Religion Dispatches
…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…
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…—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 kabbalistic literature now so popular in modern Israel is in many ways worse. We have evidence that in the heyday of Safed in the sixteenth century a “council for rectifying sins” (va’ad le tikun avonot) was established to seek out and corporally punish those who wer…
Read More…nd 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 both morally wrong and medically ruinous. Many consider this ‘reactionary’ or ‘homophobic.’ But our beliefs are rooted in the Old and New Testament, in natural law and tradition, even in the writing of that paragon of the Enlightenment, Thomas…
Read More…ynamic 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 infidelity that could have impacted religiously-identified voters, Gingrich soared. That too is a curious South Carolina outcome that begs for clarification. I’ll be talking about “God and Politics” Tuesday at…
Read More…tals and so forth. So if one had to bring Boudway’s original analogy up to code, one would have to say this: Imagine you live in a country where the default way to buy food is buying it from your employer. You get a job, and your employer negotiates with companies who in turn have agreements with grocery stores and growers, shipping companies and meat processing plants, and so on. The end result of all this is that you get a card, which you presen…
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…ould fully understand that code as “Obama doesn’t govern from a ‘Christian worldview.’ And you know what that means: he must be a secularist, or an Islamist, or some other enemy of Christianity and America, like a socialist or an environmentalist. Because someone who doesn’t have a ‘Christian worldview’ must have one of those other, anti-American, anti-Christian worldviews.”…
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…r. Santorum insists that Satan has “his sights on… the United States of America,” that he has been working on America’s downfall by “attacking the great institutions of America,” and that “the place where he was… most successful and first successful was in academia.” Santorum continues: [Satan] understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest. They were in fact smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and…
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…the DNC would have come off as more inclusive by featuring Palestinian American and transgender speakers (most LGBTQ+ Americans are, incidentally, nonreligious), secular Americans could have been included too. Representing about a third of the country’s population, nonreligious Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic, but you still don’t see the Democratic Party adopting targeted messaging or inviting representatives to the stage in order to app…
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