The fact of the matter

A couple of days ago I made the mistake of participating in that most fruitless of endeavors: an online argument with a total stranger.

It started when a friend of mine posted the question of whether the following quote was really in Hillary Clinton's book, It Takes a Village:

It isn't, of course, and a quick search was enough to turn up the page on Snopes that debunks the claim.  I posted the link, and my friend responded with a quick thanks and a comment that she was glad to have the straight scoop so that she wasn't perpetuating a falsehood.  And that should have been that.

And it would have been if some guy hadn't commented, "Don't trust Snopes!!!"  A little voice in the back of my head said, "Don't take the bait...", but a much louder one said, "Oh, for fuck's sake."  So I responded, "Come on.  Snopes is one of the most accurate fact-checking sites around.  It's been cross-checked by independent non-partisan analysts, and it's pretty close to 100% correct."

The guy responded, "No, it's not!"

You'd think at this point I'd have figured out that I was talking to someone who learned his debate skills in Monty Python's Argument Clinic, but I am nothing if not persistent.  I found the analysis I had referred to in my previous comment, and posted a clip from a summary of it on the site Skeptical Science:

Jan Harold Brunvand, a folklorist who has written a number of books on urban legends and modern folklore, considered the site so comprehensive in 2004 as to obviate launching one of his own.[10] 

David Mikkelson, the creator of the site, has said that the site receives more complaints of liberal bias than conservative bias,[23] but insists that the same debunking standards are applied to all political urban legends.  In 2012, FactCheck.org reviewed a sample of Snopes’ responses to political rumors regarding George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama, and found them to be free from bias in all cases.  FactCheck noted that Barbara Mikkelson was a Canadian citizen (and thus unable to vote in US elections) and David Mikkelson was an independent who was once registered as a Republican.  “You’d be hard-pressed to find two more apolitical people,” David Mikkelson told them.[23][24]  In 2012, The Florida Times-Union reported that About.com‘s urban legends researcher found a “consistent effort to provide even-handed analyses” and that Snopes’ cited sources and numerous reputable analyses of its content confirm its accuracy.[25]

And he responded, "I disagree with you, but I respect your right to your opinion."

At that point, I gave up.

But I kept thinking about the exchange, particularly his use of the word "opinion."  It's an odd way to define the term, isn't it?  It's an opinion that I think single-malt scotch tastes good with dark chocolate.  It's an opinion that I detest the song "Stayin' Alive."

But whether Snopes is accurate or not is not an opinion.  It is either true, or it is not.  It's a little like the "flat Earth" thing.  If you believe, despite the overwhelming evidence, that the Earth is anything but an oblate spheroid, that is not "your opinion."

You are simply "wrong."

Now, I hasten to add that I don't think all of my own beliefs are necessarily correct.  After all, I haven't cross-checked Snopes myself, so I'm relying on the expertise of Brunvand et al. and trusting that they did their job correctly.  To the best of my knowledge, Snopes is accurate; and if anyone wants me to think otherwise, they need to do more than say "No, it isn't" every time I open my mouth.

But to call something like that an "opinion" implies that we all have our own sets of facts, even though many of them contradict each other, with the result that we all do what writer Kathryn Schulz calls "walking around in our little bubbles of being right about everything."  It's a little frightening how deep this mindset goes -- up to and including Donald Trump's shrieking "Fake news!" every time he hears something about him or his administration that he doesn't like.

I can understand wanting reality to be a different way than it is.  Hell, I'd rather teach Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts than biology in a public high school.  But wishin' don't make it so, as my grandma used to say, and once you grow up you need to face facts and admit it when you're wrong.  And, most importantly, recognize that the evidence won't always line up with your desires.  As President John Adams put it, "Facts are stubborn things.  Whatever our wishes, inclinations, and passions, they cannot alter the facts and the evidence."

