Squatching down south

Lately there's been a surge of Bigfoot sightings in North Carolina.

These sorts of things are fuel to the cryptozoologists' fire.  Why else, they argue, would you see clusters of sightings, if it wasn't because the animals themselves were present in an area?  I'm inclined to suspect some sort of tame version of group hysteria -- when one person in your neighborhood claims that a large, hairy proto-hominid has been hanging around in their back yard, you're more likely to attribute anything weird -- noises at night, a dumped-over trash can, the silhouette of a black bear -- as falling into the "I saw it too!" department.

Be that as it may, I'm all about evidence, so let's see what we've got.

First, we have Vicky Cook of Shelby, North Carolina, near the city of Charlotte, who claims to have seen a Bigfoot in broad daylight.

Apparently, Cook has been trying to attract Bigfoot for quite some time, to the extent that she puts out bait for them.  "They love peanut brittle, chocolate, and peanut butter sandwiches," Cook says.

So far, her strategy hasn't turned up much but a grainy trail-cam photograph that could be damn near anything.  She has said, however, that the Bigfoots come through quite regularly.  "They just walk through leaving a big mess sometimes," Cook said.  "Broken trees scattered everywhere.  Footprints.  They come into my back yard at night as well.  But never bother anything."

I'm not sure how "broken trees scattered everywhere" jibes with "never bothering anything," but that's just me.

She also doesn't seem surprised that the photo isn't very good.  "If I was to get a clear shot of a Bigfoot standing in the open ... guess how that would go?" Cook says.

I'm not exactly sure what she's getting at.  I think it would go pretty well, myself.  I've often wondered, in these days where everyone has their phone at all times and they go around snapping photographs of everything, why all the Bigfoot pics look like they were taken using the camera's "AutoBlur" function.

Then, there, the report of a "large, bipedal animal covered with hair," from McDowell County, in the western part of North Carolina.  The sighting was from John Bruner, who (like Cook) has been looking for Bigfoot for quite some time.  He takes a different approach, however; instead of attracting them with food, he scatters glow sticks around.  This "piques the curiosity" of the Bigfoots, he says.

Well, he claims that it worked, because he was out hunting for his quarry at night and saw one of the glow sticks start to move.  He gave chase, and got close enough to see it -- it turned and looked at him, then took off too fast for him to follow.

"Its face was solid black, no hair on it," Bruner said.  "The hair looked shaggy all over.  I was able to see details of the creature … like the face, and the hair was matted and stringy.  The eyes were farther apart than human eyes."

Some sightings a couple of months ago in Davie County, however, turned out to cluster around one area for a reason.  Multiple people called in to the authorities to report a Bigfoot with glowing red eyes.  Some of the folks who phoned were hysterical with fear.  Thinking this was enough to warrant at least a cursory look, the Davie County Sheriff's Department sent in their Animal Control Unit, and found...

... this.

Turns out the property owner thought it'd be fun to put up a Bigfoot statue, given how many times he's allegedly been sighted prowling around the area (Bigfoot, not the owner), which of course resulted in more sightings.  This prompted the authorities to put out a request:

This handsome fellow stands on Pine Ridge Rd. in Mocksville.  If you are traveling this road at night, please be advised that the eyes appear to glow.  If you see this phenomenon, you do not need to call animal control to report seeing Bigfoot, Sasquatch or any other large creature.  Thank you. 

Any media outlets with questions about this matter, please contact animal control directly at (336)751-0227.  Do not tie up 911 lines.

So that explains those sightings, at least.

Anyhow, apparently North Carolina is zooming up in the ranks, coming in right after the Pacific Northwest/northern California sightings that got the whole thing going.  Who knew?  I guess the western part of North Carolina is pretty solid forested mountains, just like the Cascades and Olympics, so if the Big Guy likes that kind of terrain, it'd be understandable that he lives there.

The other spot that's been hopping lately, however, is Florida, which has the southern relative of Bigfoot, the "Skunk Ape."  Or maybe they're just elderly Bigfoots who decided to move to Florida when they retired.  They tend to hang out in the Everglades, which seems weird to me, because (as beautiful as the Everglades are) they are home to mosquitoes big enough to carry off your poodle.  If I was a Florida Bigfoot, I think I'd prefer a condo in Sarasota over mucking around in hip-deep mud, trying not to get exsanguinated by flocks of giant bloodsucking bugs, and avoiding cottonmouths and alligators.

But that's just me.

Anyhow, if any of my southeastern readers knows of other sightings, I'd love to hear about it.  And maybe now that I'm retired, I can go looking myself.  Perhaps I should head on down there in January, when up here, it's so cold that you can go out well-wrapped and still freeze off important body parts.  I'll make sure to bring along glow sticks and peanut brittle.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.

I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health.  And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture.  It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Apathy, voting, and the lesser of evils

In further evidence that we've been transported from 2018 back to 1830, the Republican nominee for the North Carolina General Assembly (House District 48) has said -- direct quote -- that "God is a racist and a white supremacist."

His name is Russell Walker, and the only heartening thing about this story is that when his claims went public the North Carolina Republican Party immediately withdrew their support for him.  "Based on recent behavior and previous statements, the North Carolina Republican Party is unable and unwilling to support the Republican nominated candidate for North Carolina House District 48," GOP chairman Robin Hayes said in a statement Tuesday.  "The NCGOP along with our local parties in Hoke, Scotland and Robeson Counties will be spending our time and resources supporting Republican candidates that better reflect the values of our party."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ardfern, Stamp Out Racism, Belfast, August 2010, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But I do mean that is the only heartening thing.  Walker beat his competitor, John Imaratto, carrying 65% of the vote in his district.  And it's not like the claims about the man are new, or that he's kept them under wraps, or anything.  (So the Republican Party's sudden disavowal of Walker has an unpleasant tang of "we knew all along, but once it became public knowledge and started to reflect poorly on us, we had to say we were against him.")  He runs a website that is rife with white supremacist ideology, wherein we can read passages like the following:

• What is wrong with being a white supremacist?  God is a racist and a white supremacist.  Someone or group has to be supreme and that group is the whites of the world... someone or something has to be inferior...  In all history in sub-Saharan Africa, no two-story building or a waterproof boat was ever made.
• God made the races and he is the greatest racist ever.
• Jews are not Semitic they are Satanic as they are all descended from Satan.
• MLK wanted to destroy the Caucasian race through mixing and integration.  He was an agent of Satan.

