Religion Dispatches
…half. There were still probably 80 empty seats, and it was clear that some number of attendees had free tickets. The largest financial supporter of the event was a local news/talk radio station and its representatives were the only media allowed in. As I arrived with my Religion Dispatches press badge they stopped me before I even got to the door. I chatted with an AP reporter and he said AP had been trying for weeks to gain media access—but that…
Read More…even marginalized among the “ex-gay” industry. By omitting this deeply relevant fact, the NPR story glosses over the true story here: those who become “ex-gay” are usually those who are making a living off of their new status as “cured” homosexuals. They are professional “ex-gays” who have their entire livelihoods bound up in maintaining their “ex-gay” status. One slip can be deadly to a career, as John Paulk discovered years ago after being caugh…
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…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…
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…ept an ‘abstracted’ science? And what does abstract science do for us? The number of nuclear bombs used by the West outweighs the number used by the entire planet. Muslims did not invent nuclear weapons, nor have they used them. (Let’s pray that stands.) When Saddam Hussein was our ally, he unleashed chemical weapons on Kurds at Halabja, the only confirmed instance of a Muslim regime using chemical weapons. Even considering the possibility of Assa…
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…uper Best Friends” in other episodes satirizing religion). If attention is flattery, the LDS Church should be pleased. Although the Church can claim only 14 million members (an exaggerated statistic that counts all baptisms and births, but not the actual number of churchgoers), representatives of the religion—and representations of it—have managed to become fixtures in popular culture. I don’t have a complete explanation for this, but I would poin…
Read More…e it, gay sex is completely titillating to heterosexuals, especially conservative Christian heterosexuals. They can’t stop thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had…
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…tunity to indoctrinate kids into his “socialist agenda” was swallowed by a number of conservative parents across the country. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that it’s unlikely that those who deliberately fuelled the outrage really thought he’d try to sell controversial policy ideas to school kids. Instead, it’s far more likely that part of their worry was precisely the fact that the speech was almost certainly going to be uncontroversial. So uncontroversi…
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…ee of interest in the February 9 webinar, for which 1500 people registered, 800 of whom attended. These are very large numbers for events of this nature, and part of the reason for releasing the report at this time is to “keep public attention on Christian nationalism.” While no particular next steps are immediately planned, Tyler expresses hope “that this will be a resource for the [US House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack], and for othe…
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…facts and not as the integral part of life and society they are. It’s the vacuum that fills the vast gap between the accelerating science and technology we are accumulating and ethical and spiritual, even practical, strategies for dealing with it. One of the tens of thousands of people estimated to employ the test by the end of the year spoke positively of the experience in a recent MSNBC story, saying, “I think it’s a lot more ethical for you to…
Read More…of homosexuals and homosexuality on an unwilling military. This is the equivalent of the spiritual rape of our military to satisfy the most extreme and selfish cadre of President Obama’s kooky coalition. When it comes to “kooky” Levin knows his stuff. His release goes on to mimic Robertson’s past statements about gays and lesbians – and the alleged acceptance they are currently enjoying in the United States – as the cause of natural disasters such…
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