Religion Dispatches
…hrough the gate leading to the water, one must punch in a combination pass code. The town’s elegantly manicured gardens belie its state’s housing market collapse. But just outside of town, realtors advertise “Free Foreclosure Lists!” Sitting along a commons of lush grass, an attractive young couple casually dressed in designer sunglasses, khakis, and expensive sandals led a group of fair-haired children in prayer. The young blond woman urged the c…
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…dictates of the prophetic voice through a regimented system of behavior: a code of conduct thoroughly imbued with an ethos and a morality. The most articulate condemnations of torture that Judaism has to offer are therefore presented most effectively as deeply spiritual legal analyses. The best of these, in recent years, was composed by Rabbi Melissa Weintraub for Rabbis for Human Rights, an international organization focusing on a number of progr…
Read More…views on everyone else, but make sure they’re free to mock that very moral code. Democrats fear that argument. That’s why their approach has been, especially since about 2006 or so, to try to make themselves out to be the “authentic” Christians who truly care about their neighbors and all that. The Aqua Buddha ad may have been a bad strategic move in Kentucky; we’ll never really know. But Conway — without, as far as I can tell, invoking treacly re…
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…ghly a third have to do with LGBT people. “Religious freedom” has become a code-word for those looking to stymie LGBT equality. Any “threat” to marriage always seems to come from those hoping to access the institution, but never from heterosexuals (despite escalating rates of divorce, domestic violence, and infidelity in such unions). Defending “bathroom privacy” is a thinly veiled (and well-documented) scare-tactic used to demonize transgender pe…
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…ons, such as a Sikh who successfully sued the Army in 2015 over a grooming code that would have required him to shave his beard and remove his turban. Justice, not to mention old wisdom about geese and ganders, demands that our judicial system should treat like cases alike. Either sincere religious conviction should be a defense, or it shouldn’t. There should be a healthy debate about the place and extent of religious exemption in contemporary, pl…
Read More…ynamic Sarah Posner wrote about here. I’ve often noted that Romney doesn’t code traditional “tough-guy” masculine, which I believe is attributable to Mormon culture. 5. Religiosity subsumes ethics. Despite last-minute revelations of marital infidelity that could have impacted religiously-identified voters, Gingrich soared. That too is a curious South Carolina outcome that begs for clarification. I’ll be talking about “God and Politics” Tuesday at…
Read More…ious liberty.” Certainly, the religious right has made “religious liberty” code for “we reserve the right to discriminate against LGBT people with impunity,” but I think some businesses ought to have the right to deal with who they want to deal with. A photographer, or a baker, for example, should be able to serve who they please. If their refusal to serve an LGBT person (or anybody else for that matter) leads to a lawsuit or a boycott, that’s the…
Read More…s, listening to speeches at the League of Women Voters, demonstrating with Code Pink and Le Front Des Lesbiennes Radicales, and generally gathering with other women to no good end. Now, I actually was there when the original plot was hatched, funnily enough: It was back in 1973, at the Women’s Exchange tea room in Eugene, Oregon. (To the public, it was billed as a Missionary Society presentation.) We had just finished singing a song about the weav…
Read More…the day in 1954 when the “Johnson amendment” language was put into the tax code was the day that “changed America” and set the stage for bad Supreme Court decisions and everything else that has gone wrong since the 1960s. Pulpit Freedom Sunday participants agree to preach political sermons, send them to the IRS, and dare the agency to sue them. The Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly known as the Alliance Defense Fund) has offered legal help to c…
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…art of a discussion of workers’ rights, or to include Maimonides’ medieval code in a discussion of the death penalty, or to quote from the writings of twentieth-century Orthodox Rabbinical jurists to make a point about trying minors as adults. So what does this all mean? I would like to suggest that this marks the third stage in an evolution from a desacralized language of social justice to the current reclamation of the language of tradition. In…
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