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Anti-Gay Marriage Arguments for Prop. 8 Fall Short

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…llot measure banning marriage equality for gays and lesbians should stand. Charles Cooper, a lawyer who argued in favor of Prop. 8 using some difficult to follow circular logic, argued that California has a rational reason for distinguishing between same-sex and opposite sex couples, and therefore to deny marriage equality. Cooper argued that if the word “marriage” is redefined, so is the institution. Marriage, of course, has been redefined many t…

Are Mormons Changing Their Stance on Homosexuality?

By John-Charles Duffy

In the United States at least, 2010 was an encouraging year for gay and lesbian equality. In August, a federal judge delivered a strong ruling against California’s Proposition 8, and this past week Congress finally repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which banned gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military. The trend in general appears to be toward greater acceptance of gay and lesbian civil rights—even the LDS Church, the leading propone…

Televangelist Watchdog says He’s “Disappointed” with Grassley Result

By Sarah Posner

…gelist finances, tells me this morning that he is “disappointed” with Sen. Charles Grassley’s recommendation that the Evangelical Council on Financial Accountabilty form a commission to study the issues raised by the probe. The ECFA, said Anthony, has no “teeth” to compel the televangelists into greater accountability and transparency. Meanwhile, he added, “the most desperate and the weakest in our society are being raped by these guys,” referring…

Whew!

By Lauri Lebo

…a cottage industry with his hysterically clueless attacks on evolution and Charles Darwin, makes it clear that the Second Coming is still a long way off. Watch it here. TV Guide provides analysis here. While we can all breath a sign of relief over Cameron’s calm assurances, isn’t the fact that a major news organization tapped Growing-Pains-star-turned-religious-nut as an “expert” on the subject of anything one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalyps…

The Quietly Crumbling Wall of Separation

By Robert Marus

…pulsory student-activity fee to pay for printing an evangelistic magazine. Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center, said the Establishment Clause trend should cause at least as much concern as the Free Exercise one. “I would also agree that the post-Smith ‘equal treatment’ of religion does, indeed, make the Free Exercise Clause a redundancy—and seriously undermines our nation’s commitment to freedom of consci…

Arrest the Pope: New Atheist Effort to Seek Justice in Sexual Abuse Crisis Should Be Applauded

By Frances Kissling

…erseas. Fr. William A. Christensen heads a nonprofit in Bangladesh and Fr. Charles H. Miller works in Rome. Two months ago, a Post Dispatch column about a Bangladesh service project (called the Institute for Integrated Rural Development) mentioned that Christensen is still working there, despite a civil lawsuit that was filed against him in 2002. And last year, the San Antonio (TX) Express News reported that Miller “was forced to resign two years…

Fundamentalist Purity Purges

By Randall Balmer

…heological Seminary. His offense? Waltke suggested that maybe, just maybe, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was not entirely incompatible with evangelical faith. “If the data is [sic] overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult,” he said in a video that made its rounds on the internet, “some odd group that is not really interacting with the world. And rightly so, because we are not using our gifts and trustin…

Red Riding Hood Arouses Man’s Inner (Were)Wolf

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…hat the Brothers Grimm were not the original source. That honor belongs to Charles Perrault, whose jarring and highly sexualized tale was designed for a very adult audience. Our prejudice for seeing fairy tales as child’s play may be Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s doing, though even their tales seem a little, well, a little too grim for children at times. Perrualt’s story, published in Paris in 1687, went something like this: Once upon a time, there wa…

Heresy, Bad Taste, or Capitalist Adventure: Is it Still Pentecostalism?

By Anthea Butler

…. Today, despite the occasional outbursts of televangelists, a substantial number of Pentecostals do not engage in the practice, as evidenced by the Pew survey on Pentecostalism in 2007. Instead, practices of healing, faith, and exorcism have gained primacy among the “spiritual gifts.” As a result, the long-term emergence and strength of Prosperity Gospel and the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) rests on the elevation and promotion of these practic…

McCain’s Prosperity Preacher

By Sarah Posner

…erial prosperity to all believers who have enough faith,” with even higher numbers of Pentecostals and charismatic Christians agreeing with that statement. Go to any Word of Faith church, tune in to TBN, or read reams of books written by Word of Faith evangelists, and you will find the movement’s trademark selective literalism of both the Old and New Testaments, picking out verses that seem—regardless of hermeneutics demonstrating otherwise—to rei…