So yeah.  It's not like we're talking about subtle stuff, here.  Oh, and if we needed more, Walker's also an anti-vaxxer, too.  On his campaign website, he says that he is "convinced that vaccinations, especially for young children, create a favorable climate for Autism."

I find it profoundly baffling that here in the 21st century anyone can make statements like this without being shouted down, much less that someone like him could win the fucking nomination.  Look, I know that being a white guy, I'm bound to be less aware of racism than someone who has to deal with it day in, day out.  But for cryin' in the sink, I thought we'd come further than this.  Are we really in a place where 65% of the voters in a state district look at a man like this and think, "Yup, that's who I want to represent my views in the Assembly"?

Walker is facing Garland Pierce, an African American minister, in the general election in November.  Pierce is the incumbent, which makes me hopeful that Walker won't win.  But this is not the only race that's got some seriously eyebrow-raising candidates.  Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera is running in Florida to replace outgoing Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in the 27th Congressional District, and... she says she's been on an alien spaceship.  And that the aliens have contacted her multiple times during her life.  

"I went in," Rodriguez Aguilera told a reporter for The Miami Herald.  "There were some round seats that were there, and some quartz rocks that controlled the ship — not like airplanes."

Oh, and we have five convicted criminals running for Congress, too.  Those are:

• Don Blankenship of West Virginia (convicted of conspiracy to evade safety laws, resulting in the deaths of 29 coal miners)
• Michael Grimm of New York (convicted of tax evasion)
• David Alcorn of New Mexico (convicted of stalking)
• Greg Gianforte of Montana (convicted of misdemeanor assault)
• Joe Arpaio of Arizona (convicted of contempt of court; should also have been convicted of being a complete asshole, but unfortunately that's not illegal in the United States)

C'mon, people, is this really the best you can do?

At this point, I can't give up on politics entirely, as much as I'd like to; I've never liked discussions over politics, because half of them seem to be about things that appear to me to be blitheringly obvious (like whether LGBTQ people should have the same rights as everyone else) and the other half about things that are completely unsolvable (like trying to balance the federal budget to everyone's satisfaction).

But I've been drawn into writing about politics because apathy seems to me to be completely unconscionable.  I still find it beyond appalling that 43% of Americans didn't vote in the 2016 presidential election.  That's 65 million people who went, "Meh," and stayed home.

And look where that's gotten us.

If we don't want idiots and crazy people running the show, we have got to table our apathy and get involved.  Political races should never require a choice between the lesser of evils.  Look, I don't care if you agree with me on how to govern the country, but I sincerely hope you agree that we want the best people we can find to be in charge.  If you differ from me on issues of policy, that's fine.  That, we can discuss.

But if you support a crazed white supremacist, or a delusional woman who thinks she's in contact with aliens, or a convicted criminal for public office -- I don't think we have any common ground whatsoever.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article178813586.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article213937944.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article213937944.html#storylink=cpy

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Total eclipse of the brain

In ten days, people in the United States will get the best shot at seeing a total solar eclipse we've had in years.  The path of totality crosses the country diagonally from northwest to southeast, starting near the northern border of Oregon and ending in South Carolina.

[image courtesy of NASA]

Astronomy buffs and people who simply like an unusual spectacle have been excited about this for ages.  Motels in towns within the path of totality sold out months ago, especially in places like the Midwest where you're more likely to have clear skies.

The buzz about the eclipse prompted the eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to make the following observation:

Well, far be it from me to argue with someone of NdGT's stature, but just because people aren't denying the eclipse doesn't mean that they're viewing it with any kind of scientific eye.  We're already having the wingnuts putting their unique spin on the event, and you should watch for this sort of thing to increase exponentially as we approach August 21.

First, we have Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of evangelist Billy Graham, who claims that the eclipse is a sign of the approach of the End Times.  Have you noticed how every damn time there's some interesting astronomical event, the religious nutjobs claim it's a sign of the End Times, and then the End Times kind of don't happen?

Well, a zero batting average doesn't discourage people like Lotz in the least.  It's interesting that the elder Graham, although we don't agree on much, always impressed me as a thoughtful and deeply compassionate man.  His kids, though... son Franklin is a virulently anti-LGBT firebrand, who has a real talent for ugly invective.  And now, his daughter... well, let me give it to you in her own words:

The warning is triggered by the total solar eclipse of August 21, nicknamed America's Eclipse. For the first time in almost a hundred years, a total solar eclipse will be seen from coast to coast in our nation.  People are preparing to mark this significant event with viewing parties at exclusive prime sites.  The celebratory nature regarding the eclipse brings to my mind the Babylonian King Belshazzar who threw a drunken feast the night the Medes and Persians crept under the city gate.  Belshazzar wound up dead the next day, and the Babylonian empire was destroyed...  Therefore, my perspective on the upcoming phenomenon is not celebratory.  While no one can know for sure if judgment is coming on America, it does seem that God is signaling us about something.  Time will tell what that something is.

As far as I can tell, what god seems to be signaling is that if something is in front of the sun, it creates a shadow.  End of story.

But the religious fringe aren't the only ones who are jumping up and down making excited little squeaking noises about August 21.  We also have the crypto-woo-woos, who warn us that the eclipse is going to be noticed by more than just humans:

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that I warned South Carolina residents about Lizard Man way back in 2011.  As far as Bigfoot, you may be questioning how there could be Bigfoot sightings down there in the Southeast -- after all, the real Sasquatch hotspot is the Pacific Northwest.  But just yesterday, an alert reader sent me an article about a sighting of Bigfoot last week in North Carolina, so it's evident that the cryptids are on the way.  The fact that they're converging on the path of totality is a little peculiar, as solar eclipses have no particular precursors that might warn an animal that one is imminent, and I generally don't think of Bigfoot as being particularly knowledgeable about astronomy.

