Religion Dispatches
…Listen to a podcast of the Ticket 2016, during which I talked about religion in the 2016 presidential campaign with Austin, Texas NPR affiliate KUT’s Ben Philpott and the Texas Tribune’s Jay Root:…
Read More
…’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….
Read More…ing Bob” La Follette, who ran for the White House on the Progressive party ticket, and whose journal survives to this day, headquartered down by the Essen Haus practically in the shadow of the Wisconsin state capitol. For those of us lucky enough to grow up in the “Moscow of the Midwest,” progressive could mean generally any non-communist member of the Old Left (it is a distressing artifact of my upbringing that I can parse far better than the ave…
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…
Read More…rro, who was the first female vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket, for all she did for “those of us who came after her.” One has to wonder what Ferraro was thinking as Palin carried on, placing Ferraro smack in the middle of Palin’s own reading of feminist history dating to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Palin noted some things that had not changed in the years between Ferraro’s campaign and her own: the “neanderthals…
Read More
…ates 24/7 surveillance of citizens. Ever since Mike Pence joined the Trump ticket, I’ve been haunted by Duvall’s character. What would that quiet, white, Christian male authority look like in today’s world, and what kind of society would Commander, oops, President Pence seek to build? As Trump’s troubles grow by the hour so does the urgency of these questions. Online and off, the term Christofascism is creeping into conversations. Christofascism,…
Read More
…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…
Read More…e shoulder. Recognized and then cheerfully interrogated by fellow protestors, Huntsman melted into the crowd. Both Huntsman and Romney remind me of the premium Mormon culture has placed on clean-cut all-American likeability. Since the middle of the twentieth-century, that’s been the ticket we’ve tried to ride away from our frontier origins and melt into the suburban middle class. And still, Mormons consistently find our faith ranking consistently…
Read More