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Lessons from the Defeat of the Oklahoma Personhood Bill

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…It seems that’s when the personhood battle really became a power struggle between the personhood lobby and the Republican leadership. With so many amendments and so much public controversy surrounding the bill, the Republican leadership opted not to bring the bill forward. This raised the ire of Personhood USA and Oklahomans for Life, who continued to lobby for its passage. Personhood USA responded immediately with a press release calling Speaker…

Justice v. Revenge: The Question Beneath the Question of Prison Reform

By Xarissa Holdaway

…our brains, which makes the admonition “an eye for an eye” in Hammurabi’s code sound less like savagery and more like a way to keep everybody in check. To punish more than the guilt deserves has been a legal problem, apparently, since at least 1792 B.C.E or so. The distinction between justice and vengeance matters, because vengeance costs an enormous amount to taxpayers, and, as reformers on both sides of the aisle argue, our own moral selves. Pe…

In Crisis, Catholic Church Plays ‘The Jew’

By Benjamin Weiner

…certed “Zionist attack.” For those unclear that “Zionist” in some minds is code not for the problematically successful movement toward Jewish self-determination, but rather for the fabled machinations of the Elders of Zion, the speaker continued: “They do not want the church. They are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God killers.” Babini has since denied ownership of these words (though the Guardian noted his leg…

Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

By Michael Schulson

…Deseret News included Trijicon in the list because the company “inscribed coded biblical references on high-powered rifle sights used by the U.S. military.” That’s it. Other than the founder’s purported religious beliefs, its inclusion is arbitrary. Why not include Ebay, whose founder Pierre Omidyar is a Buddhist, or any of Sheldon Adelson’s businesses? Trying to draw a line between “business with religious roots” and “everything else in global c…

Don’t Call It “Prayer Shaming”: Our Moral Failure Exposed

By Willie Dwayne Francois

…violence, the Native American victims of Wounded Knee, and every interned Japanese American, we make America redeemable by the policies we pass between prayers. In remembrance of the dead, we turn our collective power as voters and democratic participants into sacred acts. Through political action, people of faith and conscience ritualize hope and create space for prophetic grief in spite of—in defiance against—the starkly American narrative of h…

Lost and Found: Despite the Hope, Morality, and Meaning Inspired by Deconversion, Why is Respect Only For Those Who Find God?

By Robert Repino

…? Both conversion and deconversion have led people to do good things, lead better lives, and work for a better world. Why is that so difficult to say without caveats? But if that isn’t possible for some people, if their version of Christianity won’t allow it, then it’s fair to call out their bigotry for what it is. Empathy must be a two-way street. If the tables were turned—if we claimed that conversion is dangerous and disingenuous, and that it n…

Tennessee Anti-Evolution Update

By Lauri Lebo

…on proposed by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, an organization that promotes intelligent design. David Fowler, head of the conservative Christian Family Action Council of Tennessee, which is affiliated with Focus on the Family, and is one of the bill’s primary lobbyists. In defending the bill’s language, he has tried to draw on comparisons to the famous Scopes monkey trial that took place 86 years ago in his state. “…[T]oday’s evolutionary…

Does It Matter If Islam Is A Religion? An American Ahmadi Explains The Effects Of Religious Discrimination

By Daniel Schultz

…facto decisions about what counts as a religion and what doesn’t. The tax code makes implicit judgments about religious legitimacy in parceling out breaks to some groups and not others. Those rules, however, are fairly broad, and they don’t target certain religions as enemies of American society. Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump made repeated promises to curb Muslim immigration to the United States and institute a registry of Muslims in the co…

Religious Discrimination and the Violence Against Women Act

By Sarah Posner

…tatutory protections against religious discrimination or to create a broad free exercise right to receive government grants without complying with applicable regulations that protect taxpayers.” Last year, civil liberties groups lobbied hard to have a non-discrimination provision included in VAWA. The resulting statutory language reads: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin…

6 Reservations About U.S. Intervention in Libya

By Haroon Moghul

…bya into two separate countries, with peacekeepers patrolling the boundary between them (oil goes to the east); or walking away after it’s even more screwed up. And imagine how that would play out. 3) Why is it that we can intervene in other countries but find it so hard to intervene in our own? The Obama administration must tell us every day how much this so-called “kinetic action” is costing the American people. I’m also wondering how much of th…