Graham announced that he was transferring the association’s accounts to the BB&T Bank, “a good solid bank that’s very good at banking.”
.. Graham’s failure to find a bank opposed to gay marriage points to the accelerating isolation of unreconstructed cultural conservatives.
.. The South now suffers the highest rates of marital dissolution, nonmarital childbearing and father absence. Five of the 10 states with the highest numbers of women murdered by men are in the South.
.. Survey data that Wilcox cites in his 2004 book, “Soft Patriarchs, New Men,” indicates that family disorder in the South has been notably evident in one specific group: those born into conservative religions but who have since abandoned or neglected their ties. In contrast, those who remain religiously engaged show strikingly low levels of family dysfunction – in some cases well below national averages.
.. Along similar lines, wives among active, church-going conservative Protestants reported a significantly higher level of happiness with the husbands’ “love and affection” than wives in families that have only nominal religious ties.
.. But, she said, “the highest rates of divorce occurred for church attending conservative Protestant wives married to non-attending husbands.”
Non-Duality: Letting Go
Alternative consciousness is largely letting go of my mind’s need to solve problems, to fix people, to fix myself, to rearrange the moment because it is not to my liking. When that mind goes, another, non-dualistic mind is already there waiting. We realize it is actually our natural way of seeing. It’s the way we thought as children before we started judging and analyzing and distinguishing things one from another.
.. Note that I said you must let go of your dualistic mind at least for a while. You eventually have to return there to get most ordinary jobs accomplished, but even those you will now do in a less compulsive or driven way.
An Epidemic of Reason?
Rick Santorum, a devout Catholic and possibly the most avid opponent of abortion among the many Republican candidates, often invokes the moral power of the Pope’s position on the issue. But when it comes to climate change the former senator from Pennsylvania says this: “The climate does indeed change over time,’’ but it’s crazy to think that man is “somehow the tip of that tail that wags the whole dog.”
.. If it took the AIDS epidemic to help alter American attitudes toward gay men and lesbians, and a measles outbreak earlier this year at Disneyland to make legislators see the power of vaccines, maybe it’s not too much to hope that one day soon even the most hidebound among us will begin to acknowledge how climate change will affect us all.
Justice Breyer v. the Death Penalty
Evidently, Kennedy and Breyer felt strongly enough about the issues of solitary confinement and capital punishment to break from that tradition.
.. As Kennedy noted, an estimated twenty-five thousand inmates in the United States are currently serving their sentences in solitary confinement—a condition in which the prisoner is generally held, as Kennedy put it, “in a windowless cell no larger than a typical parking spot for 23 hours a day.” The hour each day when prisoners are allowed out, to shower or exercise, is also usually in isolation. This practice deprives individuals of almost all human contact, other than with guards. Some prisons go even further. According to Human Rights Watch, prisoners in solitary confinement in Pennsylvania are not allowed to have photographs of family members, or newspapers and magazines (unless the periodicals are religious).
.. But, in 1972, the Court did declare the death penalty—as it was then administered—unconstitutional, reasoning that the imposition of death, at the time left to the unfettered discretion of prosecutors and juries, rendered the sanction so arbitrary as to be cruel and unusual. As Justice Potter Stewart famously put it, “These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.”
.. What’s more, Breyer noted, defendants today routinely spend decades on death row while their cases are reviewed. That lengthy period of intense uncertainty, nearly always spent in solitary confinement, adds to the cruel and unusual character of capital punishment.