One language to rule them all

The aphorism "No matter what you know, there's always more to learn" is something you'd be likely to see on one of those cheesy "motivational posters" that cheery type-A personalities like to pin up on office walls, but there's a lot of truth to it.  I rather prefer the formulation credited to Socrates -- "The more I know, the more I realize how little I know."

I ran into a fun example of this principle yesterday, when a member of the online linguistic geekery group Our Bastard Language posted an article from The Public Domain Review called "Trüth, Beaüty, and Volapük," about a constructed language (or "conlang," in the lingo of the field) called Volapük that I had never heard of before.

My M.A. is in linguistics, but my field of study was historical/reconstructive linguistics (my thesis was about the effects of the Viking invasions on Old English and Old Gaelic, and should have won some kind of award for research that has absolutely no practical application).  But even though conlangs aren't my specialty, I've always had a fascination from them.  There are a remarkable number out there, from the familiar (Esperanto, Klingon, Elvish) to the obscure but fascinating (such as John Quijada's Ithkuil, which attempts to express concepts in a combinatory way from the smallest possible number of root words).

A sample of Tolkein's lovely Elvish script [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But despite my interest in conlangs, I had never run across Volapük, which is strange because next to Esperanto, it's apparently one of the most studied constructed languages ever created.  It was the invention of a German priest named Johann Schleyer, who not only wanted to create a regularized speech that came from familiar roots (to Europeans, anyhow) and was easy to learn, but was also "beautiful sounding."  Schleyer had an inordinate fondness for umlauts, which he added because he thought that "A language without umlauts sounds monotonous, harsh, and boring."

Which reminds me of the credits in Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, especially the "A mööse once bit my sïster" part.  One of Schleyer's contemporaries couldn't resist poking some gøød-natured fün at him over his umlautophilia, and published the following limerick in the Milwaukee Sentinel:

A charming young student of Grük
Once tried to acquire Volapük
But it sounded so bad
That her friends called her mad,
And she quit it in less than a wük.

To my ears, it doesn't sound bad at all, and kind of has a Scandi-Slavic lilt to it.  Here's a sample:

The author of the article in The Public Domain Review, Arika Okrent, attributes the relative failure of Volapük to its plethora of umlauts and the easier word roots of its competitor Esperanto, which currently has about two million fluent speakers (an estimated 1,000 of which learned it as their first language).  I'm a little doubtful about that; certainly umlautiness hasn't discouraged anyone from learning Finnish.  I think it's more that the idea of a universal language is one of those high-flown ideals that won't ever catch on because most people are going to be resistant to giving up their native tongue in favor of an invented system of speech, however easy it is to learn.  Language is such a deep part of culture that to jettison our own mode of communication runs counter to every social instinct we have.  (Note that one of the most common things conquerors do to conquered people is to outlaw the speaking of the native language -- it's a sure way to deal a death blow to the culture.)

Even so, I find the whole conlang thing fascinating, and was tickled to run across one I'd never heard of.  Every so often I have students who participate in an independent study class I teach in introductory linguistics, and the final project is to invent the framework of a language -- a phonetic and phonemic structure, morphological scheme, and syntax, along with a lexicon of at least a hundred words.  They then translate a passage from English into their language.  (One of the best ones I've ever seen did a charming translation of Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar.)

The result of this project is twofold -- students find out how hard it is to create a realistic language, and they learn a tremendous amount about the structure of our own language.  And that's just from producing a rudimentary skeleton of a language.  For people like Schleyer, who created a rich and fully functional language, it was the result of many years of devotion, hard work, and love for language itself.

So it's kind of a shame that people didn't appreciate Volapük more.  Schleyer's dream of having a language that would bring the entire world together in a common mode of communication may be as far off as ever, but even so, it's a beautiful dream.  Even if it would mean making friends with the mäjestïc ümlaüt.

A call to violence

I suppose it's more or less inevitable that the vast majority of religious people pick and choose which standards and precepts they want to adhere to.  Even the most literal of biblical literalists, for example, usually don't keep the dietary and dress laws laid out in Leviticus.  I'm far from knowledgeable about Islam, but I expect the same is true there; even the ones who claim to live down to the letter of their Holy Book still ignore the passages they find inconvenient.

