenos Aires, and that other members of the Catholic clergy, most notably the Jesuits, have a long history of significantly contributing to science and mathematics.
Santorum’s real problem with the encyclical isn’t that the Pope is straying into areas where he’s not qualified, but that he’s straying into areas where Santorum doesn’t want him.
Read: Santorum Wants The Pope To Back Off Talking About Climate Science
Seen at Outer Layer while walking about during last week’s vacation in Toronto, along with this fridge magnet.
See this entry from my second visit to Tampa to see what I’m talking about.
I prefer to call them “Moosewegians”.
Canada may be the country next door — on the other side of the world’s longest undefended border — and it’s the United States’ biggest trading partner, but you wouldn’t know it from this episode of the game show Jeopardy!. One of the second-round categories of a recent game was “Canadian Cities”, and the contestants avoided it like the plague until there wasn’t any choice. That’s when the hilarity (well, it was hilarious to this Canadian) ensued. Watch the video below to see how terribly wrong things went:
Seen at Outer Layer while walking about during last week’s vacation in Toronto.