Religion Dispatches
In the latest news flash that has Wall Street reeling, Bernard Madoff, arguably the most dominant figure at the NASDAQ Exchange, was arrested on one count of Security Fraud by an FBI team investigating the affair. The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched its own investigation, and further charges seem inevitable. The numbers involved are staggering. His company’s value, estimated at some $50 billion is now, by his own admission, based…
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…Indeed, the tradition of sacred spaces as gun-free (weapon-free, violence-free, force-free) zones makes the use of sanctuary language in recent “Second Amendment Sanctuary” legislation curious. The turn from the use of “sanctuary” from its origins in restricting vengeance, violent enforcement, and weaponry to the protection of gun-keeping within the sanctuary borders, while rhetorically brilliant, feels particularly cynical when research shows th…
Read More…the memo was “based on a far-fetched interpretation of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” In a 2010 letter, CARD charged that continued reliance on the 2007 OLC memo “threatens core civil rights and religious freedom protections” and that the administration’s vague case-by-case approach “raises the problem of religious selectivity and provides scant opportunity for transparency or accountability. Following this approach indefinitely whi…
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…and hatred by those who attacked him on a daily basis outside his clinic. Free From All, Free For All One of Luther’s most popular writings is his pamphlet called “The Freedom of a Christian,” in which he declares that a Christian is free from all earthly authority through the power of the gospel, which establishes a reconciled relationship with God—a quite subversive political orientation since it relativizes all earthly authority. At the same t…
Read More…hypothetical and puts his finger on exactly how it distorts the interplay between the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause: The analogy to “forcing kosher delis to sell ham,” put forward by Bishop William Lori, exemplifies the way the problem is misunderstood. In America (unlike in Israel), people have the right to choose whether they want to sell ham and whether they want to consume it; neither option is proscribed. We all might agr…
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…seem overdrawn at first glance. There seems to be a fundamental difference between a citizen and/or organization withholding taxes for state services with which they do not wish to be identified, and a citizen and/or organization being asked to provide those services themselves. The problem is that this creates a false distinction between the state as an actor and people as actors. State services are, all of them, provided by organizations and by…
Read More…ember of Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission it deemed hostile to religion: Freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the holocaust, whether it be—I mean, we—we can list hundreds of situations where freedom of religion has been used to justify discrimination. And to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to—to use…
Read More…loped is the twin definition of citizenship: on the one hand, citizens are free to participate in the political realm. On the other, they’re free to participate in the economic realm, which is to say, the market. Increasingly in the post-war era, it’s that last definition that has taken precedence, leaving us with a global marketplace populated by members of many different nations and ethnicities. As Cavanaugh points out, the less government you h…
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…incentive the Christian Right has to keep the focus on religion instead of free speech is because the implications if Smith wins on the free speech argument are, frankly, unthinkable. A win for Smith would bore a hole right in the center of nondiscrimination laws—nondiscrimination laws for all, not just for LGBTQ people—no matter what ADF want us to think. A win for Smith would, by some measures, create an entirely new class of rights: artists who…
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…poor and without health coverage, that’s all about you. We wash our hands. Free markets: If you are poor, you are perfectly “free” to sleep under a bridge, in the immortal words of Anatole France. But the wealthy are totally free to suck up health care resources via tax-favored health savings accounts. And it goes without saying that the insurance companies and health providers are totally free to suck out your blood. State authority on insurance…
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