Search Results for:

VIPREG2024 how to use 1xbet free bet promo code Japan

T-Shirts and Minarets: The Rending of the Social Contract

…so advocate this position. We recognize it as our responsibility to defend free speech because it is also our right. In Europe, the social contracts are more fraught with weaknesses, as witnessed by the recent Swiss vote to ban minarets. As Dan Varisco notes, the question should be “why minarets?” He says: The minaret is, of course, a symbol, but a rather unusual choice. In one sense it is like saying that MacDonalds cannot have a high sign (as is…

Read More

Liberals Enabled Bishops in Contraception Battle

…th states held that there was no violation of the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. That’s because the law doesn’t “substantially burden” anyone’s religious practice and is one of general applicability that was not targeted at infringing a particular religious practice.  To permit religious beliefs to “excuse compliance with otherwise valid laws regulating matters the state is free to regulate,” would, the California Supreme Cour…

Read More

How U.S. Conservatives Conjured the Jesus of Their Dreams

…d anti-Black racism that have long marked white Christian nationalism. Because of the way religion works, there’s not the slightest chance that white nationalist True Believers will ever let go of their Republican Jesus, let alone their fictive idea that the country was founded by Christians who intended to create a Christian country. It does no one any good to mock them, but it will do all of us a great deal of good to use our votes and our voice…

Read More

Mormon “Martin Luther” Causes Stir by Uploading LDS Church Handbook of Instructions to Internet

…nto two giant PDF files and put them on the internet. For just anyone. For free. A few hours later, a fully-searchable edition of the CHI started to make the digital rounds. And by Friday, much to our astonishment, the LDS Church published the entire second volume on its own website. (The first volume remains officially restricted to lay clerical leaders.) The buzz among bloggers and web-journalists quickly converged around changes to the section…

Read More

Of Love and Lodging: Doctor Who Part VIII

…o it, thus far always killing them in the process. Craig himself was of no use to the program, as it turns out, because the ship responds to the pilot’s thoughts, and Craig was made unsuitable to be a pilot precisely because he didn’t want to leave the place where he is, and thus would not have caused the ship to launch. Eventually, in order to get the ship to shut down and disappear, Craig would have no choice but to put his hand on the ship’s co…

Read More

We Can’t Have Religious Freedom Without Reproductive Freedom

…under the First Amendment. We think it’s time for us all to seek religious freedom for reproductive freedom, and to recognize that persistent efforts to interfere in reproductive decisions is “an infringement of a natural right” in the sense the Virginia Statute warned. Of course, women didn’t share in this natural right at the time—but the right to believe differently than the rich and the powerful as codified in the Statute and the First Amendme…

Read More

Beverly Cleary, Author of the Ramona Series, Understood Children, Shoes, School, Words, and How it Feels to be Heard, or Misunderstood

…least not mean. (If there is a villain in the series, it’s Mrs. Kemp, who uses Ramona for free babysitting while being paid to babysit Ramona.) But Cleary’s stories are delicate enough to reveal the stakes. In Ramona the Brave, she describes a feeling that adult readers may recognize: “Ramona was startled, then embarrassed. Once more she felt as if she were standing aside, seeing herself as someone else, a strange first grader at the front of the…

Read More

The Mistaken Assumption Behind Employers’ “Right” to Not Cover Contraception

…d or how big the occasion (birthday, graduation, etc.). It makes sense because we all agree that the money doesn’t “belong” to the grandson.   For Locke, however, God gave the world to us in common, and we appropriate a part of it to ourselves for private use through our labor. (We sowed the fields; the harvest belongs to us.) In a similar manner, the Little Red Hen eats the bread. Paternalism enters the picture when those who receive don’t partic…

Read More

First Gay Bishop? Give Me a Break

…Plan” campaign. Alston said he hopes to organize 500 community screenings between now and the film’s official release in the fall. Robinson says he has found that nothing works better to change hearts and minds than LGBT people telling their own stories—or allies telling the story of someone they love, such as a child, aunt or uncle, or friend. He recalls making a too-flippant comment at some event asking how straight white men could “get it” in…

Read More

Despising the Holidays: When Christians Led the ‘War on Christmas’

…turn to Britain with Charles II – countrymen across the Atlantic in Massachusetts and Connecticut made the celebration of Christmas punishable by a five shilling fine. The contemporary Christian Right often claims that the New England Puritans are their intellectual ancestors, but this is willfully misreading the historical record as surely as creationists misread biological evidence. Contemporary American fundamentalism, from its pre-millennial d…

Read More