lgbt
The wrong question, but still the right answer
Early this week, the same video kept popping up on my Facebook wall. It's from a press conference in Greensboro, at which North Carolina NAACP president William Barber (whom the Century profiled here) made a crucial point: "How do you feel, personally, about same-sex marriage?" is the wrong question. The right question is about equal rights under the U.S. Constitution and federal law.
By midweek, my Facebook wall was overwhelmed with comments (and links) about President Obama's decision to give the right answer to the wrong question.
A frustrating performance by Dan Savage
On Sunday night I went to hear Dan Savage speak about the It Gets Better Project. The last time I saw him was 2003, if memory serves, in front of a crowd of perhaps a hundred. At one point Savage took a break from promoting his new book Skipping Toward Gomorrah to refer his audience to the now-famous New Republic cover story "The Liberal Case for War" (against Iraq).
It was a good talk, funny and engaging, and it made a striking contrast with his Sunday appearance.
Oppressed by non-discrimination policies?
On Wednesday, the Catholic bishops' ad hoc committee issued a strongly worded statement on religious liberty. It includes a number of specific examples of "religious liberty under attack." Over at U.S Catholic, Meghan Murphy-Gill responds to these one by one.
Generational change
About 15 years
ago I was a guest at the annual meeting of the Association of Christians Teaching Sociology. In one session a professor reported on a
student's project. Taking the Century as a barometer of mainline Protestantism and Christianity Today as a barometer of evangelicalism, his student
compared the respective responses to the civil rights movement. The student
found that the Century was very hospitable toward the movement and that CT was critical of
it. (Full disclosure: At the time of this ACTS meeting, I was working for
CT.)
Since ACTS is comprised
largely of evangelical scholars, there was some hanging of heads in the room.
Evangelicals, they agreed, had been on the wrong side of history, not to speak
of the wrong side of justice.
From Disgust to Humanity, by Martha C. Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum's perspective cuts to the heart of our tendency to exclude others when they
fail to live up to expectations about how "good
people" should be.
reviewed by Laura R. Olson
Spreading lies
It may seem hyperbolic for the Southern Poverty Law
Center to add large and highly visible advocacy organizations to the list of hate groups it monitors. But not all hate comes from the fringe.