…orhood, one Hasidic man who wouldn’t give his name said that blaming dress code for the removal of the bikes lane “is just bullshit.” He is disappointed with how his people have been portrayed in news reports about this issue and insists that safety was a genuine concern. That’s what nearly everybody walking up and down Hasidic Bedford in daytime says as well. When asked directly about it, they concede that they believe many cyclists to be inappro…
…particularly irks Texas Freedom Network’s Dan Quinn. “This is not a debate between left and right,” Quinn said. “This is a debate between radicalism and the mainstream.” “What they’ve done is the same thing they did with the science experts,” Quinn added. “They’ve packed the panel with ideologues whose politics they agree with. It’s three ideologues and three mainstream academics. But they’ve moved the debate so far to the right that they make it…
…shrouded in secrecy, came into the spotlight after Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code hit the New York Times bestseller list. The novel suggested that the women in Opus Dei are “forced to clean the men’s residence halls for no pay,” and remarked upon the broad subjugation of women in the order. And while the novel is fictional, the alleged “misconceptions” that arose in the fallout of the media attention surrounding The DaVinci Code provided much of the…
By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…politics is almost irresistible.” Indeed, he succumbs, dividing the world between good liberals and “tacky” conservatives, the distinguished and the sophomoric. When confronted by evidence that these categories are not so hard and fast as his inner social scientist would like, he falls back on a rhetoric that constructs a reasonable middle by dismissing all to its left and its right as paranoid. For Randy, the center always holds. But the center…
…des, but exploded in 2003 with the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code which, more than anything, showcases Brown’s muddled if provocative incorporation of the Gnostic worldview into the novel. Fans of The Da Vinci Code don’t need to go out and purchase Robinson’s translation, they can simply read the Gnostic texts online at the Gnosis Archive. Or, if they’re interested in other early contenders for New Testament inclusion—the Gospel of P…
…lity, which is illegal on the island,” reports AFP. Sri Lanka’s 1883 penal code, a legacy of its British colonial rulers, makes sex between men punishable by 12 years in jail, although the law is rarely enforced. Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne said the cabinet had refused to endorse a provision in a proposed human rights plan that would have undermined the code. “There was a provision referring to the sexual orientation of individuals and we cl…
…s a pair) has produced new attention in LDS communities to how those dress code boundaries are enforced and who bears the brunt of the enforcement. Beginning in November, the BYU-Idaho testing center (responsible for administering academic examinations for many classes, especially large General Education courses) started interpreting and enforcing the school’s dress and grooming standards as a ban on “skinny jeans.” A flyer was posted by universit…
…law. And we do not share the kind of moral code that could exact penalties between those of the state and those of the employer or marketplace. This is a strange thing about our moment in history. The story of Oedipus reminds us that banishment and ostracism were once standard practices for protecting a community from the danger and rupture implicit in certain kinds of crimes. Early Christians who lapsed from their moral code in particularly serio…
…lamist organizations to restructure the country’s relatively secular legal code.: If the court revises the law to forbid casual sex, gay sexual relations would become illegal for the first time in Indonesian history, and straight unmarried couples could face prosecution. The Family Love Alliance, a conservative Islamist advocacy organization, petitioned the Constitutional Court to broaden existing Indonesian law, which makes adultery illegal but d…
…prosecutions of people under anti-gay laws, a step they called “an act of betrayal on the part of those in power to sell our country to foreign practices and tendencies contrary to the will of God because of money.” Indonesia: Incidents of ‘brazen homophobia’ on rise as conservatives seek to tighten sex laws Human Rights Watch reports on efforts by lawmakers to pass new legislation making sex outside marriage punishable by up to five years in jai…
