Religion Dispatches
…efforts by proving that children raised by intact mom-and-dad families do better than kids raised by two loving moms or dads. It won’t matter that the study didn’t do that. Blamers Also a safe bet: natural disasters like Hurricane-Superstorm Sandy will continue to be chalked up to God’s anger at the advance of gay rights. So will tragedies like the mass murder of students and educators at Sandy Hook elementary school. But those blamers will sound…
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…Improving educator training so they can do this effectively? Absolutely. I bet more Americans would be attracted to, appreciate and consider careers in science (the number is decreasing annually). I bet we’d have more productive conversation among students and leaders of science and religion around the many profound issues in our nation that engage both: abortion, medical care, stem cells, homosexuality, and genomic research. The battle rhetoric w…
Read More…where Christians are persecuted like North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia. Everywhere they are persecuted, Christians are working to change the system, through prayer, protest, or other actions. Yet, they would deny this kind of action to gay and lesbian people simply because we should take our time and stop and “listen” to why the people in Uganda want to kill or imprison us? Believe me, we’ve heard their reasons and they smack of misund…
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…from holding public office. Rep. Omar, originally a refugee immigrant from Somalia, is the first woman of color to hold federal elective office from Minnesota and one of the first Muslim women in Congress. The threat against Rep. Omar was particularly ill-considered in that she represents the 5th Congressional District, which includes the city of Minneapolis, the epicenter of the protests arising from the death of George Floyd at the hands of the…
Read More…ber includes those who committed acts of terrorism overseas in places like Somalia and Yemen. Even if we take the conservative number of 2 million Muslims in the U.S., that means 0.01% of Muslims are involved in terrorism-related activity over the span of a decade. Per annum, it is 0.001%. If we take a more realistic number of 4 million American Muslims, the numbers become 0.005% over a decade, or 0.0005% per year. Last year there were 14,000 homi…
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…s for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.” The response to the proposal has been swift; spontaneous protests in support of immigrants and Muslims took place in airports across the nation, advocacy groups (successfully, so far) challenged portions of the order, while public figures like Madeleine Albright vowed to register as a Muslim. The immigration ban on refugees from Muslim-majo…
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…o undo the gender-neutral Marriage Act and keep legal marriage exclusively between a man and woman in Finland. The movement’s main justification is children’s right to both a mother and father. They also argue that procreation is dependent on both sexes and that “men and women complement each other”. From the Helsinki Times: Hanna Sarkkinen (Left Alliance) reminded that everyone should be treated equally under the law and pointed out that the legi…
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…mporarily block entry visas from seven countries—Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya—for 30 days as part of a broader security review of visa-admission programs, after which permanent visa bans could be enacted for those countries and others.” Take this transparent attempt to privilege Judeo-Christian faith traditions in immigration policy and combine it with the so-called First Amendment Defense Act, which Trump has promised to si…
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…iously-mixed Middle Belt into endless chaos, as much based on the tensions between farmers and herders as on religious differences. Level heads in all parts of Nigeria, Christian and Muslim, realize the essential interdependence of all the country’s regions, for better or worse. Hirsi Ali claims (as do some Islamists) that Nigeria is a “majority-Muslim” country of 160 million people with a 40 percent Christian minority. It is more likely tha…
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…e). The positive-negative distinction is often mapped onto the distinction between supposedly positive social, economic, and cultural rights and supposedly negative civil and political rights— a flashpoint since the Cold War confrontation between communism and the capitalist democracies. (For a succinct critique of this mapping, see Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice.) Perhaps unwittingly, the Declaration’s take on childr…
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