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The ‘Common Sense’ Argument Against Marriage Equality

…r and their children.” (The infertile, asexual, post-menopausal, and child-free by choice need not apply.) Anderson echoes precisely what same-sex proponents have been saying all along with regard to children: that the desire to marry is in fact a desire to be more traditional. As Frank Bruni put it, gays and lesbians are no longer cultural rebels; “We’re aspirants to tradition, communicating shared values and asserting a fundamentally conservativ…

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Are Religious Leaders Prepared to Engage “Religious Liberty” Questions Post-Hobby Lobby?

…ders need to help their congregations tell the story of American religious freedom, both its successes and its failures. Celebrate the ways religious liberty provides the crucial bulwark that allows for pluralism of belief and experience: offer special worship services, sermons, education programs, and social media outreach efforts that critically engage the tensions between freedom and liberty in religious practice and American citizenship; take…

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Barack Obama, Pro-Life Hero

…g initiatives, conservative activists are finding they may apply religious freedom to any number of disparate issues. Apart from trivializing what ought to be a sacred liberal right, the widespread deployment of religious freedom arguments indicates a weak rhetorical posture. In each of the cases mentioned above, opponents of a particular piece of legislation embraced religious freedom only after other strategies failed to persuade. Such arguments…

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Atheists Ignore Islamophobia at their Peril

…ing things like “go back to the Middle East, you pedophiles.” We should be free to criticize all religions, Islam included, but that doesn’t mean we should feel free to deride and scorn its adherents. It should go without saying that this isn’t a problem with atheism, but it is a problem among atheists and it’s one that is being largely ignored. 9/11 is frequently lifted up as the genesis of “New Atheism,” and it’s not uncommon to see people at at…

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Final (Probably) Thoughts On The Aqua Buddha Ad

…enough to insulate him from questions about his religion. Rand Paul walked free from his Aqua Buddha past because conservative Christians think he’s a good Christian now, and others, like the reporter Jason Zengerle, who broke the story, think he’s just a fun-loving, anti-authoritarian prankster. (That’s the beauty of a conservative Christian Ayn Rand devotee — they can simultaneously embrace and reject God and get away with it, somehow.) I don’t…

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The Battle for the Meaning of Religious Freedom Day

…a long time. Indeed, what comes up first in a Google search for Religious Freedom Day is ReligiousFreedomDay.com, the work of a California-based Christian right agency called Gateways to Better Education. This group is part of a wider movement that seeks to evangelize children in public schools—as detailed in Katherine Stewart’s book, The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. Gateways states that they work w…

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Pittsburgh Paradox: A City Haunted by God and Steel

…a young man’s desire to do “splendid, brilliant, poetic things,” so as to “free some hilarious and potent spirit within him” is a religious parable, of a sort. Reading it today tells us something about the vagaries of God and Mammon in the Steel City, a story worth considering whether you’re from Pittsburgh or not. “Paul’s Case” doesn’t appear in my book An Alternative History of Pittsburgh—a gross oversight (perhaps justification for a sequel), f…

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The Devil is in the Details

…nfused by this, because one of the pre-conditions is that one must be debt-free. That doesn’t mean I don’t have an amount due against my credit card (or my mortgage, if I still had one), but it means I have keep my payments up in accordance to my agreements. No overdue amounts. I’ve done my mock packing. What is mock packing, you ask? Well, for this trip I have almost all new clothes, and I need to make sure they are sufficient for what I am about…

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Will a New Dawkins Foundation-Sponsored App Help Atheists Talk to Believers?

…-escalation are all admirable, but as noted earlier the tone is not always free of condescension. Writing realistic dialogue for hypothetical conversations is a very particular skill, and several of the scenarios reflect a deep disdain for believers. At times, the app casts believers as belligerent doofuses: …or violent bullies: Another scenario assumes that you might be tempted to lecture an intoxicated panhandler about epistemology and divine ex…

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A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

…g meals or the “click, click, click” of the computer mouse in response to “free shipping!” “40 % off!” or “Buy one get one free!” in the United States, we are gluttonous consumers of material goods (and food, but that is a whole other subject). The value and consequences of shopping in dominant US culture puts the consumer on a roller-coaster ride. One year we are told that excessive, unwise spending and its resultant debt have led our country int…

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