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Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…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…

Is Torture Utilitarian?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…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…

Why We Must Reclaim “Religious Freedom” from Christian Conservatives

By Bill Berkowitz

…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…

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

By Lucas Wilson

…, 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…

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

By William E. Smith

…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…

Republicans “Evangelizing” Catholic Voters

By Patricia Miller

…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…

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

By Bruce Ledewitz

…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….

Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…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…

Muslims in America, Fifty Years Later: New Poll Shows Pride and Optimism In the Face of Bias

By Edward E. Curtis IV

…rest of the Muslim world. The majority of Muslim Americans are Sunni, while 16% identify as Shi‘a, 14% say they are “just Muslim,” and 4% are members of smaller communities such as the Ahmadiyya movement and the Nation of Islam. The 2017 Pew poll also reveals that the more things have changed in Muslim America, the more they have stayed the same. Muslims faced a lot of suspicion and discrimination in 1967, just as they do in 2017. In 1967, the Nat…

Catholic Church Bans Gay Film: This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ts distributor Teodora Film, was that the film was shunned by the more than 1,100 cinemas which are owned by the Church and make up the bulk of Italy’s network of independent/arthouse theatres. The country’s official film board approved Haigh’s Nottingham-set drama for audiences over 14. “I cannot see any other explanation than a problem of homophobia in the Church,” Teodora’s president, Cesare Petrillo, told AFP. “They decided it was unacceptable…