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Liberals Enabled Bishops in Contraception Battle

By Sarah Posner

…being anti-contraception zealots. Inevitably, though, the developing inside-the-beltway non-wisdom is that Obama demonstrated, once again, that he is insensitive to religion and is clueless about handling issues involving the intersection of faith and politics. (For examples, see these pieces in The Hill and Politico.) While Marcotte is right that the whole episode exposed the Republicans’ dark-ages zealotry, the Democratic pundits and strategists…

Living to See the Day: Civil Rights Leaders and Obama

By Michael A. Elliott

…aign produced the ad that called Obama “The One” and used footage of Heston-cum-Moses parting the Red Sea. Belittling the beliefs that others hold dearly is always bad politics. In this case, though, this kind of taunting felt even more dangerous to me, as though McCain’s followers were thumbing their nose at something better left undisturbed. King famously described the moral universe as a long arc that bends toward justice. He might have added t…

Mormon Statement on Feminism is Relevant and Timely… But Only by Coincidence

By Holly Welker

…ight not seem controversial or surprising. But feminism—along with the “gay-lesbian movement” and questions from “so-called scholars or intellectuals”—were singled out by Elder Boyd K. Packer in his 1993 “Talk to the All-Church Coordinating Council” as especially dangerous to the church precisely because the issues they raise matter to Latter-day Saints, who may feel that “the Church somehow is doing something wrong to members or that the Church i…

Uganda’s Radical Anti-Gay Measure and the American Religious Right

By Michelle Goldberg

…Surely, strong measures are necessary to combat something so sinister! In March, Lively, along with Don Schmierer and the Ugandan anti-gay activist Stephen Langa, held a “Seminar on Exposing the Homosexual Agenda” in Uganda’s capital. PRA’s website contains video and text excerpts from the event. “The gay movement is an evil institution that’s goal is to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity in whic…

Texas Scold ‘Em: Conservative Christians Go on Offensive in Critical Textbook Review

By Lauri Lebo

…ray its members as a “bunch of anti-Christian bigots.” That’s because right-wing fundamentalist members of the Board of Education want to ignore the committee’s curriculum standards in an attempt to insert dubious stories and language that promotes the idea that America was founded as a “Christian nation. Liberty Counsel is an evangelical Christian advocacy organization that champions issues that break down the barrier of separation of church and…

Your Hatred Will Make Me Famous

By Joseph Laycock

…th a teenage girl who ran away in order to elope with him. The mother of 16-year-old Paige Marie Brewer has stated that Sharkey “brainwashed” her daughter, though Sharkey claimed he was rescuing her from an abusive home and even sent a letter to Minnesota Child Protective Services describing Paige’s alleged abuse. Eventually, Paige was taken from Sharkey and into police custody. However, in March when Sharkey appeared in Tampa, Florida, to announc…

Faith-Based Initiatives in the Obama Administration?

By Bill Berkowitz

…y too big for government to solve alone,” Obama said. “We need an all-hands-on-deck approach.” A few weeks after President Bush took office in 2001, he issued an executive order creating the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. One initiative’s major goal was the shrinking of government by farming out social safety net services to religious organizations, including many conservative Christian groups. It was also geared towa…

A Furious Sadness: Conversation with Christian Protester of Nazi-Saluting Trump Supporter

By Daniel Schultz

…lex terrain of coping with and fighting against the Trump movement. In mid-March, a Trump rally at the University of Illinois-Chicago was disrupted by protestors, forcing its cancellation. As supporters left the arena through a ring of demonstrators, an angry and chaotic scene played out, resulting in an iconic photo of a Trump fan named Birgitt Peterson giving a Nazi salute. Both she and her husband insisted that they were responding to protester…

A Palin Pastor Primer

By Esther Kaplan

…me Court ruling that ordered the state to provide the same benefits to same-sex partners as to heterosexual couples. Nor, as Gay City News point out, has she tried yet to advance legislation forcing the teaching of creationism in schools or eliminating standard sex ed in favor of abstinence-only. Then again, she’s only been in office for 20 months. Most troubling are two more telling incidents: One has now been widely discussed: In 1996 Palin appr…

Prayer vs. Medicine in the Courts

By Shawn Francis Peters

…ht proceed slightly differently in the legal arena. On Easter Sunday, an 11-year-old girl named Kara Neumann died from diabetic ketoacidosis. Treatments of insulin almost certainly would have controlled the ailment, but Kara’s parents (whose beliefs about physical healing were shaped in part by a Florida-based online ministry) chose to treat her with prayer in lieu of medical science. Dale and Leilani Neumann later told police that their daughter…