Random Politics & Religion #00

Well, Syrian refugees are M&M's and some of them are poisonous, I wouldn't try to understand the analogy.

That's sexist, brown M&M is female.

If you are going to be faux outraged, at least get your oppressed feelings right.

It's called racism, not sexism, because brown M&Ms lives matter.

That's sexist, brown M&M is female.

.... No clue what happened to her friend

The girl on the left was killed after trying to flee from ISIS (after joining them and regretting it)



She was married and pregnant and was killed when trying to flee from Raqqa. No clue what happened to her friend

I'd still tap that.

They were 16 and 17

So the issue is only about online practices? Cause over here I remember playing fantasyfootball with friends since elementary school lol, it's a very common game.

Speaking during a briefing in Belgrade's Kombak Arena venue that will host the December OSCE Ministerial Council, Dacic said that Belgrade will next week become the diplomatic capital of Europe as more than 40 ministers of foreign affairs will arrive here for the conference.

He added that Serbia has shown it can "objectively help resolve certain conflicts" and that the situation in Ukraine, where the OSCE is the only international organization present, is now "much more relaxed than a year ago."

The ministerial conference in Belgrade on December 3 and 4 will be the final event of the Serbian chairmanship of the OSCE, and will adopt a number of important declarations, Dacic said, adding that "introductory meetings" will be starting as early as December 1.

The minister stated that the ministerial gathering will bring together 57 countries and 11 partner countries. He added there was still "no definitive confirmation" about which ministers will come to Belgrade next week, but that it is certain more than 40 will take part.

"We are especially pleased that in addition to the members of the Troika - the next chairmanship, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Didier Burkhalter of the previous (German and Swiss) - Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced their arrival," Dacic said, adding EU High Representative Federica Mogherini and Secretary General of the Council of Europe Tornborn Jagland also confirmed their participation.

Dacic noted that 115 media outlets and about 500 of their staff have been accredited to cover the conference.

EARLIER this month, in Des Moines, the prominent home-schooling advocate and pastor Kevin Swanson again called for the punishment of homosexuality by death. To be clear, he added that the time for eliminating America’s gay population was “not yet” at hand. We must wait for the nation to embrace the one true religion, he suggested, and gay people must be allowed to repent and convert.

Mr. Swanson proposed this at the National Religious Liberties Conference, an event he organized. Featured speakers included three Republican contenders for the presidency: the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.

Mr. Huckabee later pleaded ignorance. Yet a quick web search will turn up Mr. Swanson’s references to the demonic power of “the homosexual Borg,” the unmitigated evil of Harry Potter and the Disney character Princess Elsa’s lesbian agenda.

Mr. Cruz apparently felt little need to make excuses. He was accompanying another of the featured speakers at the conference: his father, Rafael Cruz — a politically connected pastor who told a 2013 Family Leadership Summit that same-sex marriage was a government plot to destroy the family.

On Saturday, father and son traveled to Bob Jones University in South Carolina to join a Rally for Religious Liberty. Among the speakers was Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, who has called L.G.B.T. activists “hateful” and “pawns” of the devil.

The comfortable thing to do would be to dismiss Mr. Swanson as just another wombat from the embarrassing fringe of American politics. But that would be a mistake. Mr. Swanson’s murderous imaginings did not interfere with his ability to attract senior Republican figures to his conference, including as a keynote speaker Bob Vander Plaats, an Iowa politician who will grant the “Most Wanted Endorsement of 2016,” according to the Conservative Review.

Mr. Swanson is the product of a significant political movement that has coalesced around the theme of religious liberty. Many of its leaders and their allies appear at the Family Research Council’s annual Values Voters Summit. Other power centers include Liberty University (now a required stop on the campaign trail); conservative policy organizations like the American Family Association and Concerned Women for America; and Christian legal advocacy groups like Liberty Counsel (whose co-founder, Mat Staver, acted as Kim Davis’s lawyer) and the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal powerhouse behind the Hobby Lobby decision (whose president, Alan Sears, co-wrote a book in 2003 titled “The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today”).

When talking about religious conservatives in America, we might perhaps conjure up an image of a farmer in Iowa or a small-business owner in Ohio who goes to church and holds traditional values. But the leaders to whom such conservatives deliver their votes have a distinct, often different, political vision.

When they hail religious liberty, they do not mean the right to pray and worship with other believers. Instead, the phrase has become a catchall for tactical goals of seeking exemptions from the law on religious grounds. To claim exception from the law as a right of “religious refusal” is, of course, the same as claiming the power to take the law into one’s own hands.

The leaders of this movement are breathtakingly radical. Like Mr. Swanson, they feel persecuted and encircled in a hostile world. Like him, they believe that America will find peace only when all submit to the one true religion.

True, few share Mr. Swanson’s taste for genocidal fantasy. But they do share the ultimate goal of capturing the power of the state and remaking society in ways most Americans would find extreme: a world in which men rule in families, women’s reproductive freedom is curtailed and “Bible believers” run the government.

This movement is a power to be reckoned with in Republican Party politics. Mr. Cruz, for one, is basing his strategy on winning its support. Ben Carson told a Liberty University convocation this month of his concern that so many people “are trying to push God out of our lives.” And early this year, Mr. Jindal hosted a religious revival rally on the Louisiana State University campus that was sponsored by the American Family Association.

But the real influence of the movement is in the less visible realm of state legislatures. In 2015 alone, 87 religious refusal-related bills were introduced in 28 states.

All of this raises some unsettling questions about political life in the United States. When presidential candidates court support among the audience of a pastor who openly discusses the extermination of millions of their fellow citizens, why is this not major news?

Most functioning democratic parties in the modern world have mechanisms for marginalizing elements whose presence will ultimately prove destructive to both the political system and the party itself. What has happened to the Republican Party’s immune system?

And why are the rest of us complacent? Because a majority of the public has swung behind same-sex marriage, pundits would have us believe that the culture war is over. The leaders of the religious liberty movement may have lost that fight, but they’re still on the march — crusading through the courts and state legislatures.

It would be foolish to underestimate their resolve.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) is calling on Congress to follow the footsteps of the United Kingdom, which is preparing to officially authorize military action against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

In a letter to Senators Friday, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism called for a vote before the end-of-the-year recess in December.
“We've taken dozens of votes to repeal Obamacare; we've held hours upon hours of hearings and multiple special investigations on Benghazi; we've devoted days of Senate floor time to blocking new administration rules on clean water and power,” he said. “That is the majority's prerogative, but this Congress has so far failed to take a single vote on the war that is currently being fought against ISIS, or to truly debate how we confront this evil.”
As the one of the nation’s closest allies prepares to debate and vote on their involvement, Murphy said it’s well past time the U.S. do the same.

“Congress must declare war against ISIS,” he said. “Each one of us first ran for office on the promise that we wouldn’t shy away from tough debates, but rather, would rise to the challenge the times demand. Now is the time to prove we meant it.”

Police in Colorado Springs said they were responding to a report of an active shooter situation on Friday, and a local newspaper said the incident took place near a Planned Parenthood center.

"CSPD PIO (public information officer) responding to call (of) active shooter in Centennial BI. The area is NOT secure. Media do not stage in the area," the police department said in a tweet. No other details were immediately available.

The Colorado Springs Gazette reported on its website that the shooter was reported near a Planned Parenthood clinic on Centennial Boulevard.

Police tell me there are at least three officers injured. Two are safe and they're trying to get the 3rd to safety. @FOX21News