Religion Dispatches
…us from the military: ”I would tell them to serve anyway,” [Sergeant First Class Benjamin] Ratcliff replied. “If all men of courage and men that had a moral compass were to leave the military, then we wouldn’t have a military. There would be nobody left to serve and protect. So I don’t really—I would serve regardless of what comes out of Washington.” But, not letting facts get in the way of a good scare, Perkins – faced with a Democratic commitmen…
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…Family. “Ugandans are not concerned about the finer points of the American class system,” according to Sharlet. “They look at fanatics such as Lively, or a politician such as Inhofe, and they see the same thing: a smiling white man come to preach moral ‘purity’ as a path out of poverty.” Establishing the right connections to American politicians and religious leaders is a lucrative business in Uganda. There have been an influx of faith-based NGOs…
Read More…s, what Soulforce founder Mel White calls, “God’s chain of command.” In my book, Bulletproof Faith, I quote White from an interview I did with him on this topic. For conservative Christians, he said, the universe falls apart if this chain of command is broken. “God created the order from God to Jesus, from Jesus to men, from men to their wives, from wives to their children. So men play a critical role in bridging the gap between the deity and the…
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…uctionist belief that the Fed is unbiblical. From the safe confines of Facebook, Palin provoked a sparring match with Wall Street Journal reporter Sudeep Reddy, a sign of the disconnect between a Republican Party beholden to Tea Party economic rhetoric and the financial world’s paper of record. Palin’s view, Reddy concluded, “is not supported by the facts.” For the former Alaska governor’s audience, though, her attack on the Fed is adequate—shall…
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…the King James Bible was excluded from the curriculum, “non-sectarian” textbooks and morals education in public schools would for decades be strikingly “pan-Protestant,” geared to rooting out “sectarian” immigrant religious identity. But even if Hughes was dedicated to American religious freedom, he certainly wasn’t dedicated to the freedom of Catholics within the church. Prior to his battle over the schools, Hughes spearheaded the destruction of…
Read More…ld have been informing its constituents about the true nature of these candidates. Sure, they may give gay people a tax cut, but they’ll work to ensure that they remain second-class citizens in every other aspect of life. That should give any gay person who voted Republican in the past election pause….
Read More…e group of citizens and denied them a basic right. “California has taken a class of citizens and put them in a separate category; that is an act of discrimination and there is no doubt that it is discrimination and there is no doubt that it does great harm. Can it be justified under any standard of constitutional analysis? I argue it cannot be justified at the lowest standard of constitutional analysis,” he said. In short, Olson argued, Prop 8 doe…
Read More…t time I’ve been on a plane where 50% of the seats are business- and first-class. Sorta gives you an idea who comes to the Kingdom, among Muslims and non-Muslims alike: big business. Okay, so the flight is not exclusive to hajjis, but when we arrive they announce for us hajjis to remain on the plane and disembark last. Let the other passengers, many whom will transfer to domestic flights, get off first. Well, if the rest of us are hajjis, we don’t…
Read More…aws would protect any religious persecution, since religion is a protected class under federal discrimination statutes. On the demagoguery side of the spectrum comes Buddy Smith, Executive Vice President of the American Family Association who asserted that kids can condemn homosexuality without being a bully: ”Activist adults essentially are saying that American parents who want their kids to avoid high risk homosexual sex acts and remain abstinen…
Read More…d their proxies, no County funds are being directed into the defense of Proposition 8. But with recent polling showing that a majority of Latino Catholics now support marriage equality (as we’ve reported here at RD), one wonders whether the working-class (and deeply unemployed) Latino majority of Imperial County is setting the moral agenda or whether they’re being played by a highly motivated set of outsiders with no longterm interest in the welfa…
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