the slave masters who "owned" them.

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/09/plaque-honoring-contributions-of-slaves.html

Just a little bit ironic, I think, that a plaque which honored slaves who contributed to the building of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, was placed in a small chapel in a relatively obscure place, which was named after one of the slave masters who owned the slaves that did the work.

It would be the easiest, most natural, most Christian thing in the world for the school's administration to rename the building while dedicating the plaque. But, no. Not a big deal.

Here's a comment from one of the African American pastors who has been advocating for the placement of the plaque, and for renaming the buildings on campus:

"I understand that the descendants of the slave masters do not have that inner drive to act in the ultimate realm of spirituality by removing the names of the slave masters from the building. I recognize they just can’t do it. It requires a deep level of maturity and social reckoning to do so. If the founders were abortion advocates, they would have no hesitancy in removing their names. Most Southern Baptists do not equate the evil of slavery, with the evil of abortion, but they are wrong." Dr. Dwight McKissic

deception.

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/09/influenced-by-far-republican-right.html

The Southern Baptist Convention, which is the nation's largest Protestant denomination, and the largest conservative Evangelical denomination, is making the news yet again, and not in a good way. The most recent interim President of the Southern Baptist Convention executive committee, who is essentially the CEO of the denomination, suddenly resigned after it was discovered that his resume falsely represented his educational background. A search committee, interviewing Willie McLaurin for consideration as the permanent President of the Executive Committee, discovered this in checking with the colleges and universities he listed as having attended and from which he received several degrees, including a doctorate from one of them.

McLaurin is the fourth individual since 2010 who has either resigned from the executive board presidency because of a moral or ethical failing, or who has failed to meet the expectations required by the nation's largest Protestant denomination of it's CEO. Southern Baptists appear to have adopted the lack of transparency, dishonesty, nepotism, favor-granting, misuse of power and misappropriation of funds that characterize the far political right of the GOP which many of them have allowed to infiltrate their churches. Birds of a feather, and all that. It's subjective to argue that Southern Baptist denominational politics resembles the corruption of the Republican party, but here's more evidence, on top of a nasty sexual abuse scandal by clergy and church leaders. It's my conclusion that there's a connection, because it sure looks like it.

I suspect that the vetting process that he went through, which he obviously had not been subject to before, or they would have found this then, may have something to do with their reluctance to give him the job permanently, because he is not really an insider in the closed leadership bureaucracy, and because, well, he is black.

https://www.yourvalley.net/stories/lake-to-argue-to-examine-signatures-on-ballot-envelopes-in-bid-to-overturn-election,419909

The people of Arizona need to push hard to make this pitiful, pathetic, psychotic woman stop wasting the court's time over an election that she clearly, unequivocally, absolutely, factually and statistically LOST!

Katie Hobbs has been governor for more than 8 months now, she has done exactly what the voters put her there to do, which is to veto, veto, veto, veto, veto the garbage and junk that the GOP dominated legislature puts out. The courts have examined the evidence, or lack of it in her.[Lakes'] case, in a dozen different ways, audited the ballots, recounted them, checked to make sure every single vote in the precincts where the print settings were off was submitted and counted, which actually favored Lake, not Hobbs, so if those votes were thrown out, Hobb's margin would grow.

So "Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me", a song by my favorite Arizona singer, Linda Ronstadt, should be the theme music that is played whenever Lake appears in the media or on television. I don't have the technical skills to make a video like that, so if anyone else can, be my guest.

are still standing today.

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-walls-conservative-evangelicals.html

https://baptistnews.com/article/a-new-metaphor-could-change-the-views-of-white-evangelical-conservatives/

Certain intruders have stolen in among today's conservative Evangelical churches, replacing sound doctrine and theology with right wing political rhetoric, turning churches into cults with a political mission and purpose and in some cases, replacing Jesus with loyalty to a political "savior" which completely subverts the Christian gospel. Fear, says Rick Pidcock, the author of the piece linked at the top of this article from Baptist News Global, fear of change is the underlying motivation, while opposition to change, especially from a hard line Calvinist approach, represents God to the far right.

Rick Pidcock, in the piece from Baptist News Global, cites Dante Stewart, a black man raised in a white, Evangelical church.

“If the white folk I worshipped with and went to school with and had dinner with had the imagination to see C.S. Lewis’ Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as Jesus, then I knew there should have been no problem when Black folk said Jesus was Black and Jesus loved Black people and Jesus wanted to see Black people free. Just as they found meaning in the symbol of Aslan’s representation of love, I found meaning in the symbol of Jesus’ solidarity with Blackness. But sadly, I found out that many could see the symbol of divine goodness and love in an animal before they could ever see the symbol of divine goodness and love in Blackness.”

Give that paragraph come thought, and context in the politics of today.

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/why-dont-journalists-call-out-bad.html

Vivek Ramaswamy slips it into his talking points as if it were fact. The Democrats lied about Russian collusion in the 2016 election, therefore it justifies the lies Trump has told since then. He slipped that statement into his comments on Meet the Press Sunday morning, and Chuck Todd didn't bat an eye, offered no question about it and let it slide. That's expected with much of the main stream media.

But this morning, on a talk show in Chicago, during a discussion about whether these indictments and charges against Trump are politically motivated, Santita Jackson had a guest on her program who stated flatly that Trump, as a former President, shouldn't be charged with crimes under the administration of his successor, but that the people ought to determine whether he is guilty of insurrection by the manner in which they cast their ballots. I get it, with Jackson's program, she goes out of her way to be fair, and to represent various viewpoints, but this guest also mentioned the fact that Democrats pulled a similar "stunt" in 2016, getting the CIA, according to this guest, involved in trying to "overturn" Trump's election.

