Religion Dispatches
…nce “same-sex attraction” or “same-gender attraction,” while adhering to a code of morality that forbids all sexual contact outside the bounds of heterosexual marriage. Others claim and openly affirm a gay identity while carefully negotiating a path to maintaining church activity and membership. All of these paths entail profound risks, costs, and consequences. All require a level of conscious deliberation on matters of sexuality and spirituality…
Read More…d the policies of the institution they serve. This, of course, does not excuse Romney’s egregious incidences of coldness and disrespect towards women as reported in Salon and elsewhere. But it’s wrong to depict Mitt Romney as some kind of hardliner, because as far as Mormon men of his generation go, on gender, Romney is rather moderate. Given the scrutiny of Romney’s time as bishop, it also helps to understand more about the roles of bishops in LD…
Read More…nd, at the time under investigation by the Senate Finance Committee for misuse of tax-deductible donor funds, claimed Huckabee was on his side because, in Huckabee’s words, Copeland was “trying to get prosperity to the people and they’re [Congress is] trying to take it away from ’em.” Such efforts to win the hearts of televangelists (and by extension, their audiences) date back to the early days of the first George H.W. Bush presidential campaign….
Read More…to defend “traditional” marriage and defend “religious liberty,” which is code for defending the religious right’s ability to bully gay and lesbian people at will using God as their shield. But, wait, there’s more. Gingrich has hit the conservative Christian trifecta by sitting down with the Des Moines Register’s editorial board to affirm that opposition to marriage equality stating that there is a “big difference between saying that you’re to ha…
Read More…nity to sue the pants off of anyone who would deny us accommodations or refuse to host our wedding or shoot photos for the event or bake a cake. Have some couples sued over this? Sure … and I’m a bit dubious about how it advances our rights. An article in the Baptist Press gives a rundown of some current lawsuits and how they are “squashing religious liberty.” Certainly, the religious right has made “religious liberty” code for “we reserve the rig…
Read More…usive regulation” are “as wrong and immoral and stealing;” and the the tax code should be revamped “so we can rejoice together because it would stimulate economic growth.” But there’s more. There’s good, and there’s evil, and in laying out a parade of evils, Robison lists “radical Islam,” “terrorism” and “extreme environmental activism” all in the same breath. The players in Robison’s meetings reflect this agenda. They include Jim Garlow, the Cali…
Read More…er, and religion. It would be very revealing, I think, to see data that focuses on the intersection of religion, class, age, and gender. It might even shed some light on the Newt Gingrich “tough guy” dynamic 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 infidelit…
Read More…proved when women stopped voting. “It facilitates communication between spouses,” they argue. “A husband, who knows that he will be voting on behalf of two people, and not just himself, becomes less selfish. He learns to listen, because he has to. Meanwhile, a wife is not just encouraged, but required to make her concerns known to her husband. If a wife has her vote and a husband his, it introduces strife and self-interest into the marriage.” When…
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…misspoken and did not realize until it was pointed out to her that she had used the word ‘Islamic’ by mistake.” Of course. Because secularists and Muslims and environmentalists are equally the sworn enemies of anyone with a “Christian worldview” and therefore America. An understandable mistake to mix them up in a torrent of dog-whistles: Theological secularism. Global warmists. Radical Islamic. If you’ve had a “Christian worldview” education, you’…
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…es that I’m going to talk about here had the root of their destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the elites in our society, educates the leaders of our society, particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall. What we have here, as Joe Laycock notes, is a meta-narrative of cosmic conflict between the forces of good and the forces of evil. And Santorum’s views on academia are not incidental to thi…
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