Religion Dispatches
…cut it with Marx either, though I didn’t need Marx to point out the lie. Experience sufficed—the experience of talking to someone a hundred times richer than I was and two hundred times more decent, the repeated experience of meeting sons and daughters of privilege who felt helpless to shake off their sense of shame. And the shame was ridiculous, of course, as I tried to tell them, and as Marx could have told them, because all of us are the serv…
Read More…as revealed that he was gay and had threatened to deport an undocumented Mexican ex-boyfriend. Yet Romney forges on, with his advisors proclaiming confidence in their deep pockets and ability to buy airtime, even though the campaign’s ground game is not as strong as it may seem. That ground-level weakness reflects the foundational flaw of the Romney campaign. Romney banked on the idea that conservative Christian voters would come around—with enoug…
Read More…safety net—issues it presses with far less vigor than issues relating to sex and sexuality—does nothing to move Republican opposition. Chaput criticized Kennedy for starting “the project of walling religion away from the process of governance in a new and aggressive way.” They are not separate, Chaput (and Santorum) insist. Christians have a duty to keep them intertwined, a duty that they erroneously insist is required by the Constitution, but in…
Read More…ision Forum and Christian Reconstruction: biblical patriarchy, eliminating public education, and any public assistance for the poor, etc. In any case I’ll bet that Monumental will be a contender for the Phillips’ Jubilee Award next year. …
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…think the point was to take those prejudices and mock them by introducing extreme examples: wealthy Jewish doctors who are up to no good with Catholic girls. I’m not sure if it works in the film. Satire can be difficult to pull off, especially when most people are not in on the joke. Lapsed Catholic girls who move to New York from Omaha get what they deserve, I suppose. She and Terry Gionnoffrio, the Castevets’ first (failed) victim, are both expl…
Read More…r discrimination against them. No one would be seeking to outlaw our very existence or annihilate us by making us “ex-gay” unless they were convinced by organizations like the SBC and Exodus that we are morally evil. Most of all, there would be no fight over the phrase “civil rights movement,” since there would be no need to have a new one. Until the SBC, Exodus and all other anti-gay groups own their bigotry, the lives of LGBT people will always…
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…t of the coverage in the press has largely toed the state line. The Interfax Religion headline ran: “Famous American Expert Supports Moscow’s Ban on Gay Pride Parades.” When coverage draws attention to the controversy surrounding Cameron, it tends to spin it in such a way as to make him into a hero, conspiratorially implying that the rejection of his views in the West and/or scientific establishment derives from ideology. The following quotation f…
Read More…on quotes the FRC saying, “In a historic study of children raised by homosexual parents, sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Augstin has overturned the conventional academic wisdom that such children suffer no disadvantages when compared to children raised by their married mother and father.” Says Ferguson, “This is not only breathless but inaccurate.” In addition to the audit commissioned by Social Science Research editor Wrig…
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…harnessing our collective intelligence and technological capabilities to explore a truly alien landscape. I am reminded of how both the text and radio broadcast of War of the Worlds occurred at moments of great population and political shifts in the United Kingdom and the United States. Aliens, vampires, and other monsters—these otherworldly beings are often metaphors for our this-worldly ways of organizing difference. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls…
Read More…mockery he has now attracted, this relatively obscure congressman whom I’d bet half the pundits discussing his fate today had barely heard of before his primary win, is a National Superstar, the very embodiment of the Christian Right’s all-too-often abandoned determination to stand up to GOP pols who forever pay them lip service but rarely deliver the goods. […] And if he does win, he will enter the Senate next year not as some random wingnut dude…
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