Religion Dispatches
…e be? The obvious choice is a very very conservative independent fundamentalist church. It’s on Main Street, it’s easy to get to, it’s wheelchair accessible, and no other facility in the precinct would really work at all. As it happens, this church teaches that women shouldn’t vote. Its members hold this belief sincerely, for it is a well-attested and important part of their church’s tradition. They can cite scripture in support of their belief. T…
Read More…54 had no legal ramifications: it was not a bill to change the state legal code, as was SB-1433. It also stipulated that the bill would not apply to in vitro fertilization. Well, if any legislators believed this would give them cover, they were mistaken. The pro-personhood folks made it known that a a representative would be bringing a procedural motion to force hearing on SB-1433. Oklahomans for Life sent this memo to house Republicans, stating t…
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…elivered—dissent and approval, femininity and righteousness and pleasure—encoded the proceedings with a special kind of attention, another layer to Supreme Court ritual. Those fabric beacons shone powerfully for those of us who have experienced marginalization, had to code switch from setting to setting, or learned to express ourselves through subtle cues beyond formal language. While it’s not a huge surprise that some of Ginsburg’s collars will r…
Read More…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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…unds like a demographic that ought to be of interest to politicians, journalists, and activists, right? That demographic consists of people who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic, or religiously unaffiliated—the “nones,” as they’re sometimes called. And it hasn’t attracted anywhere near the attention it deserves in the postgame analysis of the 2012 election. A quick Google search turns up 64,000 results concerning the GOP’s “Latino problem” …
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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…
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…ess. But, along with a national abortion ban, this will be on the GOP-wish list should they win back Congress and the presidency. The Federalist piece mentioned above ends with a dark warning for its readers: “if you object or protest in any way, they are angling to get you labeled a bigot, a threat to child safety, a terrorist. And you know what that means.” In fact, parts of the American Right are already owning the term “terrorist.” At CPAC in…
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…e strings of his electric bass to bang out a rhythm that sounds like Morse code. When all twelve performers are on stage, the sounds that they make together are nothing less than astonishing. On top of it all rests the falsetto voice of the band’s vocalist, Jón Birgisson, who sings the lyrics with a keening wail: Bakvio sk´yjaból vaknar sól úr dvala Svalar sér vio kalda dropa regnsins leikur sér vio heita loga eldsins Byr til regnboga A rough tran…
Read More…6:10 James 2:5 James 5:1-6 1 John 3:17 Now, this is just a quick and dirty list that I stole from what appears to be some hippie site. But that’s just the point: you can’t read the Bible for very long before you stumble into some concern for social or economic justice. The damn thing is riddled with all kinds of socialist or fascist ideas, in Beck’s terms. Not that any of that matters. This hasn’t a thing to do with logic, or faith, or really anyt…
Read More…ligious freedom. In the terms of section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, these corporations are called “churches,” their “integrated auxiliaries,” and “conventions or associations of churches,” where churches are defined as a “subset of IRC 501(c)(3) organizations organized and operated for religious purposes.” Necessarily, such entities are artificial or fictive persons under the law, subjects capable of claiming rights and bearing respon…
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