I listen to a podcast by a licensed therapist (Dr Laura Anderson, Sunday School Dropouts) who specializes in helping people recover from religious trauma, and honestly, she does argue that high control religion works a lot like the dynamics of abusive personal relationships. She also notes that when people are used to being shamed/coerced/guilted/etc for religious reasons, they're more likely to accept abusive behaviors in personal relationships as well--it's already normal stuff. And most of the arguments I've heard in favor of preserving child marriages comes from religious folks asking "what happens when a 15 year old gets pregnant, the baby needs both a father and a mother!" Instead of wanting to use investigation or nuance, child marriages are a quick fix to always complicated situations.

I've heard people argue for (age)x.5+7=not creepy. Seems moderately reasonable.

I wonder if all the schools and hospitals and government buildings having to close and/or evacuate due to bomb threats will be enough for the burden of proof. It's not directly threatening language, but it certainly was a tangible, disruptive result.

Dank memes can't melt steel beams.

7/11 was a part time job.

I read most of that (think I missed the last few chapters, but he was out of Elan and had done some traveling)--it was horrifying. There's also a 3 episode documentary on Netflix called "The Program" where the documentary maker revisits the now closed school where she went (The Academy at Ivy Ridge) and by episode 3, she's followed the money to one family behind a lot of these institutions. But as she and former AaIR students actually see other facilities far from where they were locked up, they're all carbon copies of each other, they're all just the same punish-for-everything camps with no escape. Fucked up that there's like a formal recipe for how to do this to families and not get caught. And that there are so few legal protections for children.

Your comment reminded me of this gem of a candidate. Some of y'all gotta remember--the 2010 candidate for Nevada's Senate seat who thought a reasonable alternative to Obamacare was bartering chickens and the like.

“A lot of guys are worried that in five years, seven years, you’re only gonna have a Bowlero,” Big Mike says. “And when that happens, what happens?”>

Well, in my smaller town, our only new bookstore was part of a large chain. When the owner sold the company, the idiot who bought it drove the chain into the ground. Then that guy sold to an investment type group to be shuttered and liquidated. So now we don't have a new bookstore, roughly 8 years out.

Bowling seems to occupy the same type of niche that bookstores do. It appeals to a small dedicated following who really rely on that space. Watching so many big companies go out of business over the last couple decades makes me really not want local businesses sold to bug conglomerates, especially, for example, the way it played out for Toys-R-Us.

Friendly reminder to everyone that the rest of the world has signed on the United Nation's Connvention on the Rights of the Child; the US doesn't like that it could prevent children from being spanked, because God wants us to spank our children (spare the rod, spoil the child).

Religion is often a basis for the suffering of children.

I'll contend all day long that the 'Texas Miracle (TM)' is largely built on the backs of underpaid Latin/Mexican labor. (I would say totally, but that oil $$$ does its work too.) Republicans shitting all over immigration does, in fact, rob their localities of economic gains. I hope migrants in Mexico are treated more humanely than the United States has done. Hell, that's still quite the low bar.

Something I didn't learn until this week, but James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family (wrote "Dare to Discipline", a book about how we really needed to start hitting kid again in the 70s), was an assistant to a counselor who was a eugenics-loving, racist marriage counselor. Dobson wrote/published materials for Popenoe (the eugenicist counselor) as his assistant. Very few years later, Dobson started writing many of those same ideas as himself, but wrapped up with religion.

So these young whippersnappers might be trying to bring back eugenics, but that's largely because for the last 50 years, eugenics have been evangelized to many, many (especially Christians) in all but name.

I had a young woman, maybe 17 last semester, turn in a paper --it was a 12 page research/argumentative paper about why gender complementarianism (ie woman and men have different, distinct roles with men at the top). She's a good student, a good writer, but literally she's heard this set of morals from the pulpit her whole life... So like... Yeah. I read another young man's paper where his takeaway from 12 Years a Slave was "wow, not all slave owners were abusive monsters--some were pretty kind and treated their slaves like family." The kids are as alright as the rest of us are.

The start of your comment reminded me of the exchange between Trevor Noah & Tomi Lauren where Trevor asks her, okay, so if this protest isn't good, and this kind isn't good, how should black people protest? How should they make their grievances known? And she just could not answer that question. Protests aren't comfortable--they're disruptive by nature. If protests don't challenge anything or make anyone uncomfortable, what are they even doing?