Religion Dispatches
…get married in Iowa, the less of an issue it will become. According to the newspaper, most people are already on the way to seeing same-sex marriage as “the new normal,” even if they don’t agree on religious or political grounds: ”It’s really none of my business what other people do in their lives,” said Curt Goodell, 38, a Johnston resident. He identifies himself as a Republican but said he worries his party will try to make marriage a key issue…
Read More…s “weird.” The news set off a wave of speculation that weird was, in fact, code for Mormon, and that Obama and team planned to use the word “weird” as a dog-whistle to stoke voters’ antipathies towards Mormonism in 2012. The news set off a wave of cringes among Mormon politicos as well. Because Mormons do recognize “weird” as a word that sticks to us in the American imagination. In 1995, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley declared in an inter…
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…s invention of hate radio—because Coughlin, at one time a supporter of the New Deal, changed course and supported fascism and authoritarianism. In the hall of mirrors that houses Beck’s history that means that social justice=fascism. Conservatives face a serious challenge from Beck, however: as the panelists at the social justice session at the Freedom Federation Summit admitted, millenial evangelicals are interested in helping the poor, and not a…
Read More…e subjugation of “barbarous nations” and the building of Christian empire. Newcomb is co-producer of a new documentary, The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code. Also distributed at the press conference were excerpts from A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California Indians by the Spanish Missions, by Elias Castillo, which include Serra ordering whippings for Indians who fled the mission. The statement by Amah Mutsun Tribal Ban…
Read More…lthy gays and lesbians want to end our “religious freedoms” — which is the code phrase for “they want to pass hate crimes laws that make it illegal for us to call them the filthy sinners they are.” As a Christian, who just also happens to be a lesbian, I take offense at this continuing campaign on the religious right to promote this false dichotomy of gays vs. God. No one in the gay and lesbian community wants to curb anyone’s “religious freedom.”…
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…ighly doubt that the use of “Letters of Good Standing” and the adoption of new “Codes of Conduct” (why either term is capitalized in the report is a mystery to me) will have much impact. Under the white supremacist patriarchy that still shapes so much of the American experience—not least in the SBC and similar churches—predatory white men will always be able to find people willing to attest to their “good character.” I’m reminded of Supreme Court…
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…not sure she has subverted older paradigms as much as made them shiny and new with her irresistible narrative style. Indeed, the film could be read as a fairly simplistic rendering of women as the source of evil; tales that were born among ancient Mediterranean patriarchies, but have had a long and troubled history in the United States as well. In my work, I have explored the connection between misogyny, American religion, and images of sexuality…
Read More…tals and so forth. So if one had to bring Boudway’s original analogy up to code, one would have to say this: Imagine you live in a country where the default way to buy food is buying it from your employer. You get a job, and your employer negotiates with companies who in turn have agreements with grocery stores and growers, shipping companies and meat processing plants, and so on. The end result of all this is that you get a card, which you presen…
Read More…sh politician who provoked controversy in January with a letter to a local newspaper blaming the country’s floods on the legalization of same-sex marriage was thrown out of his party (The UK Independence Party) and is now reportedly the subject of an investigation about whether he violated his town council’s code of conduct, which includes a clause saying that councilors must treat other people with respect. In the U.S. meanwhile, a congressional…
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…our own, make it more complex, set aside its oversimplifications. The good news is that this is a gift to everybody else. Total surrender to heteronomous ethics is unhealthy, period. It may be prescribed by some, but it is also what leads to fundamentalism and religious violence. Gay people know this firsthand: to love oneself as a religious queer person requires interposing one’s own experience between oneself and the text. The text in its tradit…
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