Religion Dispatches
…ver.” Although encouraged by the Democratic Party’s “pledges to reduce the number of abortions, … [he] now worries [that] the party is using abortion as a wedge issue by running ads sharply contrasting Palin and Obama on abortion rights,” AP reported. “Strang said he’s waiting for the Republicans to talk more about health care and the economy—and is both intrigued and unmoved by Palin. ‘It’s a great story, but I don’t know what’s changed,’ he said…
Read More…the Constitution Party (then known as the US Taxpayers Party) presidential ticket with Constitution Party founder Howard Phillips in 1996. The Constitution Party’s platform includes the aim of restoring “American jurisprudence to its biblical premises.” Titus’ clients have included the far-right Gun Owners of America, which opposes all gun regulation, Rep. Ron Paul (in a challenge to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law), and former judge Roy…
Read More…tion in all instances except to save the mother’s life, and has joined the ticket with McCain, a man who has opposed efforts to institute wage equality, saying instead that women need more education and training. This twisting of feminist history and rhetoric to protect a champion of anti-feminist causes, traditionalism and sex-kitten objectification, is particularly unnerving for exactly the reasons that Palin’s biggest supporters claim it is: fo…
Read More…inding members that gaining entrance to heaven isn’t like buying a lottery ticket. There is no magic to it, no speaking in tongues, no handling snakes, no eternal security. You work hard here on Earth, quietly, diligently, to retire in eternity. Your works are an outward manifestation of your faith, and your faith is what saves you. A young woman wedged in behind an organ calls out, “Somebody pick a hymn,” and somebody else calls back, “How about…
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…er, she meets Jerry Ricks, a handsome LDS missionary who sends her a plane ticket to Utah after he leaves Austria. Jerry’s stint as a missionary exacerbates his hatred of rules; he’s unhappy to find himself saddled with a wife who insists everyone pray six or seven times a day and get out of bed early each morning for an hour of scripture reading. His wife, for her part, is beyond disappointed to find herself married to a man who cheats on her, us…
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…’ve never laid flowers at a veterans cemetery or followed troop deployment numbers. Doing so would not occur to most. Since the end of the draft and the initiation of the All-Volunteer Force in 1973, veterans have not been distributed widely through civilian communities, and Americans have allowed themselves to support the troops in a distant, spectatorial fashion that may signal gratitude or at least political correctness, but also underwrites a…
Read More…issues involving homosexuality, could pour into voting stations in record numbers to punch the Obama ticket—and then cast a vote for Proposition 8. To try and prevent this, Prop 8 opponents are holding informal educational sessions in black and Latino neighborhoods and talking with black clergy to try to sway the opinion of minority populations that have historically been hostile to LGBT rights—especially same-sex marriage. The stakes are high. B…
Read More…inding us of that shared connection. Disclosure: Eboo Patel and I have been friends for several years, and IFYC supplied my ticket to this event….
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…ssed serious Christian such as Pence even considering a place on the Trump ticket, but when it was offered, he didn’t think twice, yoking the Christian Right to Trump in exchange for a promise to appoint conservative judges and let the right have it’s way with anti-abortion legislation. While publicly Trump presented himself as an ally of the religious right, in private Mayer reports he gleefully mocked their most dearly held goal—banning abortion…
Read More…confident that both the Republican Party platform and the Republican Party ticket in 2012 and the foreseeable future will be for the federal marriage amendment, for defining marriage as being between a man and a woman, and for the Defense of Marriage Act.” GOProud opposes the Defense of Marriage Act, but only because it believes decisions on gay marriage should be made at the state level. It does not, however take a position on the merits of gay m…
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