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Dogma down under

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Here’s a fun fact: Australia is holding a national election Saturday. There isn’t much hand wringing in the nation’s press about low voter turnout because skipping that trip to the polls is against the law, and punishable by a fine. The fire this time is over the relatively new Family First Party, a socially conservative, economically flexible political party that advocates stronger controls on pornography, drugs, gambling, stem cell research, and genetically modified foods — and a general rethink of how the Australian government regards people. According to the FFP’s website:


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Pick a religious label and prepare for angry telephone calls

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Journalists cannot always predict which stories will cause a ruckus, but reporter Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News knew that his report about a local “Bus 19″ exhibit was going to raise eyebrows. The bus had been attacked by terrorists, with 11 people dead. Now it was being used as part of a tour to promote the cause of Israel. It was being displayed in North Dallas as part of the Yom Kippur holy day.


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Akinola & Griswold: A torn friendship

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I returned late Tuesday from a last-minute trip to Washington to hear Peter Akinola, the primate of the Church of Nigeria, discuss his plans to launch a U.S. alternative to the Episcopal Church. (The picture shows Akinola greeting Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold at a meeting of the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops in 2002.)


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Surprise! Gallup wants to probe faith, public life

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Months before the 1996 election, some of the politicos behind President Bill Clinton’s campaign tried to find out which poll questions best predicted a voter’s Election Day choice. On which questions were the lines most starkly drawn between a Clinton voter and a voter determined to pull the GOP lever in the voting booth?


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Ghost in the Stylebook III: New York Times keeps searching

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This is one of many stories that I intended to write about last week or even earlier, but let me bring it up here on a quiet non-hurricane weekend. As regulars to the blog know, I have been highly interested in recent stories in the New York Times, the Associated Press and elsewhere, in which reporters seemed to be tiptoeing around a tense area in journalistic style — the rule about referring to an unborn child as a “fetus.”


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Tony the tiger

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“He is the conservative bastion of the US supreme court, a favourite of President Bush, and a hunting partner of the vice-president. He has argued vociferously against abortion rights, and in favour of anti-sodomy laws. But it turns out that there is another side to Justice Antonin Scalia: he thinks Americans ought to be having more orgies.”


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