The religious right’s four-month smear campaign against Department of Education Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools director Kevin Jennings ramped up this week, with heightened calls for his resignation. Among other bogus claims, the Family Research Council, which has led the charge, insists that Jennings is “viciously hostile to religion” because of his past […]
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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Is Public Support for Abortion Access Slipping, Or Is Apathy Rising?
A new poll released today by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press bears the headline: “Support for Abortion Slips.” No doubt conservatives, and more specifically the religious right, will jump on this survey and deploy it to support their position on everything […]
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The Whining Over Pro-Life Democrats and Health Care Reform.
I don’t know who appointed Steven Waldman the Democratic Party’s chief adviser on abortion issues, but he is at it again at BeliefNet, expressing shock and dismay that the party leadership isn’t sufficiently coddling its (minority) pro-life caucus. At the Democratic National Convention last year, on a panel on faith and the party, Waldman declared […]
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Yes, Valerie Jarrett Is Beck’s Next Target.
Two weeks ago, I wondered whether, based on a WorldNetDaily smear job linking her communists and other nefarious people, White House adviser Valerie Jarrett would be Glenn Beck’s next target. Today, referring to Yosi Sargent’s resignation from the National Endowment for the Arts, Beck is saying on his radio program that Sargent is small fry. […]
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The Skousen Admiration Club.
Dave Weigel points out the hypocrisy of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s professed admiration for W. Cleon Skousen, the Glenn Beck ideological godfather and anti-Communist oddball, at this weekend’s Values Voters Summit. While many in the Christian right sidelined Mitt Romney because of his Mormonism, now Mormons like Skousen and Beck are all the rage. But […]
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Glenn Beck’s Mentor Exposed.
I highly recommend Alexander Zaitchik’s feature in Salon today, “Meet the Man Who Changed Glenn Beck’s Life.” In it, he profiles not just Beck and his band of aggrieved, paranoid disciples, but the man who inspired him, W. Cleon Skousen, whom Zaitchik describes as “too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era.” […]
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Does Size Matter? The Impact of the 912 Rally.
Don’t mind Sarah Posner — She’s just “part of the government-controlled press.” From sarahposner on Vimeo. As I rode the Metro down to the Mall yesterday, the size rumors had already begun. (Yes, even the anti-government cranks — who said things like “when the government takes over, everything goes downhill” — extolled the virtues of […]
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Signs of the Times: Scenes from the 912 March.
From yesterday’s Tea Party rally on the National Mall, sponsored by Dick Armey‘s FreedomWorks and other right-wing groups, and inspired by Glenn Beck, participants’ posters — both handmade and professional — capture the prevailing theme: that America is being destroyed by a foreign leader and his cadre of socialists, communists, fascists, and Nazis. I’ll have […]
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The Marginalization of the Non-Evangelicals.
In one of yesterday’s posts, I wrote about how conventional wisdom develops around what “people of faith” want, and how “people of faith” usually means “evangelicals.” Today there’s more evidence of the Obama administration’s overemphasis of evangelicals, as USA Today’s Cathy Grossman reports from the Religion Newswriters Association’s annual conference about a panel on Obama’s […]
