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Mitt Romney and the Ghost of Anti-Mormonism

…worried about Mormon theocracy as well. People use that word theocracy too freely. Mormons then would have said that their government was an expression of popular will. They believed in the franchise, and they exercised it. But they wanted Brigham Young to be the territorial governor. When federal agents deposed the territorial government, it looked to Mormons like tyranny. They would have said, “You are violating the Constitution, and we are the…

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‘Cancel Culture’ Is as Old as Religion, And It’s Only a Thing Because of Who’s Doing the Cancelling

…there are hundreds, maybe thousands, whose names we will never know. In a free society, I may have to tolerate your views, but I’m under no obligation to publicize them, nor to let them pass without criticism. My right to criticize you publicly is no less important than your right to pontificate publicly. As Durkheim said, secular societies and subgroups, like religious ones, get to choose what is sacred and what is heretical. The former is inclu…

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No ‘Christian Compassion’ in Tony Perkins’ Response to Anti-Gay Bullying, Suicides

…tion [to pursue changing from gay to straight].” True. That’s the point of free will. However, it wouldn’t be free will unless the partnered gay Christian has the ability to choose to live as a partnered gay Christian. Once these ideas were given voice the conversation quickly shifted, as each heard the other for the first time. When social policy, theology, and personally-tied emotions are parted for even the slightest moment, it becomes clear th…

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HuffPo Columnist Tries to Link Darwin to Hitler

…for free. In exchange for all this unpaid content, columnists are largely free to write about whatever it is they like. Consequently, Huffington Post’s living pages have long been filled with various anti-science sentiments and new age woo, from vitamin cures to the “science of distant healing.” Most egregiously, it has provided a place for Jenny McCarthy and others to peddle ongoing claims about there being a link between autism and vaccine shot…

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The Battle for the Bible Against Christian Nationalism Seeks to Continue Historic Campaign

…ory of recognizing that the state can use its power to take away religious freedom.” The kind of religious freedom the panelists discussed, of course, isn’t the Orwellian distortion posed by the Christian Right in both its Catholic and evangelical wings, in which religious freedom is invoked in order to justify the oppression of others, but the liberatory idea of religious freedom for all, including the non-religious, that traditional Baptists hav…

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Why Atheists Should Fight For Establishment of State Religion

…ular liberals. Instead, they should have done everything in their power to promote North Carolina’s Freedom of Religion Act and, more, fought to establish the Christian state of North Carolina as quickly as possible. And conservative evangelical legislators need not waste their time writing toothless resolutions establishing state religions. Rather, if the Christian Right would like religion to prosper in America, they should erect a wall between…

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Weeks After Turkey’s Failed Coup, Thousands Have Been Arrested Over a Book

…a network of schools and interfaith centers, and has been known to provide free trips to American academics to show them the Hizmet activities in Turkey. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am one of those academics who have benefited from a casual association with members of the Hizmet movement in the United States. But I didn’t get a free trip to Turkey. In my case I had given talks in spring of 2015, that were jointly sponsored by a Hizmet inte…

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McCullen v. Coakley and the Meaning of Protests

…a young woman she cajoled away from Planned Parenthood with a promise of a free pregnancy test.  The buffer zone cases really aren’t about free speech, they are about the evolving nature of protest in the anti-choice movement. In this evolution, the protest (“the act of objecting or a gesture of disapproval“) has been portrayed as “compassion,” with words that can only accurately be described as meddling portrayed as “caring.” But it is still a fo…

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Virginia High School Says Students May Post Ten Commandments on Lockers

…people, including the Giles County students, misunderstand the difference between free expression of one’s religious views and the endorsement by one’s government. Unfortunately, too many people misunderstand them as the same thing. In a yet another classic example from Giles County, members of the ministry All 10 Commandments were handing out yard signs of the Ten Commandments last week in opposition to the removal from the schools. For some rea…

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A Hidden Amy Coney Barrett Answer on COVID That Should Scare Every American

…public health restrictions on places of worship. Do states infringe on the free exercise of religion when they selectively restrict a religious gathering as a matter of enforcement discretion? RESPONSE: The Supreme Court has explained that “[o]fficial action that targets religious conduct for distinctive treatment cannot be shielded by mere compliance with the requirement of facial neutrality” and that “[t]he Free Exercise Clause protects against…

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