Religion Dispatches
…hrough the gate leading to the water, one must punch in a combination pass code. The town’s elegantly manicured gardens belie its state’s housing market collapse. But just outside of town, realtors advertise “Free Foreclosure Lists!” Sitting along a commons of lush grass, an attractive young couple casually dressed in designer sunglasses, khakis, and expensive sandals led a group of fair-haired children in prayer. The young blond woman urged the c…
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…tin has allowed authorities in Muslim-majority Chechnya to impose a strict code based on their interpretation of Islam. Official attitudes toward homosexuality are reflected in the government’s response to the story: A spokesman for Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, denied the report in a statement to Interfax on Saturday, calling the article “absolute lies and disinformation.” “You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the repu…
Read More…ome continued local resistance to marriage equality, the Civil Registry in South Baja California refused to register a newborn child as the son of two women who are married. After a few weeks of back-and-forth with government officials, the couple’s lawyer said he will ask the federal courts for an amparo, or injunction, requiring the registration to be issued. In the state of Chiapas, federal courts granted an amparo sought by a same-sex couple t…
Read More…ana will be on Utah ballots in November). I’m no expert on Utah’s criminal code, but I have a strong suspicion that it might have something to say about Kirby’s actions. In Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Kate Manne argues that in patriarchal cultures, “a woman is regarded as owing her human capacities to particular people… her personhood is held to be owed to others, in the form of service labor, love, and loyalty. ” It seems obvious to me that…
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…ntracts to family friends; and how he ordered his staff to violate IRS tax code. Falwell’s been able to get away with such behavior partly because he doesn’t fear his board of trustees, which is essentially just a collection of close friends of the family. As noted above, Mark DeMoss, the one trustee who did speak up in disagreement of Falwell’s endorsement of Trump, was immediately removed from the board—a testament to Falwell’s Trumpian fragilit…
Read More…Christians are better than Christianity. They employ their personal moral code, choosing the moral morsels from the Bible that square with their contemporary sensibility. The Bible does not portray Jesus as a liberal powerhouse. Or at least, not solely as the man liberal Christians claim. We need look no further than hell to prove this point. Americans possess an unparalled degree of religious liberty, but Jesus promises eternal torture if they e…
Read More…expressing how her faith and politics fit together. Meanwhile, South Bend Indiana mayor, first openly gay candidate running in a major party’s primary, and general whiz-kid Pete Buttigieg was on The View, doing…not so well. https://twitter.com/TheView/status/1109213160555184128 Let’s get a couple of quick points out of the way before we get down to the central issue. First, towards the end of the clip, you hear Buttigieg talk about “Pharisees.” I…
Read More…enture into a reservation inhabited by the isolated Hi-Merima tribe in the southern Amazonas. FUNAI, the government agency on indigenous affairs, stated that the missionary could be charged with genocide for exposing the tribe to potentially deadly microbes. A second-generation missionary, Steve Campbell has lived with the neighboring Jamamadi people since 1963. He said he was teaching the tribe how to use GPS navigation when he crossed into Hi-Me…
Read More…, when a federal judge in Wisconsin found the relevant portions of the tax code to be unconstitutional, but the three judges on the appellate panel did not tip their hand, although they showed few outward signs that they agreed. The regulation at issue is more than sixty years old, enacted in the 1950s to ensure that ministers at churches who could not afford to provide them with housing could nevertheless benefit from the same tax breaks as minis…
Read More…d probably hacked by Russia—revealed phrases like “cheese pizza” and other code words for child sex-trafficking. Hillary Clinton herself may have been involved. The ring seemed to include Satanic rituals. The Clinton campaign was engaged, on the side, with running a child sex-trafficking business. As German Lopez noted at Vox.com, the story seems to have begun on 4chan and spread through news aggregation websites and social media. The restaurant q…
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