The majority of American women support (for example) a 20-week ban, among other abortion restrictions. On the whole, I think polling indicates that Carly Fiorina’s position is much closer to that of American women than Anna Merlan’s.

Given that the vast majority of gay marriage’s remaining opponents are devout Christians of various stripes, I find it extremely interesting that you only talked to one devout Christian. Is that because devout Christians are less likely to make the bestiality comparison? Or is it because devout Christians are less…

Bunch of ‘em are women.

“(The videos mostly show people talking, Carly; there is one still image of a fetus, but it doesn’t show it “squirming,” as she said, or being dismembered).”

The Cylons were created by man.

Yes, I’m completely aware of it (so, neither?). But you can’t expect a person or organization to do things that it believes are fundamentally evil. This goes double when they are — as I said — a *fucking Church*.

It’s a hospital run by the fucking Church.

Good luck getting THAT law through judicial review.

It appears you are correct. Canon law does excommunicate everyone involved in the abortion (Code of Canon Law, 1398 and 1329). However, Pope Francis’s year-of-mercy extension of absolution appears to apply only to the woman who actually received the abortion.

Problem with your theory: it is an undisputed — indeed indisputable — fact that a 1-week-old fetus is a human being, and that it is a human organism in the way you are a human organism, not the way a toenail is. The question is whether such a *primitive* human being (which cannot think or even suffer) is sufficiently…

If I understand the situation correctly, all those emails were deleted at the same time, just before the server was turned in. So nothing else hit the server, so nothing needed to be overwritten. If that is, in fact, the case, then we’re looking at your first scenario. Can’t wait to read through all those wedding…

I could not have composed a better counter to my point. Well said.

The Netherlands are always 20 years ahead of us on this stuff. In 20 years, not only will you be long-since dulled to the horror, but you will actually be somewhat cheered by the slow, steady (if sometimes bloody) march of progress.

Kim Davis isn’t actually covered under public accommodations law, because the county clerk’s office is not a public accommodation in the sense of the Civil Rights Act; it’s a government office, to which different rules necessarily apply because government is a fundamentally different institution.

To be fair, both sides do this, all the time. You think if a Democratic Congress were holding hearings on Crisis Pregnancy Centers they’d invite the head of Birthright? They would not. It’s about the sound bites. Follow the sound bites.

Or you’re grandstanding for maximum political points, knowing you can’t make any practical difference. There’s no margin in putting dissenters on the stand.

I don’t think there’s a big risk of Jim Crow returning under *any* of these forms in modern America. No matter where you are, there is somebody who cares more about the money in your wallet than about the color of your skin or the sex of your bed-partner — unlike the 1950s South. If a few businesses want to…

In the United States, yes. We grant more annulments than the rest of the world combined. A good chunk of the rest of the Catholic world is harshly critical of us for this — an annulment process really isn’t supposed to be a mere formality, but a sincere, thorough investigation of whether or not a marriage exists.

Everyone’s focused on the soap and not the Lords of Kobol? Great Bird!

There was no printing press, but communication across the Empire was fast, efficient, and widespread, with a strong, centralized, and papyrus-based bureaucracy centered in Rome, scribes perfectly able and willing to make copies of interesting (or profitable) documents, and a citizenry that was unbelievably literate…