Search for "get cheap new york florida airline tickets phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Record Number of Stealth Creationism Bills Introduced in 2011

By Lauri Lebo

…on to Texas, another anti-evolution bill was also introduced this month in Florida. HB 1854 would require “a critical analysis” of the teaching of evolution in public schools. The bill is little different from legislation currently in committee in Tennessee, which says that educators may not be prohibited from “helping students understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of exi…

As New Poll Finds “Increased Xenophobic Streak,” Republicans Heighten Anti-Muslim Rhetoric

By Sarah Posner

…In an appearance on Morning Joe yesterday, Trump said the elimination of a New York Police Department program to spy on Muslims in the city’s mosques and other locations was a “mistake.” Trump claimed New York had “tremendous surveillance going on in and around the mosques of New York City and right now that has been totally cut out.” The NYPD spying program, which came to light when the Associated Press reported on it in 2011, was suspended in 20…

New York State Senator Declares War on NY Marriage Equality

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…enterpiece of the protests as participants shouted, “Let the people vote!” New York state, unlike California, has no referendum process, so it’s unlikely that a groundswell like California will succeed. Liberty Counsel, the Christian right law firm affiliated with Liberty University Law School, though, has filed a lawsuit challenging the law. Religion was prominent in the marches with people singing hymns, waving Bibles and crying out, “Jesus, Jes…

On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

By Ilana E. Strauss

…and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood.” With every new number, the end recedes, an ever-lengthening ribbon in a universe that has found a way to hold it all. How can a finite universe house something infinite? It seems impossible. And yet, pi is there, in every sunrise and car tire, every planet and solar system. Are mundane objects the site of the earth’s encounter with infinity? As scientists plumb the universe, they find…

With New York Joining DC in Defiance Methodist Church Faces Showdown on LGBT Ordination

By Pamela R. Lightsey

…menal advance for the rights of LGBTQ persons within the denomination. The New York conference has for decades declared its opposition to the UMC’s systematic exclusion of LGBTQI people, and “the Board of Ordained Ministry’s action here is living into that. It means that queer people can bring their whole selves, without distortion, into their faithful answer to the call to ministry. The era of don’t ask, don’t tell is over for this conference,” D…

What To Do When Fred Phelps Arrives in Your Neighborhood

By Susan Henking

…mall town, with a population in 2009 of about 800 people. It is in upstate New York. It is not my small town, nor is it likely yours; and yet each of these places is someone’s neighborhood. This time, it is only an hour away for me. Picketing as “The Workingman’s Means of Communication” On March 2, 2011, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in response to a series of prior decisions around Westboro Baptist Church’s picketing of a Marine’s funeral….

The New York Times Sunday Review has a Mormon Problem

By Joanna Brooks

…nism and its fascinating position in American political life: experts like Kathleen Flake of Vanderbilt (who is LDS) and Sarah Gordon of the University of Pennsylvania (who is not). It continues to be acceptable editorial practice at the New York Times to talk about Mormons as if we are not participants in national conversation—as if we’re not even in the room. Celebrity cultural critics with little to no working knowledge of Mormonism have acce…

Marriage Vote ‘Transforms’ Not-So-Catholic Ireland; Activist to Malaysian PM – ‘Love Is Not Terrorism’; LGBTs Find Growing Acceptance in Colombia, Not At World Meeting of Families; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…be killed,” another reads. Germany: Lesbian teacher rehired under bishops’ new employment policy New Ways Ministry reports on the case of a German teacher who is getting her teaching job back after the implementation of a new policy by German bishops that is more welcoming of LGBT church workers: A German educator fired for her plans to marry a woman will return to her position as head of a Bavarian kindergarten, aided by a new church employment p…

Something So Broken: What’s Frightening About Beasts of the Southern Wild

By Michael Pasquier

…cclaim of Glory at Sea, Zeitlin redirected his attention from post-Katrina New Orleans to parts of Louisiana that, in the words of Zeitlin, “kind of crumble off into the sinews down in the gulf where the land is getting eaten up.” He made his way to Terrebonne Parish, where he found inspiration on a narrow strip of land surrounded by a dilapidated ring of levees built to protect the two dozen remaining French and Indian families of Isle de Jean Ch…

Evangelical Islamophobia as American as Apple Pie

By Shalom Goldman

…election to make Islam a campaign issue. Back in August he sought to make New York’s Park51 community center a Florida issue. “I’m totally against it. If I had my way, it would pretty much be over my dead body. That religion is against everything America stands for. If we have to let them build it, make them build it nine stories underground, so we can walk above it as citizens and Christians.” [For a survey of these and other Islam-related elect…