{"id":29995,"date":"2020-08-05T20:21:17","date_gmt":"2020-08-06T01:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=29995"},"modified":"2020-08-05T20:21:17","modified_gmt":"2020-08-06T01:21:17","slug":"well-we-cant-have-that-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2020\/08\/05\/well-we-cant-have-that-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Well, We Can’t Have That – Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

The knots that religious legislators tie themselves into when faced with an atheist amuses me for reasons obscure, so I found The Friendly Atheist’s<\/em><\/strong> Hemant Mehta’s coverage<\/a> of State Senator Juan Mendez’s (D-AZ) attempts to give invocations in Arizona invigorating:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Besides being a progressive legislator, Mendez is known to atheists for his history of delivering invocations in the legislature\u2026 or at least trying to. In 2013\u00a0he\u00a0delivered one<\/a>\u00a0in the State House, but the following day, a Christian colleague\u00a0delivered a second\u00a0religious<\/em>\u00a0invocation<\/a>\u00a0to make up for his godless one. When he\u00a0tried to give another invocation<\/a>\u00a0in 2016, the GOP majority leader blocked him from doing so on the grounds that all invocations had to be made to a \u201chigher power.\u201d Days later, when Mendez gave his invocation anyway, a minister was on standby to\u00a0deliver a \u201creal\u201d one<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Mendez was\u00a0slated to give an invocation<\/a>\u00a0on \u201cSecular Day\u201d at the Capitol. But just before he spoke, the (Republican) Senate President said someone else would be doing the honors. She later said it was a mistake, but the other senator had an invocation ready to go\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps I’m just a spiritual pervert, but the story makes me smile. Some people know how to deal politely with people of other religions, but someone without religion?<\/p>\n

Oh, dear<\/strong>. How can we have a good argument about the unseeable if they refuse to see the … uh …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The knots that religious legislators tie themselves into when faced with an atheist amuses me for reasons obscure, so I found The Friendly Atheist’s Hemant Mehta’s coverage of State Senator Juan Mendez’s (D-AZ) attempts to give invocations in Arizona invigorating: Besides being a progressive legislator, Mendez is known to atheists \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29997,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29995\/revisions\/29997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}