I've been neglecting my blog for the last couple of weeks, largely because I've landed a high-paying job at a respected law firm doing civil liberties cases, been busy writing my novel, and spending time with my friends.

Well, that's why I wanted to have been neglecting my blog. Unfortunately, I have yet to hear back from the half-dozen or so places where I've interviewed recently (including an interview for a clerkship with a justice at the state Supreme Court), I've been too busy working on client websites and watching my three-year-old to either work on my novel or hang out with anyone, and I've recently come down with the flu. Those are the real reasons I've not had a chance to babble on semi-coherently in recent weeks. But, to make up for it, I'll be especially disjointed and semicoherent in this entry. Everyone okay with that?

Joel Osteen Bugs Me
Seriously, don't tell me that I'm the only one who is annoyed by this guy. It's not his religious beliefs that bug me; he actually seems to be a somewhat progressive, tolerant, and open-minded guy. At least, in the relative scheme of things. But take a look at the guy and his wife. Or read his information page on his website. You never see either them in anything less than the top of the line designer clothes, and his "About Joel" page reads like a freakin' prospectus. You're the leader of the biggest church in the country; couldn't you find something better to do with your money than spend it on your nice clothes or arena/church or ski trips to Colorado? Like maybe, I dunno, feeding hungry people, clothing naked people, sending attorneys to visit people who are being held in prison as political prisoners? Don't get me wrong: my father's a minister and I certainly don't think that being a minister should involve a vow of poverty. But this guy has turned religion into a business. (Sure, he's not the first, but he's one of the best at it.) What would Jesus do? My guess is that he'd chase him out of the temple with the other money-changers.

My In-laws are Lame
While we're on the topic of religion, I'm going to get into a lot of trouble if any of my wife's family reads this but it has to be said: most of them are idiots. Or, if not idiots, at least hideously lame. Here's the deal: when I was a kid, my dad always read the Christmas story to us on Christmas Eve before we opened presents. By "the Christmas story" I mean the Biblical account of Jesus' birth from Luke 2:1-20. And, as corny as it sounds, it was one of the family traditions that always meant a lot to me, and it was something I wanted to pass on to my son. As it happens, my wife's family has a tradition of getting together on Christmas Eve to open their presents to each other. (They usually open their presents from immediate family--as opposed to aunts, uncles, cousins, and so on--on Christmas morning.) And this year, since we just moved back, we're doing the Christmas Eve thing at our house for the first time. So I thought I would incorporate this little tradition, and let my son put the pieces of the nativity into place as I read each part. My wife loved this idea, but her family freaked out about it.

First, there's my mother-in-law, who I like to describe as "Granny from the Beverly Hillbillies": a 70-odd-year-old hillbilly from the woods of Kentucky who has a fourth-grade education and firmly believes that you can cure a wart by rubbing it on a potato if you bury the potato under a full moon (or some such nonsense). Having recently discovered that my wife and I, instead of going to a single church, like to visit lots of different ones to gather different perspectives, she flipped. I'm not sure why, but she's fixated on the fact that we visited a Lutheran church recently. This is pretty much the conversation between her and my wife:

My wife: "Before we open presents on Christmas Eve, we want to read the Christmas story."

My Mother-in-Law: "What Christmas story?"

"The Christmas story. You know. From the Bible."

"What Bible?"

"The, well, the Bible."

"Well, we're Christians. I don't want to hear anything from a Lutheran Bible. I don't want to be brainwashed."

"It's just the--what?"

And so on.

Meanwhile, my sister-in-law's response was "What's the Bible got to do with Christmas?" followed by "How long will it take? We're busy people and we don't have time to waste. We just have to cut some things out." Bwah? We're doing it at 3:00, and Christmas Eve is on a Saturday.

So, it appears, no Christmas story. I mean, we could say, "This is our house and this is something we're going to insist on", but they've managed to take all of the fun out of it so it would be pointless to do it.

