Religion Dispatches
The Washington Post’s Tom Hamburger has a detailed report out of Missouri: Nearly 400 Missouri pastors gathered at the podium of a hotel ballroom recently to pray over the kneeling figure of Rep. Todd Akin, a Senate candidate whose campaign had been pronounced dead by national Republican leaders weeks before. Akin’s political revival has become a cause celebre for this group of clerics and other conservatives, who have launched a carefully orches…
Read More…responded to NOM’s call for a solidarity protest at the Mexican embassy in Washington, D.C. Hazteoir.org, a conservative online organizing platform affiliated with Brian Brown’s CitizenGo, organized a similarly small event at Mexico’s embassy in Madrid. Hazteoir told El Universal that demonstrations were also being held in Paris, Rome, Budapest, Brasilia, Quito and Bogota. Reminder: Journalist Rex Wockner explains and tracks the complex march of m…
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…ontinue their attack on the candidate and his Christian supporters. In the Washington Post, George W. Bush’s former speechwriter Michael Gerson continued his year-long case against Trump and his backers. Last month, Gerson decried the “idea that America needs Donald Trump as savior,” a heretical notion that Trump himself has often stoked. This week, Gerson questioned again how his fellow evangelical Christians could support this “avatar of the Pla…
Read More…erg came closest to addressing this question, likening Carson to Booker T. Washington. Graham also zeroes in on the conservative star-making machinery, and draws interesting comparisons between the rise of Carson and that of Herman Cain. Carson, of course, won’t give a straight answer about his political aspirations, saying this weekend he’d leave his future in politics “up to God.” Isn’t invoking God’s plan for your future the last step right bef…
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…lk off the job in protest, in stores from California to Maryland, Texas to Washington. Warehouse workers at Wal-Mart distribution centers outside Chicago and in Los Angeles have also gone out on strike—and won. The full reinstatement and back pay granted to the workers (averaging $900 for each) was unprecedented, leading one of the strikers to comment, “I think there’s been a hit in Wal-Mart’s armor.” The retail employees are part of the Organiza…
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…oss the country. Since then, four more states have legalized aid in dying: Washington (2008), Montana (2010), Vermont (2013), and California (2015). This fall, the District of Columbia’s Council on Health and Human Services Committee approved continuation of the full council’s vote before the end of the year. New York currently has a pending court case and legislation; many observers suggest that passage in such a large, influential state could ti…
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…women, unmarried couples The threat to LGBT people in Indonesia grows; The Washington Post’s Jon Emont reported this week, “Indonesia’s highest court is deliberating whether sex outside marriage should be made illegal in the world’s third-largest democracy, in the latest push by conservative Islamist organizations to restructure the country’s relatively secular legal code.: If the court revises the law to forbid casual sex, gay sexual relations wo…
Read More…s about the candidate’s position, and the recent appointment of a Spokane, Washington LDS bishop who in his professional life as a psychologist pioneered so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” after 9/11 has raised new questions about whether Mormonism condones torture. Washington newspapers are reporting that Bruce Jessen was called and “sustained” (or approved) to serve as bishop by his Spokane-area congregation in mid-October. [UPDATE: …
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…a post-doctoral research fellow in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, writes about dispelling the “myth of ‘African Homophobia.’” She reports on research conducted in Africa in eight languages and released by the Other Foundation. The results, Moreau writes, challenge “stereotypes of Africans’ feelings toward LGBTQ people.” The report examines problems that arise from international organizations assuming “a…
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…have legalized same-sex marriage over the past 15 years, according to the Washington, D.C.-based LGBT rights advocacy group Human Rights Campaign . But it would be a notable exception among Asian and Middle Eastern countries, at least 20 of which continue to ban same-sex intercourse. Still, reports AP, “as legalization grows closer, opposition to same-sex marriage is hardening among a small minority of fundamentalist churches and conservative pol…
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