Rap Sheet
Links on R&P from around the web
The America I Know
posted on August 30, 2012At The Daily Caller, Mia Love, a black Mormon congressional candidate from Utah, contextualizes her family’s immigrant success story in the broader ideal of the American dream. “The America I know,” writes Love, “is grounded in the gritty determination found in patriots, pioneers and struggling parents, in small business owners with big ideas, in the farmers who work in the beauty of our landscapes and the artists who paint them, in our heroic military and our inspiring Olympic athletes, and in every child who looks at the seemingly impossible and says, ‘I can do that.'”
The Legitimate Children of Rape
posted on August 30, 2012At The New Yorker, Andrew Solomon writes about the estimated 25,000 rape-related pregnancies each year in the U.S. Solomon states, “The relationship between rape and pregnancy has been a topic of highly politicized debate since long before Todd Akin’s comments on ‘legitimate rape,’ Paul Ryan’s bill with its category of ‘forcible rape,’ and Sharron Angle’s suggestion, two years ago, that women pregnant through rape make ‘a lemon situation into lemonade.'”
Romney’s Mad-Libs Foreign Policy
posted on August 30, 2012“Mitt Romney’s approach to foreign policy has remained so gauzy that commentators are increasingly sounding like foreign diplomats trying to parse Chinese wall posters to better understand who was up or down in Chairman Mao’s inner circle,” writes John Norris for Foreign Policy. Compared to his running mate, Paul Ryan, Romney has been less specific about his vision for a Romney administration’s role in world affairs, but both men want to decrease money spent on diplomacy. “Romney and Ryan’s hostility to spending money on diplomacy and development becomes all the more striking when considered in light of the campaign’s burning desire to spend more on defense, deficits be damned.”
Prescriptions for an Ailing Christianity
posted on August 30, 2012At Publishers Weekly, G. Jeffrey MacDonald writes about the much discussed decrease in Christian identity in America. Citing Ross Hastings’ new book, Missional God, Missional Church: Hope for Re-Evangelizing the West, MacDonald suggests that for Christian churches to rebound, the idea of “church” needs to be redefined, embracing “a theological framework for witnessing beyond church walls through acts of mercy and justice.”
National Review, Race, and Me
posted on August 30, 2012The New Republic‘s Timothy Noah asks, who introduced race into this political season, the Democrats or Republicans? Noah points to the battle over new voter ID laws, enacted almost exclusively by Republican-dominated state legislatures. “Do Democrats poison black voters’ minds by telling them that Republicans have it in for them? They don’t have to. Republicans say it themselves.”
Catholic Church in Scotland Campaigns to Stop Gay Marriage
posted on August 30, 2012Al Webb reports for Religion News Service that Scotland’s Catholic leaders have sent letters to that country’s parishes protesting the legalization of same-sex marriage. The letter, which was read over the pulpit at some 500 churches at Mass this past Sunday, urges Catholic Scots to “sustain rather than subvert marriage” by voting to make sure marriage remains defined as a “lifelong union between a man and a woman.”
Dear Republican Catholics
posted on August 30, 2012The National Catholic Reporter‘s Michael Sean Winters pens an open letter to Catholic Republicans. “I challenge my Republican Catholic friends: Will you bring the Church’s wisdom to bear on the thinking of your party?,” writes Winters. “Will you confront this libertarian sensibility? Will you argue against the proposition, stated so clearly by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder yesterday–‘Our citizens are a customer. We’re a customer service business’–when in fact government is not a business, and it is charged with the administration of justice and the building up of the common good, both of which are not so easily understood in terms of a spreadsheet or cost/benefit analysis.”
Read at National Catholic Reporter
Republicans, Save Yourselves. Stop Talking Rape.
posted on August 29, 2012At Slate, Amanda Marcotte has some advice for male Republicans: when reporters ask about rape, “flee the scene without answering.” Marcotte recognizes that her advice might “seem a little harsh and could make you look like a coward, but it’s likely better than whatever you might let slip to the reporter.”
Cardinal Dolan to Romney, Obama: Pledge to Play Nice
posted on August 29, 2012“The deeply traditionalist Catholic Knights of Columbus want GOP contender Mitt Romney, President Obama and their running mates to all sign a civility pledge,” reports USA Today’s Cathy Lynn Grossman. And, “[h]anding out the invite: Cardinal Timothy Dolan.” Dolan, the archbishop of New York, will be offering the closing prayer at the RNC, and has made a similar offer to the organizers of the DNC.
Bachmann: ‘We’re looking at a spiritual hurricane’
posted on August 29, 2012CNN’s Dana Davidson writes, “Rep. Michele Bachmann tied religion into comments about Florida’s severe weather, saying Sunday at a prayer rally that there’s ‘a spiritual hurricane in our land.'” Davidson writes that this isn’t the first time Bachmann has equated hurricanes with acts of God. Last year she made similar remarks about Hurricane Irene, comments which a Bachmann spokesperson later equated to a “jest.”