It's also officially Columbus Day, which has a long history of introduction in the U.S. It was first celebrated, on this day, set to always occur on a Monday, in 1792 by the Columbian Order of New York, better known as the Tammany Society, which evolved into the famous New York political machine. Italian Americans picked it up as a day of Italian pride as Columbus was an Italian. It was recognized annually by the Federal Government starting in 1934, and then officially made a Federal holiday in 1968, to be first on the calendar in 1971.
It's still there.
Native Americans have never been particularly keen on the day, for obvious reasons. This lead to protests over the years and eventually the day was recognized in some areas as Indigenous People's Day.
Wyoming doesn't officially recognize either day, thereby avoiding taking any kinds of stand, but it does recognize Native American Day, which is in May. Laramie and Jackson recognize Indigenous People's Day on this day, however, those two municipalities being the most "liberal" in Wyoming (which makes Rebecca Bextel's campaign being headquartered in Jackson ironic). Casper doesn't recognize either day but usually finds a means of making the day a municipal holiday.
This year, Casper found a way to recognize both:
City of Casper Releases Indigenous Peoples’ / Columbus Day Services and Hours
City of Casper releases Indigenous Peoples’/Columbus Day services and hours
Garbage collection, water, sewer, emergency services and more will operate as usual.
Casper, Wyo. (October 8, 2026) – The City of Casper administrative offices will be closed for the observance of Indigenous Peoples’/Columbus Day 2026 on Monday, October 12, 2026. Normal water, sewer, 911 dispatch, police, fire, and metro animal control services will maintain their regular schedules. Solid waste crews will collect garbage as usual on Monday, and other crews will be on call to respond as needed.
The following is the complete list of services and hours.
Trash collection will run on the normal schedule.
Casper Regional Solid Waste Facility: Open 7:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Police Patrol, Fire-EMS, and 911 Dispatch: Regular hours.
Water and Wastewater Treatment Plants: Regular hours.
Water distribution, sewer, streets, parks, fleet services, and public facilities crews on call for emergencies.
Metro Animal Services Patrol Officers (APOs): Available 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.by calling non-emergency dispatch at 307.235.8278. Outside those regular hours, APOs are on call for emergencies by calling 911.
Fort Caspar Museum: Closed (closed on Mondays for winter hours)
Casper Municipal Golf Course: Open normal hours, 1st tee time is 8:30 a.m., the Golf Shop will close at 6:00 p.m.
Highland Cemetery: Grounds open dawn to dusk with burial search map signs.
Casper Area Transit, operated by the City of Casper: limited services on Monday. LINK transit services will be unavailable. ASSIST services will run limited services from 7:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. for scheduled medical-only appointments and for ADA complementary paratransit services.
Metro Animal Shelter: Closed.
Casper Ice Arena: 6:30 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. (Open Figure Skating), 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. (Open Figure Skating)
Casper Family Aquatic Center: 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Casper Recreation Center: 5:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Donald Trump, who loves a good cultural spat, spoke in Columbus, Ohio last week, which took down its statute of Columbus some time ago. While there, he stated; “We demand that Christopher Columbus be put back into the heart of Columbus, Ohio,”
Well, we demand the dumb ballroom be taken down.
Anyhow, Trump loves to troll in racist waters, which this is an example of. It feeds into the far right belief that "whiteness" is some sort of inherent quality, and that it's being attacked. If you want to polish that up, it would be that the country's European heritage is being attacked.
Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, which always occurs on October 11. It's set by some homosexual rights organization.
I don't pay much attention to this as I largely do not care if people with same sex attraction come out. I don't think that people have to make social martyrs of themselves. But Adam Kinzinger made an observation that no GOP members of Congress came out. Well, I wouldn't have expected any to, but he's suggesting that there's at least an appreciable number, or perhaps a number who are significant, in the GOP in Congress. That might actually matter for a party that takes a position, sort of, on social issues in this arena.
