In which Pastor Dan notes:
I like Barack Obama. I like his faith.** Up until recently, we shared that faith pretty much exactly. Time and again, I have defended his right to talk about his faith. Hell, for all I care, candidates can talk about their love of pooties if it helps voters get to know […]

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Had read something last week (and I’d link it if I could find it) about how Obama was reaching out to evangelicals on an unprecedented (for a Democrat) basis - not necessarily going and kowtowing to them, but at least listening - one on one, with leaders, looking them in the eye, and then saying […]

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Via Sullivan, William Saletan at Slate.com peruses a new study on “sexually antagonistic selection in human male homosexuality,” which concludes, bascially, that it’s inborn - and for a reason, too.
Saletan:
It starts with four curious patterns. First, male homosexuality occurs at a low but stable frequency in a wide range of societies. Second, the female relatives […]

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Via Pastor Dan, check it out - it really was only a matter of time:
Religious Right Gears Up To Push Political Choices From the Pulpit
As the presidential candidates prepare to compete for religious voters this November, some preachers on the Christian right are vowing to test longstanding tax rules that inhibit politicking from the pulpit.
The […]

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So there’s a new Pew U.S. Religious Landscape survey out, with some veddy veddy interesting findings. One of them, I’ll let Steven Waldman say, so I don’t get accused of making it up myself:
Evangelicals Similar to Muslims - In many questions, the group most similar to evangelicals was Muslims. For instance, 79% of evangelicals say […]

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Good, good…
“Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?” Obama said. “Would we go with James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?” referring to the civil rights leader.
…and then Obama goes on to cite some of […]

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Ah, those tricky fundies. Always up to something:
Opponents of teaching evolution, in a natural selection of sorts, have gradually shed those strategies that have not survived the courts. Over the last decade, creationism has given rise to “creation science,” which became “intelligent design,” which in 2005 was banned from the public school curriculum in Pennsylvania […]

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I’m game.
First, an apology: I actually ran into Joe Hainthaler at the company picnic over the weekend, but just sort of mumbled a few things en route from one place to another. Basically, I was delivering food for two hungry kids; and Joe, as I saw you shepherding one around yourself, I figure you’d understand […]

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There’s a pretty interesting video making the rounds this week in which Bill O’Reilly has a guest on who opposes gay marriage, and O’Reilly asks him - well, why do you oppose gay marriage - and the guy simply can’t come up with anything coherent. And O’Relly sort of gets on the guy’s case. Which, […]

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And social conservatives lost, writes James Joyner:
The social conservatives are in the most trouble of the three groups. First trimester abortion will never be illegal; indeed, the ability to terminate pregnancy safely at home will continue to increase, making it a moot point. Homosexuality is rapidly mainstreaming and gay marriage will achieve the status of […]

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Sure. Why not?
Reacting to the California Supreme Court’s decision overturing a same-sex marriage ban, the far right group Campaign for Children and Families compares county clerks issuing same-sex marriage licenses to Nazis gassing Jews during the Holocaust. Here’s what they say on their website, SaveCalifornia.com:
Ask your county clerk if they were a Nazi officer during […]

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So John McCain has tried to edge away from Crazy John Hagee, the hardline conservative pastor who tends to say some… controversial things. Like this:
John Hagee, the controversial evangelical leader and endorser of Sen. John McCain, argued in a late 1990s sermon that the Nazis had operated on God’s behalf to chase the Jews from […]

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So, I’ve held off commenting on this, state Sen. Mike Brubaker’s withdrawal of his Keep The Gay Down bill, because I’m coming to hate these threads - they always devolve into exactly the same thing.
But, the more I think about this - the more I begin to think that Brubaker, and maybe the state GOP […]

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And so here we have the American Life League, gearing up for a big protest (they hope) on June 7 titled, “The PILL KILLS,” the idea being that birth-control pills don’t merely prevent unwanted pregnancies but actually can act as abortifacents. And therefore, on that basis, it should be banned.
But, as usual for such folks, […]

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Via Sullivan (via NRO), Ben Stein tells us why science is a bad thing:
Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do […]

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So Ben Stein, he of the Visine commercials and other conservative intellectual achievements, has a new movie coming out in which we’re told that proponents of intelligent design, or ID, are somehow persecuted by the scientific establishment because they believe that God did it all in seven day… er, they believe that some sort of […]

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Hm. Via Sullian, Bob Casey Jr. on the role of the church in the affairs of state:
I do think there’s a difference between what a religious leader says and does and what a public official or legislator does. But there’s no question that a lot of our legal underpinnings find a good bit of their […]

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It ain’t me saying it - it’s John McCain’s advisor, Lawrence Eagleburger:
On the Christian hard right, I live in Charlottesville now and I can’t tell you I’m surrounded by it,” Eagleburger said. “I must tell you we fought it there, fought hard against it. There’s no question that in the Republican Party it is a […]

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Reading Obama’s speech, which seems to be a modern-day version of Nixon’s “Checkers” speech in terms of repudiating the now-famous Rev. Wright. But was caught by something more apropos to the discussions that we keep having around here, about Sen. Brubaker’s bill and what it seeks to regulate.
More after the jump.

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Hm. Via Paul Glastris, I see Steven Waldman, a founding editor of Belief.net is blogging over at TPMCafe in relation to his new book “Founding Faith,” which tackles the sore subject of what the Founding Fathers thought about the confluence of religion and goverment.
Waldman sums it up fairly well in his latest:
There’s a common script […]

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