Religion Dispatches
…ld have been informing its constituents about the true nature of these candidates. Sure, they may give gay people a tax cut, but they’ll work to ensure that they remain second-class citizens in every other aspect of life. That should give any gay person who voted Republican in the past election pause….
Read More…us from the military: ”I would tell them to serve anyway,” [Sergeant First Class Benjamin] Ratcliff replied. “If all men of courage and men that had a moral compass were to leave the military, then we wouldn’t have a military. There would be nobody left to serve and protect. So I don’t really—I would serve regardless of what comes out of Washington.” But, not letting facts get in the way of a good scare, Perkins – faced with a Democratic commitmen…
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…njoy together. Yes, Beck is now trying to steal the great 1946 Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life and turn it into a rallying cry for the conservative anti-government Christian right. This week on his radio show, he announced he was going to do his show from the town of Wilmington, Ohio on December 15. Of the countless towns across the country hard hit by the recession, Wilmington, which has only about 12,000 people, may be one of the worst…
Read More…or you can go to hell. There’s nothing nice about that. But then there’s nothing nice about the absurd, reactionary, vicious and apparently successful class war the rich and powerful are waging on the rest of the nation, either….
Read More…assault on a student. The litany of Freshwater’s religious activity in the classroom goes back more than a decade and includes him displaying posters of the Ten Commandments and bible versus and teaching students in science class that evolution is a lie. After the parents of Zachary Dennis complained to the district about the burn on their son’s arm way back in December 2007, the district began an investigation, in which Freshwater’s religious pro…
Read MoreThe incoming class of congressional freshmen includes, Jaime Herrera (R-WA), the first homeschooled member ever, and Daniel Webster (R-FL) a homeschooling activist about whom I’ve written here and here. In a press release celebrating the “coming of age” of homeschooling, The Old Schoolhouse Magazine poses the question: “Is Homeschooling Good for America?” which they answer by touting the culturally transformative character of the homeschooling mo…
Read More…e group of citizens and denied them a basic right. “California has taken a class of citizens and put them in a separate category; that is an act of discrimination and there is no doubt that it is discrimination and there is no doubt that it does great harm. Can it be justified under any standard of constitutional analysis? I argue it cannot be justified at the lowest standard of constitutional analysis,” he said. In short, Olson argued, Prop 8 doe…
Read More…d their proxies, no County funds are being directed into the defense of Proposition 8. But with recent polling showing that a majority of Latino Catholics now support marriage equality (as we’ve reported here at RD), one wonders whether the working-class (and deeply unemployed) Latino majority of Imperial County is setting the moral agenda or whether they’re being played by a highly motivated set of outsiders with no longterm interest in the welfa…
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…as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are almost pai…
Read More…% increased by 256%; the poorest households saw an increase of 11%; middle class homes, 21%, much of which was due to the arrival of two-job families. And yet, Fischer bemoans the fact that the government is willing to spend a little more to help those who are suffering, while not making one peep about how giving more money to those who need it the least will blow a hole in the deficit. The prophet Amos says don’t think that God doesn’t notice thi…
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