Religion Dispatches
…te-sponsored wickedness and the canons of true politeness do not ban their use. When you use policy (rather than a gun) to kill innocent people, it’s called murder. When you ruin people by stripping them and their children of basic health care, that constitutes morally criminal assault. And make no mistake, when you boycott the inauguration (and promise resistance to) a presidency pre-announced as a compound of bigotry, misogyny, and the shredding…
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…an ever: with multiple indictment trials looming, returning to the White House is the only surefire way to avoid jail time. In order to get there, however, he must a) lock up the nomination, and b) defuse the massive public response to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, which has propelled Democrats to victory even in deep-red states. He is betting on his Veterans Day comments being incendiary enough to achieve both aims. On one level, Trump’s comments…
Read More…ng the line” (and fomenting outrage among base conservatives about Obama’s use of executive order—never mind the Bush administration’s use of the same) is meant to distract from the fact that the GOP does not have a viable, reasonable strategy for addressing the broken immigration system in a way that balances even the interests of its own stakeholders. Yes, immigration is one of those big-time challenges that requires an everyone-at-the-table s…
Read More…nies now include defined benefits for sex reassignment surgery, and the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Association of Social Workers, have declared the denial of such benefits discriminatory. And intersex conditions are likely to increase, since some of them, at least, are related to the use of pesticides. It seems that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is already aware of—and opposed to—t…
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…ea of law,” tax filings show. It was founded to show students “how God can use them as judges, law professors and practicing attorneys to help keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel in America.” This program is run by the Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, an organization opposed to the separation of church and state, and so virulently anti-LGBT that it’s been named as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. You can see some of…
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…ople have it. You have to have it for your heart, for your soul.” Why? Because “Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country and I truly believe that we have to bring them back and bring them back fast. . . that’s why our country is going haywire, because we have lost religion in our country.” The “Christians are under siege” language is old hat, but embedded within this rhetoric is a newer development. Trump never re…
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…eracy. On social media, this conspiracy theory spread, along with frequent use of the images of the Berkeley house with the Pride/weed flag and school bus (which displayed a sign about the psychoactive substance ibogaine as a “natural addiction treatment”), to claim DePape is both gay and left-wing, and that the attack on Pelosi was therefore not perpetrated by anyone on the Right. What’s formed is essentially a conspiracy theory about a conspirac…
Read More…n atlas, it is clear we are living in New York, in the United States of America—not in China or North Korea. In those countries, government presumes daily to ‘redefine’ rights, relationships, values, and natural law. There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of ‘family’ and ‘marriage’ means.” Is Dolan really suggesting that if the elected legislature and elected go…
Read More…Others worry that the outcome is far from clear, and that the problematic use of water-boarding and other interrogation techniques to which these men were subjected will put the Guantanamo Bay facility on trial every bit as much as the alleged 9/11 organizers will be. I myself worry that the decision to seek the death penalty in these cases will only ensure that the proceedings and the cycle of appeals drag on for years longer than they would oth…
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…637. We cringe when millions of children in thousands of schools across America use this month to re-create the First Thanksgiving, crafting hats and feathers out of construction paper. We also know that this is not the only time of the year they will eat “Indian foods.” Americans throughout the year will eat Italian food made with tomatoes that came from Indian gardens. Over Christmas and Easter much of the Christian world will consume celebrator…
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