Search Results for:

VIPREG2024 how to use 1xbet free bet promo code Sierra Leone

State of the Union Stuck in that Olde-Time Semi-Niebuhrianism

…” was the only other huge applause line of the entire address. If the applause-o-meter in the House chamber were any judge, the heart of the matter is that, in the best Niebuhrian “realist” fashion, a “contentious and frustrating and messy democracy” is proving its superiority to every other nation with its domestic “civility,” while at the same time sending its military forces to fend off a shadowy and (let’s be honest now) apparently rather inef…

Read More

How the Politics of the 1890s Explain the GOP’s Health Care Woes

…2014, and the White House in 2016. … Every time you read about how many House and Senate seats, how many statehouses, how many thousands of seats in state legislatures turned Republican since 2008, think about how many of them swung on the backlash against the Affordable Care Act. But like the 1890s Democrats, who couldn’t explain how repealing the Sherman Silver Act would help modernize the country’s currency system, “the Republican Party never…

Read More

A Love Letter to #Exvangelicals and Those Deconstructing Their Toxic Faith

…ve in the secular world. And if you’ve deconstructed to a healthier faith, free of authoritarianism, bigotry, sexism, and abuse—and if you’ve shed the tribalism and the need to impose and convert and separate the religious from the humane—you’re doing your part to better the world, too. I think deconstructed exvangelicals in particular have a lot to offer. The sect they escaped from is the most toxic politically in the United States; the source—al…

Read More

Why Won’t Conservatives Call Gay-Bashing a Hate Crime?

…ated violence a hate crime does not revoke the Constitutional guarantee of free speech that protects someone’s right to espouse racist ideas, from the pulpit or anywhere else. Rather, it treats criminal acts motivated by these racist ideas as deserving special attention. Likewise for hate crime legislation pertaining to homophobic violence. Contrary to what some opponents of the Mathew Shepard Act have claimed, people remain free to harbor and eve…

Read More

Turn On The News: This Isn’t a Split, It’s a Tiny Sliver of Conservatives Walking Out the Door — Introducing A New Media Criticism Column

…If I can get comfortable with the idea that religion shouldn’t be given a free pass, reporters can surely get there. Which brings us, unfortunately, back to Kathryn Post’s piece. I’m afraid it doesn’t pass many of the tests laid out above. The trouble starts immediately, with the headline: “Reformed Church in America splits as conservative churches form new denomination.” The first two paragraphs then inform us that 43 out of 1,000 congregations…

Read More

‘Son Worry’ and the Hypocrisy of the ‘Purity’ Movement

…ns are rare and since son-panickers have made little effort to distinguish between those decrying baseless allegations and those looking to excuse “boys will be boys” behaviors, it makes much more sense to focus on the latter. With that in mind, what about all those Ross Douthat paeans to the lost “structures of suburban bourgeois Christian morality,” which led to “drunken teenage parties in the suburbs and hard-core pornography in Times Square”?…

Read More

The Sacred and the Dead: How an Iranian-Jewish Angeleno Discovered Her Tribe

…w could I explain to my peers that I couldn’t go out on a Friday night because I had Sabbath dinner or that the fabric and makeup of my family was just different than theirs? Jerry Garcia (right) and keyboardist Vince Welnick perform at the Los Angeles Coliseum on June 1, 1991. Photo by Herb Greene from the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz. Used with the gracious permission of the photographer. So there I was, a 14-year-old freshman trying t…

Read More

Jerusalem Honors Right-Wing Mogul Sheldon Adelson

…pointed out earlier this year, Israel HaYom’s competitive tactics—offering free papers and slashing ad costs—have undercut two of Israel’s moderate newspapers. Was it economics then or politics that shaped the Jerusalem Post’s coverage of the luncheon? Unlike the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, both of which highlighted Adelson’s inflammatory descriptions of Palestinians and his attacks on peacemaking efforts, the Jerusalem paper offered…

Read More

ACLU and Thomas More Law Center Rush to Terry Jones Defense

…was locked up, not because he was suspected of committing a crime, but because he refused to promise that he wouldn’t go near the mosque. (Hey Wayne County, thought crime, much?) The ACLU submitted an amicus curiae brief to the 19th District Court in defense of Jones’ right to protest, which says, “If the First Amendment has any meaning, it is that the government cannot suppress the free speech because it — or anyone else — disagrees with the spee…

Read More

How Will We Teach About Sikhism After the Tragedy?

…in religious and educational approaches to the world. Long-term alliances between religious institutions, and the mutual engagement between different forms of expertise, are essential to this paradigm. Steven Prothero rightly has pointed out the profound religious illiteracy of most American citizens, and has called for an educational curriculum that includes the study of religion as a prerequisite for 21st-century citizenship. Even more importan…

Read More