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Growing Up Gay in 666: Fred Phelps in Retrospect

…christ. The fact that the US Postal Service assigned “666” as Topeka’s zip code prefix the year I was born underscored my destiny as ultimate evil; even if Phelps said that about all homosexuals. Phelps is currently making his case about homosexuality to the US Supreme Court in Snyder v. Phelps. Legal scholars think the case is about First Amendment freedoms of speech and religion; military families think it’s about honoring our war dead; and many…

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God Bless Islam with Courageous Leadership

…ely and help people think imaginatively? Or does he focus on impieties and promote the virtues of paraphernalia like the dress code and the mandatory length of facial hairs? If the imam is as wise as the religious leader in the Canadian sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie, it will be a huge step up. Mosque committees share their burden of responsibility too. Often they appoint preachers by applying the lowest and cheapest standard; theological div…

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Islamic Intellectual Leadership at a Crossroads

…t ideas, and right actions, iman wa al-‘a’mal al-salihah. The relationship between orthodoxy and orthopraxis has come under attack recently, and by these three scholars in particular. If you challenge some of the presumptions about orthodoxy, you effect change in orthopraxis and all of these men were vanguards in this respect. Islam is built upon ideas. If we contribute to the world of ideas in any way, but in particular in such a way that everyon…

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‘Atheizing’ the Dead, Religious Doughnuts, & Tax-Free Witching

…to the billboard as poking “a finger in your eye.” Federal prosecutors are suing the city of Walnut, California for refusing a zoning permit to a group building a new Zen center. In Rockland County, New York, authorities are expecting sanitation violations by Orthodox Jews who perform the ritual of kaparot—which involves slaughtering a chicken. The ultra-Orthodox community in the county has rung up $15,000 in fines related to the ritual since 2007…

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Values Voters Summit: Preaching Wins the Morning

…tray constitutional rights as divinely ordained, and a government that is exceeding authority they claim was given it by God. See my dispatch from Ralph Reed’s conference last weekend. But to win over this crowd, the presidential hopefuls — and tea party king- and queenmakers like Michele Bachmann and Jim DeMint — have to know how to preach it. That was something that some speakers this morning — DeMint and Bachmann, as well as Mike Huckabee and M…

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Conservative Christians Finally Get Serious About Divorce

…n gays and lesbians who want to marry. Jesus, who said nothing about homosexuality, had plenty to say about heterosexual couples who divorced. Throughout the Bible, divorce has been strongly condemned and only allowed under certain circumstances—mainly when the woman cheats (but not the husband)—but even then, divorce is a great source of shame for both parties. A lot has changed in religious circles over the millennia. When my father divorced my…

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The New “Values Voters” Mantra

…y and Titus both read the secular language of the Constitution in the context of the invocation of “the Creator” in the Declaration of Independence: “Inalienable rights are endowed by the Creator.” These rights, both Rushdoony and Titus contend, are not granted by either document, only recognized in them; these rights exist only because they were granted by God.  That “endowed by the Creator” argument has been made repeatedly by Republican politic…

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Stephen Broden, Beck’s Black Robed Regiment In Action

…who has spoken at tea party rallies and who claimed at Michele Bachmann’s Code Red rally against health care reform that health care reform was “against the law of nature and nature’s God” and “against the Judeo-Christian ethic that this nation was built upon.” Broden also appears in Maafa 21, a propaganda film that claims that reproductive rights are a conspiracy to commit “black genocide.” The film has been promoted by the Frederick Douglass Fo…

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Final (Probably) Thoughts On The Aqua Buddha Ad

…ed Christian whose faith is not to be questioned? Because as we all know (Exhibit A, Barack Obama), for a Democrat to say he’s a Christian is not enough to insulate him from questions about his religion. Rand Paul walked free from his Aqua Buddha past because conservative Christians think he’s a good Christian now, and others, like the reporter Jason Zengerle, who broke the story, think he’s just a fun-loving, anti-authoritarian prankster. (That’s…

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