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Resurrection of ‘Comstock Laws’ Would Threaten Access to Abortifacients — But Even That Fear Misses Bigger Picture

By Gillian Frank

…e Supreme Court decided Griswold v Connecticut in 1965, Clarence Thomas was 16 years old and Samuel Alito was 15. Both men were in their twenties when the court issued Roe v Wade, Doe v Bolton, Eisenstadt v Baird, and Miller v California. Which is to say, Justices Thomas and Alito came of age as the Supreme Court, through decisions on contraception, abortion, and obscenity, liberalized a restrictive sexual order by mooting federal and state “Comst…

Religious Opposition To LGBT Equality Softening

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…nd other Christians marching together at Pride. In recent years, the small number of Christians who turn up to protest against Pride have been vastly outnumbered by the Christians participating in it. Hill also noted religious support in the UK last April for a new law “to allow religious elements in civil partnerships, while last year the Quakers became the first major Christian denomination to resolve to carry out same-sex marriages.” Even here…

Elaine Howard Ecklund Wants to Dispel Myths Surrounding Religious Resistance to Science

By Sammy Feldblum

…a—I don’t know if I should say unusual, but I can say that there’s a large number of religious organizations in Houston. I think that’s patently obvious, but also true from the research. There are potential civic resources through those religious organizations. You saw it in the kerfuffle about Lakewood, the big church there on the freeway, opening its doors. And people saying “why isn’t this enormous church opening its doors for people as a shelt…

Trump is a Nightmare, Sure, But Can He Actually Do Anything?

By Sunnivie Brydum

…January, opening email yields at least one urgent call to action from any number of progressive groups. As a journalist who’s spent the better part of a decade reporting on the LGBT community, I’m no stranger to the motivational value of panicked predictions of impending legislative disasters. That kind of all-hands-on-deck organizing has long proven crucial to forming a unified front of resistance, and indeed worked well to build broad coalition…

The War On Terror Is Over

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…alled for an increase of a hundred thousand troops, which would double the number presently there. Yet it will still be half of the numbers of Russian troops that the former Soviet Union had deployed in Afghanistan—and it lost the war, dragging much of the Soviet economy down with it. A similarly dismal prognosis is in store for America’s continuing presence in Afghanistan. Moreover, the persistence of US troops in the region will continue to prov…

New Research Links Spiritual-Not-Religious to Mental Disorder

By Elizabeth Drescher

…es. Is it an existential framework in itself—something that participants in 12-step groups find without necessarily referencing religion or spirituality and that the non-religious have sorted out in other ways—rather than its structuring in specifically religious terms that is psychologically beneficial? An atheist friend put it this way: “Maybe SBNRs are going nuts because, on one frequency, they keep thinking there’s got to be something else, an…

YOU Are Spiritual But Not Religious: The Secret Spiritual History of the Choose Your Own Adventure Books

By Daniel Silliman

…then bought up by Bantam Books and re-branded Choose Your Own Adventure in 1980. An initial marketing push gave 100,000 copies of The Cave of Time to librarians, who loved the concept and the effect it had of getting kids to actually sit down and read. Selling for $2.95 apiece, more than 50 titles were published over the next three years, and about 30 million copies were printed. Connoisseurs have noted the differences between Packard and Montgom…

As Tensions Escalate in the Balkans, the West Could Hand Putin a Valuable Weapon

By Katherine Kelaidis

…ere the dominant ethnic group in the multi-ethnic Balkans. However, between 1299 and 1453, the the Ottoman Empire conquered much of the Orthodox Christian world—including the Serbian Empire—and the Albanians converted to Islam, greatly elevating their status in an empire in which Muslims were most certainly at the top of the pecking order. This is the origin of much of the anti-Albanian sentiment, not only in Serbia, but throughout the Balkans. It…

UPDATED: Oklahoma Personhood Bill Not Dead…

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…e for their unwillingness to put their reassurances in writing, proposed a number of amendments. So did other legislators, such that by the time SB-1433 was scheduled to be voted on, it was groaning under the weight of amendments. But the real turnaround came when Speaker Steele proposed an amendment to an amendment that, in essence, would have given teeth to the reassurances that the Oklahoma bill would do no more than the Missouri language. Tha…

Trump’s “Muslim Ban” A Gift to Terrorists

By Ali Olomi

…xistence in this country. In 2017 Donald Trump wants to ban Muslims, but in 1776, the founding fathers wanted to welcome them. Muslims, though a minority, have been present in the United States from the very beginning. Historians of slavery estimate that as much as a third of slaves may have been Muslim and some even fought in the revolutionary war like Yusuf ben Ali. Thomas Jefferson kept a Qur’an near his bedside and the other framers were adama…