Religion Dispatches
…reating serious backlash among BYU students and faculty. Since then, Honor Code enforcement has been conducted through referrals—even third party referrals—of suspect students to a campus Honor Code office, a system of enforcement that has created significant opportunities for abuse. (When I was a BYU student, it was possible to make an anonymous third-party referral.) Honor Code enforcement on campus has been used to bait and target gays and libe…
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…(the precursor of ISIS) when they were empowered by the American-supported Iraqi government. If the government today in Iraq—and in Syria—were to politically embrace the Sunni Arabs in their countries ISIS would began to crumble from within. This is what US Secretary of State John Kerry meant when he said, soon after the Paris attacks, that it was a wakeup call for even more vigorous attempts at a diplomatic solution. It is time to defeat ISIS, bu…
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…nathan Freedland writes that the self-styled Islamic State’s predations in Iraq and Syria are really about “medieval lawlessness … helped by the very 21st century decline of the global behemoth.” The 2003 intervention may have been the “original sin.” But Freedland like Obama is happy to lay the blame squarely on Iraqi and Syrian politicians whose ongoing sins are not having enough Sunnis in government. By this logic, the proper antidote to sectar…
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…in a column in Indian Country Today: What the hell were they thinking… the code name was based on an extension of the metaphor “Indians Are Enemies” to “Geronimo was a Terrorist,” thus perpetuating the US tradition of treating Indian nations and peoples as enemies. Maybe if the lessons of the Indian wars had been pondered before the misdirected invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq countless lives and riches could have been saved. The lesson of Geroni…
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…nt, and a pledge at the end. A final admonition declares that breaking the Code will result in immediate execution. The Code is illustrated with images pulled from a website promoting the 2007 Swedish film Arn: The Knights Templar. This past spring, copies of the Code were mysteriously distributed across Michoacan. Like La Familia, members of the Knights Templar must refrain from drugs and must commit to routine drug testing, but unlike La Famila…
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…se FedSoc publicly casts itself as a non-partisan debate club, though, the code effectively protects Neil Gorsuch’s sacred right to don a bow tie next time FedSoc conclave rolls around. This ethics code exists largely as a marketing tool for reporters willing to buy what the FedSoc Six are selling, but also as cover for the justices’ clear preferences. Its language, which allows justices to participate in “a nonprofit civic, charitable, educationa…
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…llywood Censored. The code they designed became the Motion Picture Conduct Code, popularly know as the Hays Code after it was adopted by William Hays, a Presbyterian elder who was hired by the major studios to help clean up the industry’s image after it was rocked by a series of scandals. The code, says Black, “was a fascinating combination of Catholic theology, conservative politics and pop psychology—an amalgam that would control the content of…
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…n between the rich and poor didn’t play prominently, either in the event’s promos or at the stadium rally itself. PK did offer a “pay what you can afford” program to woo low-income rally-goers, and it also urged attendees to bring food donations for the Denver Rescue Mission. At the rally itself, there was no sustained talk about the spiritual or political effects of the global financial crisis, but there was a call to support something called the…
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…e of social and community values in pictures.” For the next 38 years, that code shaped Hollywood’s output. The Production Code insisted that movies were primarily “to be regarded as entertainment” that would “improve the race.” As such, movies should avoid explicit images that would be upsetting or play to “the lower and base element.” Those images included graphic violence, “excessive passion,” “white-slavery,” “scenes of actual child birth,” and…
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…, where they were well entrenched, to the Sunni dominated areas of western Iraq, even conquering Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, which it plundered for its wealth and military armament. It’s fair to describe ISIS as a terrorist regime, since it uses extreme acts of violence to intimidate both its enemies and its own population. The savage beheadings of Western journalists and aid workers that were posted on the Internet were matched by dozens,…
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