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The Threat to Democracy Runs Deep, But Mathematics Could Address the Abominable State of Representation and Voting

By Ismar Volić

…se should be increased so that each of its members represents a manageable number of constituents. These are all basic structural changes. No politics, no partisanship, just plain math. The parallels between Bosnia and the US exhaust themselves quickly—after all, I’m comparing a country of 3 million to the world’s most dominant and domineering superpower—but the political paralysis shored up by faulty mechanisms of democracy is shared. While a dif…

Supreme Court Rules Religion is Special… This Time

By Katherine Stewart

…bilitation service and a faith-based one, right? Except that, as per the Hosanna-Tabor ruling, the religious one now has the right to discriminate against its own employees. So which is it? Is religion something special? Or is it like every other activity? So far as America’s founders were concerned, religion certainly is special. This is why the First Amendment grants us both the right to free speech and the right to the free exercise of religion…

Speaking with Palestinian-American Republican Who Confronted GOP at Debate

By Haroon Moghul

…among the Palestinian population is about the same as the percentage of African Americans in the U.S.A. For a party so concerned with America’s Christian identity, Romney and Gingrich’s dismissal of the Palestinians is part of their broader disinterest in the Muslim world, and its diversities and differences. Namely, most Muslims aren’t Arabs, and most Arab Americans are Christians. You read that correctly. This is important because it’s a tight…

Turn On The News: This Isn’t a Split, It’s a Tiny Sliver of Conservatives Walking Out the Door — Introducing A New Media Criticism Column

By Daniel Schultz

…r words, a better headline would have been “95.7% of Reformed Church in America churches remain.” This isn’t a split, it’s a very small segment of the church body walking out. (Ask yourself how you’d feel if you asked to “split” dessert and your companion kept 95.7% of it.) It’s possible this is part of a larger trend. A number of paragraphs down there’s mention of a long-delayed vote on the future of the denomination, which might lend credibility…

To Get Through This Time We’ll Have to Shred the ‘Racial Contract’ and Choose Solidarity Over Sacrifice

By Christophe D Ringer

…t put the nation on edge represents the rider to the racial contract. Historically, American cities do not burn as the direct result of profound disparities in education, housing, health, unemployment, incarceration, or a myriad of other racial injustices. Rather, the indignity of experiencing violence or death by those sworn to protect us is often a breaking point. In his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Hearing on Police Reform, la…

New Pope Accused of Conspiring in Kidnapping

By Nicole Greenfield

…Bergoglio noted disapprovingly in a 2007 speech. Meanwhile, an astounding number of women in Argentina, women without access to or education about contraception, die annually as victims of botched abortion procedures carried out in secret. If we do dig a little deeper into Bergoglio’s past, we find that he was accused of participating in one of the numerous human rights violations committed during Argentina’s Dirty War (which ended up resulting…

New Poll Reveals That Anti-Trans Rhetoric isn’t Just Affecting Republicans and White Evangelicals

By Chrissy Stroop

…y encouraging, but there are a few exceptions. For example, only 34% of Americans believe that it is never appropriate to teach in public schools that some Americans are transgender. This and similar figures regarding feelings about same-sex relationships—for which there is very little difference between those who are parents and those who aren’t—could be useful for fighting against the well-organized efforts of minority control over school librar…

The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

By Yannick Marshall

…ons of the colony despite promising to uphold newly-won civil rights for African Americans as part of the “Compromise.” Thus the lie that “we aren’t racist” proved useful in the furtherance of the white nationalist cause and anti-Black violence as far back as 1877. Men, who only a decade earlier wore the uniform of the Confederacy to fight to preserve the traditional power relationship between white men’s boots and Black necks, removed their steel…

LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…experience suggests that the dominant usage of the term “Christian” in American discourse is not as a descriptor of the way an individual regards Jesus Christ, but as a political and social term used to distinguish sanctioned branches of Christianity and withhold approval from others, often in the service of institutional and political agendas. But none of this political and institutional debate changes the immense role Jesus Christ plays in the…

Neuroscience Says Evil is “Over”: Not So Fast…

By Paul Wallace

…e doing? On what do they base their arguments? To what are they paying obeisance? Science, or at least something that goes by that name. What loyal opposition! They have fully agreed to play at science’s ballpark, to speak the language of science, to identify truth with factuality. The reason creationists are so upset about evolution is because science works and they know it. They’re awed by it, over-awed perhaps, and they feel the heat. They feel…