Religion Dispatches
…alled “The Prolife Tea Party Vote,” although that appears to be Personhood USA’s claim, not that of any tea party organization. Yet, contrary to the conventional wisdom that tea party supporters don’t care about abortion, as the Public Religion Research Institute poll showed, 63% of tea partiers are anti-choice, and the Personhood USA video plays on many tea party themes. With the tea party’s ascendancy, much has been made of “culture war” issues…
Read More…fed by a tidal wave of political corruption scandals that have led many Brazilians to believe the nation needs moral leadership. Liberal activists have struggled to make Brazil a more open place for gays and women, and they gained some traction during the left-leaning Workers’ Party governments that led Latin America’s largest nation between 2003 and 2016. But conservatives are fighting back — aided in part by the fact that corruption scandals we…
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…es Committee in parliament voted unanimously to remove from the bill a “spousal veto” provision that would have required married transgender people to get legal consent from a spouse before obtaining legal recognition of their gender. Linda Fabiani, a member of the Scottish Parliament, had advocated for removal of the spousal veto, writing “I strongly believe that access to legal gender recognition is a human right, and a deeply personal matter, t…
Read More…en the accused is HIV positive, or when the accused has sex with a minor. Kazakhstan: NPR reports on plight of LGBTs National Public Radio’s Corey Flintoff examined problems facing LGBT people in Kazakhstan, many of whom are disappointed that its bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics lost to China. LGBTs had hoped that hosting the Olympics would also bring greater international pressure on the government to respect the human rights of LGBT people….
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…hool student who was stabbed by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man during the Jerusalem pride parade, an attack we wrote about last week, has died from her injuries. According to the Jerusalem Post, “The family called for ‘a little less hate and a lot more love,’ and announced that it had decided to donate her organs in order to save the lives of others.” Also, in the wake of the attacks, a member of the Knesset came out in a Hebrew-language newspaper….
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…ols operate with surprising inefficiency, with students scoring the lowest numbers in Europe despite having four times as many teachers as Europe’s highest ranked system, in Finland. There are there separate government owned defense corporations. As for Greek health care, it is unclear whether waste or outright theft by state employees is the greater drain on a hopelessly overburdened system. And then there are the pensions: all men who work in p…
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…ans would be attracted to, appreciate and consider careers in science (the number is decreasing annually). I bet we’d have more productive conversation among students and leaders of science and religion around the many profound issues in our nation that engage both: abortion, medical care, stem cells, homosexuality, and genomic research. The battle rhetoric would fade and, more than likely, movies like Expelled wouldn’t be made in the first place….
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…I fervently wish that Mr. Obama would say a bit more about the problem of cheap grace. Reminding us that people who work very hard for very little are not the abusers of cheap grace, but that others in well-feathered nests who are preaching sacrifice might be in real trouble on the cheap grace front. Obama cannot and should not condemn those in the electorate who buy into Romney’s “there will be showers of blessing” message, but he probably does …
Read More…Barack Obama. Antisemitism is a serious, real thing. When it is used as a cheap shot—as when pro-Palestinian advocates throw around terms like “Nazi” and “concentration camp”—it is an offense against all those who were murdered over the centuries. Diluting the meaning of the term ‘antisemitism’ is, itself, antisemitic. Second, as I described in a recent post, there is indeed a structural similarity between some of the Occupy movement’s concerns a…
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…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…
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