Religion Dispatches
…efforts by proving that children raised by intact mom-and-dad families do better than kids raised by two loving moms or dads. It won’t matter that the study didn’t do that. Blamers Also a safe bet: natural disasters like Hurricane-Superstorm Sandy will continue to be chalked up to God’s anger at the advance of gay rights. So will tragedies like the mass murder of students and educators at Sandy Hook elementary school. But those blamers will sound…
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…llywood Censored. The code they designed became the Motion Picture Conduct Code, popularly know as the Hays Code after it was adopted by William Hays, a Presbyterian elder who was hired by the major studios to help clean up the industry’s image after it was rocked by a series of scandals. The code, says Black, “was a fascinating combination of Catholic theology, conservative politics and pop psychology—an amalgam that would control the content of…
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…ek, I found myself thinking about Zoe in relation to Lawrence Lessig’s Law/Code distinction. Lessig uses the example of speeding. You can make it against the law to speed, and we have the free choice to violate the law and face the consequences. You can program the car so that it can not exceed the speed limit and you take away that free will, except for those who have the capacity to hack the code and reprogram the car. We normally think of robot…
Read More…avid Blight tells the story of the first Memorial Day, celebrated by newly freed blacks in Charleston, South Carolina memorializing dead Union troops. In Joplin, Missouri, residents mourned those lost in the tornado. The Department of Homeland Security has ended a post-9/11 registration program that required Arab and Muslim men to register with the government, but not before tangling many Muslim immigrants up in legal proceedings. The Muslim Broth…
Read More…ed Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment declaring that only marriages between a man and a woman are valid in the state. But he points out that militant homosexuals have not respected that decision and have vandalized property, threatened people, and mailed white powder to Mormon churches. Fitzpatrick calls that “fascism.” “Fascism rejects democratic values. We see outright rejection of democracy in California.” He’s half right. Those who oppo…
Read More…church adopt a more conciliatory approach to same-sex marriages, but the House of Bishops refused to back formal blessings, and forbade gay clergy from marrying. Ireland: Bishop Questions Catholic Group’s Donation to LGBT Center The Independent reported last week that Bishop of Galway Martin Drennan sent a letter to the Society of St Vincent de Paul “demanding clarification as to the grounds” of a donation made by the group to “a Galway LGBT group…
Read More…is emerging as a “global LGBT rights advocate.” Marianna Orlandi writes, “Uruguay’s lead is particularly striking, since 45 percent of its population self-identifies as Roman Catholic, and the Uruguayan bishops have persisted in their criticism of both the reproductive rights and the LGBT agendas.” Orlandi hopes that when OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro “may be persuaded to relent his promotion of the [LGBT] agenda” when he meets with Pope Fra…
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…cultural conservatism in the United States. The foundation of this source code (the motherlode of the code, as it were) is Catholic natural law moral philosophy. Natural law is the 800-year-old Thomist tradition that absorbs (from revelation and scripture) and communicates (into public discourse and legal practice) a quite specific understanding of the human individual as the summit of God’s creation. First Things has hosted some of the most impo…
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…said. In September, the deputy minister of health, Hamisi Kigwangalla, accused HIV treatment organizations of “promoting homosexuality.” Tanzania has been a success story, writes Sieff, with the HIV/AIDS rate dropping from 12 percent to 5 percent since 2002 while the number of people receiving treatment has more than doubled in five years to over 700,000. But the new anti-gay crackdown could frighten people away from receiving treatment. Even tho…
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…e that a change in the definition of marriage is unwarranted, not just because it is in opposition to the teaching of scripture and our Lord himself in Matthew 19,” he said “But because I believe marriage, traditionally understood as a union of one man and one woman, is a positive good for our society, where marriage and the procreation of children are bound together as the foundational fabric of our society, notwithstanding the sad reality that n…
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