Fred Kaplan, “The Deal of a Lifetime”
It might not lead to a deal as good as the outline suggests; it might not lead to a deal at all. But anyone who denounces this framework — anyone who argues that we should pull out of the talks, impose more sanctions, or bomb Iran because it’s better to have no deal than to have this one — is not a serious person or is pursuing a parochial agenda.
Mary E. Hunt, “Vatican Council on Women Would Be Funny Were It Not so Insulting”
In four rather disjointed sections, the writers try to square several circles. For example, in the first section they want to say that women and men are equal but different. They insist on proclaiming women’s maternal instincts (whatever those are) without ever mentioning men’s propensity to care and nurture. They cite a highly accomplished woman who, when asked what title she liked best, said “Grandma.” To prove their point about difference, the writers mused whether a man would respond in the same way.
Ouch.
Helaine Olen, “Poor Stories From Brooks and Douthat”
This world receded, not because post-war Americans suddenly acquired morals, but because they achieved prosperity, not to mention a social safety net through such innovations as Social Security. It was an uncomfortable part of our family and national memory, and not something many wanted to remember. So we allowed ourselves to forget.
But as our economy has faltered, as income and wealth inequality have soared, and family and government supports have been dismantled, the supposedly disordered existence of the poor has made a return. The second Gilded Age is imitating the first. None of this history features in the columns of Brooks, Douthat or others like them, however, who all warble on about an imaginary past.
Marika Rose, “Cameron’s Christianity”
But however much we might dislike Cameron’s Christianity, we can’t simply reject it in the name of some more authentic form of Christianity, of “Christianity, properly understood,” of what Jesus really meant, if only we could learn to focus on the right verses, read in the right way. What Christianity really is is also what it actually means and does in the world today, what people who call themselves Christians think and do.
And, in that sense, Cameron is absolutely right: Christianity is about respectability, hard work, “decency;” it is about white middle-class values. The Protestant work ethic, the cleanliness that is next to godliness, the respectability politics of compulsory heterosexuality and all those “real and necessary” values that have been weaponized so effectively by the West as it has pursued racist, genocidal, and colonialist policies around the world are precisely a Christian invention, whatever the elusive historical Jesus might have made of them.
Ed Kilgore, “Reminder: We’ve Used ‘Religious Liberty’ for Discrimination Before”
Like southern “Christian” segregationists in the recent past, today’s politicized conservative Christians are executing a strategic retreat into an allegedly private sphere where they are on stronger ground in resisting anti-discrimination policies. They intensely dislike the parallels on the grounds that hostility to gay rights and/or same-sex marriage in deeply entrenched in their faith, or in the case of conservative evangelicals, in the Bible.
That is exactly what the segregationists said as well, of course. It is not hard to foresee a day when the tortured efforts of religious leaders to stitch together a few culture-bound passages into an eternal condemnation of homosexuality (or for that matter, abortion, which is virtually invisible in Scripture) will look just as absurd and embarrassing as yesterday’s thundering sermons on black people being consigned to submission by the Curse of Ham. And then maybe the strategic retreat into efforts to hang onto discrimination via protestations of “religious liberty” will look less sympathetic as well.
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