Did anybody say it was? I was pointing out that for this guy, race is the only factor he considers. He can side with Jada because she is black. He refused to support a Latina rape victim solely based upon her race. That's pretty clear at this point.

My suspicion is that the Cleveland, TX case was considered different because, IIRC, the raped girl in that case was a Latina girl and her attackers were all African American. The town was already a very tense place due to an influx of Latinos into a historically African American locale, and it caused some issues. The…

Maybe it's because I'm a lawyer, but I tend to parse language pretty intensely. "No evidence it isn't safe" isn't exactly the same as "It's safe." When my doctor was honest with us, he noted that there are NO reliable studies dealing with the particular effects of vaccines on GBS vulnerable people. None. He was also…

Sadly, there are a fair number of atheists who have embraced this stuff with open arms. In America, we have Bill Maher, who openly rails against vaccines. There's a disturbing undercurrent of "Big Pharma skepticism" within the freethought community. They inherently view any big entity - be it the government, the…

Because people tend to think in absolutes. Are there things about the American medical system that are messed up and worth questioning? You bet. Should doctors be more open to discussions about this stuff? Yes. But people tend to see things as very black and white. If parts of medicine are bad, or crappy, then the…

Hefner has always kind of been stuck in the 60s, from where I stand. He wanted to cultivate that hip, swinging single guy that became famous back then and he's been at it ever since.

Really? I have never heard about this. The secretary? Really? I hope to God that did not include his poor personal secretary. I remember Mary from the Girls Next Door. Oh Lord, not Mary!

Forever, I'd wager. People who are so strongly invested in a particular narrative will never drop it. Short of a video of Cosby actively drugging and assaulting someone, there is nothing. To them, testimony and words are simply never, ever going to be enough. It's a form of skepticism that goes to absurd lengths to…

My opinion of him was that he was less harmful than some of the other types out there. The Playboy Foundation has done some decent work promoting reproductive rights, etc. And he always had a sort of image as a libertine-type yet relatively harmless guy. I could dislike the unrealistic body types, the alterations of…

I think this is 21. Beverly Johnson was 20. That doesn't however, count the unnamed Jane Does who were part of Andrea Constand's lawsuit. She is the 21th person willing to come forward with her name and be publicly identified. And one of them, a Playboy Bunny, said she personally knew of at least 12 others who remain…

This makes me think a lot less of Hugh Hefner. I can't believe that Cosby could be so close to him for so long and he never, ever heard even an innuendo from a girl, a staff member, etc. Maybe he didn't know, but I'm not really going to be able to look at him the same way again, I don't think.

Luckily, there is actual evidence that the US targeted a child with a drone: the 16-year old son of Anwar al-Awlaki (who, let is be said, was an American citizen entitled to due process, but that's another can of worms). The US insists that the child was not the actual target, but at the time he was sitting in very…

Well, unreasoned critiques of Islam seem to have become the greatest unifier of disagreeing people now - Christians, atheists, etc. Anti-Muslim sentiment appears to be the great unifier. So why can't we just allow this incredible display of unity?

You might want to watch John Oliver's excellent take on drones before commenting further. The majority of drone victims are not "collateral damage" in strikes that kill bad people. Most drone strikes are haphazard attacks on people who "might" be militants or terrorists, but we don't really know since we never bother…

No, you didn't. But since most people seem to be under the impression that the US is overwhelmingly conservative in terms of religion, the reaction doesn't surprise me either. It jives with what most of us tend to believe anyway. I do question the exact figures, since phone surveys such as these have inherent…

Well, when you consider that the US has an abnormally high number of Christians of the conservative bent, why is that surprising, exactly? Although I would remind you to question the methodology of any survey like this - namely that they still largely rely upon landlines and such. I'd have to see a more comprehensive…

That is the dogma of the Catholic Church. There is a vast world of Christianity outside of Catholicism. Traditional Protestantism, for instance, usually accepts that Mary was a virgin at the time of Jesus' birth, but that it was not blasphemous to believe that she and Joseph had relations after the fact. There's a…

That's not entirely accurate. Not all Christians accept the corporeal resurrection. More conservative Christians and Catholics do, but liberal Christianity has always tended to argue that Jesus could have been resurrected spiritually. By and large, the corporeal resurrection was a big deal for centuries because the…

Well, it's not totally impossible for virgin birth to occur. There was a fascinating special that ran on one of the Discovery channels a while ago that demonstrated the possibility - although it still involves a man and woman having some, uh, intimate contact, so that wouldn't much work.

The Australian system is not the same as America's. In their system, bail can be granted pursuant to a judicial determination about the relative strength of the case. The media is reporting that a judge determined that the murder case against him was not very strong (it does not say how the judge reached that…