Time to give thanks for another batch of hot-mess headlines. This week saw some doozies:
The Roy Moore mess in Alabama; Or, Does anyone really support sexual predators?
- Evangelical leaders offer odd defenses of Roy Moore’s actions.
- Evangelical voters say they’re MORE likely to back Moore now.
- Evangelicals struggle with Moore-ality, from WaPo. Can a bad man be a good leader? HT: MM
- Julie Ingersoll thinks it’s because of quiverfull attitudes. “Girls who are 14 are seen as potential relationship material.”
- The ILYBYGTH backs it up one more step: How Roy Moore put Jesus on a dinosaur.
Larry Cuban asks what happened to MOOCs.
California approves new guidelines for teaching LGBTQ history in elementary schools.
Williams College president: What if we thought of white-supremacist campus speakers differently?
- “If the World Wrestling Federation demanded to hold a cage match on the Berkeley campus, would the university be obligated to host it at public expense?”
Is this the end of college? SIU moves to abolish academic departments, from IHE.
- Or is THIS the end of college? Harvard professor predicts bankruptcy for half of higher education in the next decade or so.
Why did white evangelicals vote for a moral monster? Eric C. Miller interviews Stephen Mansfield about his new book, Choosing Donald Trump.
Genocide and Gravy: What should we think about Thanksgiving?
- Why are we celebrating genocide? From Indian Country Today.
- At HNN, Jeremy Bangs defends the traditional stories.
- The Nation laments the NFL’s choice to have a Washington Redskins game this year.
- What do we tell little kids when they ask tricky Thanksgiving questions about genocide and God?
- ILYBYGTH’s culture-war holiday archives. How can we possibly tie Thanksgiving to both communism and creationism?
I Love You but You're Going to Hell 
Dan Knauss
/ November 20, 2017The deepest explanation for Moore’s mentality and it’s endurance (especially in the Deep South) can be found in Orlando Patterson’s magisterial work on slavery, where he explains the foundational and always sexual-political role of hierarchies of domination (slave-master, male-female) in the soteriology (theology of salvation) of St. Paul. Patterson suggests there are two major ideologies one can develop toward real-world slavery from the New Testament, one of which justifies a patriarchal domination. Moore is a living legacy of the classical, biblical, and medieval traditions that have always been a part of the “romance” of the South and its justification for “traditional” roles. He is not an Evangelical or American outlier; look at the ages of consent as defined by each state — and the fact that this, and all criminal law, remains subject to state rather than federal control.
Dan Knauss
/ November 20, 2017Typo alert: it’s Eric C. Miller, not Eric D. Miller at RD.
Adam Laats
/ November 20, 2017Whoops! Thank you for catching that.