How Millennials Became So Cool With “The Whole Gay Thing”

The Article: From ‘No Homo’ to ‘Yeah, Bro’: How Gen-Y Became So Cool With ‘the Whole Gay Thing’ by Jonathan Lovitz in The Huffington Post.

The Text: Think of your ten best guy friends: the dudes you grab a beer with, play ball with, get high with and have been there for some of the best nights of your life. You’ve probably known some of them since middle school, and probably had sleepovers with when you were kids — well, the truth is at least one of them is gay. If you were our age and reading this ten years ago, that would have probably hit you like a ton of bricks, and less like the gentle thud you probably felt.

You know you know gay people. You realize by now that they’re all around. You’ve been on baseball teams and in locker rooms and rushed frats together. Whatever your religious take on them, we, as the impossible to define bunch known as Gen-Y, have become increasingly cool with our gay brothers and friends. We’ve ditched “no homo” for “yeah, bro” when hanging with our openly gay friends, and we’re civilized enough to know that the “F” word makes us look even more absurd than when your crazy uncle throws the “N” word around after three drinks at Thanksgiving.

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Alan Grayson On Violent Humanitarianism

A peaceful departure from a vote on military intervention in Syria may well be on its way, but this Florida congressman’s words warrant remembering for the Vietnams, Iraq’s and Syria’s of the future.

Why We Should Tax Churches

The Article: We Should Be Taxing Churches by Matt Yglesias in Slate.

The Text: Amelia Thomson-Deveaux has a great piece about religious groups that are trying to remove restrictions on church-based electioneering. She suggests that rather than gutting the rules, there’s a simple fix, “Religious leaders who want the liberty to endorse candidates can give up their churches’ tax deduction.”

I would go one further. Let’s tax churches! All of them, in a non-discriminatory way that doesn’t consider faith or creed or level of political engagement. There’s simply no good reason to be giving large tax subsidies to the Church of Scientology or the Diocese of San Diego or Temple Rodef Shalom in Virginia or the John Wesley African Methodist Episcopal Zion church around the corner from me. Whichever faith you think is the one true faith, it’s undeniable that the majority of this church-spending is going to support false doctrines. Under the circumstances, tax subsidies for religion are highly inefficient.

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Chris Christie Versus Medical Marijuana

In spite of the fact that it reduces seizures up to 90% and poses no risks of dependency, Chris Christie still serves as a fleshy obstacle to the legalization of edible forms of marijuana…even to the point that bringing it across state lines–even for medicinal purposes–is considered a felony. Meanwhile, as Christie lollygags, epileptics like two year-old Vivian stand to lose their lives.

15 Amazing Motivational Workplace Posters From The ’20s And ’30s

In light of today’s polarized wealth and generally miserable, stuttering economy, it might seem a cruel joke to tell someone that as long as they are loyal, diligent, honest, hard-working and cooperative with their peers, they will succeed–and be duly rewarded for their efforts–in the work place. And given what awaited workers in the early 1930s after these posters were made, it was equally cruel to say then.

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Seizing on the fascination with efficiency and productivity brought on by the Second Industrial Revolution and the success of a previous World War One motivational poster campaign, Chicago-based printers Mather & Company created poster after poster that effectively tied one’s worth and sense of self with their relative output. In other words, Mather economized Frederick Douglass’s “self-made man” to scale. This proved a great mechanism when market optimism was high and futures seemed endlessly bright, but when the economy tanked a handful of years later and unemployment rates hit the roof, the posters proved little more than a blaring reminder to those formerly employed of their own inadequacy. Looking back on these posters now at a time of similar economic malaise, their quixotic sayings are pretty haunting.