Religion Dispatches
…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 liberals and (as Sanders remembered from her own experience) to shut down student anti-war protests. Clerical leaders servi…
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…have been heard at all, because it was completely made up. Christian web designer Lorie Smith, who had never been asked to design a wedding website at all, let alone one for a gay couple, was fretting over her theoretical right to discriminate against LGBTQ people due to sincerely held bigotry. In a highly unusual move, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, 303 Creative v. Elenis—and affirmed, in a 6-3 decision, the right of conservative Chri…
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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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…leeping in the same bed or criminals profiting from criminal activity, the code was designed to emphasize that “the church, the government, and the family were cornerstones of an orderly society; that success and happiness resulting from working within this system,” says Black. The Legion of Decency was created as a counterpart to the code to make sure that the threat of a Catholic boycott of indecent movies keep Hollywood on the straight and narr…
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…the Lord!”) Yet Christian Zionism, in many of its forms, carries not only significant theological implications but political ones as well, and that is worthy of attention; especially at a time when the prophecy clocks tick louder and louder to those with ears to hear. One indication of the apocalyptic energies in the PK event was the militant language of spiritual warfare that characterized the promotional blitz leading up to the PK 2.0 launch. M…
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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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