Search for "cheap airline tickets to detroit mi phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Gays Going to Hell According to “Expert” Witness in Michigan’s Gay Marriage Trial

By Darnell Moore

…ding to Douglas Allen, Canadian economist and expert (*coughs*) witness in Michigan’s gay marriage trial. I would laugh uncontrollably if I didn’t understand the actual adverse effects such violent, punitive and dogmatic theologizing has on LGBTQ people and others. According to the Detroit Free Press, Ken Mogill, the attorney representing Jayne Rowse and April DeBoer who happens to be the lesbian couple challenging the ban, asked, “Is it accurate…

Why Donald Trump’s Love Affair With Evangelicals (Probably) Won’t Last

By Sarah Posner

…ok, Gifted Hands, details his difficult childhood and rise from inner city Detroit to become a prominent neurosurgeon. It is packaged as a morality tale of the role of faith in overcoming life’s obstacles. It was published by Zondervan, a leading evangelical publishing house which has gone on to publish other Carson books. Evangelicals have long seen the book in Christian bookstores, and have read it and become familiar with Carson’s life story. C…

Ignore the Rod: the Parental Rights Amendment Isn’t About Spanking

By Kathryn Joyce

…Treasurer Steve Oberlander, the HSLDA CFO, and current HSLDA president J. Michael Smith, serving on the group’s board. Rev. Michael T. Ramey, an out-of-work Southern Baptist pastor (who blames “the degrading condition of the American Church” for the inability of a “solidly biblical, conservative (and especially reformed) [pastor] to find a church to serve”) is Director of Communications and Research. And the Board includes homeschooling defender…

Reflections on an Ineffective Negro Leader

By Jonathan L. Walton

…hat be. Think Booker T. Washington who, with his famous 1895 Atlanta Compromise Address, appealed to the economic aspirations of African Americans with his Tuskegee model of vocational training and gospel of entrepreneurialism. Yet it was this same Negro leader who was willing to assuage the anxieties of poor white Southerners and wealthy Northern philanthropists by eschewing the goals of social equality and civic participation for his own race. T…

The Problem with Ayn Rand Isn’t Atheism

By Sarah Posner

…ho went on to become a Republican, and North Carolina’s Heath Shuler, a prominent Blue Dog who recently spoke at the Family Research Council’s Watchmen on the Wall conference for pastors, where he insisted that if Christians “had provided for people in our community,” then we “wouldn’t’ve needed a debate on health care.” The Family Research Council, incidentally, has signaled its full support of the Republicans’ budget-slashing. But at least Shule…

Papal Consultant: Cuomo Should Be Denied Communion

By Randall Balmer

…the consultant, who is also a professor at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, stated in no uncertain terms that Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, should be shown no mercy. His offense? Seems that the governor has been shacking up—not with underage boys, mind you, but with his longtime partner, Sandra Lee. And as if that weren’t bad enough, Cuomo also supports same-sex marriage and believes that abortion is a private matter that shouldn…

Don’t Blame Black Voters: The Obama Non-Effect

By Jonathan L. Walton

…lame. The fault lines of a progressive coalition to resist Prop. 8 were seemingly regional and religious as opposed to racially determined. Do Black Folks Need an Elton John? Scapegoating black folks is descriptively flawed because it pits a racial group against a multiracial reality. By positioning African Americans as a race in opposition to the GLBT community, one automatically renders black gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender persons invi…

Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…Religion is like a big flashlight. You shine it around you to help you illuminate your life, and find what it is you’re missing.” It’s not a terribly complex or comprehensive answer, but offers a distinct alternative to the God-haunted, belief-oriented versions of religion offered by my C-grade student named Bill. Bill gets this low grade because his definition of religion appears to have been culled solely from Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictio…

How To Talk To “Nones” and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…; readers need information, but don’t know where to begin asking. Rob Bell might be serving a similar function. As he told me, people make a lot of very basic assumptions when it comes to religion. And they are not assumptions based on knowledge. “I’ll just ask people, ‘what do you mean?’ Even the word ‘God’—what do you mean by that? And you’ll talk to them and it’ll end up like ‘basically an old man in the sky who either gets involved or not.’ We…

Conservative Rep Grills Oklahoma Personhood Sponsors

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…oe v. Wade being overturned. So conservative legislators are caught in the middle, and the voters themselves are… well… making phone calls and holding marches, because what else is there to do? (When I called the office of one member of the Public Health Committee to register my opposition to SB-1433, the staffer on the phone said, “Goodness, it seems like everyone in Oklahoma is calling.” I wearily replied that most of the calls must be in suppor…