Religion Dispatches
…uld see the hurt and pain in the eyes of another person and say it’s about free speech. Just because you have the right to do something does not mean that you have to do it. Our rights come with responsibilities. No religion should be above criticism. It is a mistake for groups like RM to threaten others. The response to speech should always be more speech. My issue here is that DMD does not address the key question raised by the South Park episod…
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…s fill of human flesh. If the blood of human sacrifice was the seed of the free market, its god remains hungry as ever today. As historians such as Kim Phillips-Fein, Kevin Kruse, and Lawrence Glickman have shown, wealthy followers of this god have been successfully proclaiming their gospel as the exclusive path to freedom for generations. Their message now seems obvious and their god feels like the only option. These disciples are sick of losing…
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…state and the tyranny of the majority.” [16] “Countries and Territories,” Freedom House, 2023. [17] Agustina Giraudy, Democrats and Autocrats: Pathways of Subnational Undemocratic Regime Continuity within Democratic Countries (Oxford University Press, 2015). [18] Paul Rexton Kan, The Global Challenge of Militias and Paramilitary Violence (Palgrave McMillan, 2019), 8. According to Army War College Professor Paul Rexton Kan, “collective self-defens…
Read More…clichéd word turbulence, and free love, and things like that. But there’s free love in the 1920s; there’s free love in the 1930s; the beatnik movement in the 1950s. No one invented any of this. What was different in the 60s, according to Weiner, was that baby boomers were spoiled: plenty of education, money, entertainment; there was a war, but you could get out of it if you were lucky. This vision of unprecedented opportunity strikes me as fair;…
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…the two key issues at stake in its signing: First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion and to free speech: I am very pleased to be signing this bill into law. The graves of our veterans are hallowed ground. And obviously we all defend our Constitution and the First Amendment and free speech, but we also believe that when men and women die in the service of their country and are laid to rest, it should be done with the utmost honor an…
Read More…other religious teaching) at all, much less deeming it “hate speech.” The Free Exercise Clause protects religious practice and religious speech. Under the Free Speech Clause, the government cannot proscribe “hate speech” or even define it. Under the Establishment Clause, the government cannot endorse (or renounce) a particular religion. You can say gay people are intrinsically disordered. Or you can say they don’t have a constitutional right to g…
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…the United States, you need financial and social resources. The organs are free—they’ve been donated—but the surgery, follow up visits, and medications are not free. They’re quite expensive. The estimated cost for a transplant and 180 days of follow up and medications ranges from $414,000 (kidney) to $1.3 million (heart), a cost that has to be found either in your bank account or in the bank account of your insurance company in order to get an org…
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…then, seeking a court, an institution really of the state, to preserve or promote such “freedoms” may be a last resort of conservative evangelicals. And I doubt that, in a dramatically changing and diversifying country, it will bring in substantial political or social rewards. But it may help evangelicals to retain what they have won over the better part of a century and still seek in thousands of small businesses and myriad business activities,…
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…of an adolescent boy, Tom Sawyer, who knows that Jim has already been set free by his owner. That Twain’s riotous vernacular—its mixture of sly comedy and broad parody, its thick nostalgia for a fading river culture—somehow makes it possible to read this cruel narrative with pleasure constitutes an artistic achievement of the highest order, but a deeply perverse one. What other word better describes a story in which an escaping slave is drawn by…
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…ht in any principle external to man, or superior to him, but simply in the free will of individuals; that the authority in the State comes from the people only; and that, just as every man’s individual reason is his only rule of life, so the collective reason of the community should be the supreme guide in the management of all public affairs. In Libertas, freedom—like genitals and sperm and eggs—is “ordered” to something by God. It’s not just a p…
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