Social Issues

Zombie Muhammad and the First Amendment

We’ve had a few readers send in links to coverage of a First Amendment-related case out of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. It’s a sad story that goes back to a 2011 Halloween parade. A small group of atheists marched in the parade, dressed as a Zombie Pope and a Zombie Muhammad. This outraged one Muslim father who attended the parade with his wife and son.


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Someone's confused about Santorum

An editor, whose religion I don’t know, sent this Associated Press story along with the note, “Maybe I’m too sensitive to these things, but this strikes me as kind of a vile headline if you think about it–not that some people mistake him for a Protestant, but the implication is that they wouldn’t support him if they knew he was Catholic.”


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A 'quieter battle' over ... gay marriage and ordination

If you watch internal church debates, you know that nothing gets people riled up more than just about anything to do with sex: premarital sex, homosexuality, you name it. People feel quite passionately about these issues, enough to part ways with one another. So I laughed out loud when I read a line from a piece published in New York Times about a “quieter battle” being waged within churches over gay marriage and gay ordination.


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Phony outrage over "phony theology"?

It’s been an interesting, if tiring, few weeks in media criticism and the culture wars. We saw how national media figures immediately jumped to help Planned Parenthood’s campaign against the Komen Foundation and how they have been working hard to frame objections to a federal mandate (that critics say seriously harms religious liberty) as a war on women. So when news broke this weekend about some supposedly alarming things that Rick Santorum said, I wasn’t sure I could handle another round.


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