Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
Once again a politician, setting themselves up for higher office, goes to the ‘kick a poor person’ playbook to build some conservative cred. Ohio Auditor Dave Yost, who likes to kick things conservatives like to kick – public education, for example, – is now setting his sights on the low hanging fruit of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – better known as food stamps. Yost has a funny idea of fraud that fails to match reality.
Justice Samuel Alito spent 15 pages to dissent against a US Supreme Court decision NOT to hear a case over birth control and pharmacies. In his waste of ‘ink’, he claims that only religious people are ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’.
The US Supreme Court decided NOT to hear a case from Washington state where a pharmacist wanted a religious exemption to a state law that required all pharmacists to dispense all lawfully prescribed medications or if they have moral or ethical objections they have to refer the patient to another pharmacist in the same store. The medications that prompted the lawsuit was birth control. The decision not to hear the case let stand a lower court ruling against the people who wanted the religious exemption.
A political action committee, that supports Senator Rob Portman’s reelection, have a TV advertisement running that says Ted Strickland joined a liberal special interest group that claimed members of the military are paid too much and praised the VA despite veterans having died while waiting for care. But is that really true? The claims are a misleading attempt at ‘guilt by association’ and ignores Strickland’s actual views and record on veterans issues.
Here is the ad in question, produced by the Fighting for Ohio Fund, that is being run in my area:
The Reason Rally is being held on Saturday. It will be a great opportunity for Nontheists need to show our growing numbers, on a public stage, as a counter to the religious privilege we have to deal with every day in our local, state, and national government. However in a big write up on the event at CNN, the organizers seemed to be diluting the chief idea behind the rally – celebrating our nontheism. It seems like they missed an opportunity to be more direct in, I guess, a futile effort to change the minds of people who hate us anyway.
I support the rally 100% and even donated to it even if I couldn’t attend myself. I love the idea of the rally and the reasons behind it.
The current Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, who has never feared sticking it to women and the LGBT community in the courts, is planning to run for governor in 2018. If you thought John Kasich was a butt-head when it came to conservative and religiously based politics, then wait until DeWine runs. We might have another version of Ken Blackwell and we know how well that worked.