Religion Dispatches
…eveloping charismatic and photogenic representatives of the lifestyle they promote. To this end, VF creates a beautiful glossy catalogue populated with high quality photographs of [the] Phillips children and friends in romantic historic costumes and settings: Jamestown, the Massachusetts Bay Colonies, and the Wild West. In these images, and generally in the literature and stories of Vision Forum, gender roles are greatly exaggerated and glamorized…
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…tly unseemly about advocating for reproductive or LGBT rights.” The public promotion of “abortion reduction” as a necessary “compromise” to end the “culture wars” not only undercuts my work and the work of groups such as PRA, NARAL, and NOW, but it also happens to be unnecessary to attract evangelical swing voters for the Democratic Party. Errors in Analyzing Evangelical Voters Polling data on shifts in evangelical voting patterns did not spring f…
Read More…to the Supreme Court. This year was no exception. Emboldened by the recent Republican anti-choice gains in the House of Representatives, the crowd was more hopeful than in recent years but otherwise largely unchanged. They were Catholics. Many of the participants are young people whose parishes charter buses to transport them to DC for the occasion. The younger ones—including middle and high school students—are given days off by their Catholic sch…
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…n Diego, a pastoral and family care center dedicated to “the formation and promotion of Catholic leaders in the Hispanic community.” In her lawsuit, Birge charges that Hernandez was such an involved participant in Centro San Juan that its Director, Luis Soto, referred to him as an employee. Hernandez, who was trained at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California, and the Mexican-American Catholic College in San Antonio, was also the 200…
Read More…ated into criminalizing such styles, coming uncomfortably close to a dress code. Many of those against the bill are worried that it threatens national unity; though Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim country, it has significant minorities from other religions who feel that this bill is pushing a definition of pornography under the guise of “Islamicizing” the entire nation or riding roughshod over Indonesia’s secular pluralism. There are…
Read More…cigarette and a beer (both forbidden according to the LDS Church’s dietary code, “The Word of Wisdom”), more substantial coverage this week is focusing on Romney’s service as bishop of his LDS congregation in Belmont, Massachusetts in the 1980s. On Monday, the Washington Post offered a revealing account of Bishop Romney’s interactions with Boston’s robust Mormon feminist community during tense years for the movement, when the LDS Church played a…
Read More…s comments, I note that he didn’t use the phrase “Stupak amendment” and only made vague references to “strong feelings on both sides” and that the final House bill didn’t preserve the “status quo.” What Obama would be satisfied with as preserving the “status quo” (code for no federal funding for abortions) is unclear — and more to the point, what he would be willing to capitulate to is equally unclear. This morning, Rep. Stupak postured that there…
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…to make sure this predator was not around children. No one challenged the code of deference to those higher up and obedience to the rule of secrecy. Now we have “the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in Church history,” declares the National Catholic Reporter in an editorial. The New York Times, which broke the story of abuse at the deaf school in Wisconsin, quotes a priest in Berlin as saying the crisis is “the worst in 100 yea…
Read More…es. “Deviant,” “diseased,” and other descriptors of sexual minorities were code words for homophobia and transphobia. Moving the discussion of Section 377 away from systemic inequality and toward the putative best interest of Indian society was emblematic of the right-wing attempt to erase sexual diversity. Although right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi has remained silent on Section 377 since his election campaign in 2014 (during hearings in Ju…
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…upon the visual. White LBGTQ persons have always had the option of simply code-switching when beneficial. Sexual orientation is rarely worn on one’s sleeve, face, or hair texture. Thus the particularity of white supremacy and legalized racial discrimination in previous epochs resists hackneyed comparisons to the black freedom struggle by those advocating other issues, regardless of how right or just these issues may be. At the same time, we all m…
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