Unless it's that Bigfoot is psychic, and is sensing oscillations in the quantum frequency dimensions.  You can see how that could happen.

In any case, I'm understandably not inclined to share NdGT's optimistic assessment of Americans' attitude toward the solar eclipse.  As I've observed before, there is no finding so solidly scientific, so evidence-based, that the woo-woos can't woo all over it.

So if you're going to head over to the path of totality in ten days, keep your eyes open, and make sure you drop me a line here at Skeptophilia headquarters if you see any Bigfoots, Lizard Men, or Apocalyptic Horsepersons.  I'll be happy to post an update, especially if you can take photographs.  As is required with such photographs, however, make sure you have your camera's settings on "AutoBlur."

Speak of the devil

Just because I keep hoisting the banner of rationalism here at Skeptophilia doesn't mean I don't get pretty freakin' discouraged at times.

I suppose it's an occupational hazard.  My spending hours daily seeking out the most bizarre examples of irrational behavior I can find, so I have something to write about, means that inevitably I'm going to come to the conclusion that humanity is pretty much screwed.  It's like people who become addicted to shows like CSI and Cops and Law and Order.  At some point, you're pretty certain to decide that the world is full of criminals who are trying to kill you and get away with it.

So it's an effort at times to remain optimistic.  Especially given stories like the one over at Fusion a couple of days ago describing a poll taken in North Carolina wherein 41% of Donald Trump supporters said that Hillary Clinton is literally the devil.

As I've said before, I'm not here to discuss whether or not you agree with Clinton's politics.  But the idea that 41% of Trump supporters think that his opponent is the incarnation of Satan on Earth is troubling, to say the least.

That, however, is not the strangest thing about the poll.  Apparently, of the currently undecided voters, 15% thought Clinton was the devil.  So I'm thinking: You believe one of the candidates is literally the Prince of Hell (or Princess, in this case), and you're undecided?  What are you planning to do, stand there in the voting booth and say, "Let's see: candidate who is Satan, candidate who is not Satan... how to choose, how to choose?"

The weirdest thing, though, is that on the poll there were three choices: (1) Clinton is the devil; (2) Clinton is not the devil; and (3) Not sure.  And of the people who say they're voting for Hillary Clinton, 6% of them said they were not sure if she was the devil or not.

Now, I realize that this may be because 6% of the respondents thought the question was funny enough that they decided to fuck around with the results.  Or, perhaps, that this represents the 6% of respondents who are actual practicing Satanists, who think that Clinton might be the devil and are happy about it.  But if you look at the results, you will find that 33% of undecided voters are also undecided about whether Clinton is Satan.

So there are people in North Carolina (a lot of them, apparently) who when asked, "Who are you voting for?" said, "I dunno," and when asked, "Is Hillary Clinton the devil?" said, "Um... I dunno about that either."

Some days I feel like I've side-slipped into a bizarro world where this kind of stuff is normal.  Because this isn't the only insane thing that's happened lately.  When a map came out showing that if only men voted, Donald Trump would win, his followers immediately started calling for repealing the 19th Amendment, with one woman saying she would "give up [her] right to vote to make this happen."  Then we had a completely surreal video of Alex Jones making the rounds, wherein he bursts into tears on air and says that not only is Clinton a demon, so is Obama, adding that if you vote for Clinton you're "electing President Linda Blair."

I dunno, President Linda Blair could probably get stuff done, don't you think?  If Mitch McConnell stonewalled President Linda Blair, she could just puke up some pea soup on him.  "Oh, you won't give my Supreme Court nominee a fair hearing?  Well, take this!"  *BARRRRRFFFFF*

At least it would make C-Span more interesting.

So I guess we rationalists have a way to go, and it's an uphill battle.  I'm not ready to give up any time soon, so if you are a loyal reader, no worries: I still have a few posts left in me.  But it'd be nice if we could make more headway in convincing people not to engage in insane magical thinking.

Although it would make it harder for me to find material.  So I suppose I should be glad, in a backhanded way, that these people are keeping me in business.

Risk and brain amoebas

We humans are poor at assessing risk.

It's something I've commented upon before; we tend to vastly overestimate the likelihood of being harmed by something gruesome and unusual (such as a shark attack), while vastly underestimate the likelihood of being harmed by something commonplace (such as smoking).  This leads to missed opportunities and unnecessary anxiety in the first case, and ignoring truly dangerous behaviors in the second.

This comes up because of an article I've seen posted now several times, about an Ohio teenager who died from an infection by the "brain-eating amoeba" Naegleria fowleri.  The 18-year-old victim appears to have been infected while on a whitewater rafting trip near Charlotte, North Carolina, and several days later came down with the fever, chills, and headache associated with primary amoebic meningioencephalitis, which is as horrifying as it sounds.  The microorganism gets into your system through inhaled water, and it travels through the olfactory nerves to the brain.  There it turns from eating its usual food source, bacterial films in freshwater sediments, to consuming your brain cells.  The disease has a 97% mortality rate.

Naegleria fowleri [image courtesy of the CDC]

Unfortunately, the story (although correctly reported, for the most part) is inducing widespread hysteria from people who evidently missed the following line: "The CDC reported 37 infections in the 10 years from 2006 to 2015."  Let me put that statistic a different way; given the current population of the United States (318 million), that amounts to about one death per hundred million people per year.  Even if there were three times as many cases that go unreported -- unlikely, given the severity of the symptoms and the likelihood of dying as a result -- it's still a tiny, tiny risk.

Interestingly, these numbers are ten times smaller than the likelihood of your being crushed to death by a piece of your own furniture (303 deaths in the last ten years).

So here are a few of the comments I've seen posted in the last couple of days, edited to reflect the far more likely scenario of your being killed by a falling television cabinet.  I've inserted "television watching" and equivalent phrases for "swimming" and "hard hat" for "nose plug."

• I wish I hadn't read about this!!!  I'm never sitting in front of an unsecured television cabinet again.
• Just in time for summer.  So much for television watching.
• They should post warning signs on television cabinets!  It could have prevented this tragedy.
• Every time I'm sitting in front of the television, I'm gonna think about this.
• I'm protecting my kids from this.  They'll never watch television again without wearing a hard hat.

