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Resurrection of ‘Comstock Laws’ Would Threaten Access to Abortifacients — But Even That Fear Misses Bigger Picture

By Gillian Frank

…t in most cases, women sought to terminate unwanted pregnancies by the tens-of-thousands. Some sought out illegal providers. Others self-aborted. The danger of both was evident in the existence of septic wards devoted to treating botched abortions. One of these was at Cook County’s Public hospital on Chicago’s West Side. It was a 40-bed ward, often filled to capacity, devoted to women injured from illegal abortions. One doctor who did his rotation…

The Story Behind the Catholic Church’s Stunning Contraception Reversal

By Patricia Miller

…pulating the size of their family for the sake of the family’s overall well-being. So by 1960 the church had made three key admissions: that sexual intercourse within marriage played a role that was not limited to procreation; that it was acceptable to limit family size for a number of reasons; and that it was licit to use the naturally occurring sterile period to do so. Enter Catholic physician John Rock. By designing a contraceptive that used ho…

Trump the Totem: Like Other Fascist Leaders, Trump has Turned from Man to Symbol — And That’s the Danger

By Robert P. Jones

…ce (CPAC), clad in a coat and tie paired with American flag shorts and flip-flops, holding the US Constitution in one hand and a magic wand in the other. At the individual level, a plethora of hats, t-shirts, bumper stickers, digital art (often featuring Jesus and Trump), tattoos, and, of course, Trump’s “God Bless the USA”-branded Bible flooded into public spaces. This explosion of symbolic material was the result of the energy unleashed by the B…

Review: Is the Religious Right Dying?

By Laura R. Olson

…es. The preponderance of the evidence does suggest that a religious “middle-to-left” may in fact be resurging in the United States. The proof will be in the pudding: will the Democratic presidential candidate succeed in attracting a broad faith-based coalition of voters in November? Even if the 2008 presidential election does rewrite conventional wisdom about the ideological nature of religion’s relationship to American politics, a nascent religio…

‘Imagine Better’: Can Harry Potter Change the World?

By B. Howell Belser

…s that combine to create an alternative world of wizards, muggles, and good-versus-evil that has captured public imagination on an unparalleled scale. Yet the response to Harry Potter from religious communities has been mixed at best. Some denounced the series as satanic, while others embraced the magical vision of tolerance and empowerment. J.K. Rowling explained in a 2007 Time magazine article that even though the books contain Christian imagery…

Religion vs. Science: America’s Perilous Fight

By Edward J. Larson

…od created the universe in six days, they maintain, it must mean six twenty-four-hour days; when it says that God created human and all animals on the sixth day, then dinosaurs must have lived alongside early man; and when it gives a genealogy of Noah’s descendants, believers can use it to date the flood to between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago. Despite judicial rulings against teaching it in the public school biology classes, millions of Americans ac…

Catholic ‘Soul-Searching’ as Ireland Votes on Marriage; Churches, American Activists Join Kenyan Anti-Gay Group’s ‘Family’ Confab; Indian Mom Seeks Spouse For Gay Son; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…role the Church played in France in 2013 where it helped organize huge anti-marriage-equality protests. Despite changing attitudes, the Church still retains more power in Ireland than most places in Europe. Having run many of Ireland’s social services in the 20th century, most schools are still under its control and almost two-thirds of marriage ceremonies are celebrated in Catholic churches. While the number of Irish people who describe themselve…

Refusal of Interracial Couple Shows How Slippery the Slope of LGBTQ Refusal Really Is

By Heron Greenesmith

…n, compared to 70% of Americans overall. There aren’t current data on state-by-state support for interracial marriage, but while 18% of all newly married people in urban areas are married to someone of a different race, only 3% of newlyweds in Jackson, Mississippi are married to someone of a different race, the lowest percentage in the country. And the Mississippi Clarion Ledger reported earlier this year that the overall growth in number of inter…

Response to Daniel Philpott: the Politics of Religious Freedom

By Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

…sted in promoting religious freedom). It is, rather, an inescapably context-bound, polyvalent concept unfolding within divergent histories in differing political orders. This realization has led us to pose a number of crucial questions to those engaged in the promotion of religious freedom as a stable and singular human right. These questions, explored in detail in the PoRF volume and our other publications, and underlying my own public interventi…

Despite Conflation of Israel with Judaism, Anti-Zionism is More Kosher Than You Think

By Seth Sanders

…l in bringing Hasidism to the masses, describes political Zionism as an out-and-out denial of central tenets of Judaism; namely that, because it’s the prerogative of God alone to bring a messiah, and because human activity merely usurps his role, placing the state in the role of God indicates that “the Zionists must give nationalism precedence over the Torah.” And rejection of Zionism on the part of many traditional Jews was hardly confined to Cha…