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Spiritualism and Sex Meet Evangelical Censorship, 19th-Century-Style

…lege-educated cohort who would enjoy discussing things like religion, sex, free speech, censorship, women’s rights, blasphemy, and obscenity. It was not finally an audience of specialists I dreamed of but free-ranging brainiacs—in other words, readers with some of the daring spirit of nineteenth-century amateurs. Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off? I am definitely hoping to offer my readers good, even artful,…

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Bishop Says Gay Couples Cannot Be Part of Parish Life; Does Rising Evangelical Political Power in Brazil Contribute to Anti-LGBT Violence?; Global LGBT Recap

…teaching of LGBT issues in schools Rev. David Robertson, moderator of the Free Church of Scotland, criticized LGBT activists with Time for Inclusive Education for wanting to “indoctrinate children” by having schools teach about LGBT issues, More from The Herald’s Hanna Rodger: Speaking to the Sunday Herald, Robertson said: “Primary school children do not need to be taught what gay and transgender is. “We are concerned that what is being proposed…

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Beck’s Distortions Of It’s A Wonderful Life Mirror His Distortions Of Current Events

…banks, and that the good-guy local banks were successful because they were free from government regulation. This depiction matches his thesis about today’s economic problems: that too much government intervention in the form of bank bailouts is the inherent evil—as opposed to the absence of regulation that led to the banks’ implosion at the hands of, well, you know, greedy bigwigs. To Beck, the bank bailouts are evidence of socialism—the governmen…

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McCullen v. Coakley and the Meaning of Protests

…a young woman she cajoled away from Planned Parenthood with a promise of a free pregnancy test.  The buffer zone cases really aren’t about free speech, they are about the evolving nature of protest in the anti-choice movement. In this evolution, the protest (“the act of objecting or a gesture of disapproval“) has been portrayed as “compassion,” with words that can only accurately be described as meddling portrayed as “caring.” But it is still a fo…

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Christian Inmate Suing Indiana to Recognize Religion

…uled in Glenn’s favor on a preliminary motion, it’s notable for a prisoner free exercise case to get the court’s approval to go forward. Howard Friedman, who tracks prisoners’ free exercise lawsuits on his blog, Religion Clause, notes that since October there have been rulings in 31 of such cases, two-thirds of which were dismissed by the court. Most prisoner free exercise cases involve Muslim inmates, though neo-pagan groups, New Religious Moveme…

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Tony Perkins: Atheists Can’t Be Chaplains

…mplication is that explicitly nonreligious servicemen and servicewomen are free to consult with a religious chaplain. But for the same reason that a Christian may prefer a Christian chaplain over a Muslim or Jewish chaplain, nonreligious people should be free to seek out assistance from a member of their own community. As a Humanist chaplain, I frequently hear a version of Perkins’ argument (For more on what exactly I do as a chaplain, check out a…

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It’s Only a Game: How Not to Think about Video Game Violence

…ntonin Scalia presented the 7-2 ruling as a defense of free speech and the free circulation of ideas. That’s been a consistent theme for the Roberts court, which in recent years has in the name of freedom of speech legalized the sale of animal torture videos and struck down limits on corporate political spending on the grounds that corporations have free speech rights too. But in his dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer asked, “What sense do…

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A Religion Scholar Gets It Wrong on Indiana’s RFRA

…em. Across the nation, the ACLU has fought for decades to defend religious freedom. But, while the freedom to hold religious beliefs and opinions is absolute, the freedom to act pursuant to one’s religion is not. The conversation about religious freedom in Indiana has revealed confusion about not only this point, but also the very significant differences between the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and SB 101 and other states’ RFRAs. They…

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David Brat, Theological Conundrum

…e explicit in their concern for structural justice and the failings of the free market system. Famously, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium denounces those who “continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world” as expressing a “crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding eco…

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Missing the Forest for the Witches

…ry cannot, for example, access the Wikipedia page on Wicca, though they’re free to read the Catholic Encyclopedia’s page on Paganism. By banning the categories into which minority religions are classified, the library’s policy appears to violate the Constitution’s establishment clause. By extension, it would be unconstitutional for any government agency to use Netsweeper to censor public access to “occult” sites. However, Netsweeper is a global co…

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