Religion Dispatches
…ge initiatives thought to be buried in the wake of voters concern over the Iraq War, a crumbling economy, rising gas prices, and a record number of housing foreclosures, are making a comeback. In 2004 Team Bush, in concert with a host of conservative Christian evangelical leaders, made anti-gay marriage initiatives the centerpiece of their campaign to drive evangelical voters to the polls to vote for Bush and fellow Republicans candidates. This ti…
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…e name of religion, but I also recognize that it would be hard to have any significant progress in challenging dangerous ideas when there is a shooting war on. Perhaps the greatest challenge in the Middle East today is the lack of off-ramps—of mechanisms to de-escalate conflict. Until and unless we stop the combatants from fighting in Syria, we probably can’t make much progress addressing the ideas that propel extremist groups. That also means we…
Read More…ember Haggard as a former leader of the “moral” conservative machine who resigned two years ago when it was revealed that he would defend the sanctity of traditional marriage and attack the gay lifestyle in public only after having been oiled down by a male prostitute while smoking meth in private. But despite his protestations and denials in late 2006, this latest news reveals that the New Life congregation was both aware, and attempted to cover…
Read More…bama next month has been received quite appropriately as a matter of grave significance for the Republican establishment, and yet one more indication that the “base” is shifting and the McCain-Palin ticket is wobbling in the shockwaves of that seismic event. What Powell said to Tom Brokaw was telling, most of all for his quiet composure and lack of animus. What was very clear, however, was that this career military man is completely dismayed by wh…
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…004 with his first book, The End of Faith, the United States was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The direct after-effects of September 11th continued to shape domestic and global politics. Twelve years later, with attacks on American Muslims on the rise, and a serious presidential contender claiming that “Islam hates us,” it’s much easier to see the resemblance between New Atheist invectives against Islam and other, more traditional forms of Ameri…
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…erica; and Joe Wolverton of The John Birch Society. The following year, he signed a CSPOA resolution vowing to not enforce federal gun restrictions under the Obama administration. Following the December 2019 House report Shea was expelled from the GOP Caucus he had once chaired, although by no means did this put an end to his political activism. While Shea didn’t file for reelection in 2020, in May of that year, it was announced that he would beco…
Read More…hat Her Majesty The Queen gave the Royal Assent,” he said. “When the Queen signed the Royal Assent for the equal marriages act, allowing gay people to marry for the first time, she put it down and said “Well, who’d have thought 62 years ago when I came to the throne, I’d be signing something like this? Isn’t it wonderful?” Slovakia: Pope-Backed Anti-Gay Referendum Fails on Low Turnout We reported last week that Pope Francis had given verbal suppor…
Read More…heir seventies, so far have refused to relinquish their hold on the movement. Nor is it clear that the rising generation of leadership has the imagination or the fortitude to move beyond the old issues of abortion and homosexuality to embrace other “moral issues” such as the war in Iraq, this adminstration’s persistent use of torture or the despoiling of the environment, God’s creation, in the interest of corporate profits. The failure of the gath…
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…“domestic enemies”: Hegseth views them—us—much as he viewed his enemies in Iraq: And he knows just what to do: This is not “outside the norm.” This is civil war talk. In Hegseth’s previous book, 2022’s Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, he called for rebuilding American schools along the lines of Trump’s wildly ahistorical plan for “patriotic education,” the 1776 Report. That is, as baldly fascistic as it was in amb…
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…rican.” Thus before long the “War on Terror” and the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, ‘democratic,’ ‘American,’ and ‘Israeli’ were, in the lexicon of the ADL, three synonymous terms. To return to another contested lexical item, the dreaded “A (for Apartheid) Word,” Polakow-Suransky devotes the book’s epilogue to the Israel-South Africa comparison. He acknowledges that the Israel-South Africa “apartheid analogy is an imperfect one… Unlik…
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