Reading Time: 4 minutes I woke up this weekend to the extremely welcome news that the State of Connecticut has legalized gay marriage, joining Massachusetts and California as the only three U.S. states with full marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples. Although seven other states have civil unions or domestic partnership laws, as did Connecticut before this ruling, […]
Mormonism
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Do You Really Believe That? (The Missing Pages)
Reading Time: 3 minutes Of all the major faiths in the world today, few surpass the bizarreness of Mormonism. The church was founded in the 1830s by Joseph Smith, Jr., who claimed to have been guided by an angel to a set of buried golden plates which he miraculously gained the ability to translate. These plates, supposedly, were the […]
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Mitt Romney's Kennedy Moment?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Last Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave a speech in which he argued that his Mormon religious beliefs should not prevent Americans from voting for him. I do not define my candidacy by my religion. A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith. […]
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The Pretense of Superiority
Reading Time: 3 minutes Religion has always been used to sanctify inequality here on Earth, in the present no less than in the past. By teaching their followers that they are God’s chosen rulers, religious authorities can accustom the flock to obedience and ascend to positions of power without the consent of the majority. The fundamentally oligarchic and anti-democratic […]
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The Eisenhower Test
Reading Time: 4 minutes The campaign of Mitt Romney, a Mormon, for the Republican presidential nomination has caused rifts within the party’s base, as evangelical Christians agonize over whether they could support a candidate who believes slightly different things about God than they do. The latest spat in this conflict comes in a post by Albert Mohler, president of […]
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Religion’s Harm to Women
Reading Time: 8 minutes In our society, it is still widely considered rude to criticize opinions and practices that arise from religious belief, no matter how evil or abhorrent they are. Even when it comes to the murderous fanatics who kill in the name of Islam, politicians and other public figures who criticize them often take pains to label […]
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A Religious Fugitive is Captured
Reading Time: 4 minutes A few weeks ago, I read Jon Krakauer’s book Under the Banner of Heaven, a chilling account of the persistence of fundamentalist Mormon sects in the Utah desert that still practice polygamy, often forcing girls as young as 12 or 13 to marry older men who already have dozens of wives. (As Krakauer documents, this […]