All week, I’ve been struggling to find anything sensible to post about the extraordinary brouhaha whipped up by the Catholic bishops over contraception coverage, health care and “religious freedom.” As a non-American, and as I don’t pretend to understand the detail…
Monthly Archives: February 2012
US Bishops, Religious Freedom, Health Care: Omnibus Commentary, Part 1
Robert McClory on the Embarrassment the Catholic Bishops Have Become (and How They’ve Gotten There). Robert McClory at National Catholic Reporter writing about the U.S. Catholic bishops and what an embarrassment their campaign for “religious freedom” is for many American…
US Bishops, Religious Freedom, Health Care: Omnibus Commentary, Part 2
Two Pictures, Two Thousand Words: Congressional Hearing on Religious Liberty. As Pema Levy notes at Talking Points Memo today, the picture at the head of the posting is from yesterday’s Congressional hearing about “religious liberty,” and has been circulating all…
US Bishops, Religious Freedom, Health Care: Omnibus Commentary, Part 3
This Just in: USCCB Legal Counsel Anthony Picarello Tells Media Bishops “Will Not Relent”. This just in: right-wing propagandist legal counsel to the U.S. Catholic bishops Anthony Picarello informed reporters today that the U.S. Catholic bishops “will not relent” on their…
US Bishops, Religious Freedom, Health Care: Omnibus Commentary, Part 4
Contraception Battles: More Commentary Hot off the Presses. I can’t avoid that news, because it’s everywhere these days, from an article today at Alternet by Adele Stan about how the bishops’ political powerlessness has been definitively exposed, to a similar statement…
US Bishops, Religious Freedom, Health Care: Omnibus Commentary, Part 5
Bill Moyers on Religious Freedom: Freedom of and Freedom from. As always, Bill Moyers is eminently sane in what he writes about the made-up holy war for “religious freedom” that the Republican party (and a large number of white evangelical…
US Bishops, Religious Freedom, Health Care: Omnibus Commentary, Part 6
Gerald Beyer on Strange Bedfellows: U.S. Bishops’ Religious Liberty Crusade and Neoliberalism. There was one other valuable article of which I intended to take note in the posting I just uploaded, and I lost sight of it in the thicket…
In Valentine’s Week, Marriage Equality Advances: Update
If anyone still has any doubts that marriage equality is on the move in the US, just consider how many advances there have been in just the past few days, in this week of St Valentine: In Washington state, on…
The Gay Closet as a Place of Sin
My colleague Advocatus Diaboli sent me a link some days ago to a post at Jesus in Love, about a new book (“Dark Knowledge“, by Kenneth Low) which argues that Jesus was homosexual and sexually active, but closeted - and…
Kentucky “Welcoming Church” Leaves Baptist Association
In recent years, progress towards full lgbt inclusion in church has been remarkable, with the appointment of openly gay and lesbian bishops, landmark national decisions by some denominations to remove barriers to ordination for LGBT pastors, and local decisions by…