There are consistently rumors to this effect. Hunter Biden, who may very well not be the most reliable witness on this topic, claims there's a Republican "closeted gay mafia". There are some figures whom rumors circle around continually. I was once told by a very inside member of the state's GOP that a certain Republican figure was a homosexual, which is the first time I heard the term "beard" used to describe a female spouse of a male homosexual, married to camouflage the attraction. The marriage, in that context, made sense to me. I've been told the same thing about the same person by an openly homosexual politician, but that person is sort of wildly unreliable. And there are questions that circle about others simply due to their state in life, I suppose.
None of these people may actually be homosexual, and if they are, that doesn't make them "gay" or "queer". Still, it matters because if you are holding yourself out as a defender of traditionalism in all sense while engaging in homosexual liaisons, you are being hypocritical.
Back to Trump, or rather the Trump Administration, Scott Bessent, who is a homosexual in a homosexual union, sent Elizabeth Warren this letter last week.
I've never been a fan of Warren's, who is one of those Democrats that cause people to avoid the Democratic Party, but this letter is just mean and snarky. Warren legitimately is an expert on economics. The final handwritten line recalls Warren's claim to have Native American heritage. And she actually does, as her DNA tests revealed. It is, however, remote. Trump repeatedly lampooned her for this, calling her Pocahontas, which is mean, but Warren should have avoided the entire topic in the first place.
So should Bessent who perpetually comes across as scared when he's interviewed. Maybe he isn't, but that's how he comes across. And Bessent has been press ganged into the Trump ongoing excuse machine. Some of his own claims have been lampooned, as in "I'm a farmer".
But the point here is that, once again, the MAGA Hypocrisy is at work. Trump's supporters claim to support him due to his traditionalism and his loyalty to Christian values. Bessent is an unapologetic homosexual in a same sex union, which is not traditional to say the least. Trump's a serial polygamist himself. The administration won't release the files on Epstein whose island was an epicenter of child rape.
So, like Festivus on Seinfeld, let the airing of the grievances begin.
One Brian Sauvé, senior pastor at Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah, has been much on the net recently due to some comments he made on vlog or some sort of web based video show providing for all to see how the net has served to emphasize the absurd and marginal, serving to make it seem like a big deal.
Refuge Church is a "Reformed Protestant" Church and Sauvé describes himself as "Reformed and Protestant, Paedobaptist, Postmillennial, and Patriarchal". The church describes itself as basically a solo scriptura group holding to 66 books of the Bible, rather than 73, which means that the don't believe in the 66 books of the Bible as the New Testament itself describes how sola scriptura is invalid and the omitted books that a German monk, who should never have been that, took out were done so based on his prejudice and a misunderstanding on what books of the Old Testament the Apostles were referring to.
Patriarchal Sauvé certainly is. And extremely so.
Sauvé in a September 18 podcast stated the following:
Women either shouldn't be on social media or any social media they have should be kind of a walled garden situation where some competent man is curating and blocking and directing and taking a look at what's going on. I have access to my wife's social media accounts and I have blocked—this is not an exaggeration—thousands of accounts. Thousands of them. She generally has very little idea of what is going on in the real social media because I've created a walled garden of cute goat videos.
We have normalcy bias in a certain direction. We consider normal what is actually insane. We consider normal women having unsupervised access to one another all the time. That's not normal.
We consider normal women having political rule. We consider normal women living unattached from a male—like a father, then a husband—for lengthy periods of time. You could fill in the blank with all of these modern feminist outworkings of the original feminist vision and what they've done is they've made women anxious, psychotic, depressed, miserable, and genocidally evil. And we just go, "Oh, that's normal.'"
People are going to hear me talking about, as my wife's head, monitoring her social media, and they're going to be like, "Brian is such a tyrant." You have normalcy bias for insane world. You're living in an insane asylum and you think it's the normal world and I'm saying, "No, we don't live in the insane asylum. We do what people did for thousands of years before today."
