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

By Chrissy Stroop

…ublic—even among progressive demographics. That, at least, is my grim takeaway from PRRI’s new report, “The Politics of Gender, Pronouns, and Public Education.” The overall positions of various demographics are mostly what you would expect them to be. The report singles out White evangelical Protestants multiple times as, unsurprisingly, America’s most singularly anti-trans demo. In 2021, for example, 86% of White evangelicals said there are only…

“One of Us”: Rick Santorum and the Politics of (Very Big) Family

By Kathryn Joyce

…claimed, “We win if we just keep having children, ’cause we’re going to outnumber them!”—a staple argument of the Quiverfull movement. Weeks earlier, Santorum had transformed this rhetoric into policy proposal at a South Carolina Fuddruckers appearance with the Duggars, where he argued that low birth rates and a declining American population (also longstanding concerns among the Quiverfull movement) should be fought by tripling the child tax deduc…

The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

By Yannick Marshall

…ge, is the privilege—which is to say the power—to deny racist intent and always be taken at one’s word. To always be able to clutch one’s pearls and appeal in Scarlett O’Hara’s mint julep-inflected tone, Dearest me, we never intended to… and be believed. And remain a symbol of beauty in the world no matter how many scars are on Prissy’s back. Preventing that ‘eureka moment’ Republican officials’ voter registration purges and restricting the possib…

LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…t Mormons would assent to about 90% of it.) These kind of encounters are always a strange experience for Mormons who authentically regard ourselves as followers of Jesus Christ. And without dismissing real theological distinctions between Mormonism and mainline Protestantism—and there are some—the Mormon experience suggests that the dominant usage of the term “Christian” in American discourse is not as a descriptor of the way an individual regards…

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

By Paul Wallace

…stion, we’d be in for a workout. Because “what science says” is limited in ways that are not easy to understand. Responsible scientists know this, and they are marked by their reticence on non-scientific issues. There are those, however, who insist that what science says is obvious. But they’re selling something, something like atheism or creationism or some other extra-scientific bill of goods. The real question is twofold: “What do scientists sa…

New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…lowing this flawed research up into the proof it needs that you can “pray away the gay.” Aside from the obviously flawed methodology and the laughably small sample size, the biggest problem with this study is that all of the “therapy” given to these 98 poor souls was religiously-based—and more specifically evangelical Christian. The power of religious belief to sway one’s behavior cannot be overstated. People have convinced themselves of all sorts…

The New Age Fantasy of a Celtic Church that Revered Nature and the Divine Feminine Never Existed — So What?

By Ed Simon

…ns are mythic—as with any religion, denomination, or sect—the mythic has always served a purpose: to generate usable history, helpful fiction. While Arnold J. Toynbee in the second volume of his landmark A Study of History describes an “abortive Far Western Christendom of the ‘Celtic Fringe,’” it’s more accurate to speak of an alternate Christianity, an idea more myth than reality. Today, the idealization of Celtic Christianity endures in any numb…

“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…e purpose, reflecting a sacred and beneficent design. Starting Over So, anyway, that’s where we are. The notion that pregnancy is not an illness draws, I daresay uneasily, from a number of sources. There’s the classical notion that a thing’s nature is derived from its purpose, and the purpose of female bodies is to bear children. There’s the persistent early modern fear that women, especially privileged white women, are becoming overcivilized and…

Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…tive interpretation. Multiply ambiguous, it is a strange concoction of any number of animal and human forms, as well as a sphinx; itself a hybrid monster. Moreover, the Chicago Picasso intimates both the Egyptian and Greek sphinxes—an amalgam of cultural styles. An ambiguous, almost inscrutable object, it is an enigmatic icon and the icon of an enigma; its very presence confronts the populace with a riddle. The riddle is not simply what the Chicag…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…is not a change in orientation; it is a different, religiously legitimated way of realizing it. A False Equivalence Finally, future reporting needs to include the social and political changes within which these reorientation stories are told. Many listeners rightly criticized NPR for creating the false impression of scientific and therapeutic equivalence between pro- and anti-conversion therapy camps. That impression was created in part because th…