Search for "breaking news today cleantalkorg2.ru Stories and Videos on News news usa Breaking News World News Politics Breaking News bbc news"

“Religious Freedom” and the Conservative Quest for Absolute Truth

By Ira Chernus

…thout end, whose outcome should never be predictable. A claim to absolute truth—any absolute truth—stops the process of democracy. That’s the great issue lurking beneath the specifics of the latest contraception controversy. Though the legal fine points and political cost-benefit calculations of that controversy deserve the discussion they’re getting, it’s a tragedy to ignore, yet again, the essential issue that is at stake whenever religion…

Rebuilding the Wall of Separation: A Progressive Discussion on Church & State

By Bruce Ledewitz

…do that, even if solely from among other religious believers. Theocracy is rule by clerics. Democracy is rule by majority. Democracy does not depend upon a secular motivation. Incidentally, Frederick’s defense of President Obama’s call to believers to translate their religious concerns into nonreligious language lends support to my original Constitutional proposal. I called for government and nonbelievers to perform this same operation of translat…

Lincoln, Clinton, and Trump: From Strategy to Spin to Straight-Up Bullshit

By Martin Jay

…on conform, by and large, to this model whenever they varnish or warp the truth. Trump seems to be different. It is not clear that he deliberately dissembles in order to persuade someone else of what he knows is not the case. On many occasions, he gives no indications whatsoever, even after the dubiousness of his claims are unmasked, of having actually harbored a private belief which is then contradicted by his public statements. For example, he s…

World Meeting of Families Again Positions Queer Catholics as Children

By Ashley O'Mara

…opportunities to speak for ourselves was even more visible at the previous World Meeting of Families in 2015, when professed celibate Ron Belgau was the only queer Catholic to speak, and he shared the podium with his mother. The visual effect of a forty-year-old gay man deferring to the experiences and expectations of his mother perfectly encapsulates the Vatican’s approach to queer Catholics. Instead of speaking as his own person, Belgau effectiv…

Religious Leaders Pressure Congress To Support Religious Discrimination

By Sarah Posner

…overnment-funded job opportunities on the basis of religion.” Lynn told me today, “this whole thing driven by the Conference of Catholic Bishops and World Vision, which have sucked up a vast amount of federal dollars and want to keep every one of them. The real problem is the audacity of these groups to suggest that if somehow they didn’t get the money because of their discriminatory hiring practices, the poor would be left hopeless. There are doz…

Anti-LGBT Culture Warriors On The March; More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…it. A social media campaign using the hashtag #WeNeedToTalk to promote the World Youth Forum being held in Egypt November 4-10 was hijacked by activists to draw attention to the country’s crackdown on LGBT people and on civil society in general: The conference’s organizers had hoped the hashtag would encourage interaction among the participants ahead of the forum and promote Egypt as a safe tourist destination. Instead, the activists posted images…

Why Don’t Republicans Want to Allow Pastors to Endorse from Pulpit?

By Daniel Silliman

…grown. As Alan Noble wrote last summer, American evangelicals are now fed stories of persecution and attacks on religious liberty so consistently they sometimes struggle to distinguish fact from fiction. There are theological reasons that evangelicals and other Christians sometimes aspire to be oppressed, as Noble outlines. And there are political reasons that several “major conservative political pundits and organizations have made a name for th…

How a Bill O’Reilly Bestseller Helps Explain the Anti-Semitism Behind the Poway Shooting

By Tony Keddie

…ple-based religion of the southern region of Judea (the area surrounding Jerusalem). In other words, in this book Jews like Jesus and his followers (read: Christians) are good conservatives, whereas Jews like the Herodian kings, priests, and Pharisees (read: Jews) are bad money-loving liberals who control Big Government. The authors take this geographical distinction even further by describing the bodily appearance of Galileans as different from o…

Pulitzer-Prize Winning Historian’s Latest Reveals the Problem with Today’s ‘Religious Freedom’

By Andrew L. Seidel

…of the moral autonomy of individuals, and that this recognition marks the true beginning of the liberal project.” In other words, the differences between belief and action and speech are important, but more so because they all show a founding desire to protect and foster individual freedom. Rakove’s writing shows, without openly proclaiming, that this nuance is sadly lacking in today’s conversations and Supreme Court opinions. Some scholars, in an…

Why Did an Antisemitic Christian Zionist Have the Chutzpah to Declare That He’d Be Leading a Holocaust March?

By Ben Lorber and Aidan Orly

…author, and head of influential Christian Zionist institutions like the Jerusalem-based Friends of Zion Museum and the Jerusalem Prayer Team, a global outreach network with 30 million followers on Facebook. Evans has maintained close relationships with generations of Israeli heads of state from Menachem Begin to Benjamin Netanyahu, and exerts influence within GOP circles in the U.S., recently serving as an Evangelical Advisor to former President…