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A Locked and Loaded Covenant: The Religious Roots of America’s Gun Culture

By Peter Laarman

…onic when he wrote (in the wake of the ghastly Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando) that it is “theologically inconceivable” to implement real gun control in the United States: God gave us guns to show us who we are. Giving up the gun would be surrender to evil, taking us abruptly into eschatological time… The Gun is patriotic. The Gun is America. The Gun is God. In her highly readable and timely new book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second…

Christian Schools Invoke Religious Liberty to Reopen Despite Warnings of Health Experts

By Chrissy Stroop

…deed, one nine-year-old student at Circle Christian School in the affluent Orlando suburb of Winter Park, Florida, tested positive for COVID-19 last week. As a result, the school has shifted to online instruction only until August 24, which is more than two weeks from when the boy tested positive. But while this move may seem responsible, it should be noted that, according to local reporting, the school previously required masks “except at recess,…

Katy Perry’s Evangelical Hangover

By David Mihalyfy

Despite an American Idol judging gig, a baby girl with Orlando Bloom on the way, and her new album Smile due out August 28th, Katy Perry hasn’t been capturing the public’s attention like she did with 2010’s Teenage Dream. Back then, songs from “Firework” to “E.T.” dominated the airwaves, and she reached the still unsurpassed height of tying Michael Jackson’s Bad for most chart-topping singles off of one album. And yet, separate from the ebb and f…

‘God Made Them Male and Female…and Eunuch’: Why the Biblical Case For Binary Gender Isn’t So… Biblical

By Tony Keddie

…mic fundamentalist who slaughtered forty-nine people at a gay nightclub in Orlando in 2016. Many conservative Christians have believed that liberals’ campaigns for sexual rights would bring about God’s wrath. AIDS “may be a judgment of God on the nation,” Billy Graham proclaimed as gay men and other marginalized persons fought for their lives during the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s. Jerry Falwell concurred and added that homosexuality was “Sata…

Beneath the ‘Wacky’ Paula White Video is a Dark and Deeply Undemocratic World Propping Up the President

By Frederick Clarkson

…wsuit by her former church. Nevertheless, a predominantly African-American Orlando area megachurch, New Destiny Christian Center, hired her as senior pastor in 2012. Like Donald Trump, she’s on her third marriage, this time to former rock star Jonathan Cain, best known as the keyboardist for Journey, who with his fellow band members composed the 1981 hit “Don’t Stop Believing”—long before he met Paula White and became a believer. Cain performed th…

Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting and Gaslighting of Obama Paved the Way for Trump

By Ian Reifowitz

…olitical power. When talking on June 14, 2016, about the mass murder at an Orlando night club committed by an American-born Muslim, Limbaugh went after Obama in similar terms, saying he was always “really, really bothered out there about offending Islamists,” yet did “not seem concerned about Christianity. He is a Christian. If he is [sic] get upset about attacks on Christianity, he never comes out defends [sic] Christianity.” Again, Obama is real…

When Violence is Inevitable: Club Q and the Success of the System

By Heron Greenesmith

…gas? Maybe after a man with a long gun killed 49 people in a queer club in Orlando, Florida six years ago. Maybe Congress could have acted then to make it more difficult to buy a weapon that can easily kill so many people. But they didn’t. And now five more people are dead and twenty-five more injured. The system is working perfectly. And late 2022 is bearing the fruits of a violent summer and fall. Did you know that twice as many transgender peop…

Marco Rubio’s “Constitutional Scholar”

By Julie Ingersoll

Jim Stratton at the Orlando Sentinel alerted me to an event held in central Florida yesterday in which tea party Senate candidate Marco Rubio aligned himself with Glenn Beck’s BFF David Barton. Barton, the headline speaker at the event in support of Rubio’s candidacy, is the fundamentalist Christian promoter of “Christian American History” and a revisionist history of race in America that paints the Republican party as the party of racial equalit…

Religious Right Dream of Privatized Public Education Gets Boost

By Julie Ingersoll

…leaders in an eleven-city (Detroit, Phoenix, Los Angeles Cleveland, Tampa, Orlando, Chicago, Indianapolis, Pewaukee, WI; Sacramento and Newark), “Education Revolution Tour,” the goal of which is to renew “American Exceptionalism.” The result of these reforms is likely to be a fractured educational system incapable of serving the very purpose of public education: to ensure an educated citizenry capable of participating in a democracy. An RD comment…

Prayer vigil for Las Vegas shooting victim Sonny Melton (WBBJ TV)

No Way Out But The Ballot Box: Why Partisanship Trumps Morality In Gun Control Debate

By Daniel Schultz

So here we are again, after Newtown, after San Bernadino and Orlando. This time the rampage is in Las Vegas, with more dead, more people hospitalized, more deep trauma inflicted, but with the same shitty debate over prayer-vs-action and same despair over the potential for action being recycled. There are some differences, of course. Rather than the NRA paying $3 million to elect a senator from Iowa, we now have a president elected with $30 millio…