In part, of course, that's because all of those Holy Books are rife with internal contradictions.  On its simplest level, there are mutually contradictory factual passages that obviously can't be true at the same time, such as the following bits from 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles:

Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he began to reign, and he reigned in Jerusalem three months. —2 Kings 24:8 

Jehoiachin was eight years old when he began to reign, and he reigned three months and ten days in Jerusalem… —2 Chronicles 36:9

That stuff is kind of trivial, honestly, and only a problem if you believe that every last word in the bible is divinely inspired and infallible.  A little more troubling are the ones that address deep philosophical questions, and give you different answers depending on where you look, such as this quintet of passages:

I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. —Genesis 17:7 

Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt... —Jeremiah 31:31 

For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second. —Hebrews 8:7 

For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. —Matthew 5:18 

For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance -- now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant. —Hebrews 9:15

So the old laws are everlasting... but wait, they're not... oh, yes, they are, nothing will disappear from the law until Jesus returns... oh, wait, no, there's a new set of laws...

I'm sure that biblical scholars of a literalist bent have a way of arguing around all that, but that sort of apologetics has always struck me as little more than sophistry.  And, of course, the fact that no matter what you believe, you can find support for it somewhere in the bible, means that even people who espouse crazy and/or dangerous beliefs can claim that they're biblically inspired.

Which brings us to Dave Daubenmire.

Dave "Coach" Daubenmire has been for years a spokesperson on the more fringe-y edges of the Religious Right.  His weekly webcast, Pass the Salt Live, does all of the usual stuff -- slamming LGBT people, demanding religion (specifically Christianity) be mandatory in public schools, firing away at the "secular left."  But now Daubenmire has gone one step further.

He's saying that Christianity needs to be more violent.

In last week's installment of Pass the Salt Live, Daubenmire crowed about Donald Trump's cringe-worthy shove of the Prime Minister of Montenegro during a photo op, and Representative Greg Gianforte's body-slamming a reporter who asked him a question he didn't want to answer.  Daubenmire said:

The only thing that is going to save Western civilization is a more aggressive, a more violent Christianity.  Look at [Trump].  They’re all little puppies, ain’t nobody barking at him … He’s walking in authority.  He walked to the front and center and they all know it, too, man.  He just spanked them all... 

The Lord is showing us a picture of the authority we should be walking in.  People are sick and tired of it.  They’re saying, ‘Yes, a fighter! Go, dude, go!’ … Who won?  The dude that took the other dude to the ground [Gianforte].  That should be the heart cry of Christian men.  From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of God has suffered violence and violent men take it back by force.

But just wait a second, now.  Isn't that exactly what people of Daubenmire's stripe hate about Islam -- that acting under the perceived precepts of their religion, they're committing violent acts?  Of course, he sees Islam as an evil false religion, so I suppose it's no wonder he doesn't get the parallels.

Still, you'd think he'd at least be aware of what happens when you have angry, fearful Christians in charge, imposing their views by violence -- horror shows like the Inquisition, the witch trials, the Crusades.

Although I'm guessing that Daubenmire wouldn't find any problem with those, either.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And what happened to the passage from Matthew 5, "If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek as well?"  But as I've said, people of this type are awfully good at ignoring the passages they'd rather not live by.

Me, I see Daubenmire as more dangerous than the societal ills he rails about on a weekly basis.  It's his kind of rhetoric that leads to people doing seriously batshit stuff, such as the white supremacist in Portland who killed two people in a train station who were defending some passengers from his ethnic slurs.  Once you've decided that your views -- white supremacy, jihad, or "taking the kingdom of God back by force" -- are justification for committing violence against your fellow human beings, you've taken the brakes off of morality.  After that, the only difference between you and the Inquisition is scale.

