Religion Dispatches
…tion” uttered out loud any longer. What one does hear, however, amounts to code for the same thing. Thus, R.J. Rushdoony’s still-influential ideas about forging a godly nation—a nation organized according to biblical law—take it pretty much for granted that godly social organization has whites on top. Rushdoony, who lived into the current century, condemned interracial marriage as “unequal yoking.” Un-dead David Barton, another hugely influential…
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…should be dismissed became they impinge upon the Plowshares 7’s religious freedom. This claim rested on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a 1993 law that requires the federal government not to “substantially burden” someone’s practice of religion unless a “compelling government interest” is involved and the rule the government is enforcing is the “least restrictive means” of achieving its goal. The judge in the Plowshares trial denied…
Read More…e that’s how he wants to treat her. This isn’t a hypothetical: it happened between Salt Lake Tribune humorist Robert Kirby and Mormon blogger C. Jane Kendrick (aka Courtney Clark Kendrick) at the Sunstone Symposium in July. In response to Kirby’s column this week criticizing McKenna Denson, who is suing The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over its role in an alleged attempted rape by a high-ranking church official, Kendrick posted on F…
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…st, but a White nationalist cannot. This is because there’s a differential between a “homegrown violent extremist” and a “domestic violent extremist” within the Department of Homeland Security lexicon. A “homegrown violent extremist” acts under the influence or direction of a Foreign Terrorist Organization, or FTO, but a “domestic violent extremist” does not. In other words, a “homegrown violent extremist” is Muslim and a “domestic violent extremi…
Read More…the only person who thinks this is an insane provision to have in the tax code? Medical science is evidence-based and faith is the “evidence of things not seen,” according to the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews. So I guess they’re really the same, right? Let’s fund them both! But no, no, and NO to any federal dollars for abortion, saith the good senator from Salt Lake. Hatch narrowly lost his push to get this prohibition into the Se…
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…ke Russia’s anti-gay propaganda law, a major step backward: Consensual sex between men was a crime in Soviet times but Kyrgyzstan, an impoverished country of 5.5 million, adopted a new criminal code in 1998 that made it legal. Kazakhstan and Tajikistan have also taken similar steps but the two other ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, have not. Kyrgyzstan would, however, be the first of them to ban “gay propaganda” am…
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…gaging in religious offense (listed under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code) can face a prison sentence, a hefty fine, or an extra-judicial killing. Whatever the trigger is, and whether or not arrests are made, we see that violence often takes place shortly after. Often, these rumors spread via Facebook or WhatsApp. Soon, a mob will gather. They will destroy homes, shops, and places of worship belonging to the minority community. Law enforceme…
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…t Orthodox Jews were more interested in ritual observances—the obligations between people and God—while Reform Jews were interested in charity and justice, or the obligations among people. (No one really knew where the Conservative movement stood…) The last decade has changed all this. On the one hand there has been an unprecedented growth of Jewish social justice organizations; groups like California’s Progressive Jewish Alliance, Avodah: The Jew…
Read More…e antebellum South. And many people of color are well versed at linguistic code-switching depending on the context. So why should I be offended by Senator Reid’s astute observation? If anyone should be offended it should be the critical mass of Americans, of all racial, ethnic and political perspectives, who are so informed by the logic of white supremacy that they fail to interrogate the correlations between dark skin tone and negativity or light…
Read More…e multipliers. Conservatives are strenuously trying to challenge parallels between the Norway shooter and the positions they themselves have been advocating. But Breivik’s call for a return to patriarchy, driven by a fear of emasculation by powerful women, is also a feature of American religious right rhetoric. Florida Congressman and Tea Party favorite Allen West, speaking last spring at a “Women Impacting the Nation” meeting, declared: “We need…
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