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Death Penalty, Debated (Dedicated to the Memory of Sarah Horowitz)

By Bill Berkowitz

…p from 26 in 2007]… accounting for just under 50% of all executions in the United States” in 2008. “Seven of those executed had been convicted in Dallas County.” The number of executions nationwide dropped to 37 in 2008, a 14-year low. According to USA Today, “The Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment and compiles annual statistics, reports that for the most part only Southern states resumed executions. Ohio, which car…

Trump’s Pathological Devotion to Border Walls Isn’t Political, It’s Theological

By Alana Massey

…ave only carried so many bullets with him. Americans knew how to watch the number of reported casualties go up, but we lost our collective minds when we watched the number of confirmed active shooters in Paris go up. The images coming out of Paris in the immediate term were of a city devoured by chaos and fear rather than the stillness of carnage, more terrifying for their uncertainty. There was a brief lull in the digital noise when an official g…

The Great Secret of Constitutional Law: Why Proposition 8 Will (and perhaps should) Be Upheld

By Bruce Ledewitz

…of same-sex marriage, legislative reform efforts were gaining ground in a number of states. Granted, these were usually modest civil union compromises, but they were not sparking the kind of backlash that led to the Proposition 8 effort in California. Such statutory reform could have laid the foundation for further legal development toward full recognition of the right to marry. In retrospect, the federal courts were probably wise to avoid any su…

The “Shrinking Influence” of Social Conservatives at the United Nations

By Sarah Posner

…a sign “of the shrinking influence of American social conservatives at the United Nations.” Congressional conservatives Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Christopher Smith (R-NJ) — heroes of the religious right — had joined with Muslim countries in an effort to block the IGLHRC’s application. Lynch observed: In previous years, American conservatives like Smith, backed by the White House and the Vatican, exercised enormous influence on social matters at the…

Persecution of Ugandan Bishop Continues In United States

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…d pro-LGBT denominations in the United States. As Rev. Senyonjo tours the United States speaking out against Uganda’s still pending “Kill the Gays” bill and trying to foster some compassion for the plight of gays and lesbians all around Africa, the conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy is crying foul and accusing the Bishop of trying to get Western countries to use their influence in Africa to help accomplish the “acceptance of homosex…

RDBook: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World: An Interview with Michelle Goldberg

By Mandy Van Deven

…ajor theme of this book is the global fallout from the culture wars in the United States, and Christianity plays a much bigger role here than any other religion. How much funding for family planning and abortion services in the developing world comes from the developed world? That’s a hard question to answer, because it varies so much by country. Asian countries cover much more of their own costs than poorer countries in Africa, for example. And o…

January 6 protester holds giant image of White Jesus in a Make America Great Again cap.

America Appears to be Heading for a Religious Civil War

By Nilay Saiya

…nd institutions and the 2021 insurrection at the capitol. No longer is the United States the world’s oldest continuous democracy, according to Polity. Political science research has shown that anocracies are most likely to experience civil war in the first few years of their durations and that transitions into anocracy from democracy (as opposed to transitions into anocracy from autocracy) leave states at a higher risk for civil war. The United St…

Clueless in Gaza

By Shalom Goldman

…blishment of the state, but one would be hard pressed to learn this in the United States. One reason might be that we in the United States don’t have as strong a tradition of public intellectual dissent as do other, older societies. Within Israel, a younger state, there is a tradition of political engagement that its European founders brought with them to Palestine. As in Europe and Latin America, Israel’s most prominent writers are also public in…

With Methodist LGBTQ Vote and GOP Support for Trump, White Protestantism Has Hit Bottom

By Peter Laarman

…ermining these ordinary virtues. It’s actually quite useful to look at the United Methodist vote as a blow against the rule of reason. All of the mainline denominations (the so-called “seven sisters”), including the United Methodists, claim to be guided by reason and human experience along with the authority of the Bible and church tradition. They all say that Jesus stands for inclusive love: no one is to be regarded as “less than.” The United Met…

After Orthodox Priest Suspended for ‘Stop the Steal’ Activity, a Renewed Spotlight on the Orthodox Far-Right

By Sarah Riccardi-Swartz

…ovement is not as large or institutionally powerful as evangelicals in the United States, but it is an important transnational node in the growing movements of radicalized alt- and far-right ideologues. The Orthodox far-right in the United States are caught up in the global Culture Wars; whatever political ideology they align themselves with—fascism, populism, monarchism, and many of the other isms—they are typically homophobic, transphobic, anti-…