And you've also put yourself outside of the bounds of reasonable discussion.  There's no appealing to logic with someone who has abandoned rationality.  The best one can hope for is that that most of the people who listen to Daubenmire and others of his ilk are themselves not going to take him literally.  

But as we've seen in the past, and as the people of Portland saw first hand last week, all it takes is one violent, self-righteous extremist to put innocent lives at risk.  And they nearly always claim that their own reasons for committing such acts are virtuous -- same as Dave Daubenmire wishing more Christians were like Donald Trump and Greg Gianforte.

Rage overload

It has gotten lately that I can't look at the news without repeatedly screaming, "What the hell is wrong with you people?"

And I'm not talking here about people doing bad stuff themselves, although there is certainly enough to scream about in that category, too.  I'm talking about people being willing to cast their votes for idiots, liars, moral degenerates, and people who are out-and-out batshit crazy, so that they can get into government and do bad stuff on a grander scale.

Let's start at the top, with the President of the United States.  Donald Trump has been involved in cringe-worthy stuff on a daily basis since the American electorate chose for some reason to elect a narcissistic compulsive liar to the highest office in the land, but I don't think I've cringed quite so hard as I did yesterday.  Because Trump, who when he was in kindergarten evidently never learned the rule "Don't budge," said, "Move," and shoved his way in front of the Prime Minister of Montenegro so he could be at the front of the photo-op.  And because that wasn't humiliating enough, he gave one of his typical poorly-informed, word-salad speeches at a meeting of NATO leaders -- and it was so bad that the other members laughed at him and rolled their eyes.

World leaders not even trying to be subtle about laughing at Donald Trump

How's that Making America Great Again going for you these days, Trump voters?  It's turning out to be more Making America An International Laughingstock, as far as I can see.

It's not only things happening overseas that are making me wonder if I should admit that I'm an American when I visit South America this summer.  There's enough crazy shit happening right here on American soil for me to fill ten blog posts with non-stop ranting.  In the interest of brevity, let's just look at two.

First, this week lawmakers in Arizona saw fit to appoint one Sylvia Allen as chairperson of the State Education Committee.  Allen, who gives every appearance of being only marginally sane, has appeared in Skeptophilia before; first for babbling about chemtrails during a hearing about mine safety, and then for blurting out, during a hearing about laws governing concealed weapons, that all of the problems in the United States would be solved if we just made church attendance mandatory.

Oh, and did I mention that she's a young-Earth creationist?  There's that.

This, Dear Readers, is the person who will be overseeing the education of children in an entire state.

But nothing pegged my Rage-O-Meter quite as much as when I found out that Greg Gianforte had won the special election to fill the seat in the House of Representatives vacated when Ryan Zinke was appointed Secretary of the Interior.  Why is this infuriating?

Because two days ago, Gianforte assaulted a reporter.  In front of a large crowd.

Which, you'd think, would have been the end of it.  Game over, Gianforte loses.

But no.  Exit pollsters asked voters if the incident had changed their vote... and almost no one said it had.  One person even said, "It's about time our politicians start standing up to these damn reporters."

Yes.  You read that right.  This person thinks that our elected officials are justified in assaulting a person who was doing his job, which is to report to the public what our elected officials are doing.  In fact, this person apparently believes that the reporter was himself to blame for being assaulted.

So Gianforte went on to win the election by a six-point margin, with crowds cheering "You're forgiven!" when he brought up the assault in his election speech.  It's reminiscent of the comment Donald Trump made last summer, that he could "shoot someone in Times Square" and not lose a bit of his support.

Oh, and did I mention that Gianforte is also a young-Earth creationist?  There's that.

It's getting to the point that I regret it every time I look at the news, because I'm bombarded by more examples of how credulous and ignorant a significant slice of my countrymen are -- and how willing they are to overlook immorality, sociopathy, anger management issues, dishonesty, and downright looniness from the people they vote for, as long as the candidates trot out the party line.  "Values voters."  "Patriotism."  "Religious freedom."  "Small government."  "Deregulation."