Eyes in the Bushes
Well, the Bush administration finally admitted this week that they'd been using the NSA to spy on Americans, in the United States even, without a warrant. Said Bush, "I swore to uphold the laws. Do I have the legal authority to do this? And the answer is, absolutely."

So, wait . . . now the Fourth Amendment isn't part of our laws?

And worse, he says it's going to continue. Remember when conservatives said stuff like "liberals' paranoid fixation on 'fascism'" and "scare tactics, creating the fear of Big Brother" and people thought they had a legitimate viewpoint? How are we supposed to take seriously Bush administration claims that they have not spied on people who protest against them when they have secretly told the NSA to spy on people without so much as a court order?

The IDists Finally Respond
It took them long enough, but the "intelligent design" crowd has finally responded to the blistering opinion issued by Judge Jones, finding that a requirement to teach "intelligent design" in public schools is (not surprisingly) a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Lawrence Selden did the usual "anything that doesn't support my position is to be ignored" routine: "I am actually glad to see what a wacky, extremist opinion it is. It cannot be taken very seriously."

David Heddle makes the astounding statement that the opinion was a "judicial intrusion into an area where it doesn’t belong". Since when do the courts "not belong" in deciding questions of constitutional law? He also notes that "calling IDers creationists, as Judge Jones did, identifies, whether intentionally or not, ID as young earth creationism part deux. But ID is very different from young earth creationism." And he's right. ID is "old earth" creationism. Totally different. Right?

Meanwhile, John Mark Reynolds manages to talk out both sides of his mouth (as usual). First he talks about how the decision was to be expected not because it was right, but because there is a "secular" bias. Then he whines that "a court has decided that religious motivations of supporters are enough to ban an idea (that is not essentially religious) from tax payer funded schools." Never mind the fact that the courts didn't "ban the idea" (which isn't even possible); the court merelyruled that (1) the school district can't mandate religious instruction at taxpayer expense, and (2) ID is an attempt to mandate religious instruction. If students want to talk about ID, or if the teachers want to discuss it with their students on their own, that's fine. It just can't be part of the required curriculum.

Mike Gene makes a somewhat lucid observation: maybe the ID folks will move their focus out of indoctrinating people and into doing actual research to make a case for their "theory". That's all well and good. In fact, it's what I've been telling them they need to do for a long time: don't come to us and claim that you're teaching "science" if you can't show us the science behind what you're teaching. We get a lot of Behe-esque generalizations and conclusory statements, but that's it. You can't have a scientific theory without scientific testing. You can't conclude anything without data that supports your theory and rules out most (if not all) others. Of course, the problem for them is the problem that has dogged ID forever: it's not actual science, it can't be tested or proven, and its goal is to "prove God." People have been trying to prove the existence of God for tens of thousands of years without much luck. Somehow, I doubt these yahoos will have much more success.

Meanwhile, the Thomas More Law Center, the religious fanatics who convinced the religious fanatics on the Dover school board to adopt the policy, whined that this was all because the Supreme Court has mistakenly reached the shocking conclusion that the establishment clause of the First Amendment should prohibit the government from establishing an official religion. Of course, things are different if a religion other than theirs is being taught; they're more than happy to invoke the establishment clause when kids might learn something about Islam. (By the way, their claims about what happened in Byron Union are more than a little misleading; what they claim as Muslim indoctrination was really a lesson in how people in a different culture live. I'm guessing those "impressionable twelve-year-old students" are somehow more subject to indoctrination by the school that the students in Dover, right?) Undaunted, the Thomas More Center is determined to go 0 for 2 by threatening to sue Gull Lake Community Schools in Richland for refusing to allow two science teachers to include ID as part of their classroom curriculum. Man, would I love to get a piece of that case!

Kansas Lottery Threepeat
In a related story, the Kansas Lottery picked the same numbers three nights in a row. The state's school board immediately ordered that this be offered as part of the state-mandated mathematics program as evidence of "intelligent gambling."