Religion Dispatches
…new suffering among people with disabilities, the elderly, vulnerable children, etc. Because as sure as the sun rises in the east, GOP leaders will use the new deficits their own plan creates to demand huge cuts in the social safety net: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and everything else. Oh, and did I mention Fun Fact #3: the GOP plan, for all the pro-worker verbiage attached to it, actually raises taxes for the lowest-income workers? Hey,…
Read More…ical attack ad, starting last Friday. Using clips from Townhall.com, World Net Daily, Fox Business, CNSNews.com, and Glenn Beck, narrator E. W. Jackson invokes the boogeymen of ACORN, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the New Black Panther Party, Hamas, and Mao Tse-Tung to paint President Obama and the Democratic Party as “extreme,” “treacherous,” “socialist,” and “with hostility” towards America. As I wrote two years ago during the presidential campaign, the…
Read More…ve’ relative to an issue like abortion. And while he is right that both Catholics and Evangelicals often seem more worried about children before they are born than after (though the Catholic Church is more consistent in its support for safety-net programs) the reality is that abortion rights can’t be separated from the larger issue of reproductive justice, which itself can’t be separated from the issues of poverty and opportunity—as many women get…
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…need of quality, affordable health care, straining the health care safety net system even more. Planned Parenthood health centers provide health care services to more than three million people a year and 97% of those services are preventive, including wellness exams, cancer screenings, STD testing and treatment, and birth control. (italics added) Support from the Old Guard Over the past few years Rose has not only received considerable publicity…
Read More…ng internal debates about big issues like marriage equality. Over at World Net Daily (which features such fact-challenged articles on how terrorists are setting wildfires and ads that promise to show you how to get an untraceable AR-15) there’s a fairly comprehensive article laying out the argument between those who wish to privatize marriage, and those who believe the government’s role is a necessary evil … for the children. Those speaking in fav…
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…ion also had its dissenters, notably, representatives from SNAP (Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests) were there, as well as a group of women campaigning to be ordained as priests. It perhaps is no coincidence then, that while the Pope was concelebrating mass for the Year of the Priest that had turned into the Year the Pedophile Priests, Part II, the Pew Forum was releasing a little journalistic beatification of its own, a report on medi…
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…dies’ legs into provocative stockings” or the “lusty buttocks” of ham. The net effect, she suggests, is the emanation of a “you know you want it” kind of sensuality. Make no mistake. Meat—the flesh of non-human animals—is a force of desire in human life. But is there an ethical argument in favor of flesh consumption? That is, can a meat-eating human find solid moral ground for her more carnivorous appetites? Is there a soul-cure for the stomachach…
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…ave come to be represented by a man who has no interest in a social safety net and blames those in need for being in poverty or without work. Mormons don’t believe that. He is not us. I get requests from Mormons around the country to do service projects in Gulu and work side by side with Ugandans. We are very clear about not imposing our ideas on the Ugandans. We have a local staff from the community who have worked all their lives with child sol…
Read More…for the corporate entity, the thousands of dioceses they oversee on the planet. Those folks are suddenly on their own when it comes to liability. Rome’s hands are off. The Holy See is the “juridical personification of the Church,” considered the government of the Catholic Church. It is located in Vatican City (which really is not, by most lights, a state). Will the real Roman Catholic Church please stand up? This is all quite murky, resulting in t…
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…e ideologies are pervasive in the culture at large. The blame casts a wide net, not in order to single out a minority group, but in order to implicate a culture that’s been saturated with these ideas. In short, not all ideological blame is alike. But there is a common thread here in the tendency to focus exclusively on ideas as the motivation for an attack. That focus can be revealing, because ideology alone never fully explains violence. Plenty o…
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