And, as I mentioned earlier, "Make America Great Again."

As long as you say the magic words, it doesn't matter what you do.  The voters will still follow right behind you, mooing loudly, and pull the lever on your behalf.

Even writing this is making me have to check my blood pressure.  So I'll end this here, by simply repeating what I started with: What the fuck is wrong with these people?

Pet peeve

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who also happens to be a veterinarian, sent me a message saying, "They're coming for me!" along with a link to a site entitled, "Autism Symptoms in Pets Rise as Pet Vaccination Rates Rise."

The site, which I hardly need to point out is rife with confirmation bias, claims that vaccinating pets against such diseases as canine distemper, feline leukemia, rabies, and Bordetella is triggering behavioral changes similar to the ones seen in humans that have been vaccinated.  The problem, of course, is that there are no behavioral changes in humans due to vaccination; as I have described repeatedly, there is no connection between vaccination and autism (or any other behavioral or neurological condition).  None.  Nyet.  Nada.  Bubkis.  Rien.

But a little thing like no evidence and no correlation isn't enough to stop some people, particularly people with an ideological ax to grind.  The author, Kate Raines, cites a Dr. Nicholas Dodman, who has studied compulsive behaviors in dogs.  Raines writes:

Presenting the evidence from his study at the 2015 American College of Veterinary Behaviorists, Dr. Dodman reported an autism-like condition, noting that “the vast majority of affected dogs were males, and many had other strange behaviors or physical conditions that accompanied the tail chasing, such as explosive aggression, partial seizures, phobias, skin conditions, gastrointestinal issues, object fixation and a tendency to shy away from people and other dogs.”  He and his associates were further able to establish that two biomarkers common to children with autism were also present in the affected dogs.

Which is all well and good, but doesn't establish any kind of correlation between those behaviors or biomarkers and vaccination.  The only evidence she brings out is anecdotal; that some dogs exhibit temporary increases in irritability or aggression following the rabies vaccine, and those symptoms "mimic the ones described in discussions of canine autism."

Oh, and there's the tired old Motive Fallacy argument; that since makers of vaccines profit from sales, they have a motive for covering up any bad side effects, which proves that said side effects exist.  The illogic of which you'd think would be apparent to anyone, but evidently not.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But there is something here to explain, and that's the "autism-like condition" Dodman and others describe -- and which I am in no way trying to dismiss.  Presumably it does have some underlying cause.  Raines kind of gives away the game herself by saying that the symptoms are "idiopathic... or congenital," both of which would imply that vaccines had nothing to do with it.  I have to wonder if some of it has to do with recessive genes affecting behavior showing up in inbred dog populations; Raines mentions that Dodman was studying compulsive behavior in Bull Terriers, which (like most pure breeds) have a very tightly restricted gene pool.  (The most extreme example of this is the English Bulldog, the entire breed of which is descended, over and over, from 68 individuals selected back in 1835.)

My veterinarian friend had an interesting perspective on this.  She writes:

[D]ogs don't have autism.  Most vet research shows OCD like behavior in dogs does have a genetic component, but these dogs don't have issues with being social with other dogs, being overstimulated, or anything else, and mostly recover if you give them a job to do, like flyball or herding...  Most of it we see in high energy high drive dogs (collies, guard dogs, those sorts) that are in home environments that don't stimulate them much - so they go find their own, whether that's herding small children or licking their legs until they bleed or spinning in circles for hours.  So superficially similar to some autistic behavior, but 95% of those dogs respond very quickly to environmental enrichment, and the rest to anxiolytics.

But once again, it is unlikely that the arguments of a person who is an expert in her field will sway someone like Raines, who clearly has no particular need for evidence or logic to convince her.

