Religion Dispatches
…own spiritual/cultural values. Liberals see porous borders as a symbol of freedom: free movement, free choice, and the free creativity generated by the intermingling of peoples. To conservatives, the very presence of so many Illegal “aliens” proves that the borders they once imagined as the key to a safe, orderly life have long been crumbling around them. To give undocumented people legal status would be further proof that the nation’s walls and…
Read More…genitalia, they were told that any parody of religious art is offensive and cannot be displayed. The SBAS stall was then removed entirely from a student fair. Publically mocking religious truth claims probably isn’t very productive, and not all government institutions must be “religion-free zones.” But in a democratic society, the same rules must apply to everyone. These cases point to a pattern of de facto censorship of atheism. The good news is…
Read More…ences such as radical gay sex education being taught in school, threats to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.” At Crikey, Amy Coopes responds to critics within the LGBT movement who dismiss the marriage equality movement as a form of assimilationism: Some in the Yes camp wish to paint this as, quite simply, a question about amending the Marriage Act to allow two consenting adults to marry, and in a sense, of course, that is true. But as wi…
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…t promised to them by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978), and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993). This case has precedent working against them, however. In Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, the U.S. Supreme Court declared constitutional a plan to build a road and log trees in the High Country in Northern California, an area sacred to the Yurok, Karuk, and…
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…plaintiff’s faith. There’s a good reason for that, Kreis explained. “Historically, religious claims and free expression claims are both analyzed under strict scrutiny,” said Kreis. “Usually religious claims lose because there’s conduct involved. The courts are more susceptible to allowing conduct-based exemptions because there’s usually a third party harm. In the free expression context, speech doesn’t harm people generally. … Barring some kind o…
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…e massively and to destroy me politically. This was intended to weaken the Free Voters and steer votes to other parties,” he says in an interview with the conservative newspaper Die Welt. He also describes the reporting as “bumbling and a bottomless meanness,” and reinforced the message via Twitter, writing, “Smear campaigns backfire in the end. #Aiwanger.” [sic] Unfathomably, he seems to be right about one thing: the allegations, reported and fac…
Read More…United States Capitol with his band of fear-stoking propagandists. Gaffney is right. The Constitution is under attack. The panic that the Constitution is so weak that it would collapse under the weight of a few contracts providing for alternative dispute resolution, or wither from upholding the Free Exercise clause for Muslims or conducting criminal trials in accordance with it, has actually caused a mortal threat to the Constitution and the free…
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…rowland. Creative ingenuity and technological advance are the drivers of a better—even paradise-like—world. Even when such advances also lead to Tomorrowland’s and our planet’s potential downfall, a technological remedy is sought. Moreover, the film ends with a sequence in which agents are dispatched to recruit gifted people able to rebuild Tomorrowland’s futuristic Eden, and to make it even better than it was before. A critical eschatology would…
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…rt to refashion American history to conform to his vision of the “real” America. In this case, Beck’s been using the movie to promote a visit he’s making to the economically hard-hit town of Wilmington, Ohio. He has said, inaccurately, that the town has taken no government money and that its residents’ economic plan is based on praying to God to provide. In that sense, he argues, Wilmington is trying to mimic Bedford Falls, the fictional town wher…
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…New Money System 666 (1982), popularized the idea that the Uniform Product Codes (i.e. UPCs or barcodes) were the mark of the beast and would one day be tattooed on human bodies. A trend of ironic barcode tattoos popular in the early twentieth century nods to this idea while commenting on western consumerism. Microchip technology has since replaced the UPC as the most likely candidate for the introduction of a cashless society and thus the mark of…
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