The Ron Show30 Jul 2025

Georgia 10th revisited & what to make of the ugliness of religious extremism

With Mike Collins making his move to take Jon Ossoff's Senate seat comes a wide-open Congressional seat in northeast Georgia. Republicans like state representative Houston Gaines and former Congressman Paul Broun are licking their chops, but as we here know, there's a plucky Democrat already on the road campaigning in that district: Lexy Doherty. She was on this show about seven weeks ago. A worthy and timely revisit no?

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'Fixer Upper' power couple Chip & Joanna Gaines have built a reality TV empire and had been the darlings of evangelical America; that is, until they - gasp - cast a married gay male couple and their twin boys for the reality series "Back To The Frontier." Then came the ugliness.

Listen, I know somewhere there's some written or unwritten reason I'm not supposed to like Chip & Jo, but I like 'em. Their having never booked a gay person or couple for their 'Fixer Upper' series isn't an issue for me (mostly because what gay person wants to move to Waco? I kid; I kid), because I see inherent goodness in them. Well, so did most of evangelical America until this show's cast was revealed.

It's that element of religious extremism that just keeps dividing humanity. I noted a passage on friend of the show Dom Kelly's personal Facebook page. On a recent post, he shared that he'd become something of a pen pal with a Palestinian Gazan father not unlike him - in fact quite similar. Despite Kelly being a Jewish American and Ahmed being a Muslim Palestinian, they had plenty of common ground to develop a lovely bond. There's no citation (yet) to attribute because I share this from his personal and private page, but I do hope you'll listen to me sharing the passage. It's so moving, and gut-wrenching, too.

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