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Why Do Evangelicals And Dems Want Immigration Reform?

…5 percent to 9 percent. The number of blacks, however, will grow only from 14 percent to 15 percent of the population, making them only half the size of the Hispanic population by 2050. The foreign-born percentage in the population will also grow, reflecting the growth of nonblack minorities. By 2050, about one in five Americans will be foreign born, up from one in eight today. … Hispanics also have historic ties to the Democrats, if not as stron…

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The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut

…, and then I say, thinking of all the ruined gay lives, this really is the number that no man can number. It’s also interesting to me that “Writing It Out” is followed by the section “War on the Children.” Such an organization suggests that the latter was a reaction against the former—that as these voices emerge, there’s this really virulent reaction culturally against them.  And also it’s so very political. As the church has become more right-win…

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Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

…overthrew democratically elected leaders for fear of what they might do. In 1979, Russia ‘intervened’ to save Afghanistan’s fractious Communist government, which gesture led to the deaths of nearly ten percent of Afghanistan’s population. Afghanistan has still not recovered. Subsequently to this horrifying military intervention, Russia cracked down on a Chechen independence movement that emerged, plausibly enough, with the collapse of the brutal S…

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Is Torture Utilitarian?

…ve that the CIA interrogators really “believed” that waterboarding session number 151 was the one that was going to do the trick, succeeding where 150 previous attempts had failed. Protecting Us from the Worst in Ourselves If we have learned nothing else from the shocking photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, then it is this: torture is not about utilitarian calculation—it is about humiliation. It is forbidden because men and women under the stress of…

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Why We Must Reclaim “Religious Freedom” from Christian Conservatives

…lition and the way it carries out its politics has dynamically evolved. “A number of Christian right legal agencies have produced manuals for churches and related institutions, to rewrite such things as job descriptions to extend the legal definition of ‘ministry’ in order to seek exemption from labor standards and civil rights laws, and to inoculate themselves against discrimination lawsuits.” Thus, assumptions most of us have about the nature of…

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Liberty University’s In-House Conversion ‘Therapist’ Retires, But Will the Christian School Cease This Discredited Practice?

…, since almost all students who matriculate to Liberty are above the age of 18, such a protection would not have applied. In truth, those over the age of 18 are protected under consumer fraud laws. But since Emerick always framed his services as “pastoral counseling”—a broad umbrella term that does not require a professional therapy license—and since there was no direct monetary exchange between Emerick and his “thousands of sons,” such laws would…

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Who’s Scared of Polygamy? A Restrained Case for the “Slippery Slope” Argument

…ding Martin Luther. This case and other developments around polygamy in the 16th and 17th centuries are chronicled by John Cairncross. What Lyndal Roper has said about experimenting with marriage in the Reformation holds true for our time too. We have been busy overhauling our marital system at least as thoroughly as happened in the Protestant Reformation so we must ready ourselves for a debate on polygamy, as they had to. And the Reformation deba…

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Republicans “Evangelizing” Catholic Voters

…fficking. As I note in Salon: According to Pew, between 2009 and 2014, the number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration — and by inference the Democratic Party — was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent. This suggests that the war on religion is resonating with Catholic voters who increasingly see themselves on the losing side of a culture war and feel the need to assert their religious identity i…

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The Great Secret of Constitutional Law: Why Proposition 8 Will (and perhaps should) Be Upheld

…ecutive seizure of the steel industry during the Korean War and rejected a number of assertions of executive power during the Bush administration when given the chance. However, the courts are reluctant to act where rights are not clear, and assertions of equality are not traditional. Even in these contexts, the courts have rendered decisions protecting novel rights and groups. But they have done so with an eye toward what the public will accept….

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Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church

…xploring their spirituality in different ways.’ I think eventually a large number of those people will re-affiliate in some way, shape, or form—but when they do, the actual institutions of religion will be very different because of the demands those people make on new kinds of churches. I look at that whole arc of people who are leaving church because of the failure of the institution, and I don’t see that as threatening. I see that as a really ex…

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