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Record Number of Stealth Creationism Bills Introduced in 2011

…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…

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Gays Losing Value to “Value Voters”?

…ts civil unions. “I’m going to nursing school now, and part of the nursing code is to be nonjudgmental,” Smith said. “In hospitals, if a same-sex partner couldn’t visit or get information about their partner’s health? I just think that’s wrong.” With election season right around the corner, the “value voters” in Iowa agree with those who huddled in DC this past weekend – there are more important things to worry about than what the gay couple up th…

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Why Belief in the Primacy of Language Leads to a Misunderstanding of Richard Dawkins, Islamophobia, and Politics

…than thinking about the self as being a language—as being like a computer code that speaks—we think about the self as a cluster of forces. [These forces] make us what we are, and our decisions come from that rather than from this linguistic layer, which is actually constituted by that more fundamental cluster of forces. That’s what I see affect theory doing: upsetting this idea that human beings start with language and that we do what we do becau…

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Benny Hinn Can’t Heal His Marriage

…Christians is not reason enough for a divorce and, more often than not, is code for “serious sin.” Pentecostals have a history of being strict about reasons to divorce, adultery being scripturally the only reason to do so. For those who divorce and who have a denominational affiliation through ministerial license, a divorce can mean, at best, additional scrutiny and at worst, stripping of ministerial credentials. Of course, that never has stopped…

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California Tribes Denounce Catholic Church’s “Fraud” and “Blatant Fabrication” on Serra Sainthood

…America. But speakers at today’s press conference suggested the church has better options. “Surely Archbishop Oscar Romero is a more worthy candidate for the Hispanic peoples of the Americas,” said Norma Louise Flores, author of a MoveOn.org petition opposing the canonization. Steven Newcomb, co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Law Institute and author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, connected…

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Gay: The Superior Lifestyle

…stitution meant,” she continued. “The homosexuals get it — it’s a struggle between our religious freedoms and their right to do what they want to do.” Ah, there’s the old canard that always gets trotted out by those on the religious right — it’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 sinn…

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Jennifer’s Body and Why I Like Buffy’s Body Better

…ry discourses about contraception and abortion regularly made a connection between female sexuality and demonic influence (an image in a book from the National Police Gazette shows a young woman, a scaly demon emerging from her vagina with a caption that reads “The Female Abortionist”); In the early twentieth century, silent film actress Theda Bara became the archetypal “vamp” who used sex to lure men to their deaths while Adele Farrington, in a p…

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How (Not) to Understand Romney’s Time as an LDS Bishop

…cigarette and a beer (both forbidden according to the LDS Church’s dietary code, “The Word of Wisdom”), more substantial coverage this week is focusing on Romney’s service as bishop of his LDS congregation in Belmont, Massachusetts in the 1980s.  On Monday, the Washington Post offered a revealing account of Bishop Romney’s interactions with Boston’s robust Mormon feminist community during tense years for the movement, when the LDS Church played a…

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Bachmann’s Law School Mentor Asserts Biblical Roots of American Political System

…cannot do within the guidelines of the IRS rules. He cited the part of the code that prohibits influencing legislation and labeled it “legalese,” before a lengthy parsing of what counts as legislation and then what counts as influencing— none of which substantially departed from everyday understanding of those terms. The talk sounded much like the “word study” sermon style found in many fundamentalist churches. He was careful to clarify that wheth…

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The Democrats Got Religion, At Huge Cost

…ed Parenthood in which he promised to deliver, first thing, on getting the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) passed. For the religious right, FOCA is the devil’s bill, one which would codify reproductive freedom and dash their plans to shackle women to maternity wards. Obama started softening his pro-choice position in early 2008, when he was feeling the heat from the right’s virulent Jeremiah Wright smear campaign, and continued to do so throughout th…

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