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Kim Davis, County Clerk, is Not a Person

By Ivan Strenski

…ic office is not Kim’s private property. This is the United States of America, not some place where police extort bribes because they feel they own their offices, like franchises, or “turf,” onto which you have been unlucky enough to have trespassed. Public offices are not like the “businesses” Tony Soprano “owns,” the use for which you have to pay what he demands on top of the cost of service. Tony’s “businesses” are very personal things, part of…

Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

By Susannah Heschel

Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…

Humiliating “Kim Davis Bill” To “Protect” Anti-LGBT County Clerks Passes Texas Senate

By Sunnivie Brydum

…omeone—who need not be employed by or appointed by the state, county, or locality—who can administer the oath and sign the license. Imagine if you’re a same-sex couple living in Texas who has decided it’s time to make it legal. You and your partner, and maybe some close friends or family, trek down to the county clerk’s office with all the necessary documentation and fees in hand. But when you arrive, the clerk who is supposed to serve you says he…

Virginia High School Says Students May Post Ten Commandments on Lockers

By Lauri Lebo

…lved in a different fight over the Ten Commandments. However, in the Giles County case, the ACLU, as well as the Freedom From Religion Foundation, are opposed to the displays because they were not put up by individual students expressing their religious views, but were the official government-sponsored displays of the Giles County School District. After the district decided to remove the Ten Commandments, the Giles County students hosted a walk ou…

Does Atheism Have a Misogyny Problem?

By Julia Galef

…e left a comment on another popular atheist blog, PZ Myers’ Pharyngula, sarcastically comparing Watson’s experience to the much more serious problems faced by women in the Muslim world. He then followed it up with two more comments insisting that “zero bad” had happened to her in that elevator. An outpouring of thousands of comments as well as additional posts from popular atheist bloggers like Phil Plait, Greta Christina, and Jen McCreight replie…

LDS Church Launches New Website Calling for Greater Openness and Understanding on LGBT Issues

By Joanna Brooks

…m his home in East Helena, Montana, to a predominantly Mormon community in Las Vegas, Nevada, so that he could be surrounded by LDS people. He served in the Church, attended LDS temple services, worked for a Church-owned bookstore, got engaged to a woman, and prayed earnestly that he’d feel the same kind of attraction to her as he did to men. “But one day in the temple,” Cox says, “I got the impression I was asking for the wrong thing: that I shou…

Praise the Lard This Holiday Season

By Becky Garrison

…as,” the United Church of Bacon (UCB) placed a holiday themed billboard in Las Vegas, Nevada featuring two strips of bacon hiteheadearing a Santa hat and a Star of David respectively. This billboard’s slogan reads “Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah from the 13,000 Atheists and Skeptics at the United Church of Bacon,” replete with the tagline, “Bacon is our God because bacon is real.” Since its inception during a meeting at Penn Jillette’s house i…

Violence of the Lambs: The Legacy of Anti-Choice Extremist Father Norman Weslin

By Kathryn Joyce

…tion figure who made national news at the Atlanta protests when he, then a Las Vegas police officer, publicly changed sides and was arrested alongside Weslin. Gallagher was launched on a career of clinic blockades, and today serves as the local leader of Las Vegas’ Operation Save America—a group notorious for distributing “wanted”-style posters of abortion providers, an act that has been judged in federal appeals court as an implicit death threat….

Hagee Calls Obama “The Most Anti-Semitic President Ever”

By Sarah Posner

…lev reports more details: The other stars of the night were the ubiquitous Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, whose generous contributions to ZOA have helped lift the organization out of the doldrums and into the spotlight and the fast lane. [ZOA president Mort] Klein gave Adelson a gift mezuzah for his new Las Vegas home (in which “God himself would be happy to live if he could afford it”] then Miriam Adelson told the a…

Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace

By Karyn Carlo

…things, and sent the rich away empty.” This same Jesus tells us in Matthew 19:24 that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Similarly, the early Christian community is described in Acts 4:34-35 like this: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ fe…