Reading Time: 6 minutes When American university and college students try to deny “free speech” platforms to arch-conservative opinion leaders they consider dangerous purveyors of bigotry, or just shout them down, right-wing complaints of suppression are swift and virulent. The constant trope is that American higher education institutions are controlled by “woke,” “liberal” academics and students who want to […]
politics
Posted inReproductive rights
How to discuss the overturning of Roe v. Wade with our kids
Reading Time: 4 minutes We’ve heard about the SCOTUS decision. Changes to abortion laws are coming. Now it’s time to discuss it with our kids. Here’s how.
Posted inReligion
Fascism in India: The weaponization of religious custom
Reading Time: 8 minutes Where I live, Navidad and Semana Santa are significant religious affairs, times when the hustle and bustle of city life eases for a month and a week respectively: to observe Catholic customs, to be with family, or simply to travel to nearby towns and farms. One side effect, though, is the impact of reduced foot […]
Posted inPolitics
Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin: ‘Christ will reign’ if I’m elected governor
Reading Time: 2 minutes For over a year now, Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin has been broadcasting her Christian nationalist fantasies to the nation. She’s publicly spread COVID misinformation, promoted pseudoscientific responses to the virus, and publicly condemned the mild restrictions placed by Gov. Brad Little (a fellow Republican) — and she’s done all this in the name of […]
Posted inPolitics
Fascism in India: The global turn toward nationalist politics
Reading Time: 9 minutes Although I never needed to “deconvert” from a religious tradition, I was fascinated by New Atheism’s debate circuits at the turn of the century: The eloquence of its speeches. All those witty rejoinders. The rallying of knowledge from a range of disciplines to out-fact an opponent. It was easy to fall prey to the idea […]
Posted inReproductive rights
The Catholic Justices driving the Supreme Court’s Roe reversal
Reading Time: 5 minutes I grew up Catholic, so I know something about the ancient faith’s hammerlock absolutism, especially regarding anything even remotely sexual. That’s why I immediately thought of sexuality when I learned along with everyone else this week about the “leaked draft opinion” of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in a case that threatens […]
Posted inHistory
Fascism in India: The role of Nazis in Hindu nationalism
Reading Time: 7 minutes When writing on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in Hindu extremism, I committed the cardinal sin of not defining a key term: fascism. This was a conscious choice, because I’ve written before on how quickly we mire ourselves in political word games. Better to start with the government figure that Western media keeps centering, as […]
Posted inHistory
Fascism in India: Who’s ‘in charge’ of 1.4 billion?
Reading Time: 8 minutes There’s something fascinating, if also disturbing, about Western incuriosity around the world’s largest democracy. 1.4 billion of our world’s 7.8 live in India, a country a third the size of the US, which has under a quarter of India’s population. How can the fortunes of so many mean so little? Nevertheless, India exists in the […]
Posted inPolitics
Rep. Jamie Raskin: Some members of House act more like ‘a religious cult’
Reading Time: 2 minutes During a discussion at an April 21 event at Georgetown University in Washington DC titled “Truth and Trauma: The Trials of American Democracy and Personal Tragedy,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, a humanist and a member of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, claimed that some Republican House members are “acting much more like members of a religious cult.” […]
Posted inPolitics
Ohio senate candidate is a ‘proud Jew’ using evangelical churches to attract GOP votes
Reading Time: 4 minutes Although the words “separation of church and state” do not appear in the First Amendment, the Establishment Clause was intended to separate church from state. But Josh Mandel, hoping to become a US senator, doesn’t believe in church/state separation and is aggressively wooing evangelical MAGA cultists in a bid to become a US senator. He’s […]