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A Recent Local Controversy Reveals the Theocratic Heart of ‘Project Blitz’

By Frederick Clarkson

…also received much attention, but a remarkable episode in Minnesota this past state legislative session may be a harbinger of a more profoundly theocratic politics on the horizon. Earlier this year, Minnesota state Sen. John Marty was perplexed during a committee hearing. State Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer, the Republican chair of the Senate State Government Finance Committee, had proposed a $4 million cut in the budget for the Minnesota Historical Society…

Tim Pawlenty’s Dilemma: How Far Will His Anti-Choice Extremism Go?

By Sarah Posner

…rnick notes that Minnesota, while Pawlenty was governor, was one of the first states to enact a law requiring that women seeking an abortion would be offered the scientifically unproven claims that the fetus experiences pain, in their 2011 legislative sessions, several states, including Minnesota, have introduced legislation banning abortion after 20 weeks based on the disproven claim that the fetus feels pain. (Minnesota’s current governor, Democ…

Will Minnesota Voters Be on the Right Side of History?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…pproved a ballot measure that will ask voters if they wish to change their state constitution to define marriage as being between one man and one woman. The debate before the measure passed was emotional. Four Republican representatives, including John Kriesel of Cottage Grove, voted against the measure. Kriesel lost his legs in fighting in Iraq and gave an emotional speech about how he fought for everyone in this country to have equal rights—not…

Pricey Tickets, Cranky Citizens, and Priests Behind Bars as Philadelphia Prepares For Papal Visit

By Anthea Butler

…ground is where the altar will be. Photo by Anna Orso, for Billy Penn Yup, stay at home, post up, get your drinks and popcorn, and watch in your jammies. Much of the confusion and drama lies with the poor messaging of the World Meeting of Families and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Both have managed to make both Catholics and non-Catholics so angry that many will certainly stay away. What happened? Why has the WMOF and the Archdiocese mangled th…

LDS Church Calls on Members to back Minnesota Anti-Equality Initiative

By Joanna Brooks

…o support a November 2012 ballot initiative that would amend the Minnesota state constitution to restrict the right to marry to heterosexual couples. (State law already bans same-sex marriage.) According to LDS Church data, there are about 30,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Minnesota, constituting less than .5% of the state’s population. It is unclear at this time whether LDS congregations will be activated as vol…

Bachmann’s “Dangerous” Summit

By Sarah Posner

…rd of Summit Ministries, according to its current executive director, John Stonestreet. Rather, she served on the board of a Minnesota non-profit, the Minnesota Summit Project, which was intended to encourage students in the state to attend Summit’s conferences. One of the founders of the Minnesota Summit Project was Jack Oakes, who was also one of the founders of The King’s College in New York City, whose current president is Dinesh D’Souza, the…

Why Have So Many Fallen for the Rune Stone Hoax?

By Joseph Laycock

…s long before the arrival of the Pilgrims. John Ireland, the archbishop of St. Paul and an important Catholic intellectual, endorsed the Rune Stone’s authenticity in 1909. Catholics also made much of the invocation to “AVM,” which they assumed stood for “Ave Virgen Maria.” (Others suggested this was actually the Hindu syllable “aum,” which was popular in Western esoteric circles when the stone was discovered.) In 1957 Bishop Peter W. Bartholome co…

Mile-High Identity Politics: What We Can Learn From the Same-Sex Seating Controversy

By Eboo Patel

…ly offered to other people with different identities? No doubt this is a distinct circumstance based on a very particular identity, but cultural progressives are often on the vanguard of fighting for special accommodations for specific groups. Women-only, black-only and LGBT-only spaces are a relevant parallel. Such spaces take into account the issues related to certain social identities (the personal) and advocate for a reshaping of the public sq…

The Key to Understanding the Federalist Society Isn’t Originalism — It’s This 800-Year Old Tradition

By Peter Schwartz

…hich Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. With no feudal past to constrain us, with Protestantism and the Enlightenment the beginning of our history, we’re often blind to political and legal activity within our own nation that doesn’t conform to liberal democratic precepts. Like the android host Dolores in the first season of Westworld, when presented by her father with a photo of a smiling woman in an alien urban landscape, we als…

Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

By Susannah Heschel

…fined Jesus as an Aryan Galilean, and downplayed the role of the Jewish apostle Paul. In addition to their New Testament they distributed a dejudaized hymnal and catechism to churches throughout the Nazi Reich. Grundmann argued that Jesus’ intimacy with God established a morality that was utterly opposed to the law-based morality of Judaism—laws that forbid murder, for example—presumably in case Christians had qualms about Nazi orders to do just t…