The interview went on and discussed how "crazy" it was to allow women to vote, something Hegseth fan boy has said of Doug Wilson in Idaho.
Unlike Wyoming, the least religious state in the country, Utah is the most religious state in the Union, and its religious landscape is dominated by the Latter Day Saints. It's not as Mormon as it once was, however, with about 55% of the residents of the state being in that faith. Culturally, however, they dominate it. Catholics are about 5%. About 25% claim no particular faith.The rest are mostly some sort of Protestant but there are, of course, Jews, Muslims, etc.
About 63% of the residents of Ogden are LDS. Catholics make up almost 9% of the population there. The rest would mostly be some sort of Protestant.
We'd note that Mormons, which Sauvé is not, are extremely socially conservative generally. That's important to note as while, at least in my experience, Mormons and some conservative Protestant religions do not get along, the overall cultural conservatism of Mormonism heavily impacts the Jello Belt. I'm not saying that to be mean or critical. Utah has some of the most well kept towns, including small towns, in the country and as a rule Mormons don't go in for the weird cultural silliness that is part of the current zeitgeist. Without condoning the tenants of their faith, their faith also causes them to have what some folks refer to as "nice families", as other conservative religious groups sometimes to. You'd probably have to get into Traditional Catholics in order to find a similarly family oriented well kept group of people.
The Culture of a People reflects upon the place they live. The views that Sauvé are not all that radical in the locality in which he is speaking them, as they reflect sort of broadly on the LDS, and specifically on some of the LDS, although most LDS would not hold them to the extreme that he does.
Now, as should be obvious, Pastor Sauvé is extremely socially conservative. Why should we care?
We shouldn't.
The church is indicated as having a "mid sized" congregation. His congregation ought to care what he thinks, and chances are they believe exactly what he does. This sort of extreme patriarchal view is quite limited and goes way beyond what even very conservative members of various other Christian faiths typically believe. It's also ironic in that women more than men were the foundation of the early Faith. Women brought men to it. There's a reason that Mary Magdalene is the "Apostle to the Apostles". And there's a reason that St. Brigid is so closely associated with St. Patrick.
But then, I'm an Apostolic Christian where strong women are the norm. Protestants can keep John Calvin, we'll take Joan d'Arc.
And Protestants can keep telling us that we shouldn't ask Mary for help, we're going to keep doing so.
Virgin Mary at Zetum
Such a diminished view of women is odd, and sad.
It's also cultural and malformed.
But here's the thing. It's the Internet that has given voice to stuff like this. But for that, Sauve would be an unknown Protestant Pastor in the Jello Belt. Probably a lot of people in his own city wouldn't be able to tell you anything about him. I couldn't tell you anything about the two large warehouse type churches' pastors here. I'm sure that there are Protestants around here who hold the same beliefs. I just don't know who they are, and there aren't many of them.
The Internet is really giving voice to a lot of things, ideas and people who shouldn't have one. I don't know if Sauve was known before, but there's a whole host of like minded Protestants who show up on blogs all the time and spark Internet outrage. That outrage then circulates their message.
It's the same with people like Nick Fuentes, whose message is political and not religious, although there is some of that mixed in. But for the Internet, he'd just be a barely employed oddball.
It's one of the real challenges of our time. We need to ignore these people. They don't deserve a national audience.
This election has been a reminder about being careful about getting tattoos.
Maine Democratic Senatorial candidate Graham Platner, in addition to other skeletons (no pun intended) in his closet, has, or at least had, a large Death's Head tattoo on one of his breasts. Not one like the one above, but one more or less like this:
Shown here:
Well, I say, had, now its this:
We're informed that's a Celtic knot and a dog.
Well, anyhow, this has caused quite a flap, as the design he had is pretty clearly the same one used by the SS during World War Two.
He says he didn't know that. Frankly, while people are incredulous about that, he may very well not have known that.
