Christianity’s tent is not big enough to accommodate both the supporters of Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act and Brittney Cooper, who in a Wednesday piece for Salon blasted both the state’s pre-fix RFRA and the religious right in general.

“This kind of legislation is rooted in a politics that gives white people the authority to police and terrorize people of color, queer people and poor women,” declared Cooper. “That means these people don’t represent any kind of Christianity that looks anything like the kind that I practice…This white, blond-haired, blue-eyed, gun-toting, Bible-quoting Jesus of the religious right is a god of their own making. I call this god, the god of white supremacy and patriarchy...This God isn’t the God that I serve…He might be ‘biblical’ but he’s also an asshole.”

Kim Messick believes America since its founding has suffered three serious breaches of political trust, the last of which is ongoing and results from “the readiness of Republicans to violate long-standing norms of institutional conduct in order to advance a highly divisive, intensely partisan agenda” that’s implacably hostile to most functions of government. Messick touches on Tom Cotton’s letter to the Iranian mullahs and John Boehner’s invitation to Benjamin Netanyahu as recent examples of the congressional GOP’s “disregard [of] any limitation on their pursuit of conservative purity” as well as of “its own hermetic vision of the conservative ‘cause’– a cause that transcends national boundaries. Its adherents find it easier to cooperate with the leader of Israel’s Likud Party than with their Democratic colleagues in the American Congress.”

Sonia Saraiya suggests that Stewart “is one of the most influential political figures of our era” and claims that “as difficult as it has been to advance a progressive agenda over the last 16 years, it would likely have been impossible without Stewart’s ability to connect to millions of viewers and remind them that they weren’t alone in hoping for something better.”

Georgetown professor Aaron Hanlon argues that Stewart’s foul-mouthed rants in response to conservatives are appropriate given that “his objects of critique aren’t interested in reasoned dialogue, clever jabs or unveiled truths.”

Ann Jones has doubts about allegations that America is “crazy,” but adds, “Some people who question me say that the U.S. is ‘paranoid,’ ‘backward,’ ‘behind the times,’ ‘vain,’ ‘greedy,’ ‘self-absorbed,’ or simply ‘dumb.’  Others, more charitably, imply that Americans are merely ‘ill-informed,’ ‘misguided,’ ‘misled,’ or ‘asleep,’ and could still recover sanity.  But wherever I travel, the questions follow.”