I think this is something everyone, even those whose ideologies rival fossils in terms of antiquity, can agree upon. Don’t like gay people? Don’t marry ’em. Chances are, they don’t want to marry you, either.
The Article: Gay marriage in the year 100 AD by Annalee Newitz in i09.
The Text: Gay marriage sounds like an ultra-contemporary idea. But almost twenty years ago, a Catholic scholar at Yale shocked the world by publishing a book packed with evidence that same-sex marriages were sanctioned by the early Christian Church during an era commonly called the Dark Ages.
John Boswell was a historian and religious Catholic who dedicated much of his scholarly life to studying the late Roman Empire and early Christian Church. Poring over legal and church documents from this era, he discovered something incredible. There were dozens of records of church ceremonies where two men were joined in unions that used the same rituals as heterosexual marriages. (He found almost no records of lesbian unions, which is probably an artifact of a culture which kept more records about the lives of men generally.)
Bolstered by this evidence, Boswell published a book in 1994, the year before his death from AIDS, called Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe. The book comes out next month for the first time in a digital edition. It was an instant lightening rod for controversy, drawing criticism from both the Catholic Church and sex pundit Camille Paglia. Given the Church’s present-day views on gay marriage, these detractors argued, Boswell’s history seemed like wishful thinking.
Source: The Smithsonian
This early 20th-century doozie was given to 8th graders in the Bluegrass State to test their scientific literacy…and to make its 21st century discoverers/takers feel incredibly stupid. Fear not, though; for every geography question you Nagasaki’d, there’s an expert refuting the real value of tests like this. Case in point: researchers Will Grant and Merryn McKinnon say “We pretend that factoids are a useful proxy for scientific literacy, and in turn that scientific literacy is a useful proxy for good citizenship. But there’s simply no evidence this is true.”
With that said, though, if you still can’t get behind basic concepts like alternative energy sources and global warming, you’re on your own.
The Article: The Drone That Killed My Grandson by Nasser al-Awlaki in The New York Times.
The Text: I LEARNED that my 16-year-old grandson, Abdulrahman — a United States citizen — had been killed by an American drone strike from news reports the morning after he died.
The missile killed him, his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians on Oct. 14, 2011, while the boys were eating dinner at an open-air restaurant in southern Yemen.
I visited the site later, once I was able to bear the pain of seeing where he sat in his final moments. Local residents told me his body was blown to pieces. They showed me the grave where they buried his remains. I stood over it, asking why my grandchild was dead.
Don’t let Tea Party zealots fool you; immigration reform is good for you, for the country, and for our future. The video above shows exactly why.
