Say, for example, that a Catholic school had no trouble hiring a chemistry teacher who openly advocated for same-sex marriage, because that teacher was in the school to teach chemistry. His views on gay marriage are irrelevant, in practice. The school may have a different standard for hiring its religion teachers, or its social studies teachers, requiring them to be more doctrinally in line with the Church. But that is a distinction that may not hold up in court under challenge, Kingsfield said.
The result could be that religious schools have to start policing orthodoxy in terms of all their hires — a situation imposing standards far more strict than many schools may wish to live by, but which may be necessary to protect the school’s legal interests.
.. “I think it would be really wise for small religious institutions to think hard if they can cut the cord of federal funding and can find wealthy donors to step in.”
.. “There was a professor at Penn last year who wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education calling for the end of accrediting religious colleges and universities,” Kingsfield said. “It was a Richard Dawkins kind of thing, just crazy. The fact that someone taking a position this hostile felt very comfortable putting this in the Chronicle tells me that there’s a non-trivial number of professors willing to believe this.”
.. “In California right now, judges can’t belong to the Boy Scouts now. Who knows if in the future, lawyers won’t be able to belong to churches that are considered hate groups?” he said. “It’s certainly true that a lot of law firms will not now hire people who worked on cases defending those on the traditional marriage side. It’s going to close some professional doors. I certainly wouldn’t write about this stuff in my work, not if I wanted to have a chance at tenure.
.. What happened to Brendan Eich” — the tech giant who was driven out of Mozilla for having made a small donation years earlier to the Prop 8 campaign — “is going to start happening to a lot of people, and Christians had better be ready for it.
.. There is a bitter irony in the fact that gays coming out of the closet coincides with traditional religious people going back into the closet.
.. “Basically, it says that culture comes through your peer group,” he said. “The most important thing is to make sure your kids are part of a peer group where their peers believe the same things. Forming a peer group is hard when it’s difficult to network and find other parents who believe what you do.”
.. It will no longer be sufficient to be part of a congregation where people are at odds on fundamental Christian beliefs, especially when there is so much pressure from the outside world. I thought of Neuhaus’s Law: where orthodoxy is optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed. It is vital to find a strong church where people know what they believe and why ..
.. “We need to study more the experience of Orthodox Jews and Amish,” he said. “None of us are going to be living within an eruv or practicing shunning. What we should focus on is endogamy.”
.. “Intermarriage is death,” Kingsfield said. “Not something like Catholic-Orthodox, but Christian-Jew, or high church-low church. I just don’t think Christians are focused on that, but the Orthodox Jews get it. They know how much this matters in creating a culture in which transmitting the faith happens. For us Christians, this is going to mean matchmaking and youth camps and other things like that. It probably means embracing a higher fertility rate, and celebrating bigger families.”
.. Because of liberal culture, and its demonization of Christians as the Other. President Obama will speak out for the Yazidis, but not for the Iraqi Christians, he said. When he talks about the martyred Egyptians in Libya, he doesn’t acknowledge that they were killed for being Christians. It’s simply a fact that there is tremendous animus against Christians within the liberal culture, and that liberal elites will tolerate things from Orthodox Jews and Muslims that they will not from Christians.
.. Christians should put their families on a “media fast,” he says. “Throw out the TV. Limit Netflix. You cannot let in contemporary stuff. It’s garbage. It’s a sewage pipe into your home. So many parents think they’re holding the line, but they let their kids have unfettered access to TV, the Internet, and smartphones. You can’t do that.
.. “I could still imagine having a kid who was really strong in his faith, and believing that God was calling him to going to a prestige college. I’m not ready to say ‘never’ for that, but I do think there are a lot of kids that we need to steer away from such hostile places, and into smaller, reliably Christian schools where they can be built up in their faith, and not have to deal with such hostility before they’re strong enough to combat it.”
.. “That generation is superseded by Social Justice Warriors in their thirties who don’t believe that they should respect anybody who doesn’t respect them,” Kingsfield said. “Those people are going to be in power before long, and we may not be protected.”
‘Conservative’ Media Exposes Itself with Trump Obsession
the worst possible development for a “conservative” news/opinion outlet would be to have a Republican president. It would be ratings and content death for them, especially considering the only type of Republican that the news media would ever allow to be elected (Walker?) would have to be at least somewhat boring.
.. I am not alleging “conspiracy” here. There is no meeting which outlines the secret plan to make sure that a Republican president doesn’t make life more difficult and less profitable for conservative news outlets. It is simply a situation where everyone individually pursues their own obvious self-interest. In short, the “conservative” media simply doesn’t care that it is doing things which hinder the cause of beating Hillary Clinton, especially when it is bringing good ratings in the short run.
.. The bottom line here is that Hillary Clinton (who has made it clear she fears Walker and Rubio most) could not be happier with how things are progressing on the Republican side. She is an incredibly vulnerable candidate, but the seeds of her likely ultimate victory are currently being sown by those wrongly perceived to be her political enemies.
The Best Investing Advice Has Always Been Too Boring for TV
There’s no particular reason, other than curiosity, for ordinary investors to examine the stock market’s performance more than once or twice a year—plenty of evidence indicates that it’s incredibly difficult to hand-pick stocks or time the market. This finding might bruise some egos, but it’s actually great news. It should free up any time spent scrutinizing the market for more rewarding endeavors. That’s precisely the message the financial media ought to send in turbulent times, when ordinary investors are most tempted to engage in panic-selling—or alternatively, trying to be clairvoyant in timing global-securities markets. The truth is that the same boring index funds that made sense last month, last year, and five years ago still make sense today.
Unfortunately, there’s one huge problem associated with this valuable message: No one would be excited to watch a business-news show or to buy a financial magazine that continually reminded them to simply invest in low-fee index funds. No advertiser is excited about it, either—who would want to advertise stock-market newsletters, commodity futures, or actively-managed mutual funds on programs that constantly remind viewers that these goods and services should be shunned?
Dispensing dicey stock-market advice provides a much better financial model for business media, if not for viewers.
.. This message was that the smart investor is someone who can pick a good stock in a good company that makes good products. This thinking reflected the era, in which many investment experts suggested that smart consumers were capable of recognizing good companies as they encountered them in everyday life. As the renowned investor Peter Lynch famously phrased it, “Invest in what you know.” In my view, such messages are deeply misleading: Ordinary investors are ill-equipped to evaluate the numerous aspects of corporate performance that have nothing to do with the everyday consumer experience.
Samantha Bee Prepares to Break Up Late-Night TV’s Boys Club
Lizz Winstead, who created “The Daily Show” with Madeleine Smithberg, said that despite the success of shows like “Broad City” and “Inside Amy Schumer,” “there’s still an undercurrent, at networks and studios, that anything that comes from a lens of quote-unquote other will not be accepted by white male viewers.”
Ms. Winstead, who is a founder of the comedic activism site Lady Parts Justice, said that people in decision-making roles still needed to go through “a full cycle in their careers” of working with people of differing backgrounds.
.. The “Full Frontal” producers used a blind submissions process to hire new writers, meaning that they did not know the names or backgrounds of the people whose material they were reading.
.. Speaking from her corner office, she said: “Maybe I should be more panicky about it, but I actually feel pretty mellow. I’m really confident.”
Then again, she added, “If you look down this row of offices, there is a bottle of alcohol in every single desk.”