Religion Dispatches
…r, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen that have very different notions of free speech and the separation between church and state. It was thoughtless for the library to check the box marked “occult” when planning their Internet filtering policy, but what’s even more disturbing here is that something as central to a democratic society as which sites can be accessed in a public library have been outsourced to a foreign corporation. How many America…
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…in full swing, hard-right strategists William Lind and Paul Weyrich at the Free Congress Foundation had a vision for the future of the American right. They argued that American conservatives, having successfully mainstreamed a free-market consensus, should pivot to the terrain of social issues, and adopt a “cultural conservatism” centered on family, education, crime, and morality, in order to shape public discourse. Needing a new enemy to rally th…
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…secular and democratic Bangladesh, where people have secure life and enjoy freedom of speech, freedom to publish, and freedom to express.” Still—what has he and his family lost? And what is Bangladesh losing as a result of this unchecked mayhem? Who Will Remain? As the attacks illustrate a deep problem in Bangladesh, these two stories illustrate a deeper success: since February 2015, more than a dozen writers, publishers, and activists—and, in som…
Read More…their views by erecting monuments—and then vetoed an atheist monument because its use of “incomplete quotations” did not meet their guidelines. This strategy—in which atheists are legally allowed the same rights as Christians but are silenced on technicalities—is fairly common. Recent cases on both sides of the Atlantic bear an eerie similarity to the case in Bronson. Last August, Hermant Mehta wrote on a case in Georgia where atheists objected t…
Read More…ristian Groups’ Complaints Lead to Cancellation of Queer Art Exhibit Queermuseu, or Queer Museum, an exhibition at Santander Bank’s cultural center in Porto Alegre was closed a month early after protests by anti-gay Christian groups. From the Guardian: Supported by evangelical Christians, protestors from the Free Brazil Movement accused the exhibition – which included 263 works from Brazilian greats such as Candido Portinari and Lygia Clark – of p…
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…else begins to define and delineate for them what it means to be human and free. Only then do people get up in arms. If we are going to conserve our humanities, we must be actively involved in our politics and education. Only through the reflection on what it means to be human—a reflection that engages with those beyond our immediate community, state, and nation—can we teach and learn to become better humans for both ourselves and each other. As A…
Read More…ecision did not violate the group’s First Amendment rights of association, free speech, and free exercise. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority: In requiring CLS—in common with all other student organizations—to choose between welcoming all students and forgoing the benefits of official recognition, we hold, Hastings did not transgress constitutional limitations. CLS, it bears emphasis, seeks not parity with other organizations, but…
Read More…one agrees with him or not is beside the point. Anti-choice Catholics are free to argue goals and strategies, and a religion publication is free to host parts of that conversation. This is about context and consistency. It’s about the fact that Dolan’s piece is, in more than one way, suggestive of the very favoritism that Jones and Russell-Kraft document. First off, there’s history here between Rev. Reese and the Catholic hierarchy. Reese was onc…
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…ory of recognizing that the state can use its power to take away religious freedom.” The kind of religious freedom the panelists discussed, of course, isn’t the Orwellian distortion posed by the Christian Right in both its Catholic and evangelical wings, in which religious freedom is invoked in order to justify the oppression of others, but the liberatory idea of religious freedom for all, including the non-religious, that traditional Baptists hav…
Read More…ty of business owners to discriminate against LGBT people, using religious freedom as an excuse, or restricting access to reproductive health care. They represent the heart of the religious conservative worldview on religion in public life. 1. The Upside-Down Health Argument. The Breast Cancer Prevention Institute and other related groups have filed a brief charging that contraceptives are actually detrimental to womens’ health, and that the Insti…
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