So the bottom line: vaccinate your pets.  You're not going to trigger them to develop autism or obsessive-compulsive disorder, but you will protect them from horrible diseases like canine distemper, which is fatal 50% of the time even with the best veterinary care. Your pets depend on you for everything -- love, food, shelter, protection, and medical care.  If you fall for Raines's claptrap, you will fail their trust in you, and in all likelihood, put them at a significant and unnecessary risk.

And, in general, don't be swayed by emotionally-charged, fact-free arguments.  Find out what the experts and researchers have to say, and think for yourself.  Don't forget that we make our best decisions with our brains, not our guts.

Good vibrations

My stance as a skeptic sometimes makes me something of a magnet for wackos.  There are the earnest types who are driven nuts by the fact that I scoff at their favorite brand of nonsense (homeopathy, ghosts, and conspiracy theories seem to be favorites).  And then there are the ones who find my blog because Google keyword searches seem to pick up on words like "psychic" and "haunting" and miss important words like "ridiculous" and "bullshit."

As an example of the latter, my blog was linked yesterday by Christie Marie Sheldon, who has a website called "Love or Above."  I include this link some trepidation.  So for those of you who would prefer not to look at it and thereby murder scores of valuable brain cells, I will include a summary of its main points.

The headline says, "Are your vibrations helping or hurting you?"  This is followed up by: "Your personal vibration frequency could be the ONE thing holding you back from abundance, happiness, and success.  Discover how to raise it, so you can finally start living from the vibration of Love or Above."

Allow me to interject that in the interest of keeping this PG-13 rated, I will consider the obvious joke about "Personal Love Vibrations" to be already made, and we will move on.

Christie's website then goes on to say, "Ever notice how some uncannily lucky people can almost effortlessly attract good things into their lives?"  These people, she claims, are leaders, have opportunities at work, good relationships, and a healthy attitude toward money.  Myself, I just figured that people like this were smart, hard-working, and well-adjusted, but no: it's because they have a personal energy vibration score, not to mention probably a credit rating, of over 700.

All emotions, Christie explains, vibrate at a particular frequency.  Shame, for example, vibrates at a frequency of 20. (At this point, I was shouting at the computer screen, "20 what?  Hertz?   Megahertz?  Pounds per square inch?  Fluid ounces?  Furlongs per fortnight? Where are the fucking units?" This caused my dog, Grendel, to look extremely worried because he thought I was yelling at him, meaning he was presumably "vibrating at a frequency of 20.")  Apathy vibrates at 50, Desire at 125, Anger at 150.  Then we move on to more positive emotions; Willingness is 310, Acceptance is 350, and so on.  She says, if you vibrate at 1000, you are an "Enlightened Master."   I guess that at that point, you're vibrating as fast as you possibly could.  Any faster and you might just vanish in a flash of Quantum Psychic Aura Energy, or something.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

She goes on to explain that the vibrational energy of the Earth, at the moment, registers at 207 on her Cosmic Vibration-o-Meter.  This is somewhere between "Courage" and "Neutrality."  So, basically, most people average out at somewhere between "Yes, I can!" and "Meh."  Which seems about right, frankly.  But then she says that we should all be vibrating at 500 or above, because 500 is the frequency of "Vibrations of Love."

As proof of how personal love vibrations work, she presents two experiments done by people we should automatically believe because they have "Dr." in front of their names. Dr. William Braud, of the "Mind-Science Foundation" in San Antonio, Texas, found that he could extend the life spans of red blood cells by having the owners of these red blood cells "think positive thoughts about them."   And Dr. Masaru Emoto did an experiment in which he sent a variety of positive or negative emotional thoughts into glasses of water, and then froze the water, and he found that the happy water made pretty, symmetrical crystals, and the unhappy water made disorganized, ugly crystals.  Christie then asks us a poignant question: since our body is full of red blood cells and water, what kind of damage could we be doing to ourselves with negative thoughts?  The implications are staggering.  I don't know about you, but if I ever froze to death, I would definitely want the water in my body to form attractive-looking crystals.  Think of the humiliation if at my funeral, my friends and family said, "I guess it's just as well he died.  Did you see those ugly-ass ice crystals?  He must have been vibrating at 180 or lower."

