Religion Dispatches
Rabbi Yehuda Levin knows how to get press – emulate Pat Robertson. Levin, the spokesman of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, issued a press release today warning that lifting the military ban on gays and lesbians serving open in the military is equivalent to the “spiritual rape” of the military: When Americans are suffering economically and millions need jobs, it’s shocking that the Administration is focused on its ultra-liberal militantly homo…
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…fied as AIDS, did not receive ongoing or thorough coverage. By 1982, nearly 800 AIDS cases had been diagnosed. According to one study, infants and children were increasingly infected. Although a threat to the general population was quickly dismissed, the implication was clear: anyone could be infected. The epidemic had exposed social and cultural fault lines that made coverage more than just a medical story. Its initial outbreak in the homosexual…
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Culture Wars Today, Culture Wars Tomorrow, Culture Wars Forever At a Super Bowl party at my friend Al’s house, I was standing in the kitchen ladling some of my wife’s extraordinary chili into a bowl, when a friend asked what I was going to write about now that the Christian right is defeated and demoralized. Rushing to get back into the living room for third quarter action, I mumbled that I wasn’t worried about not having the Christian Right to w…
Read MoreWhile sanctimonious conservatives and godless liberals alike await the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Hobby Lobby case, two more suits with serious church and state implications are quietly making their way through the system. The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) is a group of “atheists, agnostics and skeptics” with a Scientology-esque fondness for litigation. Recently the FFRF has gone after the so-called “parsonage exemption,” which allow…
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…ortions say it is in part because they cannot afford a child. That is about 800,000 women and girls each year. The only bill they support, The Reducing the Need for Abortions and Supporting Parents Act, includes only a fraction of what would be needed for women to be able to provide for children. The bill was first introduced in 2006 and has never even made it to full committee consideration. None of the groups or individuals active in the common…
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…fetish of their choosing. But they should not do so with a government microphone, and not on the taxpayers’ time and dime. We’ve seen plenty of divisive prayers from the conservative side. Often deliberately so, wielding prayer like a cudgel. The Pennsylvania legislator’s Jesus-laden, jaw-dropping prayer uttered to intimidate the state’s first female Muslim legislator. A preacher echoed this prayer, telling the Virginia House of Delegates that “ev…
Read MoreColorado’s fetal personhood ballot initiative petition failed to get enough valid signatures, and so the measure will not appear on the ballot, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler announced this morning. According to the Denver Post, some of the signatures were deemed invalid, so the petition was found to have only 85,800 valid signatures—305 signatures short of the required 86,105. Jennifer Mason, speaking for Personhood Colorado, said tha…
Read More…g District of Western China, where officials have reportedly bulldozed over 800 mosques. Authorities have also detained hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in re-education camps. The scale of the suffering is difficult to imagine. In fairness, there’s been a lot of good reporting about the plight of the Uighurs. And yet I believe the outpouring of emotion for more recognizable places—especially Notre Dame—is instructive. Samuel Johnson defined sympat…
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In Florida, a state senate committee wants to make it illegal to cause discomfort to white people. This bill, which reads like a scene from 1984, is a doozy. You can, and should, read the full text of it here. The bill purports to “protect individual freedoms and prevent discrimination in the workplace and in public schools.” But it then proceeds to define “individual freedoms” and “discrimination” in ways that are unrecognizable to the plain, hi…
Read More…rtisan politics. The devotional speaker who had been invited to address the 800-plus crowd that evening spoke mainly about the need for Christians to think and act “eschatologically,” orienting their practices always to their vision of ultimate reconciliation which is portrayed as the eschatological banquet of God. Then she used an example to drive the radical nature of Christian reconciliation home to her audience. She was born and raised a Democ…
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