Religion Dispatches
…t tea party supporters don’t care about abortion, as the Public Religion Research Institute poll showed, 63% of tea partiers are anti-choice, and the Personhood USA video plays on many tea party themes. With the tea party’s ascendancy, much has been made of “culture war” issues like abortion not being hot election topics this year. But as I reported this morning, anti-choice groups are pouring financial and legal resources into painting anti-choic…
Read More…ndidates have pledged to be pro-life.” It clicks through to the Personhood USA website. Personhood USA did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Jason Jones, a spokesperson for the Pro-Life Super PAC, claimed the Super PAC was not connected to Personhood USA or any other organization. He said, “we like the [Personhood] pledge. We think it’s a good standard.” The Personhood pledge, which Romney did not sign, commits candidates to su…
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…ting married.” Focus cried foul to FoxNews saying: “If Google wants to be truly fair to its employees, it should consider extra compensation to married heterosexuals who are bitten every April 15 by the marriage-penalty tax,” spokesman Gary Schneeberger told FoxNews.com. “How is offering more money to only one group to offset a perceived inequity not a form of discrimination against those groups not fortunate enough to receive such bonuses?” Fox l…
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…teenage evangelical boys who’ve wrestled with doubt, and he’s the atheist crusaders’ most feared enemy. He’s also a gifted organizer [who is helping to hatch] an ingenious plan to transform the map of academic philosophy. Inside particular subcultures of evangelical atheists and evangelical Christians, he’s a huge celebrity; but outside them, he’s almost completely unknown. That may change soon. How does religion inform (or not inform) your intere…
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…Kristlnacht and the star and between the star and deportations, because thousands upon thousands of Jews were being crushed during those years, they were being starved, they were humiliated, they were being excised from society. And that was as much of the Holocaust, in some ways, as the extermination and was the precursor to the final solution. Valy’s story, then, is both a “small” story—in other words, Valy’s story—and a “big” story, one that ca…
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…dentity, a manhood purged of anything feminine. Consider the young purity crusaders I write about in chapter 13, “The Romance of American Fundamentalism.” They’re smart, hip, engaging kids; they scoff at the old Christian Right war chiefs, they live in Brooklyn and worship in Manhattan, they don’t like Bush—and they’re dedicated to an ideology that in its emphasis on “purity” above all is potentially farther right than anything Bush has ever dream…
Read More…has changed his beliefs for political advantage, particularly on marriage. Rudd responds that he came to his decision “through an informed conscience, and a Christian conscience, that it was the right thing to do.” Rudd goes on to say he doesn’t think people choose to be gay. “It is how people are built,” he says, adding that he considers it a “completely ill-founded view” to think of homosexuality as abnormal. But things get really interesting…
Read More…r are informed, for instance, by labeling on screen or in voice over, the true nature of what they are seeing. Reconstructions must not, however, distort the known facts.” It’s bad enough that we flippantly observe that someone is “drinking the Kool-Aid,” without regard to the origins of the expression in the deaths at Jonestown. But faking the Kool-Aid in re-enactments goes even further, turning religious tragedies into cheesy melodramas. Seeing,…
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…esolve to press forward.” The conservative media machine, from Live Action News, to Newsbusters, to Free Republic, ran with Mason’s story of being attacked by violent pro-choice advocates, pushing the narrative that violent assaults against pro-life Americans are on the rise. The Daily Beast reacted on the day of the press release by publishing its third story on the Masons in the space of a week, complete with the same home vandalism photos the a…
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…workshops and conferences. Its website says the organization, which still runs today “recognizes diversity, challenges male chauvinism, patriarchy and cultures that aim at oppressing women.” Uganda has drawn global controversy over the Anti Homosexuality Act that was passed into law bu then suspended by the courts on a procedural issue. More from the story: In Uganda, where homosexual acts are punishable by prison sentences, being openly gay requ…
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