Indeed, one of the things that's interesting about this, as an (amateur) historian is that suddenly everyone is an expert on World War Two German insignia. I doubt that many people, anymore, were before the last couple of weeks. Indeed, I can recall Walmart getting in trouble some years ago has had a t-shirt it was selling with some Nazi symbology on it, if I recall correctly SS ruins.
Anyhow, the Totenkopf has an interesting and weird history. It's been around for a very long time, and is famously associated with pirates from the 18th Century, who flew various variants of death's head flags, nicknamed the "Jolly Roger", to warn a ship they were approaching that that's what they were. Death's head on a flag threatened death, and the hope was accordingly that the opponent would give up without a fight. Because of the pirate association, legitimate navies coopted the symbol and you can still find it in use to some degree in navies.
The crew of the HMS Utmost showing off their Jolly Roger in February 1942.
The Prussians started using it as a military symbol under Frederick the Great, when it was introduced to hussars. That use was distinct enough that one US state militia unit, formed as hussars, was still using it with a distinctly Prussian style uniform at the start of the Civil War. It also spread to other units in the various German states prior to German unification, and to some other European nations. One Spanish unit, for example used it.
Field Marshall August von Mackensen in 1914 in his full dress hussars uniform.
Infante Fernando wearing the uniform of Spain's 8th Light Armoured Cavalry Regiment "Lusitania" in 1915
After German unification following the Franco Prussian War the pre unification units that used it continued to, with some German units and even individuals adopting it informally. After the German defeat in the Great War, some Freikorps units used it and it carried on in use in German cavalry units.
After Hitler's rise to power, the SS co-opted it almost immediately at the time of their formation, but that didn't actually cause the German Army or the Luftwaffe from using it as well. German panzer troops wore a black uniform with the Totenkopf early on, with the design aat first being identical to the SS in that regard. The SS later changed its design, which Heer panzer units never did.
German panzer soldier, wearing a 1939 black flat cap, with a feldgrau shirt, black tie and black jacket with Totenkopf lapel badge. The first version of the panzer uniform featured a very large black beret.
This actually created some confusion at the time and still does, although the confusion was more of a problem to German troops during the war. By 1944 the Totenkopf was associated with the SS as was the color black, which actually was not worn by most Waffen SS troops. Tanker POWs were easily mistaken for members of the SS and risked being shot out of hand to some degree. By 44, however, black was being phased out for tankers, both in the Heer and SS, in favor of feldgrau. They retained the Totenkopf, however.
As sort of a rough rule of thumb, every member of the SS wore a uniform with a Totenkopf device, including auxiliary units. Armored units of the Heer wore it also, as did the one oddball Luftwaffe armored unit. One Luftwaffe bomber unit used it as a symbol as well. Black uniforms were worn by tankers of all branches early on, and as regular SS dress uniforms, but not as Waffen SS dress uniforms.
This doesn't get into the concentration camp system uniforms, which I don't know anything about, and which were often staffed by auxiliaries. They all wore the deaths head, however.
One Nazi organization that didn't wear the Totenkopf or a black uniform was the Gestapo. Movies and television shows constantly show them doing that, but they didn't. For example, an SS dress uniform is shown being worn by a Gestapo member in both Where Eagles Dare and Hogan's Heroes. In reality, the Gestapo didn't have any uniform at all. The depiction given in Von Ryan's Express is the correct one. They favored civilian dress clothes and trench coats, often leather ones. They were, after all, secret police and were dressed like civilians.
Marine Corps Raiders' insignia.
One US ground unit used it too, the Marine Corps Raiders, which took it from Naval use.
By the war's end the death's head, except in naval use, was hopelessly associated with the SS, although amazingly some use continues on. The South Korean 3rd Infantry Division, the British Army’s Royal Lancers and Brazilian Military Police use it officially. Some Ukrainian units controversially use it which seems to be an intentional effort to associate themselves with the World War Two era Ukrainian National Army which fought both the USSR and the Germans, but the Germans rather late.
