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Are Tea Partiers Pro-Gay and Pro-Choice?

By Sarah Posner

…t the majority of tea partiers believe Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided. As Ruy Teixeira showed in this further dissection of the poll: Findings from a recent New York Times/CBS News poll make this point very clearly. The poll finds that the general public remains stalwart in its support for the Roe v. Wade decision establishing the right to obtain a legal abortion: 58 percent say this decision was a good thing, compared to just 34 percent who say…

Tea Party Rhetoric: Literal Slavery Not So Bad

By Julie Ingersoll

…tances acceptable. This worldview (like his discussion of the three-fifths rule, which minimizes the rule’s dehumanization of slaves) diminishes the dehumanization of slavery in general by explicitly arguing that God condones it in certain circumstances. Both Rushdoony and McDowell assert that biblical slavery is either enforced on prisoners of war who would otherwise be killed or it is “voluntary.” They say that voluntary slaves, or indentured se…

Ponzi Schemes, Treason, and Cervixes

By Sarah Posner

…ts consume. Tonight, Bachmann hit hard back at Perry, not only over the intrusion of a government-ordered vaccine for “innocent little 12 year-old girls,” but because Perry had done the bidding of pharmaceutical industry cronies who had contributed to his campaign and profited from the sale of the vaccine. This was one of Bachmann’s best debate moments, where she could simultaneously look like she was (1) defending “parental rights,” a big issue…

Who’s Afraid of Sacred Soccer?

By Gary Laderman

…remain trapped in the same old patterns of thought that seek to divide the world into black and white, true and false, right and wrong, without paying sufficient attention to how muddled reality—and what counts as sacred—is for most of us. And, even more frightening to some, is that God really is irrelevant in the religious equation for a growing number of people. An atheist soccer fan can be religious, just as an evangelical Protestant soccer fan…

Family Research Council is Attacked—Tony Perkins is Quick to Blame SPLC

By Evan Derkacz

…erkins keeps his mouth shut. I don’t see him criticizing that speech. The truth is, you can’t pick and choose what kind of rhetoric to condemn. Why a person commits an act of violence like this one is an incredibly complex question to answer—and it may well have to do with rhetoric. Language most certainly does have power (on that score, the FRC isn’t wrong). Unfortunately for Perkins and the FRC, attempts to draw any equivalency between the hatef…

Obama’s Wrong Answer on Leno

By Sarah Posner

…Women are capable of making these decisions… for politicians to want to intrude on this stuff is a huge problem.” Of course that’s a huge problem, but isn’t there another huge problem: that Mourdock thinks that because he believes he knows what divine intentions are, that his religious views get to dictate policy? Wouldn’t it be just as problematic if Mourdock were a female candidate? Mitt Romney is refusing to distance himself from Mourdock, beca…

C’mon, Joel, Swerve a Little Bit

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

Poor Joel Osteen. I’m not sure why he keeps going on national news and talk shows when he knows that, inevitably, he’ll get cornered on the gay question. It happened to him again when he appeared on CNN this week with Soledad O’Brien and a panel of guests including Deepak Chopra and Richard Socarides, an openly gay Democratic strategist. Osteen offered his signature pained full-toothed smile as he explained, again, that homosexuality is like lyin…

DNC Platform, Thy Name is Esther

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…hout ever mentioning God at all, Esther thwarts the male dominated power structure of her world and offers hope and security to the minority Jewish population. I bring this up because, as Peter Montgomery has noted here this afternoon, there are a lot of right-wingers, like Bill Donahue of the Catholic League, complaining that the Democratic Party Platform does not mention God. Why should anyone be surprised that the mere mention of the word “God”…

Why Don’t Muslims Condemn Terrorism?

By Hussein Rashid

…ase the Mizrahi from collective Jewish memory. The fact that almost 90% of worldwide Jewry lived under Muslim rule for near a millennium must be ignored by both sides. Violence against communities of Jews is portrayed against violence against the Jewish Community. Muslims forget the contributions of figures like Samuel HaNagid and Ibn Killis. If there was a divine command to kill all Jews, it seems that waiting 1400 years and operating from a posi…

Left, Behind on Obama’s Warren Strategy

By Nick Street

…bama’s defense after the scandal around Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich erupted; Pat Robertson had high praise for Obama in a recent interview with CNN; and when his antigay remarks began to unsettle religious moderates, Rick Warren felt compelled to make a pilgrimage to West Hollywood for a gays-are-people-too photo-op. When a powerful political ally begins to play your opponents like a fiddle, you’re a fool to complain that he’s not letting yo…