There.  I hope that sounded as ridiculous to you as it did to me.  And remember; there is ten times the justification for making those statements as there is for making equivalent statements about brain-eating amoebas.

Note that I'm not trying to minimize the tragedy of what happened.  A young life cut short is always sad, especially given how unlikely an occurrence it was.  What is completely unjustified is the panic that these sorts of stories always induce, even in people who should know better.  The U.S. National Whitewater Center, where the young woman is thought to have been infected, has responded by hyperchlorinating their well water, and health officials in North Carolina have recommended "holding your head above water when taking part in warm freshwater activities" and "avoid(ing) water-related activities in warm freshwater during periods of high water temperature and low water levels."

So when are you supposed to go swimming?  January?

The bottom line is that everything you do is a risk.  Most of the risks are quite small, and chances are that you do several things every day without a thought that are orders of magnitude riskier than your being killed by brain amoebas.  If you really want to lower your risk of illness and death, quit smoking, eat a healthy diet, drive carefully, find ways to reduce your stress levels, and get enough exercise.

And keep an eye on any unsecured television cabinets.  They're just waiting for an opportunity to strike.

Legalizing hypocrisy

I cannot stomach pious hypocrisy.

Unfortunately, that's all we're being served by Congress at the moment with respect to providing protection to LGBT individuals.  Only days after one of the worst mass murders of gays and lesbians ever, the House of Representatives voted to block a bill protecting LGBT employees of federal contractors.  The sponsor of the bill, Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, thought it'd be a no-brainer.

"It’s hard to imagine that any act that is so horrific could lead to anything positive," Maloney said.  "But if we were going to do anything, it would be a very positive step to say that discrimination has no place in our law and to reaffirm the president’s actions in this area.  Seems to me a pretty basic thing to do."

Seems so to me, too.  The House disagreed.  So do the majority of state governments, apparently.  At the time of this writing, less than half of the states in the US (22, to be precise) have anti-discrimination laws that address sexual orientation.  Only 19 specifically address gender identity.

Instead, many states are now moving toward passing laws legalizing discrimination against LGBT individuals based on "deeply-held religious ideals."  Three -- Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee -- already have such laws.

You know what?  If your religion impels you to discriminate against a minority, you need to find a different fucking religion.

So the pious hypocrites keep pretending to care, while simultaneously sandbagging every piece of legislation that might actually make a difference.  And the toll keeps rising, not only because of well-publicized events like the Orlando massacre, but because of the ongoing pressure on LGBT individuals to hide and/or deny who they are.  No surprise, is it, that suicide rates are four times higher among LGBT youth than straight ones, and nearly a quarter of transgender individuals have attempted to take their own lives?

Oh, but never mind all that, because House Rules Committee chairman, Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, said his "thoughts and prayers" were with the people of Orlando after the attack.  That should be enough, right?  Then he turned around and joined the others in voting to block the anti-discrimination bill, and when interviewed about it all, even denied that Pulse was a gay nightclub. "It was a young person’s nightclub, I’m told," Sessions said.  "And there were some [LGBT people] there, but it was mostly Latinos."

Because "Latino" and "gay" are apparently mutually exclusive categories.

So to Sessions and his colleagues, I have the following to say: you can take your thoughts and prayers and stick them up your ass.  Sideways.  Your thoughts and prayers accomplish nothing.  Your actions, on the other hand, perpetuate prejudice and discrimination.  You and and the rest of Congress had the opportunity to make a difference.  Instead, you chose to side with the bigots, all the while uttering mealy-mouthed platitudes designed to feign a stance of compassion.

Well, you're not fooling anyone.

Nor are the powers-that-be in North Carolina, where there's been an ongoing battle over the law prohibiting transgender individuals from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender identification because of some bullshit argument about protecting women from attacks, and yet which authorized the destruction of 72 rape kits containing genetic evidence from open/unsolved cases of rape and molestation.

Right, North Carolina officials.  Explain to me again how much you care about attacks on innocent women and children, and how the bathroom bill was totally not about discrimination against LGBT individuals.

And the right-wing media continues to misrepresent the situation, and people continue to be suckered.  Just a couple of days ago, I saw a post on Facebook from a friend of a friend that might be the most vile thing I've ever seen on social media.  This woman went on for paragraphs about how sick she was of the liberals destroying the moral fiber of America, and how she was furious that "gays and lesbians now have more rights" than she does, and how there's an agenda to take away all of the rights from straight white working-class Americans.

I felt physically ill after reading this.  More rights?  Such as what?  Such as the right to walk down the street holding hands with the person you love without being afraid that you'll be harassed, attacked, perhaps killed?  The right to ask someone out in a bar without having the nagging fear that if you guess wrong, it might be the last mistake you'll ever make?  The right to marry, the right to expect service in a place of business, the right to hold down a job and not be the subject of discrimination over something you can't control?

At least if you're going to hold these sorts of beliefs, then be up front about the fact that you're espousing a doctrine of hatred against an entire sector of our society.  Don't try to hide behind a pious shield of false and twisted morality.  Maybe you're the ones that need to re-read a few passages in your favorite book, most especially Matthew, chapter 23:

[T]hey say, and do not.  For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers... Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.  Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

License to hate

I know that social media lends itself to vitriol, but for sheer ugly invective I don't think I've ever seen anything like the posts regarding the controversy over who gets to use the restroom in North Carolina.

House Bill 2, titled the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, was signed into law by Governor Pat McCrory in March.  The bill prohibits transgender individuals from using the restroom for the gender they identify with; they have to use their restroom based on what genitalia they have.

Notwithstanding the fact that it's gonna be hard to enforce -- what are they going to do, have an armed guard outside the restroom making everyone drop trou before they let them in? -- supporters of the bill laud it as preventing "perverts" from going into the "wrong bathroom."  "One of the biggest issues was about privacy," North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore said.  "The way the ordinance was written by City Council in Charlotte, it would have allowed a man to go into a bathroom, locker or any changing facility, where women are -- even if he was a man.  We were concerned.  Obviously there is the security risk of a sexual predator, but there is the issue of privacy."

