Religion Dispatches
…bsumed into a moderate image. The hard right is the new normal. In another sign the culture wars aren’t over, anti-gay activists in Maine successfully overturned a state law legalizing gay marriage. Some LGBT rights activists are angry that Obama, reprising his refusal to take a position in the Proposition 8 campaign in California last year, didn’t weigh in on Maine’s referendum, which repealed a law passed in the state legislature and signed by t…
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…mber does not include the transgender people who haven’t undergone sex reassignment surgery (a process many people call “the transition”), so the number of transgender-identified people is likely much higher. The term “transgender” encompasses anyone with a gender identity that is different from his or her birth sex. A transgender person could be someone who just cross-dresses from time to time in private; someone who identifies as gender-queer (t…
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…e? For starters, there’s the guy in New Hampshire who brought a gun (and a sign about watering the tree of democracy with blood from time to time) to a protest outside a recent presidential forum on health care. Interviewing the guy later on Hardball, Chris Matthews was baffled by this, but it makes a certain, scary sense to me. Having spent a lifetime immersed in the fundamentalist evangelical culture of rural America (first as a Southern Baptist…
Read More…nemployment benefits will add to the deficit: Conceding on this point is a sign that the GOP senatorial leadership still doesn’t get it. There is no offset for this extension of unemployment benefits, meaning that the GOP did not insist that some way be found to cover the cost of this program without borrowing money from their own grandchildren. They’re just going to willy-nilly add to the deficit cavalierly and casually, as if the Tea Party movem…
Read More…the airport, for my own travel or to pick up family and friends. The road signs had a little airplane logo to designate the way to the airport. I never got lost going, but always got lost trying to get back home. I used to say, there needs to be a sign with a little picture of my house to direct me. I knew how to get to the mountain but I forgot to make markers for getting back! Anyway, while wandering around until I found the road with that gate…
Read More…r a floor vote, and despite the likelihood that Governor Mary Fallin would sign it into law, I think SB-1433 is in danger of becoming a political hot potato. The die-hard “personhood” position—which holds that not just life, but legal rights, begin at some poorly-understood “moment of fertilization”—is not a position all pro-life people are comfortable with. And it’s not hard to understand why: What of women with life-threatening pregnancies? Does…
Read More…es ago in the New Testament letters of James” and figure “prominently as a sign of the coming economic Armageddon.” The book is a favorite of Glenn Beck’s, who declared that it exposes what he imagines to be linkages between the global financial crisis and the coming “new world order.” (Jeremiah last year called President Obama a “dangerous person” because he is a “globalist” heading the country toward “socialism.”) Lest you leap to any conclusion…
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…h religious myths are singular; they constitute the thing everybody has to sign on to in order to be a member of the movement. In Tertullian’s day, however, most Christians agreed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God; but as for what that actually meant, well, that was one of the things Christians argued most vehemently about. Those arguments led to the emergence of “orthodoxy” and “heresy” in time. And it took a very long time to figure out which…
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…ly meeting at six, many of the participants had decamped to Starbucks to design flyers to spread the word. They left the poster board that listed goals, handwritten contributions of anyone who wanted to chime in, under a tree in the square (see image above). Some goals were appropriately wonky for DC (“reinstate Glass-Steagall”); others were overbroad and silly (“abolish capitalism + the state”); others were born of frustration (“get jobs for educ…
Read More…s Gideon’s Fleece bus tour of earlier this year did not seem to give her a sign to run, and now the footage resembles highlights from a retirement reel, rather than the fodder for a crop of Palin 2012 commercials. Put this together with the doubling down of conservatives like Ann Coulter, who said this about Palin on the O’Reilly factor: She is “The One to a certain segment of right wingers”, and “No conservative on TV will criticize Palin, becaus…
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