Yeah, it bugs me too. But I've found that fireworks are a FAR bigger deal in the rural mid-west. The times I've driven through Ohio I'm always amazed at how many firework stands/store I see. Talking with people from that area who now live here confirms this.

As a general rule, yeah, booze is verboten. But the thing is, the Southern Baptist Convention is really a lose affiliation, not a top-down organization like the Catholic Church. Technically speaking, each individual SB church is it's own organization, answerable only to themselves. They kind of team up with each other for mission work and such as a Convention. So there is no "official" convention-wide ban on booze, but most churches choose to engage in that little bit of blasphemy and tell people it's a sin even though it's not in the Bible.

This, of course, doesn't keep them from engaging in local politics to push their corrupt, regressive views on everyone else when it comes to alcohol.

I've just got to say that while I despise pretty much everything about the current incarnation of the Republican Party, I've just about had all I can take of the liberal politics of the atheist "community." I see posts every day from countless atheists lamenting the fact that the "movement" isn't cohesive and it's hard to get people motivated to actually do something. Well, as a libertarian minded atheist, I can tell you that the most prominent atheists out there don't exactly make it a comfortable place for the millions of people like me.

Atheist =/= liberal and it certainly doesn't mean "Democrat" regardless of what a reading of popular atheist sites would have you think. So post the Democratic Party line all you like, pretend that everything from Democrats is automatically great and everything from Republicans is necessarily terrible, but don't follow that with posts about why the "movement" doesn't enjoy greater support. There are millions of people like me with no faith who come to our political positions for the same skeptical reasons we abandoned our faith and find the Democrats just as loathsome as the Republicans.

You're beginning with an assumption that has not been established.. Namely that a fetus is a "life" and of equal personhood as an adult woman. This may or may not be the case, regardless of what your preacher has told you.