So the issue of safety for transgender individuals is not a concern?

I'm sorry, gender is not as simple as what equipment you were born with.  There are at least four different biological constructs related to gender -- anatomy, chromosome makeup (XX or XY), sexual orientation, and brain wiring (i.e. what gender you feel yourself to be).  These don't line up the way you'd expect a considerable amount of the time, and that's not even considering the fact that some of these are a spectrum (i.e. bisexuality).  So looking at gender as a black and white, either/or situation is simply ignoring the reality.

The whole thing has been cast as a way of keeping sexual deviants out the bathroom -- i.e., as a way of protecting innocent cisgender people.  The reality, of course, is that the vast majority of people who commit sexual crimes are cisgender; a study by the Human Rights Campaign last year was unable to find a single substantiated case of a sexual crime committed by a transgender person.

What is equally unequivocal is the suicide attempt rate by transgender individuals.  A study by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention found that 41% of transgender individuals attempt suicide, compared to 4.6% for the rest of us.

Wonder why that is?  Maybe it's being on the receiving end of bigoted legislation, not to mention vicious slander in the press every single day, you think?

But none of that seems to matter.  Hype, prejudice, hatred, and invective are the order of the day on this issue.  Just yesterday, Liberty Council President Anita Staver posted a tweet saying that because of the uproar over transgender people using the bathroom, she was planning on bringing her Glock .45 into the ladies' room with her, because it's her "bodyguard."

Odd, isn't it, that the Liberty Council's mission statement "is to preserve religious liberty and help create and maintain a society in which everyone will have the opportunity to discover the truth that will give true freedom."

Except, apparently, if you were born different.  In that case, you can get shot just for looking for a quiet place to pee.

What points out even more starkly the hypocrisy of this stance is that when a high-profile right winger -- former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert -- is accused of sexually abusing four boys, there has been a rush by his colleagues to defend him.   Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said about Hastert that he is "a good, godly man with very few flaws and who doesn’t deserve what he is going through."

So this isn't about preventing sexual crimes.  Just like the Jim Crow laws in the Deep South were never about water fountains.  This is about finding a license to hate people who aren't like you -- and, as DeLay shows, making any number of undeserved excuses for the ones who are.

The vitriol continues.  Just yesterday I unfriended someone on Facebook who posted a meme threatening violence against any transgender person who went into "the wrong bathroom."  I try to be tolerant -- I have friends of various religions (and no religion at all), of all places on the political spectrum, and with just about every ethnic background you can think of.  So as you can imagine, I see lots of things in my Facebook feed that I disagree with.

Which is entirely fine by me.  Liking you doesn't mean always agreeing with you.  But if you imply that you have the right to harass or physically injure someone who isn't exactly like you, that crosses a line in our relationship beyond anything I'm interested in repairing.

For those of you who are still on the fence about the whole "bathroom bill" issue, I have a suggestion.  Find some people in your community who are transgender, and talk to them.  I have had three students who are transgender and who have opened up to me about it, and I can say honestly that I learned more from hearing about their experiences than I could have learned from any number of news articles.  Do you doubt that transgender is real?  Go to a local center for LGBT equity -- most communities have one.  Walk in with an open mind, and get to know real people who deal with this prejudice every single day of their lives.

And until you have the courage to do that, stop posting inflammatory memes on social media.  First, you don't know what you're talking about.  Second, you come off sounding like just as big an asshole as the "separate but equal" bigots did back in the 50s and 60s.

And third, you're missing out on learning about the experiences of people who are not like you.  Which is about as critical a lesson in personal growth as anyone can have.

Fluid morality

I try not to let my skepticism slide over into cynicism.  The latter, a disbelieve-everything-they-say approach, seems to me to be as fundamentally lazy as gullibility.  Being a skeptic is harder, but ultimately more likely to land you near the truth; keep your mind open, wait for hard evidence, and then follow that wherever it leads.

But there are some realms in which I am reminded of Lily Tomlin's line, "No matter how cynical I get, it's just not enough to keep up."  And one of those is the way fracking is being presented by the powers-that-be.

Consider the highly publicized publicity stunt by Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, who in 2013 drank a glass of fracking fluid to show how safe it was.

"You can drink it," Hickenlooper told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.  "We did drink it around the table, almost rituallike, in a funny way.  It was a demonstration… they’ve invested millions of dollars in what is a benign fluid in every sense."

[image courtesy of photographer Joe Sullivan and the Wikimedia Commons]

The gas companies have stated outright that the ingredients are "sourced from the food industry," but still refuse to give a complete formulation for how it's made, saying such information is "proprietary."  Hickenlooper agrees, and said, "If we were overzealous in forcing them to disclose what they had created, they wouldn’t bring it into our state."

Under pressure from environmental groups, the gas industry has released a list of "the chemicals used most often" in fracking fluid, along with their purpose.  They state that "there are dozens to hundreds that could be used as additives" above and beyond these, although this is downplayed.

They look like they're doing everything they can to be completely transparent, up to the point where it starts to jeopardize their trade secrets.  "Here, we'll show you what we're doing!" they seem to be saying.  "You want the water supply protected, and safety to be paramount?  Well, so do we!"

Then you have to wonder why the industry has not rushed into the breach when people have been injured by the chemicals in their "benign" fracking fluid.  Makes you almost think they're... covering something up.

In 2008, a gas driller, Clifton Marshall, came into the emergency room in Durango Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango, Colorado, after he had spilled fracking fluid on his clothes and boots.  Marshall was in a bad way, but it didn't end there; Cathy Behr, an emergency room nurse, spent ten minutes working on Marshall without using adequate protective equipment.  By this time, the emergency room had to be cleared because the smell of the chemicals was strong enough to make people gag.  But Behr, who had come into direct contact with the contaminated clothing, was to experience worse.  Two days later, the nurse found herself back in the emergency room, but this time because she was sick; she had jaundice, and was vomiting and feverish.  The doctors found that Behr was in multiple organ failure from "poisoning by an unknown chemical."

