Religion Dispatches
…e poor. According to Salon: The income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year to its widest amount on record as young adults and children in particular struggled to stay afloat in the recession. The top-earning 20 percent of Americans — those making more than $100,000 each year — received 49.4 percent of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4 percent earned by those below the poverty line, according to newly…
Read More…rights of free speech and religious liberty that are the birthright of all Americans. By joining together in “solidarity” — signatories include usual suspects Republican Reps. John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mike Pence, and Michele Bachmann; Republican Sens. Jim DeMint, James Inhofe, and David Vitter; and probable presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty, and Rick Santorum — these groups and individuals are standing together as demonizers of h…
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…as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are almost pai…
Read More…bundance and, well, betterness. But when he’s on the other end of the microphone, being asked questions about homosexuality, you can see the discomfort wash over him. The ladies on The View cornered him on the subject back in 2009, and his evasive answer was that homosexuality was not “God’s best” for such people. He retreated to the tired “some of his closest friends are gay, and that they tend to be ‘some of the nicest people in the world.’” Jus…
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…
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 MoreThe incoming class of congressional freshmen includes, Jaime Herrera (R-WA), the first homeschooled member ever, and Daniel Webster (R-FL) a homeschooling activist about whom I’ve written here and here. In a press release celebrating the “coming of age” of homeschooling, The Old Schoolhouse Magazine poses the question: “Is Homeschooling Good for America?” which they answer by touting the culturally transformative character of the homeschooling mo…
Read More…to filibuster the START treaty until tax cuts for the upper 2% of wealthy Americans were made permanent. Oh, and like a maraschino cherry high atop a lollapalooza of suck, we find out from Wikileaks that the Obama administration—with GOP help—basically has quashed the investigation into torture by slow-marching it to death. It’s starting to feel a lot like 1983 around here. Or, as one friend put it, “Pretty sure the way I feel about human politic…
Read More…! And nowhere and no how can they be separated from this act into ranks of class, race, and gender. Well, then again, there are some gendered ascriptions: Lines are ad hoc gendered, plus or minus. Priority seating on the first floor of the Haram is given to the men, with male and female security guards shuffling women out of their spots to give way to men, creating men’s sections in a way that is more intrusive or abrasive than what I’ve observed…
Read More…independent investigator’s report that said that Freshwater had been using class time to witness to students, teaching intelligent design and displaying numerous Christian materials around the classroom for more than a decade. The district settled with the family in July 2009, but the settlement with Freshwater had dragged on, due to Freshwater and his attorney’s obfuscation and refusal to produce evidence. I’ve written about this case numerous ti…
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