USA Today reports that Southern Baptists are suing the federal government over Obamacare’s contraception mandate. Guidestone Financial Resources is a division of the SBC that provides health benefits to Southern Baptist churches. When the law goes into effect on January 1, it would require Southern Baptists to foot the bill for insurance that covers contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs. From the report:
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ERLC and ManDec Panel on Religious Liberty
The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and the Manhattan Declaration teamed up last week and hosted a fascinating panel discussion on religious liberty. Andrew Walker moderates and panelists include Kirsten Powers, Ross Douthat, Russell Moore, Jennifer Marshall, and Timothy Shah. I think this discussion is really helpful, and I commend it to you. Click the image at right or click here to watch.
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Time is running-out on religious liberty
Rod Dreher has a must-read article about gay marriage and religious liberty in The American Conservative. He shows that the battle over the definition of marriage has largely been lost, and there’s not much that can be done about it now. Religious conservatives are conceding that legal gay marriage is inevitable. As a result, conservatives are turning their attention most urgently to the threat that legal gay marriage poses to religious liberty. Dreher writes:
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Scalia believes in the Devil and is offended if you don’t
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is always quotable, but he is in rare form in a recent interview with New York Magazine. The conversation is wide-ranging, but by far the most interesting part to me involves a conversation about heaven, hell, and the existence of the Devil. In short, Scalia declares boldly his belief in the existence of a personal Devil. The interviewer is somewhat scandalized by the admission, but Scalia doubles-down. Scalia makes the observation that a majority of Americans believe in the Devil and that you have to be pretty out of touch with the American mainstream to be surprised to meet someone who really believes in the…
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The Matthew Shepard Myth: Was it a hate crime?
The Advocate has an article calling into question the common understanding of Matthew Shepard’s 1998 murder. Almost immediately after Shepard’s death, people began to form the impression that the murder was a hate crime targeting a homosexual young man. Aaron Hicklin reviews a new book that challenges that narrative and says that the circumstances surrounding this crime were quite different. He writes, What if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepard’s murder was wrong? What if our most fiercely held convictions about the circumstances of that fatal night of October 6, 1998, have obscured other, more critical, aspects of the case? How do people sold on one version…
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SBC Chaplains face a crisis over same-sex marriage
Albert Mohler has a must-read article about the crisis facing evangelical chaplains in the military. The issue has come to a head, and now some are calling for Southern Baptist chaplains to resign their commissions if they will not embrace same-sex marriage. Mohler writes,
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Christian baker closes shop under pressure from gay activists
Earlier this year, I wrote about Aaron and Melissa Klein, owners of a bakery called “Sweet Cakes by Melissa” in Greshem, Oregon. They’ve been in the news since January after they refused to provide a cake for a gay wedding of two lesbians. Since then, the story has gone viral, and the Klein’s business has been under siege from protesters and gay activists. Aaron Klein says that gay rights activists have been using “militant, mafia-style tactics” to shut the business down.
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Should the president authorize a military strike?
Secretary of State John Kerry began laying the groundwork today to justify a military strike against the Assad regime in Syria. As one would expect, the prospect of another war has become quite the controversy among politicos and the talking-head class. I read today about one Senator who said this: The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation… In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent. History has shown us time and again, however,…
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Gay marriage as litmus test for acceptance in elite society
R. R. Reno offers some insight on why gay marriage has become the litmus test for acceptance in elite society. He writes: Same sex marriage has become the issue of our time… How did this come to pass? There’s no easy answer, which is not surprising. Same sex marriage is the issue because lots of different interests, concerns, and trends converge on it. The first thing to say is that the gay rights movement has been largely an upper middle class project. Thurgood Marshall attended Lincoln University, an all-black college in southeastern Pennsylvania, and then Howard University Law School. Gay activist Larry Kramer went to Yale. Judge Vaughn Walker went…
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Is opposing gay marriage like joining the Ku Klux Klan?
When Ben Carson was disinvited from offering the commencement address at Johns Hopkins University last Spring, Michael Kinsley used the occasion to describe our current cultural moment. He writes: But Carson didn’t murder millions of people. All he did was say on television that he opposes same-sex marriage—an idea that even its biggest current supporters had never even heard of a couple of decades ago. Does that automatically make you a homophobe and cast you into the outer darkness? It shouldn’t. But in some American subcultures—Hollywood, academia, Democratic politics—it apparently does. You may favor raising taxes on the rich, increasing support for the poor, nurturing the planet, and repealing Section…