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Catholic Church Bans Gay Film: This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

…perous Justice Party (PKS), a conservative Islamist party that has a small number of seats in the National Assembly. Reuters’ Alisa Tang reported on Tuesday on the climate of fear that has been created: LGBT activists, facing a barrage of homophobia and hate speech by Indonesian authorities, are setting up hotlines and safehouses, while “unfriending” people on social media and deleting website directories that could expose them to violence.” The i…

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Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

…ence do for us? The number of nuclear bombs used by the West outweighs the number used by the entire planet. Muslims did not invent nuclear weapons, nor have they used them. (Let’s pray that stands.) When Saddam Hussein was our ally, he unleashed chemical weapons on Kurds at Halabja, the only confirmed instance of a Muslim regime using chemical weapons. Even considering the possibility of Assad’s use of chemical weapons in his brutal war against h…

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The Great Secret of Constitutional Law: Why Proposition 8 Will (and perhaps should) Be Upheld

…ecutive seizure of the steel industry during the Korean War and rejected a number of assertions of executive power during the Bush administration when given the chance. However, the courts are reluctant to act where rights are not clear, and assertions of equality are not traditional. Even in these contexts, the courts have rendered decisions protecting novel rights and groups. But they have done so with an eye toward what the public will accept….

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Who’s Scared of Polygamy? A Restrained Case for the “Slippery Slope” Argument

…in the U.S. with Loving v. Virginia in 1967. In other words, marriage has changed substantially and consistently over the past 70 or so years in the United States. Of course these changes have occurred both inside and outside of religious communities, but not necessarily in spite of them. There’s no reason to believe that this trajectory will suddenly change in the wake of the same-sex marriage debate. And this is hardly the first time marriage h…

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Republicans “Evangelizing” Catholic Voters

…leaning Catholics over the next few months. The irony is that Bush, an Episcopalian convert to Catholicism, is in many ways the most traditional Catholic of the sizeable number of Catholics jostling for the GOP nod. Bobby Jindal has labeled himself a “Catholic Evangelical” and even hosted “The Response,” a prayer extravaganza that amounts to a full-out paean to Christian nationalism. Rick Santorum has long courted the Christian right with his anti…

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Cruz and the Evangelical Illusion

…“We brought them with no expectations and we were highly pleased with the number who decided Ted is the right man to be of the president of the U.S.” When judging these statements (particularly the words “very diverse,” “significant standing” and “the number”), keep in mind that Barton is known (among evangelicals) for playing fast and loose with facts. Three years ago, the evangelical publisher Thomas Nelson halted publication of one of Barton’s…

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Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, and Pro-Home Birth

…professor of medical anthropology at Oregon State University. The growing number of women seeking a secular midwife has created a gap in care, however. In some areas the preponderance of Christian midwifery, in tandem with restrictive laws, can make it difficult for secular women to locate a well-matched midwife. Anna Waterland-Dykstra, a nurse and director of community options at the Spearfish Family Planning clinic of the South Dakota Departmen…

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Who Bombed the Boston Marathon?

…ted. Only 149 groups existed before Obama was elected in 2008. In 2012 the number had expanded to 1,360. Not all are plotting terrorist attacks, of course. But some are. In September 2012, Daryl Johnson, a terrorist analyst for the US Department of Homeland Security testified before a Senate committee that there was an “upsurge” of potentially violent non-Islamic extremist activity in the United States. So fingers point toward right-wing Christian…

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The Problem with AMC’s Sci-Fi Hit Humans

…human form isn’t always best for the job. Take, for example, the synth telephone operator. Why create a physical robot for this job which has to receive audio through a wired earpiece and then respond via speaker into a microphone? Couldn’t synth software do the trick without complex parts that mimic the functions of ears and a mouth? Furthermore, wouldn’t it make better economic sense to distribute artificial intelligence across multiple hardware…

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A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

…I was no different. However, my intention in writing the book was never to change people’s minds or make them believers. I wasn’t trying to change the minds of skeptics. What I wanted to do was to tell my story and get people to think about some of the things I wrote about: Is there more to life than what we can see with the naked eye?; What happens to us after we die?; How do we explain the fact that for thousands of years people from around the…

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