Religion

A bitter white supremacist has killed a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and we all need to take steps to make sure something like that doesn't happen again. So we have to reach out to the moderates in the white community -- those who think affirmative action is wrong, those misguided souls who still think judging people on merit alone isn't racist, those who pretend to have philosophical arguments against Sonia Sotomayor -- so that the extremists can see no harm is meant to them, and they will come back into the fold.

Good news -- the Guantanamo problem has been solved; Terre Haute will take all the prisoners:

When the location of Terre Haute's new Wal-Mart Supercenter came under debate three years ago, City Councilman Rich Dunkin received more than 300 phone calls about the issue.

At least once a year, the nerds have their moment in the spotlight:

An intense, oddly compelling spectacle of smart kids, the Scripps National Spelling Bee pitted 293 fourth through eighth graders against one another in a tense three-day competition.

Kavya Shivashankar of Olathe won it all on Laodicean, which means halfhearted in respect to religion or politics.

Now that the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign has moved its sign campaign ("You can be good without God," "In the beginning, man created God") to Chicago, Time magazine finds the issue worthy of comment, reporting that residents there have largely greeted the ads with "a quick, curious look and then a shrug." The piece closes with a non-believer saying that atheists are still "in the closet," afraid to "come out" to their families and "say they don't believe in God" and makes this observation:

Bet this moron can't even spell autism:

A Paoli man convicted of battery and criminal confinement after trying to exorcise demons from a 14-year-old boy with autism was sentenced to house arrest on Thursday.

Monroe Circuit Judge Teresa Harper sentenced Edward Uyesugi to three years in jail, with all but six months suspended. He will serve those six months under house arrest at parents' home in Orange County.

Today's Juxtaposition Workshop features two stories from today's wires. First, a matter of religious conviction:

A proposal to shield doctors and pharmacists from penalties for refusing to provide health services because of religious or moral objections won approval Tuesday from the Louisiana House, but only after the measure was rewritten to limit its scope.

President Obama said at Notre Dame that, since the views of the two camps in the abortion debare are "irreconcilable," we need to at least stop demonizing one another and reducing those with differing views to caricature. I was with him on that, but then he said:

"Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words. It's a way of life that always has been the Notre Dame tradition."

The Journal Gazette's Sunday Perspective section had a couple of pieces by people who, it could be argued, do not exactly have in mind  the best interests of the people they are criticizing. First up is Tracy Warner, who says the local GOP won't succeed without its moderate wing:

Poor Hoosier atheist activists can't get a break. First, Bloomington refused to let its buses carry the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign's signs proclaiming that "You can be good without God," ruling the message too controversial. Then, the Mishawaka and South Bend bus people, because of the Bloomington flap, decided to seek board approval for putting the signs on its buses.