What’s the big deal with Hosanna-Tabor, yesterday’s unanimous Supreme Court decision supporting a religious school’s right to fire a teacher with ministerial responsibilities regardless of her health disability? Although the Court had never recognized a “ministerial exception” to federal anti-discrimination law before, lower federal courts have habitually done so. Most people would agree that religious […]

Religious identity doesn’t make much of a difference when it comes to voting in New Hampshire, as demonstrated by a new poll conducted by JZ Analytics for the Washington Times. It shows the two Catholic candidates, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, actually doing worse with Catholics than they do with Protestants. And Mitt Romney does […]

I’ve received the following request for a correction from Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:”Table Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:””; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Eric Rassbach, the national litigation director for the Becket […]

Opposition to Health and Human Services’ rules on coverage of contraception under the Affordable Care Act is no longer just a Catholic thing. Last week, a collection of the evangelical elite plus the heads of the leading Orthodox Jewish groups wrote a letter to President Obama protesting the mandate as a violation of their institutions’ […]

Anyone who doubts that Newt Gingrich is a bomb-thrower should head right over to “Bringing the Courts Back Under the Constitution,” a position paper that is part of the Newtonian revolution also known as the 21st Century Contract with America. The New York Times was not exaggerating when it editorialized a few days ago that […]

Four years ago, a bipartisan group of prominent Catholic laity led by former Ambassador-to-the- Vatican Thomas Melady put out a statement calling for greater civility in American politics and got slammed for their effort by Catholic riiht-wingers who considered this an assault on the pro-life movement. And inasmuch as the statement opposed bishops’ denying Communion […]

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty relieved that the House of Representatives passed a resolution yesterday declaring that the National Motto is the national motto. So In God We Trust is In God We Trust, and God’s in his heaven, and all’s right with the world. More or less. OK, so there are […]

Obviously smarting from the slings and arrows of outraged pundits, Rev. Robert Jeffress took to WaPo’s op-ed page yesterday to defend himself. And his defense is worth a careful look, because rarely (I’m tempted to say never) has a leader of the religious right argued so directly and publicly that Americans should use religious identity […]

A new organization claiming to represent 2,000 evangelical chaplains in the U.S. military calls itself the Military Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty. What threat to religious liberty does it discern? That would be Pentagon’s recent memo declaring that military chaplains can participate in private marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples in jurisdictions that recognize SSM. To […]

When Ralph Reed talks, I listen. On the religious right, truer words were never spoken than when he told the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot 20 years ago, “You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night”–and if you don’t believe that, unzip the body bags of the 2002 leaders […]

Judge John Schmidt didn’t have to ponder very hard to decide that the state of Illinois is within its rights to terminate its orphan and foster care contracts with Catholic Charities in Southern Illinois. As he wrote, “The fact that [Catholic Charities] have contracted with the state to provide foster care and adoption services for […]

Anyway, there’s now a Christmas tree installed in a Bar Harbor park with multicolored lights to be lit in perpetuity–or at least until the Bar Harbor Town Council revisits the deal in two years. The organization responsible for the installation is a Maine non-profit called Wreaths Across America, which is dedicated to honoring America’s veterans […]

Props to the Forward for tracking down the whereabouts of the original of George Washington’s justly celebrated letter to the Jews of Newport, written after receiving a welcome from their leader Moses Seixas during his visit to Rhode Island with Thomas Jefferson in August of 1790. Not so much to the International B’nai B’rith, which […]

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:”Table Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:””; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Responding to my post on military chaplains post-DADT, commenter Sandra Brown writes: First […]

“Do the citizens of a state have the right to define legal marriage as a man-woman relationship? Or can courts overrule them on behalf of same-sex marriage?” So Russell Shaw began a piece in that avatar of Catholic conservatism, Our Sunday Visitor, a couple of weeks ago. Shaw went on to acknowledge that courts have […]