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A Queer Atheist In the Heart of Mormon Country

…t hope that the act of encounter with someone who is unfamiliar will bring new ways of thinking to light. After all, support for marriage equality more than doubles among people who know a gay person. The Pew Research Center reports that of the 14% of Americans who went from opposing to supporting gay marriage in the last decade, 37% (the largest category) did so because of “friends/family/acquaintances who are gay/lesbian.” The second largest cat…

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The Threat to Democracy Runs Deep, But Mathematics Could Address the Abominable State of Representation and Voting

…nt republic of Yugoslavia, a country whose socialist-era days were clearly numbered. Three ethnic parties, representing Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs, swept the election and formed the new seven-member presidency. The dream of Bosnia as a multicultural, multiethnic model of tolerance and coexistence for the rest of Yugoslavia—and Europe—had started to unravel. On June 25, 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia. A bri…

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Speaking with Palestinian-American Republican Who Confronted GOP at Debate

…ack to that thing he calls history, telling the audience that “prior to the 1970s” Palestinians were actually Arabs, which is an amusing bit of diversionary hogwash, since a political Palestinian identity has been dated well back to the 19th century, and anyway Palestinians are still Arabs. Both candidates shifted Hassan’s question in their own special way; that Republicans might be Arabs and even Palestinians seemed too much of a contradiction fo…

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Catholic Church is Lucky it’s Just Same-Sex Marriage

…lity and gender. One night this spring I came home late to switch on a PBS news segment about kids as young as 3 years old announcing that they were not the sex they seemed to be. Then there was “S/He,” a feature article in New York magazine, on the challenges presented to the parents of such children, including whether or not to allow them to use drugs to block the onset of puberty even before they transition to the opposite gender as teens.  At…

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How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture

…m in England nonetheless benefitted from America’s sudden interest in this newly public faith. Indeed, Bebbington’s famed four-part description of evangelicalism as bibliocentric, crucicentric, conversionist, and activist has become so widely regarded that the National Association of Evangelicals has adopted it as the preferred description of its members. The essays that make up Part I of Evangelicals evoke this authorized evangelical historiograp…

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The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

…ness. The Confederacy wasn’t dissolved, it was sublimated The Compromise of 1877 brought white, anti-Black militia culture into the fold of the postbellum state. Confederate generals and other violent Southern Democrats agreed to accept Republican Rutherford B. Hayes’ victory in the 1876 election so long as the federal troops were removed from the South. After the federal withdrawal, conservatives quickly marshaled their racist street and electora…

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And What of the Non-Jewish Jews?

…ancestry generations ago, a Jewish spouse, Jewish friends etc. In terms of numbers, Jews by religion or no religion make up 2.2% of the U.S. population, but if you add “People with a Jewish affinity” it rises to 2.7%, so that this category of people who are not considered Jews by the Jewish community but identify as Jews is nearly 25% of the Jews by religion or no religion, those we conventionally call “Jews.” The fact that there are so many Ameri…

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LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

…ave asserted the Christianity of Mormon belief for national audiences, the number one reaction has come from Christians who seek to correct my understanding of my faith and remind me that Mormons are not, in their eyes, Christians. Some assert that they’ll be praying for my mistaken soul (and the soul of my Jewish husband too). Others seek to engage in a friendlier conversational exchange about whether Mormons profess the Nicene Creed. (We do not…

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The Faith Outreach Canard

…ent, Sapp claims the following: Compared to ’06, Democrats nationally saw a 14 point drop in White Protestant support, 14 point drop with White evangelicals, and a whopping 20 point decline with Catholics. But there are two major problems with this argument: first, it’s factually inaccurate — the numbers are simply wrong. While Democrats experienced significant losses compared to the last mid-term election in 2006, which was a good year for Democr…

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New Study Touts Success of “Praying Away the Gay”

…ouse, and his colleague, Rob Tisinai, gives a better breakdown of what the numbers really mean—and it isn’t a rousing success story about “change.” “Out of 98 highly-motivated subjects, the authors found that a small, unspecified number can use prayer and counseling to shut down their sexual feelings or become a bit more bi. And possibly none who turned straight.” Even the researchers call their conclusions “overly optimistic.” “These results do n…

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