Pressed by the hospital to tell them what was in the fracking fluid that sickened Behr and Marshall, the gas company -- Halliburton Industries -- refused, saying it was a trade secret.  If anyone released what was in the fluid, they said, they would sue -- and then pull their multi-million-dollar drilling operation from the state.

Hospital officials backed down.  To this day, no one knows what was in the fluid.

In a rural community in Pennsylvania -- no one knows exactly where, for reasons you'll see in a moment -- the owners of a 300-acre dairy farm signed a land-use agreement with a gas company, allowing fracking on their land.  The disturbance would be minimal, the gas company said, and the risk slight.  After the drilling began, though, the family who owned the farm, the "Rogers" family (not their real name), began to question the effects that the operation was having on their drinking and agricultural water, and agreed to participate in a study by an independent agency to monitor what was happening.

But they couldn't do that, they found out quickly.  Here's how TruthOut reported the story:

The Rogers did not realize they had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the gas company making the entire deal invalid if members of the family discussed the terms of the agreement, water or land disturbances resulting from fracking and other information with anyone other than the gas company and other signatories... 

Mrs. Rogers initially agreed to participate in a study Perry [the scientist coordinating the study] was conducting on rural families living near fracking operations. She later called Perry in tears, explaining that her family could no longer participate in the study because of the nondisclosure clause in the surface-use agreement. She told Perry she felt stupid for signing the agreement and has realized she had a good life without the money the fracking company paid them to use their land.

There are also dozens of cases where gas companies have been sued because their operations have permanently contaminated drinking water supplies, and have settled in the litigants' favor -- but only on the condition that the litigants sign a statement mandating that they never disclose what the gas companies did.  This is an easy out for the gas companies; people will usually settle for an amount of cash that the gas industry considers a pittance as compared to the bad press they'd receive if such information became public.  "At this point they feel they can get out of this litigation relatively cheaply," Marc Bern, an attorney with Napoli Bern Ripka Sholnik LLP in New York, who has negotiated on behalf of homeowners, said in an interview.  "Virtually on all of our settlements where they paid money they have requested and demanded that there be confidentiality."

There are also multiple cases where doctors have appealed to gas companies to release what is in fracking fluid, to allow the doctors to treat patients poisoned by exposure to it, and the industry has complied -- but only if the doctors themselves agree to a lifelong nondisclosure statement.

And state governments are caving in from the pressure by the industry.  Just last year, North Carolina passed a bill that made it a crime for anyone to disclose the constituents of fracking fluid.  The name of the bill?  The "Energy Modernization Act."

Still think that the gas companies are all about safety and transparency?  Then consider one more story, again from southwestern Pennsylvania, only two years ago.

Chris and Stephanie Hallowich lived with their two children, then 7 and 10, in a house in rural Washington County, when they started experiencing health issues from water that had been fouled by a fracking operation nearby.  They were desperate to get out of their house, and sued the gas company, Range Resources, for enough money to cut their losses and move.  Range Resources agreed to a $750,000 settlement, but required (guess what?) a nondisclosure agreement.  The Hallowichs could not speak to anyone about fracking, or the Marcellus Shale, or Range Resources, or their symptoms, or the contamination to their water supply, ever.

And that lifelong gag order also applied to their children.

The Hallowichs' attorney, Peter Villari, said directly to Washington County Common Pleas Court Judge Paul Polonsky, who heard the case, "I, frankly, your Honor, as an attorney, to be honest with you, I don’t know if that’s possible that you can give up the First Amendment rights of a child."  Pozonsky didn't have an answer to that except that this is what the Hallowichs had to agree to if they wanted to settle.

"That someone would insist on confidentiality of a minor child," Villari said, "or that it would be discussed within the context of a proposed settlement was unusual.  I have not encountered it before and I have yet to encounter it again."

"Unusual" isn't the word I'd use.  I think "unconstitutional" comes closer to the mark.

The frightening part of this is that because the gas industry is wealthy and powerful, they are pulling the strings here -- and everyone else is dancing to their tune.  They have no reason to bend.  They've been getting their own way at every turn, from politicians and courts that conveniently ignore the dangers to ordinary citizens because (frankly) money talks.

Where this skein of lies comes full circle, though, is in asking why the gas companies are this protective of the ingredients in the fracking fluid.  I simply don't believe that this is a trade secret that is worth keeping simply from a proprietary-protection argument alone.  Surely each of these companies can't have discovered a formula that they think is so wonderful, so much better than their rivals', that they'd engage in all of these dubiously-legal shenanigans to protect it?

Isn't it just slightly more likely that there's something in this fluid that is not exactly "benign?"  Something that might, in fact, be toxic enough that to make it public would alert the public to how much danger they're actually in?

But surely the Toxic Substances Control Act would protect the public from this kind of thing.  That's why it was passed.  Right?

Wrong.  TSCA has an exemption for reporting "Tier 2" exposure to chemicals -- i.e., exposure that happens after the chemicals leave the site of manufacture -- for "petroleum process streams."  If you're exposed to fracking chemicals, you have no federal leverage to force the industry to give you information, much less to force them to stop what they're doing.

So the only way all of this will halt is if enough people know about it, and refuse to sign the fracking leases.  Already we're seeing cases of eminent domain being invoked in laying in pipelines to carry the gas; the only way to halt the industry is to cut off its source.

Which is why it's so critical that people find out about these things.  Because as we've seen, once the damage is done, the industry has been more interested in hushing it up than cleaning it up (or, heaven forfend, changing their ways).  And if that doesn't justify some level of cynicism about their commitment to decency, safety, and public health, I don't know what would.

Siege mentality

One of the things that strikes me about the most fervently religious is that they seem to believe in a contradictory set of premises: that (1) god is all-powerful, and the truth of his word is intrinsically obvious; and that simultaneously (2) god's truth is so flimsy that it's threatened by the mere mention of contrary beliefs.

We see this in Islam, where atheism or (worse) apostasy is punishable by death in some countries (Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia come to mind).  What, is the message so weak that one person stating, "No, I don't believe this" is such a devastating threat to the worldview that it warrants a death sentence?

