Because I am a sad muppet, I spent last night up watching the Iowa causus results role in. Browsing the net for info on the candidates, CNN provided a summary on how the candidates stood on key issues. What key issues were picked?

Abortion, Immigration, Iraq, Social Security, Taxes, and Same-Sex Marriage. While I am very conscious that this is CNN setting the agenda and it is therefore rather skewed, I was surprised to find abortion and same sex marriage so high on the list and yet other far more relevant ”moral issues”, such as the death penalty, absent. (Nice to see a majority male and unanimously straight group consulted here.) Most shocking and disturbing is the absence of climate change from the list.

Browsing further, I came across this article on the eligibility of American atheists to adopt children. It relates the case of a couple, one atheist and one pantheist, and the opposition they faced attempting to adopt children in the USA because of their religious views. It was alleged by judges that it was wrong to deny a child the experience of worshiping a god from birth. Atheists were recently voted America’s least trusted group in an opioion poll…

America is a land that looks a lot like ours on the surface, but scratch below the surface and in many of it’s citizens you’ll find a mindest that is very, very alien to most forward thinking, fair minded people…