Religion Dispatches
…ille access to contraception. A headline from the ACLU read: “Wait: Did an Oklahoma Hospital Try to Ban Birth Control Prescriptions for an Entire Town?” Slate also led with a rhetorical question and answer: “Are the majority of gynecological patients in the small city of Bartlesville, Okla., about to be cut off from access to prescription contraception? That seems to be the conclusion of the local newspaper, the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise…”…
Read More…he brains behind the proposal for a Satanic monument on the grounds of the Oklahoma capital and the “Pink Mass,” held to convert the spirit of Fred Phelps’ mother to homosexuality, both organized by The Satanic Temple. My initial suspicion was that Greaves was simply a “smartass” who took issue with conservative Christian hegemony and was employing satire, much like Bobby Henderson when he created the Flying Spaghetti Monster. However, Greaves ass…
Read MoreRoger Cohen, in a recent New York Times Op-Ed, goes to Oklahoma to discover why the state decided to ban shari’ah and attempt to abrogate the Constitution. The key section, in my opinion, is when Cohen states “Shari’ah is the new hot-button wedge issue, as radicalizing as abortion or gay marriage, seized on by Republicans to mobilize conservative Americans against the supposed ‘stealth jihad’ of Muslims in the United States and against a Democrat…
Read More…s displays prompted by one bank in Oklahoma. Payne County Bank in Perkins, Oklahoma ran afoul a Kansas City Fed examiner who said the bank’s Christmas displays and Christian symbols could be regarded as discriminatory. A county in Indiana is fighting to keep its nativity scene up: “If we let them do this, let them take Christmas away, what’s next?… If you ruffle the feathers of the people of Franklin County, you better be ready to fight because th…
Read More…s and, more ominously, punishments. As Haroon Moghul wrote here just after Oklahoma voters passed a shari’ah ban last year: Shari’ah is, for Muslims, the “path to the water,” the texts that normatively define a moral life and the means to God and heaven in the life to come. But Shari’ah is an ideal. Muslims, across countries and centuries, have only ever been able to interpret revelation, producing readings of Shari’ah which are never fully conclu…
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…isoned for some years in Florida before living his later years in exile in Oklahoma where he was ultimately buried. In a twist of fate it has long been rumored that the skull and bones of Geronimo were stolen from his grave in Fort Sill, Oklahoma by the Skull and Bones society at Yale University. Fact is, Geronimo has been part of military lore for more than one hundred years. When he was being hunted during the last of the Indian wars in Arizona…
Read More…as enjoined pending a legal challenge. This year’s actions bring to 27 the number of states with state-directed counseling requirements in effect. (emphasis added). The Minnesota bill did require that the woman be informed “whether or not an anesthetic or analgesic would eliminate or alleviate organic pain to the unborn child caused by the particular method of abortion to be employed and the particular medical benefits and risks associated with th…
Read More…plit rather precisely. But it doesn’t explain it. Certainly these hometown Oklahomans (where Trump is set to win by a large margin, or at least once did, prior to this most recent scandal) are angry about immigration, even though immigrants now manning agricultural factories (hog farms and the like) have helped to resurrect the formerly struggling economy of the Oklahoma Panhandle. At the same time, formerly all-white counties (such as where I gre…
Read More…ship with God” — he’s also part of the “creeping sharia” crowd, writing of Oklahoma’s ban on sharia law, “The threat of Sharia law is real and the people of Oklahoma are ahead of the curve.” And at Media Matters, Jamison Foser points out that Sekulow has previously used the platform at On Faith “to approvingly quote biblical references to homosexuality as an ‘abomination’ and ‘unnatural’ and ‘indecent’ and ‘perversion.’” I’ve reported on the ACLJ’…
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…as a “mental illness,” the change was widely reported as were the growing number of cities that added “sexual orientation” to anti-discrimination laws. By the end of the decade, reporters were filing profiles about a “hip” community with its own bars, clubs, music, and fashion as well as a distinctively uninhibited sexual scene. Journalists also covered an emerging religious backlash, coalescing in the 1977 “Save Our Children” campaign to rescind…
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