Various navies keep using it, but the Nazis didn't taint the pirate association it had on the seas.
One place it oddly saw use was in civilian groups that wanted to cultivate an edge look after the war. All sort of Nazi paraphernalia became associated with motorcycle gangs. And heavy metal bands affected the look as well.
Ian Fraser Kilmister, "Lemmy" of Motörhead who notoriously sported German military and German SS paraphernalia constantly, and who did know what it meant. He claimed to have no Nazi sympathies. His father had been a chaplain in the RAF.
The interesting thing there, I suppose, is that the predecessor to the SS was the SA. The SA didn't use the Totenkopf, but it was comprised of thugs, so in a way the Nazi paraphernalia returned to a demographic that had first used it.
So, what of Platner?
Darned if I know. He says he didn't know what it meant, and I suspect a lot of Americans under 70 years of age don't know what it means. World War Two is simply too long ago for a uniform detail to have much in the cultural memory. Those younger people who do know what it was used for are likely students of history, members of prison gangs, or white supremacists. History students don't get tattooed with the Totenkopf. The other two groups likely do. That doesn't mean that Platner was a white supremacist, however.
It does require some sort of explanation, however.
While on the topic of the tattoos, let's discuss Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense.
Pete Hegseth is festooned with tattoos.
Pete has a variety of them, which seem to be the following:
Jerusalem Cross, a type4 of Christian cross associated with the Crusades, rightly or wrongly.
"Deus Vult", Latin for "God wills it", a phrase claimed to be associated with the Crusaders.
Kafir, the Arabic for infidel, but also Afrikaans slang for blacks.
Cross & Sword, apparently referencing Matthew 10:34
Yahweh, the Hebrew lettering for the name of God, added near his cross and sword tattoo.
"We the People", The opening phrase of the U.S. Constitution.
American Flag & AR-15.
Roman numerals (1775) & Stars: The year the U.S. Army and the Revolutionary War began.
"Join, or Die" Snake, the Benjamin Franklin cartoon depicting a severed snake, symbolizing colonial unity during the American Revolution.
Infantry Patch.
It's really a bit much. Hegseth is an example of how people become addicted to getting tattoos and won't stop.
So what of it?
Well, the top two tattoos are offensive to some Catholics, myself included. Hegseth is a member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, he has stated., which is a collection of Evangelical Churches. The Crusades are a Catholic thing, grossly misunderstood, and for which Catholics have taken heat from Protestants for five hundred years. Moreover, the Crusaders would have regarded the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches as heretical.
"Kafir" is a flat out weird thing to tattoo on yourself, and for Sub-Saharan Africans its highly offensive, being the Afrikaans equivalent of the n word. I suppose its supposed to be a taunt at Muslims.
Tattooing Yahweh on yourself is just weird, and potentially offensive to Jews, as well as others. Leviticus 19:28 prohibits tattoos themselves, although this is not regarded by most Christians as applicable to Christians and many modern day Jews do not follow that as well.
The point here is this. Tattooing the Totenkopf on your chest is bound to be offensive to the historically aware. Tattooing Crusader phrases on your body is no doubt offensive to Muslims, although I'm not particularly concerned about that, but it's a cultural appropriation that is offensive to some historically aware Catholics. Kafir, as a tattoo, is outright calculated to be offensive to Muslims, and it's highly offensive to Sub Saharan Africans. And the Yahweh tattoo is disturbing.
I suppose the lesson is to be careful about tattoos. Hegseth is so tatted up its frankly absurd, but he comes across as disturbed. Platner comes across as just sort of messed up.
Of course, you don't get to vote for or against Hegseth, no matter where you live. Your view of him has to weigh into your view of the administration. If you live in Maine, you can weigh the tattoo in your opinion on whether to vote for him or the ancient Susan Collins.