It was nothing of the sort. Except for the fact that the DOJ came under Trump's control and therefore would not pursue the conclusive evidence of Russian interference and Trump campaign collusion that Robert Mueller found in his investigation. Primary evidence came from the FBI, but it is clear that this had nothing to do with any effort to prevent Trump from being inaugurated. Those are all right wing talking points that we haven't heard until now, with Trump's back to the wall and the very real evidence of his attempts to overturn the results of a legitimate election.

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/and-on-and-on-it-goes.html

Ironic, wasn't it, that the anti-woke governor of Florida, the guy whose attacks on teacher classroom autonomy, local school board control, Critical Race Theory, student freedom of conscience and just about every other constitutional right except, of course, unrestricted and unregulated gun ownership, had a statement to make about the tragic and racially motivated shooting in a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida this past week. It's hard to take his remarks seriously, as it appeared those who heard them not only failed to applaud, but actually booed the guy.

Football is the social life of most Oklahoma communities. So a shooting at a game would almost certainly hit close to home, disrupting the social life and threatening the very heart of the community. I'll wait to see if anything comes of the incident except blaming someone else. The two schools involved in the game, Del City and Choctaw, are in the Oklahoma City suburbs, both overwhelmingly white and relatively affluent communities, though Choctaw still retains some of its rural characteristics. The superintendents of both school districts issued a statement that their "thoughts and prayers" were going out to the victims of the shooting.

Red states. But Red states in which the predominant Democratic constituencies are under-registered, and vote at percentages well below where they could if more would register.

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/texas-school-board-member-searches.html

If I hadn't read it in a reliable source, I wouldn't have believed it.

Sneaking into a school library, with a flashlight, looking for porn, a board member in a small Texas town lied to an assistant Principal about being authorized to be there, and then proceeded to try and prove her conspiracy theory correct by finding porn in the library that she knew had to be there.

No mention of whether she found anything, though the rest of the board censured her.

THIS IS WHY ELECTIONS MATTER! IF we don't vote, idiots get elected to office.

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/a-vote-for-cornell-west-is-vote-for.html

Cornell West has an outstanding liberal resume. A graduate of Harvard University, with a B.A. and Princeton University, with an M.A. and a Ph.D, the first black to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy, he taught at both institutions, and currently is the Dietrich Boenhoffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary. I've read several of his books, heard him speak on more than one occasion and I find little in the statement made in this piece in Baptist News Global with which I disagree.

Except that he doesn't seem to see himself running for President on the Green Party ticket is only going to benefit whomever the Republican party nominates, including Trump. And if Trump wins again, Cornell West, everything he stands for and everything he is running to achieve, will become a lost cause. West himself would very likely become a target of Trump's intended and publicly announced revenge.

Other than abolishing the electoral college, something that I am completely in favor of doing, but which isn't going to happen anytime soon, as long as that's the way we elect a President, Democrats must figure out how to maximize the size of the party, keep the majority of Independent voters we have won over because of their adverse reaction to Trumpism, and make sure the Green Party's potential supporters know that voting for their own candidate will not lead to their ability to achieve their agenda, but will be a futile attempt which will result in their getting absolutely nothing in return for their work.

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/an-old-ideology-in-new-setting.html

"If there is any hope that Christianity is going to find its way to health in this country, it's only going to be by white Christian churches facing the root causes of its ill health, which includes its complicity in the idea that the entire continent was a divinely promised land for exploitation by European Christians--by white Christians."-- Robert P. Jones, Author of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.

Jones says that white supremacy, and the idea that Christians were the "chosen people" originated with the Vatican and the 15th century "Doctrine of Discovery." This was the church's attempt to "evangelize" the rest of the world, and gave its moral and religious authority to support of colonial domination of people in areas all around the world by western European powers. In America, combined with frontier revivalism and the lack of trained clergy to pastor churches, it developed into a theology known as "Anglo-Israelism," equating white people with the Israelites, and extending the Old Testament's Abrahamic Covenant to justify the subjugation of native Americans and the enslavement of Africans, both of whom were considered inferior people, and savages, in the same way the Old Testament described the Israelite subjugation of the Cananite people in Palestine following their exodus from Egypt.

The problem with this perspective, which has morphed into several variations of white, Christian nationalism that seem to be experiencing revival today, is that it rests entirely on a flawed, distorted, erroneous interpretation of the Bible. And it is dangerous, because when people think they are God's chosen, they believe they are agents of God's judgment against those he has deemed to be "inferior" people. American history is full of such brutality, according to Jones, and he lists as examples the murder of Emmett Till, the mistreatment, disenfranchisement and murder of native Americans in events like the Trail of Tears, the Tulsa Race Riot, the lynchings and burnings of Jim Crow. All of this is tied to the influence of the Doctrine of Discovery. These are things that were done by white Christians who have distorted and twisted the meaning of their only source of faith and practice, the Bible.

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/hey-republican-candidates-heres-how-to.html

At the top of the list, publicly admit Trump lied about election fraud, the 2020 election was legitimate and Biden won.

Then do all the things that Democrats are doing. Keep working on the infrastructure. Fix the health care system with single payer medicare for all. Come up with a fair tax system that works and has no loopholes for the rich. Raise social security benefits by 50%.
Protect democracy. Get out of the culture war and on the road to true freedom.

No Republican would ever get my vote.