One Utah

I’ve read some dribs and drabs about the movement calling itself Joel’s Army. The upshot is:
Joel’s Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian “dominion” on non-believers.
Large swaths of the rightwing conservative Christians seeing current events through an apocalyptic lens is dangerous [...]

So, the back story goes something like this: Old, white haired Catholic guy in Great Britain issues stupid statement attributing a host of things to demonic possession - which he deems contagious.
Promiscuity, as well as homosexuality and pornography, says 73 year-old Fr. Jeremy Davies, is a form of sexual perversion and can lead to [...]

Last night channel surfing I happened across a show on one of the Christian networks that are cropping up in the 200 range on the TV - it as an hysterical (as in characterized by hysteria) show about the way in which Christians are being - reach for your smelling salts girls - persecuted by [...]

A few years ago, the youth group from my congregation participated with the youth group from the mosque on a service project. At the end of the night, the kids returned to HUCC for debriefing. The Muslim youth later complained they felt it was wrong for boys and girls to sit together in [...]

PZ Myers reports receiving:
somewhere well above 12,000 hate mail messages from religious people, mostly Catholic; two reasonable messages from Catholics who said that while they are unshaken in their faith, they approve of my opposition to cracker idolatry; and zero comments of any kind from admitted Muslims.

Sam Harris, in The End of Faith [...]

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is an absurd, counter productive policy. At Pam’s House Blend, she’s got some fun video of Elaine Donnelly doing her whackadoodle best to argue in favor of the policy. Donnelly raises the “unit cohesion” argument again and again and Rep. Patrick Murphy smacks it down -asking in essence, “Are [...]

…or is it the other way around? Well, not any more.
As Utah led (or lagged) the country in Bush approval ratings, so Utah lags the Nation in the growing acceptance of Gays as evidenced by popular sentiment about Gays in the military.
But Utah WILL follow the national trend, albeit several steps behind, as sure [...]

According to Paul “Sorry-ma’am-this-is-my-job-someone’s-got-to-do-it” Mero, chief of Utah’s conservative Sutherland Institute, the state has a vested interest in your sex organs. Your children, you see, are the state’s means of production, and your sex organs, being the means of producing the means, are therefore a national asset subject to oversight. Lots of oversight. The more [...]

For a long time now, the ridiculous right has been ginning up pointless controversies over claims that religious people have the right to refuse to do their jobs on the basis of their faith.
From Rob Boston, at Talk to Action:
Stories abound in the media of “pro-life pharmacists” who refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions and Muslim [...]

In our society, almost all minority groups face a complicated choice between being fully integrated and between self-segregation. At one time, women’s colleges were the only avenue for women to pursue higher education, same for the historically black colleges. Catholic schools were organized since many public schools openly indoctrinated students into protestantism. [...]

The history of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is a sordid tale of bigotry, ignorance and fear-mongering. The Clinton Administration tried to do the right thing and got blown out of the water. Congress - stampeded by a bunch of raving homo-bigots - decided to set military policy. DADT was the result.
DADT has [...]

We Utahns of the more mainstream political persuasion (nationally at least) have a certain affection for Utah’s Sutherland Institute Director Paul Mero. He is after all, exceptionally lovable, friendly and affectionately earnest in his radically conservative positions. Most endearing is his forgiving nature and patience in the face of our, at times, rough edges.

In [...]