Tuesday’s Religion News Roundup

Tony, Tony, come around; something’s lost and must be found! In this case, it’s actually a piece of St. Anthony himself, stolen from a Southern California church. If St. Anthony can locate a piece of himself, then he really is the patron saint of lost items. And now, some highlights from last night’s GOP presidential […]

Tony, Tony, come around; something’s lost and must be found! In this case, it’s actually a piece of St. Anthony himself, stolen from a Southern California church. If St. Anthony can locate a piece of himself, then he really is the patron saint of lost items.

And now, some highlights from last night’s GOP presidential debate (h/t: Religion Clause):

RON PAUL: “The most important thing is the First Amendment. Congress shall write no laws — which means Congress should never prohibit the expression of your Christian faith in a public place.”

RICK SANTORUM: “If your faith is pure and your reason is right, they’ll end up in the same place.”

HERMAN CAIN: “The statement was would I be comfortable with a Muslim in my administration, not that I wouldn’t appoint one. That’s the exact transcript. And I would not be comfortable because you have peaceful Muslims and then you have militant Muslims, those that are trying to kill us. And so, when I said I wouldn’t be comfortable, I was thinking about the ones that are trying to kill us, number one.”

MITT ROMNEY: “I think we recognize that the people of all faiths are welcome in this country. Our nation was founded on a principal of religious tolerance. That’s in fact why some of the early patriots came to this country and we treat people with respect regardless of their religious persuasion.”

NEWT GINGRICH (following up on Cain): “I’m in favor of saying to people, if you’re not prepared to be loyal to the United States, you will not serve in my administration, period. We did this in dealing with the Nazis and we did this in dealing with the communists. And it was controversial both times, and both times we discovered after a while, you know, there are some genuinely bad people who would like to infiltrate our country.”

A vote to legalize gay marriage in New York is getting “closer,” according to political observers; the Daily News says the “shadowy” National Organization for Marriage is spending hard to defeat the bill.


Census data indicate the percentage of gay couples with adopted children has more than doubled (to 19 percent) in the past decade. A federal judge will decide today whether to toss Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision to strike down Prop 8 after Vaughn admitted he’s gay.

And more from the Republican candidates on whether they support a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage: No — Cain, Paul. Yes — Pawlenty, Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann.

Part of the Sarah Palin e-mail trove released last week contains a “letter from God” that Palin wrote to her family days before her son Trig was born with Down syndrome: “Children are the most precious and promising ingredient in this mixed up world you live in down there on earth. Trig is no different, except he has one extra chromosome.”

The head of a right-wing Christian group is blaming POTUS (and his position on Israel/Palestine and the 1967 border dispute) for causing hurricanes in the U.S. Southern Baptist Seminary prez Al Mohler wants Anthony Weiner to find Jesus.

Southern Baptists open their annual meeting today in Phoenix and are poised to elect a black pastor to the largely ceremonial post of 1st vice president; New Orleans’ Fred Luter is seen as a possible candidate for SBC president next year.

The Supremes rejected (again) a challenge filed by atheist Michael Newdow over New Hampshire’s Pledge of Allegiance law; Newdow doesn’t like the whole “one nation under God” part.

The NYT profiles Eboo Patel and his efforts to foster interfaith understanding on U.S. college campuses.


Catholic University is returning to single-sex dorms in a bid to discourage drinking and hooking up. Mormon officials aren’t making any apologies for not allowing non-Mormon wedding guests inside the Salt Lake Temple for marriage sealing ceremonies.

It’s getting really ugly in New Square, N.Y., where dissident Orthodox Jews filed suit against the ruling rabbi after one of their own was allegedly badly burned by one of the rabbi’s followers.

And it got kind of ugly on Twitter after actor Russell Crowe waded into the circumcision debate and things quickly spiraled out of control: “I love my Jewish friends, I love the apples and the honey and the funny little hats but stop cutting yr babies.”

Reform Jews, as expected, elected Westchester County’s Rabbi Richard Jacobs as their next president. Gay Orthodox Jews are coming out of the closet in Israel.

And happy 50th anniversary wishes to the Unitarian Universalist Association, still in love (mostly) after all these years.

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