Lotta People
I don’t like this.
Americans remained critical of the influence of both the right and the left on religion. Sixty-nine percent agreed that liberals have “gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government” — an increase of 3 percentage points, which is not statistically significant. At the same time, 49 percent agreed that conservative Christians have “gone too far in trying to impose their religious values on the country,” also a 3 percentage point increase.
Sixty-nine percent think ‘libbruls’ have gone too far in keeping religion out of schools and government? Well…it’s presumably Pew’s question, and Pew who phrased it that way, so it may be that sixty-nine percent of Murkans wouldn’t have actually volunteered that crack-brained opinion. Maybe it would have been only sixty-five percent or so who would actually formulate the opinion themselves. But all the same, that’s a pretty staggering figure. Sometimes I’m afraid to leave the house.
Americans have a very strange appreciation of the term ‘liberal’, they should all be shipped to the UK for a compulsory year of political diversification. In fact, an exchange programme would be… Oh, someone has already thought of that? Rhodes scholarship?
Perhaps extending the privelege to the proletariat would do some good.
BTW, the SCopes trial is being revisited in comments at Volokh Conspiracy: http://www.volokh.com/posts/1156720292.shtml
There are indeed towns in the US where people take great pride in not paying taxes for services, even those that would presumably improve the quality of life.
Still, it is hard to predict what people will choose. When I lived in upstate New York (albeit in a Republican county) we had no police force and no public refuse collection. The county sheriff’s office handled crime and we paid private haulers to take the garbage. For some reason, the town would pick up yard waste, chip it and give the resulting mulch away free.
Now I live in Phoenix, AZ, home of the Goldwaters and we have trash pickup, police and the most complete recycling program in the county. No mulch, though.