Religious Freedom only for major religions?

Moon Phase: Waxing gibbous
Weather: Perpetually cloudy

The Supreme Court yesterday refused to hear the appeal of a Wiccan priestess who is suing a county board in Virginia for not allowing her to do an opening prayer at their meetings DESPITE the fact that clergy from major religions are invited to do so. In fact, the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors allows only Christian, Jewish, and Muslim clergy to pray at their meetings. That is, no Hindus, no Buddhists, no Sikhs, no anything other than the three major religions.

The U.S. District Court ruled the practice unconstitutional, but when the county appealed to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the ruling was overturned. And now that SCOTUS has refused to hear Simpson's appeal of that ruling, there's not much else we can do.

Wisconsin photos

Moon Phase: First quarter
Weather: cool & cloudy

Now that I'm done with college I thought I'd put up some miscellaneous photos from Wisconsin that I haven't posted for some reason (mostly because some of them were on my film camera and I hadn't gotten around to scanning them yet). So here they are:

This is a photo I took during the summer of 2003 when I stayed in Wisconsin to be a wild rice intern. You can't actually see any wild rice in this photo (the bed was down river a little in this little flowage, if I recall) but there's some nice yellow dock in the foreground. Even though I saw a lot of really beautiful things that summer, I didn't get that many good photos and I wish I'd had a digital camera back then because I know I would have taken more.

These two I took from Sioux Beach north of Washburn, which is a nice little beach on the peninsula that faces east onto the lake toward Madeleine Island. I really liked the way the water looked that day; it had a sort of shimmery-iridescent quality that the photos captured marginally well.

These two I took last fall on my last roll of film before I got my digital camera. The second one is of the pond outside my dorm; I like how dark the sky came out in that. I used a magenta filter to increase the contrast, but I'm not sure how much difference it made.

This is a stump we found during my Woodland Plants class, when we got lost in the woods trying to take a shortcut. It probably belonged to one of the huge white pines that used to grow in northern Wisconsin. It makes me think of the redwoods I saw in California when I was a kid, and the stump of a redwood that Nell and Eva found in the book Into the Forest.

This picture I took my last night in Ashland, the evening after graduation when my family went for a walk down by the bay and the sunset was so amazing. I took about 20 pictures, but this is my favorite.

I have lots of pictures from this summer; next time I'll post some of those.