Showing the spirit our age, I suppose, Donald Trump called Platner a pig. Pigs have a highly hierarchal pecking order, so I suppose that's the big pig reacting to a younger one in the pen, if you accept the analogy.
And a happy ending, or at least an ending, occurred to this story when the Pentagon redid its classifications to read as follows:
It's actually not a bad reclassification, although a person does hae to wonder why, in order to make a non Christian religion happy, the Christian identification was taken away from actual Christian religions.
One of the major newspapers ran statistics for the various religions in terms of the what percentage of the military is comprised of them. While there are Mormons in the military, the percentage is infanticidally small. As noted earlier, however, there would be units in the military that would be heavily made up of Mormons, principally Guard and Reserve units in Utah. Their spiritual needs would be different than those of Christian religions, however, which would gain importance in a large scale war.
According to exit polls form the last general election, 64% of Mormons voted for Trump in the last election. 20% voted for Harris. 56% of Catholics did, with 41% voting for Harris. Catholics are a much larger demographic than Mormons and Trump has interestingly shown little concern about enormously offending them. 68% of Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant religion in the country, went for Trump. Southern Baptist, I suspect, are probably the largest Christian denomination to be upset by the reclassification, if they are.
I don't know that I have a strong opinion on the list being reworked to address Mormon concerns, but I would note a couple of oddities about it. One is that that the U.S. Government didn't define them as Christian, although they seem happy with the result. The second is that what Trump may say aside, he doesn't love Mormons anymore than he loves anyone else.
The big flap over the Pentagon's new list of religions, mostly focused on the LDS insisting it be recognized as a Christian religions which at least conventional Christianity holds that it is not, is obscuring the fact that frankly the list may not matter all that much.
All the list does is to provide some guidelines on anticipating the patrol needs of troops. T/he prior list was so large there was no way that it was useful. The original list, Protestant, Catholic and Hebrew, was probably too narrow, in the modern world, to be useful.
Arguably the current list is too big. It'd make more sense, actually, to have Mainline Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Judaism, Islam and Other. Every one of those categories, it might be noted, has various groups within it. Probably only Catholic expresses a singular religious group, but even there, there are a lot of Catholic rites. The Orthodox are a collection of Orthodox churches and have a major division between Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox.
Anyhow, that's probably more useful.
Of note, listing religions isn't an endorsement of them.
About 70% of all service members are some sort of Protestant. 20% are Catholic. I've given the figures already, but the number of LDS troops is very small, although in National Guard units from Utah the opposite would be true. At least one religion on the list discourages its members from joining the military and last had any presence in the military when there was conscription in place.
They are! None of her books have been banned — as in made illegal to sell. 99.9% of the “banned book” b.s. is about a book being removed from a some local school library — because of parental objections, new acquisitions, age restrictions, etc. People *want* there to be censorship so they can demonstrate their transgression and courage in protesting a straw man problem. The fact that book store chains market “banned books” gives the game away. It’s all marketing. A century ago, one of the best things that could happen to your book was for it to be banned in Boston (they really banned books there) because it made the book cool and subversive everywhere else. This all a con.
Frankly, what Goldberg notes on The Handmaid's Tale is true of a lot of "banned books". They aren't banned, it's what Goldberg describes. Some of the "bans" are simply books being moved from one section of the library to another.
I'm not going to link it in, as I think it's shallow on the solution, but pundit Ezra Klein has a current segment of his vlog in which he discusses how the Democratic Party is in such a mess, in spite of people really not being all that keen on Donald Trump's Fascist Roadshow, because they're really lost touch with average people at the street level. I've been saying the same thing now for what's approaching a decade.
Well, actually more like two, or more.
