Rachel Ford is a programmer, and since 8:00 to 5:00 doesn't provide enough opportunity to bask in screen glare, she writes in her spare time. She was raised a very fundamentalist Christian, but eventually "saw the light." Rachel's personal blog is Rachel's Hobbit Hole, where she discusses everything from Tolkien to state politics.
Last year, Marjorie Silva, owner of Denver, Colorado’s Azucar Bakery, was asked by a customer to make a cake featuring homophobic language and imagery. Silva agreed to make the cake and offered to furnish decorating instruments if wanted but said that the bakery would not inscribe the cake with the offensive language. The customer, Bill Jack, subsequently filed a religious discrimination complaint against her with the Civil Rights division of the Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA). Read more
A number of Illinois Bible schools are suing the state’s education regulators in federal court for the right to award degrees without meeting the state’s accreditation standards. They don’t deny that their programs fail to meet the standards for awarding degrees; they just feel that they should be exempt regardless because, they argue, it’s an infringement of their religion to do otherwise. Read more
The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer is certainly not one to shy away from expressing bizarre opinions, but last week on his show Focal Point, he might have set a new record for the most hilariously contradictory and nonsensical statements uttered in a short time. It transpired when a caller, Don, wondered, “… how come there’s nobody on AFR [American Family Radio] that will say that Barack Obama’s not a Christian?” The caller speculated that President Obama might instead be a Muslim or a New Age spiritualist and opined that “even” Russian president Vladimir Putin is a Christian. (If only, I guess, we had such a righteous man in charge here…) Read more
The other day I noted, writing about Pope Francis’ comments about attempts to “redefine marriage,” that for all the progressive tone, the Pope is still head of the Catholic Church. He is more progressive than his predecessors, but much of the theology that drives the Church remains regressive. I mentioned that the Pope’s opposition to contraception use was an example of an issue upon which he maintains a conservative stance. In comments made yesterday, Pope Francis reiterated the Church’s position on birth control… but not exactly how one might expect: Read more
