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…
Read More…at evening. As Buchanan’s speech (which Molly Ivins once remarked “sounded better in its original German”) got around 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…
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…se lives improved when women stopped voting. “It facilitates communication between spouses,” they argue. “A husband, who knows that he will be voting on behalf of two people, and not just himself, becomes less selfish. He learns to listen, because he has to. Meanwhile, a wife is not just encouraged, but required to make her concerns known to her husband. If a wife has her vote and a husband his, it introduces strife and self-interest into the marr…
Read More
…ooled by Santorum’s defense that he believes Obama when the president says he’s a Christian. Listen to the world salad Santorum and Stewart dropped onto the national airwaves. Anyone steeped in the “Christian worldview” (including Stewart’s old boss Bachmann) would 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 Christian…
Read More
…he bounds of the critical methods that define academic inquiry—it would be better if fewer people, rather than more, had access. On the campaign trail his rhetoric is purged of explicit Christian language, favoring the bogeyman of liberal professors to the forces of Satan. But Santorum’s religious vision places his more sanitized comments into a disturbing context. The policy implications that such convictions would likely have (for example, on t…
Read More…known for attacks on Scientology, decided to send a message to the Catholic Church by shutting down the official Vatican website (still not responding as of this posting). What are the Church’s misdeeds, according to these code crusaders? They go back to the selling of indulgences in the 16th century. And more recently, of course, there’s the Church’s interference in Italy’s domestic politics. (Not just Italy, we’d have to say.) – The Eds. …
Read More…wants to make us slaves again. Sigh. Palin’s over the top proclamation was coded in one of her specialty word salads that few can translate. Since I have been called the Palin Whisperer by one of my Twitter followers, let me give you the short version: Obama wants to make white people slaves!!!! In case you don’t want to watch the video, here’s the transcript: PALIN: Well, what we can glean from this is an understanding of why we are all on the ro…
Read More
…ind him. He holds in his right hand a ghostly “Q+” (according to some, the code name Trump himself uses when he posts on Q message boards) and the text reads “The World Will Soon Understand/Nothing Can Stop What is Coming,” a direct reference to “The Storm.” As I wrote back in 2020: The QAnoners’ apocalypse, unsurprisingly, is one of political partisan violence, culminating in “The Storm,” when all of the so-called “deep state leaders” will be arr…
Read More