Religion Dispatches
…the evidence I have is small, but I think it’s significant. In her recent appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show, Gingrich’s half-sister Candace Gingrich-Jones said that while her brother did not attend her wedding (since he was out of town) “they did send a gift.” As someone who has anti-gay siblings, I find this to be significant. The siblings that refused to attend my wedding never, ever sent a gift. Any acknowledgement of my marriage to my part…
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…same Torah and commentaries, study the same Talmud, live by the same legal codes, and adhere to the same basic belief system. Yes, the haredim have a very narrow reading of these sources but it’s a safe bet that they can cite chapter and verse to support their views—often more adroitly than their modern counterparts. In his Mishneh Torah (Code of Law), Maimonides explicitly advocated the position that women should stay mostly in their homes. The k…
Read More…The elderly couple who owned the B&B had invited us down to the Victorian appointed living room to watch television with them that evening. As Buchanan’s speech (which Molly Ivins once remarked “sounded better in its original German”) got around to gays and lesbians – an uncomfortable silence permeated the room. “Americans are a tolerant people. But a majority believes that the sexual practices of gays, whether a result of nature or nurture, are…
Read More…um, which is conducting state-by-state analysis of primary results in what appears to be an effort to get a statistical grip on the religious vote. Pew Forum data from last weekend’s contest in South Carolina shows that evangelical Christians did play a major role in the Gingrich victory. Of the two-thirds of Republican voters who self-described as “born-again” or “evangelical,” 44% voted for Gingrich, 22% for Romney, and 21% for Santorum. This is…
Read More…e practice. “Yes, that’s lovely that you think so. But outside of Pretend Happy Land, robbing women of the vote is disempowering, and I can’t even believe we’re having this conversation.” Anyway, the municipal government, for many compelling practical reasons, wants the church to serve as the polling place. The church insists that it cannot, in good conscience, allow its sincerely-held teachings to be violated on its watch. The elders take a vote…
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…says he is a Christian. But I am talking about his worldview or the way he approaches problems in this country and I think they’re different than how most people do in America.” Today, his national press secretary, Alice Stewart (whose previous job was press secretary for Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign), went on MSNBC and also claimed that Santorum wasn’t questioning Obama’s religion. Instead, she said, he was talking about “radical envi…
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…in 100 years.” It isn’t a stretch to say that his invocation of “truth” is code for conservative Christian dogma; his real problem with Harvard—and academia in general—is that its scholars do not defer to such dogma. But there’s no need to stretch as Santorum explicitly linked higher education to the work of Satan in a 2008 speech (which has recently gone viral) at Florida’s Ave Maria University. The intimate connection between these views and his…
Read More…known for attacks on Scientology, decided to send a message to the Catholic Church by shutting down the official Vatican website (still not responding as of this posting). What are the Church’s misdeeds, according to these code crusaders? They go back to the selling of indulgences in the 16th century. And more recently, of course, there’s the Church’s interference in Italy’s domestic politics. (Not just Italy, we’d have to say.) – The Eds. …
Read More…wants to make us slaves again. Sigh. Palin’s over the top proclamation was coded in one of her specialty word salads that few can translate. Since I have been called the Palin Whisperer by one of my Twitter followers, let me give you the short version: Obama wants to make white people slaves!!!! In case you don’t want to watch the video, here’s the transcript: PALIN: Well, what we can glean from this is an understanding of why we are all on the ro…
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…ind him. He holds in his right hand a ghostly “Q+” (according to some, the code name Trump himself uses when he posts on Q message boards) and the text reads “The World Will Soon Understand/Nothing Can Stop What is Coming,” a direct reference to “The Storm.” As I wrote back in 2020: The QAnoners’ apocalypse, unsurprisingly, is one of political partisan violence, culminating in “The Storm,” when all of the so-called “deep state leaders” will be arr…
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