Religion Dispatches
…ernment”=”tyranny,” for the GOA and many others on the religious right, is code for government is supplanting God’s will and plan for what America is and should be. As Julie and I reported in a piece about the GOA over the summer, GOA’s position is rooted in its religion, not the Constitution (which it believes is a reflection of God’s will, not human hands): The militia movement and Christian Reconstructionism both contend that our current civil…
Read More…s. The man with no religious record to speak of has virtually been given a free pass by his own party’s evangelical base—however lukewarm their support—and the man with a religious record of some depth has been paying for it on a regular basis. Senator Obama is faulted for going to the wrong churches, hearing the wrong sermons, possessing the wrong religious convictions. And all the while, John McCain, unquestionably a man who has sacrificed and s…
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…taught in school, even in the study of race and racism. Unsurprisingly, Americans today act like racial literalists, conflating the text that we read—human bodies—with the interpretation through which we read it—which is to say, the long legacy of thinkers like Blumenbach, who blended Biblical scholarship, proto-science, and aesthetics to bequeath upon us categories that now feel as permanent as mountains and rivers. Again, that’s not to say that…
Read More…to consider the global Anglican Communion – which includes some anti-gay African Churches. The document notes: “Balancing the Church of England’s responsibilities to the people of the parishes and local communities it serves, and its historical position within the global Anglican Communion, introduces complex and morally challenging tensions – and the issue of sexuality has become a focal point on which future relationships across the whole Commun…
Read More…ntific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.” As always, since intelligent design was ruled unconstitutional in Kitzmiller v. Dover, the introduced bills rely on such creationist code words as “teaching the controversy,” “academic freedom,” or “critical analysis.” However, in the case of Florida, the bill’s sponsoring lawmaker Rep. Stephen Wise had proposed similar legislation in 2009. The bill died in comm…
Read More…med by such lewd activity. The poll, however, appears to disprove the hysterical rhetoric from the right. When asked if they had felt any positive or negative changes in their lives after marriage equality was granted, a whopping 92 percent said same-sex marriage had made absolutely no difference in their lives one way or the other. Only 4 percent said it had negatively affected them. The sky in Iowa is apparently quite safe and is not expected to…
Read More…n remains for many Mormons: what makes us so “weird” to the rest of the American public? It’s a subject that Mormons will have to face and learn to engage directly in the twenty-first century. If in the nineteenth century our cultural strategy was to remove ourselves physically from the American mainstream by physical emigration, our twentieth-century strategy was to cultivate an aggressively friendly and “mainstream” public presentation in appear…
Read More…’s gays vs. God! Those filthy gays and lesbians want to end our “religious freedoms” — which is the code phrase for “they want to pass hate crimes laws that make it illegal for us to call them the filthy sinners they are.” As a Christian, who just also happens to be a lesbian, I take offense at this continuing campaign on the religious right to promote this false dichotomy of gays vs. God. No one in the gay and lesbian community wants to curb anyo…
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…is parish spent too much time in “company keeping.” After World War II, American car culture increased elder anxieties about adolescent sexual experimentation. By the 1980s, films like Hardbodies and Porky’s suggested that high school and spring break offered unlimited sexual exploration. By the 1990s, a new generation of parents learned from American Pie that not even dessert was safe from the adolescent libido. Horror films in the “slasher” genr…
Read More…n, Caribbean, and Pacific Parliament reportedly “said it will discourage African heads of state and government from attending the EU-Africa summit scheduled for May should Western nations impose sanctions on Uganda and Nigeria. Navi Pillay, the UN’s Human Rights chief, met with Nigeria’s justice minister last week and slammed the country’s new anti-gay law, saying it violated the Nigerian constitution as well as the African Charter and the Interna…
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