Sat: Tupperware Parties Can Be Pretty Big

It's Just Flori-Dumb

The Florida measles outbreak is expanding. On Friday, health officials in Broward County confirmed a seventh case of the virus, a child under age 5.

The patient is the youngest so far to be infected in the outbreak, and the first to be identified outside of Manatee Bay Elementary School in Weston, near Fort Lauderdale.

It’s unknown what connection the youngest measles case has to the school, but the spread beyond school-age kids was expected.

Cases are “not going to stay contained just to that one school, not when a virus is this infectious,” said Dr. David Kimberlin, co-director of the division of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that as of Friday there have been at least 35 measles cases in 15 states in 2024 — most related to international travel. In January, there were nine measles cases in Pennsylvania, eight of them in Philadelphia. (If there are no more cases reported there as of early next week, the Philadelphia outbreak will be declared over.) Late Friday, Michigan’s health department announced that it, too, had identified a measles case — its first since 2019.

Florida’s outbreak is the largest in the U.S. right now. And what Florida’s health officials are doing — or not doing — is drawing fire from experts who study the way diseases spread.
Measles is so contagious and has such a long incubation period that the decision of the state’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo to let parents decide whether to quarantine their children or let them keep going to school could allow cases to spread, experts warn.

“Measles is the most infectious pathogen in humans that we know of,” said Kimberlin. “It’s like a heat-seeking missile. It will find the people who are not immune, and they’re going to get sick.”

They Support IVF, Except When They Don't

It's been a really rough week for Republicans who hate reproductive rights, and Republican Rep. Michelle Steel of California is no exception.

"As someone who struggled to get pregnant, I believe all life is a gift. IVF allowed me, as it has so many others, to start my family," she tweeted Thursday. "I believe there is nothing more pro-life than helping families have children, and I do not support federal restrictions on IVF."

Great! Just one teeny tiny little problem with that, as Inside Elections editor Jacob Rubashkin noted: Steel actually does support federal restrictions. Steel is one of the co-sponsors of the Life at Conception Act, a House bill that "declares that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual comes into being."

And as Rubashkin points out, there is no carveout in the bill for in vitro fertilization. Oops!

There's More of Us Than There are of Them.

Has Christian Nationalism Intensified or Faded?

Comparing Survey Data from 2007 and 2021

It's all happened so fast that it's hard to get our arms around a pretty basic question in the discussion about Christian Nationalism - are those sentiments increasing or decreasing in the general public? Well, now I can answer that with a great deal of specificity.

If one is looking for the empirical foundations of the Christian Nationalism debate, it’s in a series of statements that were posed to respondents in the Baylor Religion Survey back in 2007 - Wave II. They are as follows:

The federal government should advocate Christian values
The federal government should allow prayer in public schools
The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces
The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation
The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state
The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.

Response options ranged from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The middle option is undecided. I know that there's a lively debate about defining Christian Nationalism and whether these questions are tapping that concept accurately. I am going to sidestep that discussion entirely here. The authors I mentioned above are much more well-versed in those debates than I am. My focus here is narrow - I just want to see how responses to those questions have changed over time….

I think it's fair to say that the results point to the fact that Christian Nationalism is fading in the general population. That's evident in a number of these statements. For instance, in 2007, 55% of folks said that the government should advocate Christian values. In 2021, that share had dropped to just 38%. That's substantial.

A Man is a Man, But Very Few Men are Rapists

A pastor in North Carolina has apologized for remarks he made during a sermon where he said women’s clothing choices are responsible for sexual assault.

During a sermon recorded last August that recently went viral, the Rev. Bobby Leonard of Bible Baptist Tabernacle in Monroe, N.C., said that if he were serving on the jury for a rape trial, he would acquit a male rapist if his female victim were wearing shorts during the assault.

“If you dress like that and you get raped, and I’m on the jury, he’s going to go free,” Leonard said, adding later, “I’m right, you know, because a man’s a man.”

So, parents can decide whether or not they want to expose other children to their child's infection?  Am I missing something here?