Religion Dispatches
…close enough for vote-tampering to give him a victory. Was it “values” (a code word for conservative religiosity) or national insecurity? When Democratic strategists Stanley Greenberg and James Carville asked “Why America Wanted Change But Voted for Continuity” in 2004, they came up with the best answer: “A narrative is the key to everything, and the Republicans had a much more coherent attack and narrative… The president was able to keep the ele…
Read More
…interactive nature of communications, he says, relativizes the distinction between producer and consumer so that “communication appears not only as an exchange of data, but also as a form of sharing.” The Pope’s recent creation of a personal Twitter account in December 2012 seems to have been an attempt to engage with this interactive world without compromising papal authority (though as Elizabeth Drescher notes here on RD, this is a nearly imposs…
Read More
…that I guess? Look, it’s hard to argue that the Biden campaign didn’t do a better job of faith outreach than Clinton’s campaign did. But that also needs to be put in the context of Clinton herself: we know that Christians overall and particularly evangelicals are not as friendly to women leaders as secular folks are, and we know that Clinton has been relentlessly demonized for decades. It’s hard to say for sure, then, but it’s entirely possible th…
Read More
…ve resistance even if it means putting those toned, spandex-clad bodies in between Trump’s administration and the most vulnerable populations—Muslims, Mexicans, blacks, queers, disabled people and women. To be activists against poverty and hunger, they would need to embody resistance through concrete action. They would need to support the efforts of groups like the anti-war Code Pink that resorts to reason, empirical evidence and visibility to cha…
Read More
…une 17, Chris Rodda, a Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), an expert on historical revisionism and a frequent contributor to the blog Talk2Action, discusses the rebroadcast of a segment of an HDNet Dan Rather Reports program titled “Christian Soldiers,” (originally aired on October 2, 2007), which features Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of MRFF and Stephen Mansfield. “When his last book, Ten Tortu…
Read More…the most tolerant toward homosexuality, while a connection can be observed between societies in which religion tends to hold a central position and greater intolerance in this area. As a citizen of a democracy that is still young, allow me to show how proud I am of the level to which Spain accepts homosexuality and to recognize how valuable this acceptance is. Because I do not believe that tolerance can be divided. There is no middle ground betwee…
Read More
…r backers of the proposal based on their “blackmail tone.” Georgia’s Civil Code already defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The purpose of the now rejected referendum was to write the same specification into the Constitution, effectively banning same-sex marriage. Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili has promised that if the Georgian Dream Party wins a sufficient majority in the October 8 election, a constitutional ban on same-se…
Read More
…ldare to ER. In Chinese culture, acupuncture is similarly reinforced and encoded as effective therapy. Antibiotics, and apparently also acupuncture, work regardless of your belief system—but they work better if you believe in them. Double-Blind The history of medicine up until the last century was essentially the history of the placebo effect. Double-blind, randomized control trials are now the gold standard in medical research and have only been…
Read More
…nterviewer, “Gays must have legal protections in terms of their rights and freedoms.” But in 2004 the government removed language protecting LGBTI people from a draft penal code, with the justice minister at the time saying it was “unnecessary to add sexual orientation because gender already covers it.” The timeline tracks anti-LGBT statements from columnists and party officials, including one made in 2010 by Aliye Kavaf, “the then state minister…
Read More…to “shari’ah law,” and did we need a party like Geert Wilders’ nationalist Freedom Party in the Netherlands? In his answer, McCarthy said he was an admirer of the incendiary, far-right, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant Wilders, who has likened the Qur’an to Mein Kampf. Although Wilders’ Freedom Party had one goal of banning the burqa, McCarthy nonetheless suggested that the U.S. should be be “like France” and ban the burqa. Instead, he maintained, th…
Read More