Portside

• First Church of Cannabis Wins IRS Nonprofit Status – John Tuohy (Indianapolis Star)
• Teaching the Controversy:  James Baldwin and Richard Wright in the Ferguson Era – Benjamin Anastas (New Republic)
• Every Serena Williams Win Comes with a Side of Disgusting Racism and Sexism – Jenée Desmond-Harris (Vox)
• Jeb Bush’s Favorite Author Rejects Democracy, Says The Hyper-Rich Should Seize Power – Ian Millhiser (Think Progress)
• ‘Devious Defecator’ Case Tests Genetics Law – Gina Kolata (New York Times)
• Chinese University Revives Research on Official Ideology to Head Off Suspicious Values – Zhou Yu (Global Times)

First Church of Cannabis Wins IRS Nonprofit Status
By John Tuohy
June 2, 2015
Indianapolis Star
Emotions appeared sky high at the newly formed First Church of Cannabis, after the Internal Revenue Service granted it nonprofit status.
The designation means donors to the church can deduct their gifts on their federal tax returns as charitable and the church would be eligible for a property tax exemption in Indiana. The church has raised $10,905 on a gofundme.com account but has not found a home yet.
Bill Levin, the self-appointed "minister of love," formed the church this year partly as a means to test the state's new Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which offers protections against the government infringing on religious practices.
Levin plans his first official church service July 1 — the day RFRA becomes law — where his members will follow blessings by smoking marijuana in what he describes as a religious practice. But some legal experts doubt such an illegal act would be exempted from prosecution by the religious protections offered by RFRA.

Teaching the Controversy:  James Baldwin and Richard Wright in the Ferguson Era
By Benjamin Anastas
May 26, 2015
New Republic
Last fall, without knowing just how topical the subject would turn out to be, I taught a course on Richard Wright and James Baldwin at Bennington College, where I’m a member of the literature faculty. When I’d first planned the class, I imagined it as a chance to revisit the work of two writers who loomed large in African American literature of the twentieth century but who had fallen, in recent years, out of favor and off of syllabi.
At the first class in September, we went around the room and talked about the books we’d read over the summer and what had brought us to a class on Wright and Baldwin. I still felt confident that Baldwin’s loving vision was the more powerful, that Wright’s cruder binary of black and white belonged to a different and older reality. The protests and candlelight vigils for Eric Garner and Michael Brown that had roiled late summer were still very much on the minds of the students, but that world felt far away from the rich Vermont green outside our classroom windows.

Every Serena Williams Win Comes with a Side of Disgusting Racism and Sexism
By Jenée Desmond-Harris
June 7, 2015
Vox

Serena Williams beat Lucie Safarova to win the French Open Saturday. Her reward, at least on social media, came in the form of some of the same racist and sexist comments that have followed her for her entire career.
In the moments surrounding her win, Williams was compared to an animal, likened to a man, and deemed frightening and horrifyingly unattractive. One Twitter user who wrote that Williams "looks like a gorilla, and sounds like a gorilla when she grunts while hitting the ball. In conclusion, she is a gorilla." And another described her as "so unbelievably dominant...and manly".  

Jeb Bush’s Favorite Author Rejects Democracy, Says The Hyper-Rich Should Seize Power
By Ian Millhiser
May 26, 2015
Think Progress

Charles Murray, an author who GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush recently named first when he was asked which books have had a big impact upon him, is not an elected official, so he is free to rail against democracy to his heart’s content. And that is exactly what he does in his new book, By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission.
Pay no attention to the title. Government “by the people” is the last thing Murray cares to see. Murray admits that the kind of government he seeks, a libertarian fantasy where much of our nation’s regulatory and welfare state has been dismantled, is “beyond the reach of the electoral process and the legislative process.” He also thinks it beyond the branch of government that is appointed by elected officials.

‘Devious Defecator’ Case Tests Genetics Law
By Gina Kolata
May 29, 2015
New York Times
Seven years ago, Congress prohibited employers and insurers from discriminating against people with genes that increase their risks for costly diseases, but the case that experts believe is the first to go to trial under the law involves something completely different: an effort by an employer to detect employee wrongdoing with genetic sleuthing.
Frustrated supervisors at a warehouse outside Atlanta were trying to figure out who was leaving piles of feces around the facility. They pulled aside two laborers whom they suspected. The men, fearing for their jobs, agreed to have the inside of their mouths swabbed for a genetic analysis that would compare their DNA with that of the feces. Jack Lowe, a forklift operator, said word quickly spread and they became the objects of humiliating jokes.
The two men were cleared — their DNA was not a match. They kept their jobs but sued the company. On May 5, Judge Totenberg ruled in favor of the laborers and set a jury trial for June 17 to decide on damages. She determined that even though the DNA test did not reveal any medical information, it nonetheless fell under the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA.

Chinese University Revives Research on Official Ideology to Head Off Suspicious Values
By Zhou Yu
June 1, 2015
Global Times

A day after China celebrated Youth Day, marking the start in 1919 of the student-led May Fourth Movement that helped lead the country toward communist governance, a foundation stone was laid by the Party secretary of Peking University near the south gate, for a new building named after Karl Marx.
The Marx building is part of the university's "Six Marx Projects" that kicked off this year. Another highlight of the project is the launch of "Ma Zang," a grand collection of Marxism classics and documents. In the Chinese tradition, "Zang" means collection of sacred sutras or treasures.

Currently, there are only three collections of scriptures named "Zang" in the Chinese language: Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. The launch of the Marxism collection as "Zang" put it on an equal footing with the other three major Chinese traditions.

Sun Daiyao, deputy dean of the School of Marxism at Peking University, told the Global Times, "'Zang' is a collection of treasures. Marxism isn't a religion and it should not be a religion. It is the mainstream and ruling ideology in China."