Religion Dispatches
…ent, Sapp claims the following: Compared to ’06, Democrats nationally saw a 14 point drop in White Protestant support, 14 point drop with White evangelicals, and a whopping 20 point decline with Catholics. But there are two major problems with this argument: first, it’s factually inaccurate — the numbers are simply wrong. While Democrats experienced significant losses compared to the last mid-term election in 2006, which was a good year for Democr…
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…atirizing The View, and was feted by fellow panelist Star Parker for having 19 children because, as Parker proclaimed, “We win if we just keep having children, ’cause we’re going to outnumber them!”—a staple argument of the Quiverfull movement. Weeks earlier, Santorum had transformed this rhetoric into policy proposal at a South Carolina Fuddruckers appearance with the Duggars, where he argued that low birth rates and a declining American populati…
Read More…to become better organized as a political force, even as they increase in number. The major impediment to that kind of organization is the fact that it is very difficult for secularists to conceive of themselves in tribal terms. Most tribes, whether of nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us, or talk like us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rit…
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…ng an intimate knowledge of the area and the people who call it home. Alasdair, a student at Brigham Young University (a private university owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, originally established in 1875), was the student organizer of “Intersecting Convictions,” the interfaith conference for which I had come to speak. The conference was held in early March at Utah Valley University, a publicly funded universit…
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…nt republic of Yugoslavia, a country whose socialist-era days were clearly numbered. Three ethnic parties, representing Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs, swept the election and formed the new seven-member presidency. The dream of Bosnia as a multicultural, multiethnic model of tolerance and coexistence for the rest of Yugoslavia—and Europe—had started to unravel. On June 25, 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia. A bri…
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…ash, since a political Palestinian identity has been dated well back to the 19th century, and anyway Palestinians are still Arabs. Both candidates shifted Hassan’s question in their own special way; that Republicans might be Arabs and even Palestinians seemed too much of a contradiction for Gingrich’s ideological fluff or Romney’s well-crafted, test-marketed style of engagement. Both candidates also used the opportunity to charge off in another di…
Read More…either in one “ovotestis” or with one ovary and one testis). An increasing number of public and commercial health insurance companies now include defined benefits for sex reassignment surgery, and the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Association of Social Workers, have declared the denial of such benefits discriminatory. And intersex conditions are likely to increase, since some of them, at leas…
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…Harris, one of the key architects of the U.S. homeschooling movement in the 1980s and the brother of Joshua Harris, whose 1997 book I Kissed Dating Goodbye made waves in American evangelical purity culture. Alex Harris—a lawyer who has clerked for both Justice Anthony Kennedy and then-Judge Neil Gorsuch—tweeted that he participated in the docuseries to tell the story of his own family’s involvement in the movement to “take America back for God” an…
Read More…ospel, then it will have to expose and ultimately expel the ‘new and alien spirits’ that have weakened its authentic voice,” argued Arida. “Among these spirits are Biblical fundamentalism and the inability to critique and build upon the writings and vision” of the theologians and “fathers” of early Christianity. Arida’s essay sparked fierce debate. Among the critics was the Brotherhood of the Orthodox Clergy Association of Houston, Texas, which de…
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…trans inmate Sophia Burset in Netflix’s hit Orange is the New Black, which aired from 2013-2019. Cox’s work was truly groundbreaking in terms of on-screen trans representation and helped educate the public about the realities of trans experience. Meanwhile, Caitlyn Jenner came out in 2015, and while her right-wing Christian politics were and remain awful, her coming out generated a great deal of buzz about trans people. Despite the inevitable misg…
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