Anyhow, yesterday I ran this item which was sparked by liberal/center left blather about J. D. Vance hoping that his wife Usha become a Christian:
One of the things this event shows, quite frankly, is the degree to which the left holds religion in contempt. The fact that they so obviously hold religion in contempt is part of the reason that people who are serious about their faiths, and that isn't limited by any means to Christians, do not trust the Democratic Party and, as long as it continues, aren't going to trust the Democratic Party. As I warned would occur, this is leading to a massive exodus from the Party by Hispanics, who are largely Catholic. If you demonstrate contempt for people's existential beliefs, they're not going to vote for you even if you promise all kinds of nifty social programs.
They also are not going to vote for you if you show childish glee over a made up sense of morality over an event that doesn't mean anything.
As people who stop in here know, I really don't particularly know what to make of the late Charlie Kirk. I've expressed my views on that elsewhere and I'm not going to back into them here. As little as I know about Charlie Kirk, and that's not much, I know even less about Erika Kirk.
The widowed Erika Kirk has been in the news a lot recently, as she's sort of taken up the mantle of her late husband's organization, Turning Point USA. In that role, she's been very public and is making public appearances. She's drawn criticism for that alone, as apparently those generally on the left feel, even if they don't, that she should be dressed in widow's weeds and moping around the house or something. Quite frankly, if she was a figure on the left, the same people would be praising her for her bravery.
And now comes the embrace with J. D. Vance.
Vance was speaking at some Turning Point USA event. He's probably a good choice for that, as Donald Trump is 750 years old and most Turning Point members aren't. The populist right has to keep in Turning Point's good graces, moreover, as it's part and parcel of the Evangelical embrace of Trump, albeit one that wasn't initially certain about Trump.
Anyhow, Kirk made some comment about Vance and her late husband being similar. I don't see that at all, quite frankly. And then she went on to hug him after introducing him.
This is a big non event.
Indeed, if you see the whole video, the entire thing lasted just second from beginning to end. You can only really make it a big deal, if you desire to, by screenshotting the whole thing as if it was an endless romantic embrace.*
Nonetheless, the left has reached out in shock and horror, certain after Vance's recent comments about hoping his wife converts, that he's about to ditch her as Kirk and Vance are now a couple.
Oh horseshit.
This shows once again the degree of contempt for conservative views that people on the left hold. There's no evidence at all that Erika Kirk is happy that her late husband was murdered and has now moved on to Vance. There's no evidence at all that Vance would betray his wife. Indeed, as he is a Catholic, and is expressing a Catholic view on his desire that she also convert, the better evidence is that he'd never do that.
This is, again, the very sort of thing that causes people on the right to regard the left and contemptuous and mean. And that doesn't win votes.
Footnotes:
*FWIW, as an Irish American (and genetically, I'm more Irish than many Irish), with some Westphalian heritage, I'm in that category of people who abhor hugs from people I'm not extremely close to. By that I mean I'll accept hugs from my wife and children, and I'm uncomfortable with them from anyone else.
This is a real northern European thing. We aren't a touchy people, and any kind of physical contact of this type is an unwanted intimacy unless its a wanted intimacy, in which case, you're contemplating marriage. Out in society, however, this just ain't so.
I've known people, almost invariably women, who are very touchy and it means nothing at all. And for some reason, in recent years, it's become increasingly common. I used to work with somebody, for example, that would do this routinely, particularly if you were at any sort of a function and she's had a drink. She's latch on to an arm and not let go. I took up using my wife as sort of a shield to avoid that. Another female lawyer I know invariably will make physical contact. There I am sitting at a hearing when all of a sudden there's hands on my shoulders so that I'll say "hi". Couldn't you have just said hi?
To make matters worse, I'm 5'6" tall and that puts me way down torso wise on any woman who is inclined to hug me for some reason. If they're short too it's okay, but if they're not, it's really awkward.
Anyhow, a flap like this reinforces my desire to avoid that sort of thing. The irony is, the people complaining about this probably aren't bugged by hugs at all, and a lot of them probably aren't all that concerned about personal or sexual morality either.
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