When the Affordable Care Act went into effect, it exempted religious organizations from having to fulfill the contraceptive requirement. In other words, if you were a pastor of a large church, you didn’t have to provide your employees with birth control if it went against your religious “conscience.” The ACA did not offer the same exemption to public, for-profit companies owned by religious people — as well it shouldn’t have. Just because the owner of a huge company like, say, Hobby Lobby, is an evangelical Christian, why should he be able to withhold contraception from those who work for him? The company’s purpose isn’t to promote Christianity. But Hobby Lobby’s CEO David Green felt he should be allowed to dictate the kind of health benefits his employees received and he took his case to court. In November, the Supreme Court decided it would hear that case, deciding in essence whether corporations could be religious. There is about more than just birth control (which Green unscientifically and ignorantly equates with abortion). If the Supreme Court rules in his favor, where would the line be drawn? What if a business owner was a Jehovah’s Witness who doesn’t believe in blood transfusions? Or a Christian Scientist who believed in the power of prayer over medicine? Would they get to force their employees, whose insurance comes through the workplace, to live by those rules as well? Today, a group of 19 Democratic Senators filed a brief urging the Court to deny the Hobby Lobby exemption. Read more
One of the readers of this site (“co—“) recently sold her Kindle on eBay, but the buyer (“lu—“) wasn’t happy with the product she received. She claimed it wasn’t working. So the two of them had a quick back-and-forth exchange until the conflict was resolved. But just wait until you read how it was resolved (click image to enlarge, or read the text below): Read more
In a overall positive cover story for Rolling Stone, Mark Binelli profiles Pope Francis: What I love about that cover is that if you don’t look at the bottom half of it, it looks like Pope Francis is described as “The Internet Crime Kingpin” 🙂 Read more
Someone posted this photo of a Creationist exhibit in Oklahoma to Reddit Atheism the other day, with the headline “This should be illegal”: No, it really shouldn’t. Read more
I have a hard time believing Christians are under attack in America. Mostly because they’re so totally not. Usually, when Christian groups are upset, it’s not because their rights are being violated, but because they’re no longer getting the privileged treatment they’re used to receiving. So you should always take their complaints with a grain of salt and search for whatever they’re not telling you. When I heard about first-grader Brynn Williams’ story, in the back of my mind, I was wondering what really happened because I knew Advocates for Faith & Freedom (a Christian version of the Freedom From Religion Foundation) couldn’t be trusted to share the entire story. Here’s how AFF explained what happened: Read more
A few days ago, I mentioned that evangelical Christians in the Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) wanted to censor two performances of a comedy play called “The Bible: The Complete Word Of God (abridged)” because they felt it was too blasphemous: Well, they changed their minds pretty damn quickly after everyone started laughing at them. The shows are back on! Read more
We’re not even in February, but I think this is a potential winner in the category “Bizarre Whodunnit of the Year”: Thieves broke into a small church in the mountains east of Rome over the weekend and stole a reliquary with the blood of the late Pope John Paul II, a custodian said on Monday. Dozens of police with sniffer dogs scoured the remote area for clues to what the Italian Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana called “a sacrilegious theft that was probably commissioned by someone”. Franca Corrieri told Reuters she had discovered a broken window early on Sunday morning and had called the police. When they entered the small stone church they found the gold reliquary and a crucifix missing. One of Christianity’s more unsettling practices is the veneration Catholics have for the body parts — and bodily fluids — of their purported saints. Nothing is too ghoulish to turn into a religious object. Jesus’s foreskin. The finger of Doubting Thomas (the one he poked into the gash in Christ’s side). The breast milk of the Virgin Mary. The thumb and head of St. Catherine of Siena. St. Fiacre’s semen-encrusted sock. OK, I made that last one up, but is it really any crazier than the preceding relics? Read more
Last year, Mississippi’s Republican Governor Phil Bryant signed into law a bill that made student-led, administration-supported proselytizing perfectly legal in the state’s public schools. On the surface, the bill appeared to be useless — as one Americans United lawyer said of similar legislation, “This bill is a solution in search of a problem.” It said students could “express their beliefs about religion in homework, artwork, and other written and oral assignments free from discrimination”… even though they could always do that. It said students could form religious clubs that met before or after school… which was also never in doubt. Here’s where things got really weird. The bill said: Read more
Kirk Cameron, Protector of the Family, Defender of the Faith, and Speaker of the Bullshit, took to Facebook today to announce that the mass-wedding at last night’s Grammy Awards during Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ performance of the pro-LGBT song “Same Love” was an “all out assault on the traditional family.” And there’s only way to defend against that assault: Buying Kirk Cameron’s new movie: Read more
Last year, the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center found out that administrators at Mountain View Elementary School in Taylors, South Carolina held their “graduation” ceremony inside of a church. To make matters worse, the program for the event very clearly listed two separate prayers — both of which were led by students. Furthermore, both were Christian prayers that referred to “Jesus” and both were approved by a school official before the ceremony: It’s possible to hold a public school graduation in a church — other districts have gotten away with that — but even Christian administrators who want to sneak prayers into the ceremony know well enough to call them “invocations” instead of giving away the game and they make sure school officials are not linked to the prayers. The AHA sent the district a letter warning them of the consequences, but the school’s response didn’t quite indicate how they would change the ceremony in the future other than reiterating that “the school will not endorse the use of prayer by students”… which left the door wide open for prayers to continue without the school’s public support. After another round of back-and-forth, the district took a stand and said they would not stop student-initiated prayers, leading the AHA to file a federal lawsuit on behalf of a family in the district. Unfortunately, December’s court hearing was a mess. The judge, Ross Anderson, said things that no one with a strong knowledge of the facts should have said, a claim the AHA suggests in a recent court filing: Read more
