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Pawlenty Stars in American Civil Religion: The Movie

By Michael J. Altman

…dogs, and fire hoses. He gives us a quaint picture of horses and wagons but no images of American Indian removal, Indian wars, and shrinking reservations. He gives us the fall of the Berlin Wall but not McCarthyism. It’s an ad for a book (a book that isn’t selling that well, apparently) and not a history lesson. But like history, every national politician offers American voters a narrative of who they are and what America means. Sometimes bad hi…

“Living in Favor, Abundance, and Joy” (Unless You’re Gay)

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…. It’s a difficult issue. I don’t understand all the answers. I just come back to what I read in the scriptures. I can’t ignore that. I don’t know that I understand it all, but I come back to this, we’re for people. It’s not going to do any good to bash people and say you’re second class. We have gay people in our church. We have people from different faiths. It’s a hard issue and I don’t know that I fully understand it. I’m glad to see Osteen a…

Martin Luther King: Libertarian and Anti-Abortion Social Conservative

By Paul Harvey

…womb, at which point, as Martin Luther King pointed out, they might, given class or racial barriers from birth, very well be left without a bootstrap to pull themselves up by. King’s niece, Alveda King, who appeared at last year’s Glenn Beck rally on the anniversary of the March on Washington, has endorsed the use of her uncle’s name, insisting that today he would be called a “social conservative.” In fact, King strongly supported Planned Parentho…

Updated with Audio: Secular Good, Muslim Bad: Unveiling Tunisia’s Revolution

By Haroon Moghul

…; in Turkey, some who refused to change their clothes were executed). In a number of Arab and Muslim states, you can go to the beach, get a drink, skip prayers, and walk around with your hair down. You just can’t expect that your vote will matter. Tonight, in one less country, it seems that may no longer be the case. That government was overbearing, it overreached, and now, it seems to be over. Let us pay less attention to the visibility of their…

Mao, Meet Confucius: China’s Religious Revolution

By Kwok Pui-lan

…eijing’s relation with the Vatican remains tenuous. In his controversial book, China’s Best Actor Wen Jiabao, China’s most famous Christian author and dissident Yu Jie mocks the popular Chinese Premier as paternalistic and a “puppet” for the hard-nosed Chinese Communist Party. His books have been banned in China since 2004. Yu converted to Christianity after he was disillusioned by the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, and had openly criticized the su…

Not Cause, But Effect: Jared Loughner and Tea Party Rhetoric

By Finbarr Curtis

…. As Loughner explains, algebra is free. Charging a student for an algebra class amounts to selling a free product and is a scam. If the world worked properly, grammar and currency would convey real value without distortion. But because of government practices of mind control and currency fraud, they do not. As a way out of these misrepresentations, individuals need to learn to dream, a practice that he labels “conscience dreaming.” This dreaming…

Romania’s “Witch Tax”: Magic Meets Bureaucracy

By Joseph Laycock

…ecause they brought us into it.” The United States is also home to a large class of fortune-tellers, who quietly pay their taxes. Why is Romania different? A global recession exasperated the situation in Romania. However, the heart of the matter appears to be not money but respect. The witches are primarily Roma—an ethnic group that long been disenfranchised and persecuted by governments throughout Europe. For witches like Buzea, the tax is simply…

Teacher Who Burned Cross into Student’s Arm Fired

By Lauri Lebo

…assault on a student. The litany of Freshwater’s religious activity in the classroom goes back more than a decade and includes him displaying posters of the Ten Commandments and bible versus and teaching students in science class that evolution is a lie. After the parents of Zachary Dennis complained to the district about the burn on their son’s arm way back in December 2007, the district began an investigation, in which Freshwater’s religious pro…

What Does Anti-Christian Even Mean?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…has come out with his top ten “Anti-Christian Acts of 2010.” Coming it at number one on the hit parade is the passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that ended employment discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans. Cass warns that the new law “would force ministries to hire people who oppose the beliefs or values of the organization.” That might be something to worry about if it were true, but it’s n…

Conservatives Stand Together for Anti-Gay Bigotry

By Sarah Posner

…tting the “attempt to. . . enshrine homosexual behavior as some protected class.” Potok emphasized that the SPLC’s decision to place a group on the list is not about criminality or violence, but is based on whether the groups in question “demonize other groups with falsehoods” or conspiracy theories. FRC, he added, has associated gay men with pedophilia, a known falsehood. TPM’s Evan McMorris-Santoro reported that the SPLC sees little difference…