Religion Dispatches
…te-sponsored wickedness and the canons of true politeness do not ban their use. When you use policy (rather than a gun) to kill innocent people, it’s called murder. When you ruin people by stripping them and their children of basic health care, that constitutes morally criminal assault. And make no mistake, when you boycott the inauguration (and promise resistance to) a presidency pre-announced as a compound of bigotry, misogyny, and the shredding…
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…an ever: with multiple indictment trials looming, returning to the White House is the only surefire way to avoid jail time. In order to get there, however, he must a) lock up the nomination, and b) defuse the massive public response to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, which has propelled Democrats to victory even in deep-red states. He is betting on his Veterans Day comments being incendiary enough to achieve both aims. On one level, Trump’s comments…
Read More…ng the line” (and fomenting outrage among base conservatives about Obama’s use of executive order—never mind the Bush administration’s use of the same) is meant to distract from the fact that the GOP does not have a viable, reasonable strategy for addressing the broken immigration system in a way that balances even the interests of its own stakeholders. Yes, immigration is one of those big-time challenges that requires an everyone-at-the-table s…
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…” (through his work with the United Nations in the first Gulf War). This caused few of Robertson’s neoconservative allies to break with him in any decisive way—although one former neocon, Michael Lind, denounced him in a major exposé in the New York Review of Books. Moral of the story: Although this item overlaps with the one just considered—Robertson as central to the Republican coalition—I rank it separately and higher because anti-Robertsonite…
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…ing pundits who otherwise couldn’t give a damn about the life of faith because it gives them the opportunity to wax on about how the Democrats are doing everything wrong. Likewise, what the Biden VP campaign used to refer to as the “bedwetter caucus,” otherwise known as anonymous “senior Democratic strategists” have been out fretting about Dems taking on Barrett’s faith, among other things. All of this is quite ridiculous. Like any sane political…
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…ople have it. You have to have it for your heart, for your soul.” Why? Because “Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country and I truly believe that we have to bring them back and bring them back fast. . . that’s why our country is going haywire, because we have lost religion in our country.” The “Christians are under siege” language is old hat, but embedded within this rhetoric is a newer development. Trump never re…
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…eracy. On social media, this conspiracy theory spread, along with frequent use of the images of the Berkeley house with the Pride/weed flag and school bus (which displayed a sign about the psychoactive substance ibogaine as a “natural addiction treatment”), to claim DePape is both gay and left-wing, and that the attack on Pelosi was therefore not perpetrated by anyone on the Right. What’s formed is essentially a conspiracy theory about a conspirac…
Read More…Others worry that the outcome is far from clear, and that the problematic use of water-boarding and other interrogation techniques to which these men were subjected will put the Guantanamo Bay facility on trial every bit as much as the alleged 9/11 organizers will be. I myself worry that the decision to seek the death penalty in these cases will only ensure that the proceedings and the cycle of appeals drag on for years longer than they would oth…
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…ple. We know that Thanksgiving is a holiday forged from the fires Puritans used to burn the victims of their war against the Pequod Indians in Massachusetts in 1637. We cringe when millions of children in thousands of schools across America use this month to re-create the First Thanksgiving, crafting hats and feathers out of construction paper. We also know that this is not the only time of the year they will eat “Indian foods.” Americans througho…
Read More…n said, “Hi. I’m so and so, and I’m a lesbian.” Then she paused. “Well, I used to be a lesbian,” she added, “but my partner had a sex-change operation, so now I’m not exactly sure what I am.” And that was just the beginning. Next there was a newspaper article about women Olympic athletes being eliminated from competition because tests revealed that they were genetically male, something about which they themselves hadn’t a clue. Then there was Suz…
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