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“One of Us”: Rick Santorum and the Politics of (Very Big) Family

By Kathryn Joyce

…prove the pro-life claim that every child is a blessing (or in case of rape, a gift, as Santorum has argued) by accepting as many children as God gives. It’s the movement that looks to the Duggar family as de facto spokespeople (even if the Duggars have often hedged whether or not they consider themselves a part of it), and that so venerates the role of proud “patriarch” fathers leading their families—comparing them to CEOs and generals—that it’s…

Obstacles for Secularists

By Sarah Posner

…us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rituals, sacred texts, and physical spaces that all serve to bind the participants together. Atheism has none of these things—most of the time it’s an individual choice, made and kept alone. In my piece, I point out how even Democrats still resort to appeals to faith, but: The religious right has given the secular-humanist-atheist community a huge opening: by placing conservative…

A Queer Atheist In the Heart of Mormon Country

By Chris Stedman

…S heart LGBT,” they were there to show their support for the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) community and celebrate recent advancements in issues relating to LGBTQ people and Mormons, such as Bishops no longer excommunicating members who come out and the Boy Scouts of America voting to allow openly gay scouts to participate. (LGBTQ adults and atheists still cannot do so openly.) As I read about Utah Pride in preparation for…

The Threat to Democracy Runs Deep, But Mathematics Could Address the Abominable State of Representation and Voting

By Ismar Volić

…ce for the rest of Yugoslavia—and Europe—had started to unravel. On June 25, 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia. A brief military intervention in Slovenia and a full-scale war in Croatia quickly unfolded. The military campaign was initiated by Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, which was unwilling to relinquish its centralized and increasingly nationalistic power. The day after those declarations of independence…

Supreme Court Rules Religion is Special… This Time

By Katherine Stewart

…uses of worship. If you treat religious worship as something different than, say, student theater workshops and local running clubs, the reasoning went, then you are discriminating against religion. The same line of thought informs the world of government-funded, faith-based social services. There is no difference between a secular nonprofit drug rehabilitation service and a faith-based one, right? Except that, as per the Hosanna-Tabor ruling, the…

Speaking with Palestinian-American Republican Who Confronted GOP at Debate

By Haroon Moghul

…ence of the object of such intolerance could only resolve itself in a tepid, sporadic, nearly embarrassed applause. It’s one thing to hate, and another thing to do so in such close proximity to the hated—especially when that person demands to be identified alongside you. Now what would you expect the candidates to say? Both Romney and Gingrich had the chance to respond. And, as Hassan put it, “neither candidate sufficiently answered my question.”…

Catholic Church is Lucky it’s Just Same-Sex Marriage

By Marian Ronan

…inatory. 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—transgenderism, since one reason for their launching an investigation of the Girl Scouts of America was the admission of a male-to-female transgender child to a troop in Colorado. But what about sex/gender reassignment surgery, which is ch…

New Pope Accused of Conspiring in Kidnapping

By Nicole Greenfield

…emned to death,” Bergoglio noted disapprovingly in a 2007 speech. Meanwhile, an astounding number of women in Argentina, women without access to or education about contraception, die annually as victims of botched abortion procedures carried out in secret. If we do dig a little deeper into Bergoglio’s past, we find that he was accused of participating in one of the numerous human rights violations committed during Argentina’s Dirty War (which end…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…intimacy with men for its other variations may well be worth the deal. But, again, this is not a change in orientation; it is a different, religiously legitimated way of realizing it. A False Equivalence Finally, future reporting needs to include the social and political changes within which these reorientation stories are told. Many listeners rightly criticized NPR for creating the false impression of scientific and therapeutic equivalence betwe…

How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture

By Christopher D. Cantwell

…on to the collection. For too long, Clark points out, scholars like Marsden, Noll, Bebbington, and others have written about evangelicalism and thought that their work described “someone who likes Billy Graham.” In reality, their portrayal of evangelicalism as intellectual and orthodox more accurately described “someone who likes George Marsden.” The communities that scholars once described as but a part of evangelicalism’s “fringe” are now the ce…