I know, I'm being a little disingenuous, because these same worldviews also often encompass a belief in a devil (or more than one) who is acting to lure the righteous away from belief.  But still, doesn't it strike you as a little odd that the religious aren't more confident?  For people who believe in an almighty deity, they seem a little... besieged.

Take, for example, the biology teacher in Wake County, North Carolina who found himself in hot water last week for referring to the school district where he teaches as "a concentration camp dedicated to the spiritual death of those imprisoned behind these walls."

Ray Fournier, of Fuquay-Varina High School, wrote an article in which he attacked public schools in general, and in particular the subject he'd been hired to teach.  "Evolution based science classes discredit the reliability of the Bible and get rid of God as Creator," Fournier wrote.

Well, yeah, they kind of do.  Notwithstanding my incredulity over how someone who evidently doesn't believe in the fundamental idea of biological science could get enough college credits in the subject to end up teaching it, isn't it a little mean-spirited of him to complain about what he's being paid to teach?  I mean, he shouldn't be surprised at what the curriculum is.  It's a little like someone being hired to teach math and then being surprised that there was algebra involved.

But Fournier didn't stop there.  "History classes,” he wrote, "get rid of God as Sovereign King and demonize Christianity.  English classes reinforce this message through the literature they assign their students to read."

"This deliberate indoctrination encourages students to break each and every one of the Ten Commandments," he continued, "leading countless numbers of our own children down the broad road to spiritual destruction."

He then tells the cautionary tale of a family he spoke to about the danger.  "I warned them about the spiritual dangers of public education, but sadly they ignored my warning," Fournier wrote.  "It was as if their daughters where [sic] placed inside a spiritual gas chamber.  It didn’t take long for the poison to take effect.  Within a year’s time, one of them even became a lesbian."

About his own role in the school, he makes it clear why he pursued a teaching degree, and it wasn't so that he could teach kids science.  Fournier says he is "a missionary masquerading as one of the ‘guards’… an eyewitness to the daily indoctrination and spiritual torture that is inflicted upon those who have been sentenced to come here by their own well meaning parents."

After this kind of tirade -- comparing his workplace to a Nazi concentration camp, stating his determination to subvert the entire educational process, and basically belittling the whole approach of the school -- the Wake County School Board was forced to take action.  Which they did.

By suspending him for five days.

Really?  That's it?  A guy demonstrates every which way from Sunday that he's unfit to teach, and considers himself a spiritual missionary instead of a science teacher, and he's back in the classroom?  Teaching science?  This left some parents and students understandably furious.  Krista Bennett, a senior, was astonished that Fournier was back to teaching.  "In the corporate sector you’d get fired over [what Fournier did]," she said.  "But I guess not in the school board sector."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But back to my original point.  Isn't it funny that Fournier, and the (many) others like him, think that an omnipotent and omniscient and all-loving god needs that kind of defense?  That a three-week unit on the basics of evolution is all it would take to trash fourteen years of religious indoctrination?  That a righteous, god-fearing heterosexual kid would read The Color Purple and think, "cool!  Now I'm gay!"?  That a Christian 11th grader in a world history class would find out that Christians Did Some Bad Things and say, "Oh, crap.  I guess my only option is to become a satanist?"

How fragile do you think the whole thing is?  It's sounding less Onward, Christian Soldiers than it is House of Cards.

Of course, that's hardly the only self-contradictory, counterfactual view people like Fournier hold.  But it does make you kind of wonder where this siege mentality comes from.  If their beliefs are so self-evidently correct as they claim -- to the extent that people like Ken Ham state that nothing, no evidence, no argument, would ever change them -- the fact that the whole edifice could be knocked down by a single high school teacher at least deserves an explanation.

The Vampire Beast of Bladenboro

So, today we're going to investigate a topic that I know is weighing heavily on all of your minds: is the Vampire Beast of North Carolina back?

Yesterday, in the delightfully wacky weird news outlet Who Forted?, writer Dana Matthews tells the tale of a bizarre beast that troubled the good citizens of Bladen County, North Carolina in 1953.  Matthews says, about the first round of attacks:

In 1953 the Bladenboro Newspaper covered a story about a strange creature that had blamed for the deaths of numerous dogs, draining them of their blood. Local eyewitnesses who spotted the beast claimed it possessed the body of a bear, the head of a cat, and that when it opened its mouth to growl it made the sound of a woman screaming.

The creature then proceeded to vanish for fifty years.  Attacks didn't begin again until 2003.  This makes you wonder what it was eating all that time, doesn't it?  Be that as it may, the second round of deaths sounded pretty much like the first:

The bizarre animal exsanguination began again in 2003, only this time it seemed the creature had broadened his horizons and was now killing in a 150-miles radius beyond Bladenboro.  During its second blood-run, the Vampire Beast of North Carolina was managing to slay even the bulkiest of Pit Bulls with ease and many Bladenboro residents claimed to have found strange tracks around their dead pets that even wildlife biologists couldn’t explain.

Pretty scary stuff.  So imagine the terror of the residents when, just last week, the Vampire Beast got hungry this time after only a ten-year hiatus, and it all started up again:

According to a report by paranormal investigator Thomas Byers, on June 15^th 2013, Bladenboro, NC resident Misty Turner and her son Tyler contacted local police after something visited their farm in the dead of night, killing three of their horses and a large Bull Mastiff dog. Misty’s son Tyler found the horses after the barking dog had alerted the family to the fact that something was skulking around the property. The dog continued to bark for quite some time, obsessed with the dense wooded area alongside the farm.

Arriving police and veterinarians were shocked to discover that the horses had died from very deep puncture wounds to the neck. Even more shocking was that it seemed that the purpose of the marks was to allow the blood to be drained from the animals. The horses were also reported to have been wet with sweat, almost as if they had been running hard to avoid whatever was chasing them down.

The following evening, much to the Turner’s display, their dog was also killed in the exact same fashion, with two puncture marks to the neck, found with its blood drained. Misty claims to have seen the thing that had killed her animals as it was running from the lifeless body of her pet. Her description of the creature matched the same eyewitness reports of the Vampire Beast reported in 1953.

