Religion Dispatches
This spring, workers at Planned Parenthood began to notice a flurry of visits from women asking very pointedly if they could use the women’s health organization’s services to abort a child based on gender. What’s the aim of these hoax visits? Support for PRENDA, the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, a bill currently making its way through Congress.
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The Personhood Amendment, MS26, is a deceptively simple sentence: “The term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” There’s not a word about IVF, or about contraception, or about ectopic pregnancy treatment or miscarriages. Anyone who considers himself or herself pro-life will almost certainly reflexively agree with it. The implications, though, are drastic. Because there’s no established legal standard for what rights are conveyed by the term “personhood,” it can be applied as broadly as the state legislature and judicial system will support. Everyone, supporters and dissenters alike, agrees that it will prohibit elective abortion, the morning-after pill, and discarding frozen embryos. What else, though, might be prohibited under the same logic?
Read MoreBarton’s interpretations don’t even resemble a close examination of the Founding Fathers’ intentions.
Read MoreAnti-abortion organization wants definition of life determined by popular vote.
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A veteran analyst of right-wing militancy notices a creeping maturity in the media’s ability to talk about the religious elements of terrorism—even when it’s Christian.
Read MoreThe tea partiers disparage liberalism while anti-abortion activists claim to follow the civil rights movement.
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With left-leaning faith groups unable to agree on abortion issues, the religious right—with the help of anti-choice Democrats—were able to convince Democratic strategists that they spoke for people of faith. Will the inability to take a strong stance for women’s rights split religious coalitions?
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As so many pundits ask whether it was the 11th-hour activism of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops that enabled the anti-choice provision to be inserted into the health care bill, our analyst explores a different possibility: Democratic strategy.
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Plus: Anti-abortion groups march on; Tony Perkins’ advice to Obama; Focus on the Family sets Newsweek straight; CPAC rides again; a boom in Christian films; and Training against the death penalty.
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Evangelicals on torture; BornAliveTruth.org targets Obama; Focus on the Family and gays; the Evangelical Youth Vote; Regnery’s Islamophobia; the Religious Left
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