Religion Dispatches
…n exemption from generally applicable laws that everyone else has to comply with, exemptions that are not envisioned or required by settled law on the Free Exercise Clause. “The state is making itself into a church.”=Um, what?…
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…abeled bigoted and narrow-minded. Yet many clamor to deny Muslins the very free exercise rights for which Sekulow, and now also his son Jordan, litigated, with the ACLJ leading the fight against the nonexistent effort by Muslims to take over America by implementing Sharia. We’re seeing the rhetoric around “religious freedom” as Christian privilege, the denial of which is framed as persecution from the Trump Administration—but there are at least tw…
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…helpfully references Tyler Stovall’s important work on the historical link between freedom and whiteness. Unfortunately, Anker fails to take sufficient notice of Stovall’s primary thesis, which addresses what is often considered the “paradox” at the heart of the founding of this great republic. His thesis maintains that the subjugation of people of color from the Enlightenment forward is no anomaly or paradox within the overall march of freedom bu…
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Along with freedom of religion, freedom of the press stands as one of the five fundamental freedoms in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. But what is the free press, as an institution, supposed to do? Theorists of democracy generally put forth the free press as a cornerstone of civil society. Media outlets inform readers on matters of public interest, sometimes exposing malfeasance and corruption in business or government. They also prov…
Read More…o it, thus far always killing them in the process. Craig himself was of no use to the program, as it turns out, because the ship responds to the pilot’s thoughts, and Craig was made unsuitable to be a pilot precisely because he didn’t want to leave the place where he is, and thus would not have caused the ship to launch. Eventually, in order to get the ship to shut down and disappear, Craig would have no choice but to put his hand on the ship’s co…
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…ating my religion,” you should feel free to tell them that their religious freedom ends where your own religious freedom and moral autonomy begin. The fundamental fact remains that you haven’t asked them to change their mind about anything; you’ve only asked them to leave you alone. If we want to have a functional pluralist society at all, we need people, broadly, to respect such boundaries. Stalking and harassment shouldn’t get a pass simply beca…
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…d anti-Black racism that have long marked white Christian nationalism. Because of the way religion works, there’s not the slightest chance that white nationalist True Believers will ever let go of their Republican Jesus, let alone their fictive idea that the country was founded by Christians who intended to create a Christian country. It does no one any good to mock them, but it will do all of us a great deal of good to use our votes and our voice…
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…at homeschoolers have been key forced-birth advocates. But that’s also because forced-birth messages are being promoted from the top of the homeschool pyramid. (“The homeschool world is organized as a pyramid,” writes sociologist Mitchell Stevens in Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement.) The leading lobbying organization for homeschoolers in the United States, the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA),…
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…e very survival of minority communities. As MASGD puts it, “none of us are free until all of us are free.” To get a sense of what motivates MASGD’s activism, particularly in the current political atmosphere, I interviewed four pioneers of the American LGBT Muslim movement: Faisal Alam, Urooj Arshad, Raquel E. Saraswati, and Tynan Power. These leaders are members of MASGD’s Steering Committee, and were gracious enough to discuss with me their appre…
Read More…ther blogs has accused Singer of an “advocacy sleight of hand” in equating freedom of religion with “freedom to worship.” Smith and his crowd want not only an expanded definition of what is to be a religion, they want any activity a group or individual claims is “religious” to fall outside the scope of government control. He says “the exercise of one’s religion involves how the faithful live their lives outside of the church, synagogue, temple, or…
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