Good morning, City Desk readers, and welcome to another spring-time installment of Freedom Friday. United States Supreme Court Justice David Souter is set to retire and word has it that President Barack Obama may choose a woman as his replacement. The AP has a rundown of potential lady judges; oddly, the list is all pedigree and no track record. Based off my gut (it’s OK to make decisions that way, right?), I’d pick Georgia Supreme Court Justice Leah Ward Sears. She and Clarence Thomas could battle over who was more “down-home Georgia.”
Christians who support torture, actors who support torture, and a few thoughts on All Hands on Deck after the jump.
- A Pew Center survey found that 62% of “white evangelical protestants” support torture. David Sessions at Patrol magazine has some thoughts on this: “Christianity has just as much emphasis—if not more—on justice as mercy, and its personal commands to be mercifiul do not necessarily apply to states and governments. Thus, churchgoers tend to have more binary understandings of good and evil, and are less squeamish about what they perceive to be justice.” I’m withholding judgment until Pew can come up with a decent sample size. In this case, they polled only 174 “white evangelical protestants.”
- Speaking of torture: Idiot child Bradley Whitford (the villain from Happy Gilmore Billy Madison!) advocates for the waterboading of Dick Cheney in a (satirical?) HuffPo piece. There’s no shortage of evil things one could say about Hollywood activists: They can’t seem to shut the fuck up once they realize they’re allowed to vote, they shamelessly “testify” in front of Congress and cite made-for-tv movies as experience, and they preach about the environment while simultaneously lear-jetting back and forth between the lavish wasteful parties they both throw and attend. That said, it’s kind of refreshing to see Whitford undermine his own fierce objections to torture by calling for it to be done to someone he doesn’t like.
- On Wednesday Jason Cherkis posted the results of last weekend’s All Hands on Deck initiative: 377 arrests. As you go about your day—saying hi to your friends at your stable, well-paying office job, collecting your paycheck, thinking about how far you’ve come since graduating from college—just remember that every one of those 377 arrests that was related to drugs equals one more person who will never be able to borrow a Stafford loan, one more person who will find it very difficult to land even the most menial of jobs, one more person for whom crime will make more sense that trying to succeed in the way that many of you succeed. If those thoughts tug at your conscience even a little bit, then do something.
Have a good weekend.