A pretty
interesting day around here Monday…..
We posted a
poll last Sunday afternoon for our Monday Morning Question of the Day. We asked
if our Facebook friends agreed with the prayer delivered by Fairfield minister
Cory Musgrave in front of the Illinois House on Friday morning. The prayer was
pro-life.
It had a
thousand votes when I got to the station in the morning, comfortably trending
60-40 in favor of Rev. Musgrave. Then something curious happened.
An avalanche
of votes starting pouring in…. But none of them were from around here. Looking
at the naysayers….you could see a definite trend. One poster merely identified
herself as “Satan.” There was a woman voting from Azerbaijan, Seattle, and
plenty of fake people----you know----the Facebook page with zero activity and
nothing more than an avatar of a sunset or a kitten. We get lots of those from
people who don’t have the bravery to use their own names.
Well, here’s
what happened. A website called “Friendly Atheist” did a blog post on
Musgrave’s prayer. Pleas went out to rock our poll….and next thing you know,
Satan is registering a vote for pro-choice and anti-Musgrave.
The atheist
blog had this interesting quote in referring to the Fairfield minister and
State Representative Darren Bailey----“Thankfully, the state is not their
church and their God was nowhere to be found when all the votes were in.”
In the
middle of this storm a frustrated reader of my commentary had a suggestion for
me. She thinks I should change the name to “Entitled Old White Guy Fears
Change.”
Probably
appropriate-----but I’ll continue to be the Cheaptalker.
I tend to not get involved in that debate as I dont have a uterus I feel as though it's none of my business. separation of church and state. I agree with the above. Statement you quoted “Thankfully, the state is not their church and their God was nowhere to be found when all the votes were in.” I can only imagine what it would be like with Christian shira law enacted everywhere.
ReplyDeleteSo that's where they all came from... I figured it was just off organic shares. I looked in at 8:30 or so the night before and it was around 300-400 votes and split 52-48 toward yes. Then the next day it was over 1000 and split 60-40. I had just seen that night that Darren Bailey had just shared it to his campaign page as did the White County Republicans. I suppose it's not a surprise that people really shared, since it was such a hot-button issue. I know I shared it among all my friends and many of them also shared it. Indeed it looks like you got some 51 shares and I assume a ton of reach. Congratulations on that. That must be good for business.
ReplyDeletehttps://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/.../invocation.../
I presume this is the article you're talking about, but I don't see any pleas to go rock your poll. It would even appear that it was written before you posted the poll.
I feel like I should also mention that if someone's privacy settings are all the way up, you don't see anything on their Facebook page. Just a profile picture and maybe their featured photos. And now that I'm looking through the no votes, most of these people have actual names and profile pictures, so I'm thinking this is just another batch of easily disproven lies coming from your commentaries. I even decided to go through all the no votes, and what do you know? Satan didn't show up to the poll.
All in all, it just feels like you're making an excuse for a poll you didn't like the outcome of. Whatever you can do to keep feeding that narrative, right?
Also you said yesterday on Morning Coffee that the polls are anonymous, which is false.
Looks like the link didn't properly transfer when I copied that. There you go
Deletehttps://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/06/01/invocation-speaker-god-must-punish-il-for-destruction-of-the-innocent-unborn/