…tradition continued through the tenures of Speakers Dennis Hastert, also a Republican, and Nancy Pelosi. Over the years, the number of people attending grew, eventually leading to the creation of the CMSA around 2007, when Khan has already left Hill service and was working in the Bush administration. Like other Congressional staffer organizations, the CMSA does not receive any funding or support from the government; rather the status permits it to…
…es and information. The stigma around sex and contraception has hidden the pain caused to their private parts and lives from public view. We therefore have to read between the lines of the many newspaper articles about injuries caused by Lysol and similar products. In 1934, for example, a short news item in the Hammond Indiana Times reported how two unmarried eighteen-year-old “Chicago girls are in St. Margaret’s hospital today, severely burned ab…
…’s incongruence on the issue of family planning dated back to 1930 and the papal encyclical Casti Connubi (On Christian Marriage), which was written to address the growing acceptance of birth control throughout the Western world. The tipping point was reached in 1930, when the Anglican Church officially approved the use of birth control by married couples. Other Protestant denominations soon followed, signaling that contraceptives had gained moral…
…ainstay of the MAGA movement. Now the totem is the flag of the clan…. [The participant] does not know that the coming together of a number of men associated in the same life results in disengaging new energies, which transform each of them. All that he knows is that he is raised above himself and that he sees a different life from the one he ordinarily leads. However, he must connect these sensations to some external object as their cause. Now wha…
…that adherents of the religious right comprise a core constituency in the Republican Party—and that their support arguably was the most important reason why President George W. Bush was reelected in 2004—it is at least somewhat surprising that the presidential candidates most closely allied with the religious right (Gov. Mike Huckabee, Sen. Fred Thompson, and Sen. Sam Brownback) did not do better in the campaign for the Republican nomination. To…
…the people who work in Catholic schools for low wages. We see T-shirts for papal teddy bears, but no hint of the impact of the Vatican’s policy banning the use of condoms, even for those who are HIV-infected. Whether it is a Sunday morning talk show, the front page of a newspaper, or the evening news, I continue to be amazed at how little the Vatican press office has to do to assure softball questions, few dissident voices, and reverent talk about…
…ic schools, this division plays out in biology classes around the country. Parents, students, teachers, and taxpayers informed by the dominant scientific view of origins expect that biology courses stress evolution. Many of those committed to a biblical view want some place for creation in the science classroom. In the United States, three basic concerns underlie most religious objections to Darwinism. In a narrow sense, any theory of evolution ch…
…rence of the Family was held in Nairobi on May 15 with the sponsorship and participation of several American anti-gay and anti-reproductive-choice organizations, including the World Congress of Families, Sharon Slater of Family Watch International, and John Eastman of the National Organization for Marriage as well as Kenya’s first lady Margaret Kenyatta, the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, National Congress of Churches Kenya, and the Kenya Conferen…
…which less than half of residents supported the right to marry a same-sex partner. The same poll found that only 57% of Mississippians thought LGBT people should be protected from discrimination, compared to 70% of Americans overall. There aren’t current data on state-by-state support for interracial marriage, but while 18% of all newly married people in urban areas are married to someone of a different race, only 3% of newlyweds in Jackson, Miss…
By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…nd the world through support of dictators considered “men of God” (Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier, for whom Family members arranged congressional support, Efrain Rios Montt, the Guatemalan killer championed by Pat Robertson, etc.). That, sadly, is the link between the killer bunny and its ostensible victim, fundamentalism and the establishment. What we learn through The Family is that when it comes to the question of American democracy vs. American emp…
