Search for "airline tickets to st louis cheap phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Did the Pope Embrace the Prosperity Gospel?

By Sarah Posner

…use “according to the Committee’s staff memo, there was a ‘high level of distrust‘ of the government by the churches under investigation and the religious advocacy groups that supported them.” The Committee’s staff memo revealed further that “the Copelands employ guerilla tactics to keep their employees silent:” We are flat out told and threatened that if we talk, God will blight our finances, strike our families down, and pretty much afflict us w…

Normalization is Control: Telling Stories to Survive

By Mariam Durrani

…and others, aren’t being highlighted as wrong, as unconstitutional, as racist. Instead, we hear the normalization of these racist policies. Some have described this as a form of obedience testing, to see just how far he can go before more people protest. I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but I wonder if we need to adopt Hoodfar’s strategy and write; not only as survival strategy, but also to make sure these stories don’t disappear. That we cont…

Gambian Leaders Portray Anti-Gay Law as Defense of Islam, Ugandan Politicians as ‘Christmas Gift’; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…tch officials for evaluating asylum claims by measuring their stories against stereotypes about how gay people ought to behave rather than reviewing the specific stories and evidence presented. That is what the standard EU rules require, the court held, and it needed to be applied to people seeking asylum on the basis of their sexual orientation as it would be to any other asylum seekers. Mexico: Officials in Baja California Thwart First Gay Weddi…

Are Atheists Taking 1st Amendment Suits Too Far?

By Gordon Haber

…he system. The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) is a group of “atheists, agnostics and skeptics” with a Scientology-esque fondness for litigation. Recently the FFRF has gone after the so-called “parsonage exemption,” which allows clergy to forego paying taxes on income used for housing. Last year the FFRF sued the IRS, claiming that the exemption privileges clergy over laypersons and is thus unconstitutional. The exemption was created to he…

“Stress Test” a Con: Obama Still Coddling Banks

By Peter Laarman

…all. Everybody else, from NPR to Fox News, goes right along with the cute “stress test” metaphor, forgetting that the so-called patient being “tested” is actually an 800-pound gorilla that needs to be put into a cage if not shot dead outright. Johnson pointed out this morning that today’s news non-event even has a kind of Goldilocks character that the big media are bound to lap right up. It will turn out that the $1 trillion in TARP is an amount “…

Something So Broken: What’s Frightening About Beasts of the Southern Wild

By Michael Pasquier

…the film’s “screw-tightening methods,” smothering musical score, and “a distrustworthy slickness reminiscent of a British Petroleum oil spill clean-up commercial.” Much of the applause is directed at the film’s heroine, Quvenzhané Wallis, the six-year-old non-professional actor who grew up in a Louisiana bayou town and who may soon become the youngest Academy Award nominee of all time. Sharing much of the admiration, and the object of much of the…

Why Faith Needs Redemptive Struggle to Be Meaningful

By Liz Theoharis

…. Barber reminds us of the importance of education and history in the long struggle for justice and righteousness. Referring to how those in power kept the poor divided in history, he speaks about how both enslaved persons and poor whites were denied literacy before the Civil War. He implores all of us to see the connections among our struggles and to come together to build a powerful movement. He summons us to resist the divide-and-conquer strate…

The Right Questions Kamala Harris’ Blackness — Yet as Long as She Holds Any Power She’ll Always Be Too Black for Them

By Mary Rambaran-Olm

…and during his presidency, Harris has Sherlock Homeboys digging into her past and dusting off their old race science textbooks in an attempt to somehow prove or disprove her ethnic and racial identity—which is just racism pawned off as political analysis. The weird (yes, that word) thing is, for people who claim to be totally not obsessed with her race and definitely not obsessed with making race an issue, they sure seem concerned with her race. T…

Fox Makes Mockery Of Promise To Rein In Beck’s Anti-Semitism

By Sarah Posner

…is a foe of communism and anti-Semitism). He’s wealthy; he’s a philanthropist for justice causes; he’s a Jew; he’s therefore the scapegoat, whether conservatives invoke tropes about wealthy Jews or their secret control of money or an imaginary one-world order; or as Beck put it, a “shadow government.” Beck — unoriginal, as usual, but also as usual taking his derivative conspiracy theories over the top — further peddled the utterly false claim that…

The Burning Houses of Worship We Missed

By Gordon Haber

…shows “a smooth patch of earth.” There’s a less radical but nevertheless disturbing story about China’s Kargilik Mosque. According to Radio Free Asia, the Chinese authorities stripped the 16th century building of its Islamic imagery and festooned it instead with banners proclaiming, “Love the Party, Love the Country.” The destruction and desecration of the mosques is part of a larger Chinese governmental effort to expunge Islam from China. It’s di…