We are also treated to an artist's rendition of the Vampire Beast, in case your imagination hadn't been sufficiently stirred by the eyewitness description:

I'm guessing that the bats are artistic license and don't actually follow the Vampire Beast around, but I could be wrong.

Well, no offense to the people of Bladenboro, but I tend to be doubtful about all of this.  The whole story -- reports of animal killings and exsanguination, strange wounds, unnamed veterinarians and wildlife biologists admitting bafflement, a mysterious beast that is supposedly responsible -- sounds much like the alleged depredations of El Chupacabra, coupled with all of the cattle mutilation stories you hear (variously attributed to satanists, aliens, or monsters).  And I suspect that if anyone really does do a thorough investigation, the whole thing won't hold water, at least not as an "unexplained monster attack."

The problem is that ordinary animal attacks often lead to rather oddball wounds.  A study done by the Washington County (Arkansas) Sheriff's Department, in response to claims of bizarre livestock mutilation, found the following [Source]:

They placed a dead cow in a field and had observers watch what happened over the next 48 hours. When they reported that bloating led to incision-like tears in the skin and that blowflies and maggots had cleaned out the soft tissue so that the carcass looked exactly like those that had been attributed to aliens or satanic cultists, they were generally ignored by the community of true believers.

Claims of exsanguination -- removal of all of the blood from a dead or dying animal -- have never been substantiated.  According to Benjamin Radford, whose book Tracking the Chupacabra: the Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore was a finalist for the ForeWord Review Book of the Year and was called a "slam-dunk debunk" by The Skeptical Inquirer, the apparent exsanguination has a completely natural cause:

The apparent loss of blood could be explained by internal hemorrhaging and pooling of blood at the bottom of the corpse.  The attribution of the attacks on livestock to a vampiric entity can be explained by the puncture wounds resulting from the canine teeth left by most predators, who often instinctively go for the neck, according to taxidermist Jerry Ayer.

Put another way, once the heart stops pushing the blood around, the blood settles downward due to gravity, and the upper parts -- the parts immediately accessible to anyone investigating the case -- appear to be completely devoid of blood when cut open.

So, sorry to puncture your scary, monster-shaped balloon, but it looks like the Vampire Beast is just a plain old beast of some kind.  Not that this should go uninvestigated, mind you; if I had my horses killed by some large predatory animal, I'd want to do something about it.  Horses were attacked by rabid bobcats in Florida in 2010 and again in 2011 -- if I had to place a bet on what was responsible for the Bladenboro attacks, it'd be that.

Anyhow, that's our news from the cryptozoological world.  At least this story was more interesting that the latest from Melba Ketchum, who is once again blathering on about how she really did know what she was doing, there really is a Bigfoot, and all of the people who are criticizing her are big ol' poopyheads.  Given the choice, I'd rather face a Vampire Beast than a delusional geneticist any day of the week.

Establishing a state religion

There is something going in on North Carolina right now that I bet a lot of you haven't heard about.  It's gotten barely any press coverage, which is weird, because if it doesn't scare the absolute hell out of you, you're not thinking hard enough.

A bill, filed by two Republican lawmakers from Rowan County on Monday (and backed by nine others), had as its intent to supersede the United States Constitution with respect to the establishment of a "state religion."  The bill was written by Representatives Carl Ford (R-China Grove) and Harry Warren (R-Salisbury), and says, in part,

SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.
SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

Backers claim that the bill is in response to President Obama's moves to establish universal health care and to alter gun laws, and they characterize it as fighting "federal tyranny."

Now, before you start writing letters, allow me to mention that this bill died yesterday afternoon in committee.  But the fact that it got as far as it did is like a dash of cold water down my back.  And if you think that this is a feint, or a political move intended just to "send a message," consider what Michael Bitzer, a professor of political science at Catawba College in Salisbury, had to say about the bill: "[I]t is attempting to appease to a certain base of supporters here in Rowan County, but also probably throughout the state, that believe very firmly in the needs for religious liberty."

Now wait, Dr. Bitzer, let me get this straight: allowing North Carolina to establish an official state religion, and thus compel prayers in schools, prayers before governmental functions, and (presumably) state control over what can and cannot be taught in science classrooms, is a move toward religious liberty?  Can I just take a moment to remind you of what theocracies are actually like?

Because a move toward a Christian theocracy is what this is, of course.  No one in his or her right mind believes that all religions in North Carolina will be given equal respect.  This is just the old "America is a Christian nation" thing, rebranded as some kind of fight against the power of the federal government.  Take a look, for example, at the billboard campaign that has begun, in support of this move:

Many local churches have been vocal in their support of the bill, and vow to continue the fight now that this iteration of it will not be voted on.  "It's very exciting," minister Bill Godair of Cornerstone Church in Salisbury told WBTV on Wednesday.  "I was thrilled about it...  I know this money could have been given to the poor and I feel like we do so much and I feel like we elected these men, the fact that they're standing together unified, all five of them, I just feel like that we have to stand with them."

I find the whole thing profoundly frightening.  In this time, when there are large, organized, well-funded private groups that have as their official goal mandating the infiltration of religion into every aspect of our lives -- determining what we can do with our own bodies, how we have to teach our children, what we can and cannot say in public -- that this sort of thing is now being considered by government officials is horrifying.

And for those of my readers who are yourselves Christian, I hope you have the sense to recognize why this would be a terrible move.  Because, after all, it's not like Christianity is one thing; it is a diverse system of belief, a term that encompasses everything from the liberal, bible-as-metaphor approach of the Unitarian Universalists to the hard-as-nails biblical fundamentalism of the Pentecostals.  (Notwithstanding the fact that some of these sects say about the others that they are "not true Christians.")  So, if there's to be a state religion, which one?  If you take just that parts they all agree on, there won't be much left.  One of them has to be chosen as the actual state religion -- which should rightly terrify members of the others.

In any case, keep an eye on North Carolina, and other states in the "Bible Belt."  This fight isn't over yet.  And for those atheists, rationalists, agnostics, and freethinkers who somehow survive down there -- speak up.  Now.

Before it's too late.