Religion Dispatches
…lding, and the need was soon felt in official and certain legal circles to promote the military jihad as a religiously meritorious activity. This is precisely what happened during the expansion of the Islamic empire after the death of Muhammad during the late seventh and eighth centuries of the Common Era. Certain hawkish scholars, starting already in the late seventh century, framed Realpolitik concerns focused on security and territorial expansi…
Read More…to have the help of a lot of good people.” It’s not like Romney and Trump happen to disagree about, oh, I don’t know, what to do about the deficit. Romney’s saying Trump’s a good person, and they just happen to disagree about a few things, like whether the president of the United States is an American citizen. Of course Trump’s birtherism is a proxy for Islamophobia. Has Romney met this Trump? The Koran is very interesting. A lot of people say it…
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…Lemon test,” said Steve Newton. The hot-button issues of human cloning (a code word for abortion, Newton says) and global warming are linked to increase the appearance of evolution’s controversy. Fostering Fear of Science The science blog Denialism has a list of themes used in the global warming debate that have been similarly deployed in intelligent design battles: Well-funded think tanks are capable of derailing a scientific consensus, in this…
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…, it is a vocation” to create babies. But to dismiss gay desire as just an appetite of course missed the entire point of Sullivan’s disquisition on love and the sacredness of his own marriage. As he put it to her, “You keep sexualizing the homosexual relationship in a way that you wouldn’t sexualize the heterosexual relationship.” Sullivan, a devout Catholic, condemned the Catholic hierarchy for “dehumanizing” LGBT people through its teachings, wh…
Read More…areers for women; and reforming the media such that 1950s gender norms are promoted and “sex and the city lifestyles” are discouraged. He claims the only other alternative to these “reforms,” which he acknowledges are restrictions on women’s rights, is “the creation of a network of surrogacy facilities in low cost countries and basically ‘outsource breeding,’” with the state as foster parent because “career obsessed” women would not prioritize car…
Read More…e antebellum South. And many people of color are well versed at linguistic code-switching depending on the context. So why should I be offended by Senator Reid’s astute observation? If anyone should be offended it should be the critical mass of Americans, of all racial, ethnic and political perspectives, who are so informed by the logic of white supremacy that they fail to interrogate the correlations between dark skin tone and negativity or light…
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…takes place shortly after. Often, these rumors spread via Facebook or WhatsApp. Soon, a mob will gather. They will destroy homes, shops, and places of worship belonging to the minority community. Law enforcement will often turn a blind eye, or in some cases, actively participate in the violence. Finally, violence in one country ignites retaliatory violence in another. We saw this recently, where attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh led to attacks on Mu…
Read More…ay messages when spoken by anti-gay people, even if it is spoken in pretty code. Michael Jones over at Change.org celebrated Osteen’s appearance at the inauguration: “But give both Osteen and Parker some credit. Today was a day for the history books for LGBT politicians, and also a day where a socially conservative evangelical leader and a progressive lesbian mayor found some common ground in celebrating a victory.” This was written before Iloff’s…
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…Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa allowing gender reassignment surgery – apparently after being moved by a meeting with a woman who said she was trapped in a man’s body. Shabnam- not her real name – who is a psychologist at a state-run clinic in Iran says some gay people now end up being pushed towards surgery. Doctors are told to tell gay men and women that they are “sick” and need treatment, she says. They usually refer them to clerics who tel…
Read More…the only person who thinks this is an insane provision to have in the tax code? Medical science is evidence-based and faith is the “evidence of things not seen,” according to the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews. So I guess they’re really the same, right? Let’s fund them both! But no, no, and NO to any federal dollars for abortion, saith the good senator from Salt Lake. Hatch narrowly lost his push to get this prohibition into the Se…
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