She ends, of course, with a sales pitch for her program, the "Love or Above Energetic Breakthrough Kit."  To show how awesome it is, she displays a photograph of herself at an event that I swear I am not making up: The "Awesomeness Fest."  There are further details, including descriptions of a technique called "Space Cleansing," but at that point my remaining brain cells were crying for mercy so I had to stop looking at the website.

I suppose it's an occupational hazard, being a skeptic, that people want to convince you.  After all, the word "skeptic" implies that there's a chance you might be swayed.  This is, in fact, true; but the difficulty, of course, is that what sways a skeptic is empirical evidence, or failing that, at least a logical argument.  When you have neither, all you have is a severe case of Doubt, which vibrates at a frequency of around 110.

Politics in the pulpit

New from the "Wow, You Really Didn't Think That Through All That Well, Did You?" department, we have: Texas Governor Greg Abbott signing into law a bill that will prevent the government from subpoenaing pastors based upon what they say in the pulpit.

This is yet another one of the so-called "Religious Freedom" laws, designed to give carte blanche to anyone who does anything as long as it's part of their religion.  Want to discriminate against someone?  Claim that your religion considers the person a sinner.  Want your kid to get out of having to learn about other cultures or other beliefs in school?  Claim that your religion considers the knowledge of such information a threat.

Or, now: want your pastor to be able to stump for a political candidate?  Claim that preventing him/her from doing so is allowing the government to "pry into what goes on in churches."

That, at least, is how Governor Abbott sees it.  Upon signing the bill, Abbott said:

Freedom and freedom of religion was challenged here in Houston, and I am proud to say you fight back from the very beginning... Texas law now will be your strength and your sword and your shield.  You will be shielded by any effort by any other government official in any other part of the state of Texas from having subpoenas to try to pry into what you’re doing here in your churches.

Which brings up a problem that I think about every time someone starts snarling about how much better it was when we had prayer in schools.  My first question would be, "What kind of prayers?"  Because generally the religion people want in schools -- and in all the arenas of public life -- is just one religion, namely their own.  It's curious how a lot of the same people who would love to see prayers to the Christian god reinstituted in public schools pitch an unholy fit when students even learn about Islam, and would probably spontaneously combust if students were told to bow down and pray to Allah.

Which is the problem with Abbott's new law.  Are the pastors who are now protected from subpoenas based on what they preach only the Christian pastors?  Because this law could easily be invoked to protect extremist Muslim mullahs preaching "Death to America" from their pulpits.  The whole idea of separation of church and state is that you are free to subscribe to whatever religion you choose, or no religion at all, and all religions are treated equally under the law.  What Abbott clearly intends here is that Christian churches have rights that other institutions do not have.

And the reason Abbott and the bill's author, Senator Joan Huffman of Houston, came up with this is abundantly clear.  There is an increasing push by evangelical Christians to consolidate their power in order to influence political races.  They wielded considerable clout in the last presidential election; without people like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr. throwing their support behind Trump, you have to wonder if the election might not have gone the other way.  Some preachers went even further, and said that if you don't vote for Trump, you are committing a sin because you're going against God's Chosen One.

How a narcissistic, sociopathic, adulterous compulsive liar ever got to be God's Chosen One is beyond me.  But there you are.

Myself, I have no problem with a church getting involved with politics, as long as it brings with it the price of losing tax-exempt status.  Once churches become the religious arm of a political party, they should be paying taxes on donations the same way any other political organization does.

But Abbott would probably consider that "religious persecution."

So this is a law that is inherently unfair in intent, almost certainly will be unevenly enforced if it's enforceable at all, and is likely to be challenged in the courts in any case.  Another exercise in governmental waste of time, solely to grandstand a little and appease Abbott's hyperreligious base.

Because, apparently, our elected officials have nothing better to do.