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Religious Right to Newsweek: ‘Woe to [You] for Even Printing This’

By Bill Berkowitz

…governor, Christine Gregoire. However, as the holiday season proceeds, Americans United suggests that Americans might “keep in mind the following”: “It is not the job of government to promote religion: Christmas has both secular and religious aspects. Governments at all levels are constitutionally barred from promoting religion. People who want a religious experience at Christmas time would do better to go to a house of worship, not city hall.” “…

Clinging to God, Guns, Obama, and Freud

By Louis A. Ruprecht

On April 6, in a speech delivered in San Francisco but apparently aimed at Pennsylvania, Barack Obama made the following somewhat ill-advised social/political observation: Our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives… You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s…

John Calvin at 500: From Theocrats to Marxists, Calvin’s Vision of Joy and Cruelty Left Complex Legacy

By Paula M. Cooey

…nally or unintentionally, a steady stream of colonizers tramping through Africa and the New World, covering exposed indigenous body parts with their misplaced prurient interest in “civilizing the savages.” Perhaps the best evidence of what Calvin called the utter depravity of the human will lies in the practices of these Calvinists themselves. No one talks much about the more left-wing version of Calvinism these days. It is just way too much fun t…

Catholic Bishops’ Religious Liberty Fight Enables Anti-Jewish Discrimination (Updated)

By Patricia Miller

…“shares the parents’ religious beliefs and moral convictions.” To date, a number of Catholic Charity adoption agencies, including those in Illinois, Boston, San Francisco, and most recently Buffalo, New York, have shut down rather than offer adoption services to same-sex couples. They’ve then turned around and accused civil authorities of putting them out of business because of anti-Catholic animus. Catholic Social Services (CSS) of Philadelphia…

Challenging Both Homophobia in Islam and Populist Bogeyman of ‘The Homophobic Muslim’; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…nd a practice of Islam that celebrates queerness” Catholic Church: South African bishop promotes reparative therapy, Brazilian promotes acceptance South African Cardinal Wilfrid Napier announced on Twitter earlier this month that he is reading “Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality: A New Clinical Approach,” by the late advocate of reparative therapy Joseph Nicolosi. His August 1 tweet called the book “a challenging work on a subject of great i…

Public Shrines to Treason: Charlottesville and the Cult of Confederate Memorialization

By Spencer Dew

…ry. “Unite the Right” called attention to this, that dueling visions of America—American history and expectations for and patterns of an American future—are more than just differences of opinion, they are radically divergent worldviews, with separate systems of values, conceptions of humanity, and even understandings of the good. The problem of the proliferation of Confederate civil religion has always been what to do with a citizen who glorified…

Post-Paris Reflections: We May Have to Learn to Hope

By Donna Schaper

…reat of terrorism. The lead news stories all these last ten days have been San Bernardino or Chicago or the French election, moving to the right in Islamophobia. What if good people and decent governments worldwide commit to less than 2 degrees Celsius as a goal and find themselves spending all their money and energy on a security state, which would shut down the very movements that brought the world to a good goal? We can’t lose our streets right…

By the Way: Fractured Religious Right Endorses McCain

By Randall Balmer

…ition and Focus on the Family, and Jim Garlow, pastor of Skyline Church in San Diego. Also present were Rick Scarborough, founder and president of Vision America, and David Barton, president of WallBuilders; both men have fashioned entire careers out of their denials that the founders ever intended church and state to be separate entities. The meeting (as reported on the website) contained more than the usual over-the-top Religious Right rhetoric…

What’s Wrong With the Virgin Mary Depicted as a Barbie Doll?

By Joseph Laycock

…o’s also “Barbie-fied.” According to legend, Correa attempted to cross the San Juan desert with her baby after becoming separated from her husband during the Argentine civil wars. When Correa’s corpse was discovered, her baby was still alive. Miraculously, her body was still able to supply her baby with milk even in death. A spokesperson for a sanctuary commemorating Difunta Correa claimed the saint’s image is copyrighted and threatened to sue. Pa…

Israel-Hamas is Not a Religious War and This is Not Your Rapture

By Thomas Lecaque

…ill lead to the return of Christ, who will defeat evil and reign for a thousand years—something that’s been written about over and over again in the 21st century. The Christian Zionist crossover to Islamophobic violence is unsurprising. In the aftermath of 9/11 it simply became more politically acceptable for pastors and politicians to voice it in the most aggressive and open way possible. One of the more prominent right-wing pastors in the moveme…