One Utah

Okay so seriously, the good people of Blanding found this statue offensive.
An anatomically correct sculpture of the humpbacked flute player Kokopelli has been moved from the front of Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding after complaints from a local group calling itself the “Values Committee.”
Park manager [...]

“We are here to stand up for the unborn, to stand up against the dogs of hate who defend abortion on demand,” Wimmer said. [snip]
The supporters said the cost of the fight will not be an issue. Wimmer said that a group based out of Washington, D.C., which he would not [...]

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 [...]

The more than 200 insurgents who made a predawn attack on an outpost near the Pakistan border outnumbered defenders three to one, according to the New York Times. Sunday’s assault occurred just three days after 45 US soldiers, likely from the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and 25 Afghan troops established a new combat outpost in [...]

PZ Myers was righteously and correctly offended at a nonsense nonissue kerfuffle over a student “stealing” and “holding hostage” a communion wafer. The story goes something like this: the student went to Catholic communion service, didn’t eat the wafer immediately, was physically assaulted by someone trying to force him to eat the wafer [...]

The official story is that this year’s Taliban spring offensive was blunted because Coalition forces seized the initiative. The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit was sent in to Kandahar Province to chase bad guys, and the enemy disappeared without a fight (as insurgents often do), retreating back to Pakistan.
That’s the official story.
John McCreary, a former [...]

The Government Accountability Office released a report (PDF) today concluding that the United States has no plan to combat al Qaeda and other terrorist threats in Pakistan. The GAO found that “[t]errorists are still operating freely in Pakistan along the country’s Afghanistan border, despite the U.S. giving Pakistan more than $10.5 billion in military and [...]

The Texas Polygamist raid is a PR disaster for the Mormon church.
Last night, Larry King did his best impression of a journalist and interviewed people who have left polygamy - all with the LDS Salt Lake temple in the background.  The repetition of LDS/Mormon and polygamist/polygamy is undoing decades of work by mainstream Mormons to present [...]

President Bush and the rest of the right wing never get tired of telling us that America is hated by religious fanatics who can’t stand the ideas of freedom and democracy. Considering how many right-wingers are religious fanatics themselves, they may be projecting their own intolerance on others.
Although there are a minority who truly [...]

Via DailyKos, Pulitzer Prize winning author Steve Coll speculates that Osama bin Laden (OBL) might be found before the November elections. His reasoning goes like this:

Pakistan’s Musharraf regime believed that their $10 billion aid package might be reduced if they tracked down too many al Qaeda leaders
Key elements of the regime had close ties [...]

Some basics:  Some individual parents, a Chrisitian indoctrination center school and the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) filed a lawsuit alleging that the University of California was discriminating against them; UC has said that some of the courses these groups teach do not meet their requirements.  Among those courses are courses on creationism pretending [...]

The discussion about modesty and sexuality has me thinking about the complicated ways in which male anxiety - specifically about sexuality - plays itself out. Calls for modesty and events chastity balls are often called for in general terms but directed at women in practice; they are equally often called for in specifically gendered [...]