The press ignores the influence of religious conservatives on Republican lawmakers bent on curbing the rights of American women.
Sarah Posner
Sarah Posner’s coverage of religion and politics has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Week, and many others.
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The Lord Is My Insurer
Conservative Christians have found a way around health-care reform’s individual mandate.
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Cracks In The Catholic Armor.
It might look like Rep. Bart Stupak, the crucial holdout for more draconian restrictions on abortion in the health-care bill, was swayed, finally, by the executive order reiterating that The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act upholds the ban on federal funding of abortion. For months Stupak, carrying the water of the U.S. Conference of […]
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Children of God
As inflammatory tea party rhetoric gets toasted at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Focus on the Family’s advocacy arm tries to show a softer, gentler side of the religious right.
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Faith and the Stupak Amendment.
The Catholic bishops have gotten a lot of attention for the role they played in pushing the Stupak amendment — and the House health-care bill — over the finish line. While there’s no doubt the bishops applied the midnight pressure, their role is just one piece of how Democrats yearn for the godly imprimatur. To […]
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Islamophobia, From Screen to Capitol Hill.
Last week saw the preposterous spectacle of members of Congress calling for an investigation of the allegedly seditious activities of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Republicans Sue Myrick, John Shadegg, Paul Broun, and Trent Franks, who accused CAIR of planting interns to work as spies on Capitol Hill, based their charges on the […]
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If Only War Were that Simple.
The Washington Post today profiles Lt. Carey Cash, the Navy chaplain serving at Camp David, where President Obama attends services. Cash — a great nephew of music icon Johnny Cash — is a conservative Southern Baptist who won’t, apparently, give Obama the trouble that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright did. If Obama is seeking some spiritual […]
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No Abortion Shift, No Need To Cater to Anti-Abortion Activists.
In his U.S. News and World Report column, Dan Gilgoff buys into the idea that President Obama and the Democratic Party should be mindful of voters who worry that Obama will “overreach on abortion rights,” based on the new Pew poll out on abortion attitudes. But that poll doesn’t show any seismic shift in abortion […]
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Shotgun Adoption and Government Funding of Faith-Based Programs.
RH Reality check has republished Kathryn Joyce’s excellent piece, which originally ran in The Nation, about the coercive tactics used by crisis pregnancy centers — recipients of tens of millions in federal abstinence-only funds under the Bush administration — to persuade women not to choose an abortion, and then pressure them to give up their […]
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The Religious Right’s Jennings End-Game.
Make no mistake: the religious right’s smear campaign against Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools director Kevin Jennings is not about Jennings’ alleged past actions, or even about the fact that Jennings is gay. It’s about a much larger, concerted campaign by the religious right to dismantle the separation of church and state. How? […]
