Reading Time: 3 minutes In a state where Sarah Huckabee Sanders will soon be governor and a Republican trifecta will control the government, you wouldn’t expect common sense to win out when it comes to a ballot measure regarding “religious freedom,” but that’s what happened with Amendment 3, a proposal intended to block the government from ever “burden[ing] a […]
Law
Posted inPolitics
America is a long argument
Reading Time: 4 minutes Whatever your political views, we need to drop the pretense that the Constitution has One True Meaning we can discover or that the founders had one monolithic opinion we can appeal to.
Posted inLaw
TN’s ban on pastors in government may go away (but an atheist ban will remain)
Reading Time: 5 minutes Tennessee is on the verge of eliminating a discriminatory, archaic part of its State Constitution that forbids pastors from holding elected office… but state officials are purposely not getting rid of a similar ban on atheists in government. You may be familiar with the ban on atheists because it pops up in the news every […]
Posted inLaw
Kroger to pay $180K for firing Christians who wouldn’t wear heart symbol
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Kroger supermarket chain has agreed to a settlement of $180,000 after two Christians who worked at a store in Conway, Arkansas claimed they were fired for religious discrimination after refusing to wear a work uniform with a pro-LGBTQ symbol on it… even though the company insists the symbol had absolutely nothing to do with […]
Posted inReligious News
After Methodist pastor jailed for sexual assault, victim’s family sues church
Reading Time: 3 minutes A Florida family is suing leaders of Gulf Breeze Methodist Church, along with the local Methodist denomination itself, for allowing a pastor to sexually assault a little girl (who’s one of the plaintiffs). The lawsuit says Methodist church leaders at all levels failed to do enough to prevent the sexual assault. All of this started […]
Posted inEducation
Brooklyn yeshiva will pay back millions after admitting to fraud scheme
Reading Time: 3 minutes A month after the New York Times‘ bombshell report about how Hasidic schools in the city were depriving students of a quality education, the largest school has now admitted to fraud, stealing millions of dollars from the state government that was meant to assist kids. The Central United Talmudical Academy (CUTA), which serves over 5,000 […]
Posted inLaw
Abuse victim says Denton Bible Church in Texas ignored all the red flags
Reading Time: 3 minutes Last year, Rob Shiflet, a former youth pastor at Denton Bible Church in Texas who had been repeatedly accused of sexual abuse, was sentenced to 33 months in prison for sexually assaulting two girls on church trips. He’ll be released next April and have to register as a sex offender. That allegations that became public […]
Posted inLaw
This week in progress: Colombia, Cuba, and the Indian Supreme Court
Reading Time: 5 minutes With Russia having formally annexed four occupied regions in Ukraine after a series of sham referendums, to strong rebuke and promises of escalating consequences from the EU and NATO, one can be forgiven for thinking this was an altogether bleak week. (The recent press of an extreme hurricane in Florida, and ongoing energy grid destabilization […]
Posted inBooks
‘American Crusade’: How the Supreme Court is weaponizing Christianity
Reading Time: 6 minutes Three years ago, constitutional attorney, atheist, author, and “fake Christian” Andrew Seidel wrote about the threat of Christian nationalism in his book The Founding Myth, arguing that we were never a “Christian Nation” in any real sense of that phrase. Yet even though we weren’t founded as a Christian country, and even though we won’t […]
Posted inEducation, Law, LGBTQ, LGBTQ News
Yeshiva University shuts down all student clubs to thwart one LGBTQ group
Reading Time: 3 minutes Yeshiva University, a private Orthodox Jewish school with campuses in New York City, has decided to shut down all undergraduate clubs rather than allow an LGBTQ group to meet temporarily. It marks the second time this week that Orthodox Jews are in the news for making the worst possible decisions when they easily could’ve done the bare […]