Religion Dispatches
…ed Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment declaring that only marriages between a man and a woman are valid in the state. But he points out that militant homosexuals have not respected that decision and have vandalized property, threatened people, and mailed white powder to Mormon churches. Fitzpatrick calls that “fascism.” “Fascism rejects democratic values. We see outright rejection of democracy in California.” He’s half right. Those who oppo…
Read More…avid Blight tells the story of the first Memorial Day, celebrated by newly freed blacks in Charleston, South Carolina memorializing dead Union troops. In Joplin, Missouri, residents mourned those lost in the tornado. The Department of Homeland Security has ended a post-9/11 registration program that required Arab and Muslim men to register with the government, but not before tangling many Muslim immigrants up in legal proceedings. The Muslim Broth…
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…y to the individuals he tortured and the families he left bereft. He is accused of presiding over some 12,380 deaths at the prison, and yet this horrific figure pales in comparison to the estimated 1.6 million souls believed to have been lost under the regime of social engineering promoted by the Khmer Rouge. One fifth of the entire Cambodian population was lost to the so-called Killing Fields, which means that the country today is demographically…
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…ng Back, is also under way. Northern Ireland: Opposition to “conscience clause” builds A “conscience clause” bill that would permit anti-gay discrimination in Northern Ireland has attracted the support of the Catholic Church, but a petition campaign by the group All Out attracted more than 100,000 signatures in 48hours, 30,000 of them from Northern Ireland. Switzerland: Parishioners support priest who blessed lesbian couple; marriage bill introduc…
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…cultural conservatism in the United States. The foundation of this source code (the motherlode of the code, as it were) is Catholic natural law moral philosophy. Natural law is the 800-year-old Thomist tradition that absorbs (from revelation and scripture) and communicates (into public discourse and legal practice) a quite specific understanding of the human individual as the summit of God’s creation. First Things has hosted some of the most impo…
Read More…ank week after week. For example, after all the uproar over Jeff Sessions’ use of Romans 13 to defend the extravagant cruelty of separating migrant families at the US border, you might be tempted to bet against administration members citing scripture. You would be a sucker. Vice President Mike Pence and Nielsen met with Central American leaders on Thursday to discuss the number of migrants trying to cross into the U.S. In a speech in Guatemala, he…
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…applied to both religiously motivated and non-religiously motivated peyote use, the free exercise clause, in Scalia’s opinion, simply does not apply. The Smith opinion faced two hurdles. First, as in the instance of the sacramental use of wine during Prohibition, government has often exempted generally applicable laws based on their effect on religious practices. It had always been assumed, as Justice Brennan stated, that at least on occasion such…
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…has argued that “Muslims attack Christians in as many ways as they can because of their hatred for our beliefs.” He added that there is “no such thing as freedom of speech when there are blatant attacks against an entire religious community.” Ironically, in an earlier interview, Gobrail spoke out and supported the European cartoonists who drew caricatures of the Prophet Mohamed wearing a bomb as a turban. He said at the time that freedom of expres…
Read More…financial experts is to stress that Jesus talked a lot about money—not because money makes a nice metaphor for spiritual rewards, but because, according to Hyman, “the carpenter from Nazareth was a shrewd businessman.” Throughout the hour-long video I kept wondering what the angle was; it finally came, of course, towards the end of the seemingly endless 60 minutes. Hyman is selling subscriptions to his monthly “Ultimate Wealth Report”—one year, al…
Read More…powers of autonomy. A draft bylaw sent to AFP on Saturday outlaws anal sex between men and “the rubbing of body parts between women for stimulation”, and for the first time applies Islamic laws and punishments to non-Muslims. The bylaw also punishes adultery with 100 lashes of the cane. The bylaw reinforces previous sharia legislation that bans alcohol consumption, gambling, fraternising between unmarried men and women, and physical displays of af…
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