Rap Sheet
Links on R&P from around the web
When Hate Speech Hits Social Media
posted on June 5, 2012At The Jewish Daily Forward, Nathan Guttman reports on the differing responses Twitter and Facebook take toward hate speech on their respective websites. While Facebook “has recently won plaudits from Jewish groups … for its willingness to censor perceived anti-Semitic hate speech,” Twitter “has consistently rejected attempts to intervene with its content, citing its concern for maintaining free speech.” Guttman writes: “Twitter has made its resistance against requests to provide information to government and police investigations part of its brand,” while Facebook “has shown its willingness to address concerns of other interest groups and of governments.”
Read at The Jewish Daily Forward
Statism Means Culture War
posted on June 5, 2012The American Conservative’s Robert Murphy argues that the real cause of culture war controversies such as gay marriage originates from the government’s reach and power into citizens’ lives. He writes that “part of the reason people care so much about whether the government agrees on who can get married, is that the government exercises so much power over the rest of our lives.” Murphy advocates for small government and private contracts in order to overcome conflicts arising from government control.
Read at The American Conservative
Twitter Dynamos, Offering Word of God’s Love
posted on June 5, 2012At The New York Times, Amy O’Leary writes about evangelical Christian leaders on Twitter, “whose inspirational messages of God’s love perform about 30 times as well as Twitter messages from pop culture powerhouses like Lady Gaga.” When Twitter executives discovered the evangelical leaders’ influence on their site, they sent “senior executive, Claire Díaz-Ortiz, on a mission: to bring more religious leaders into the Twitter fold.” O’Leary reports that Díaz-Ortiz encourages religious leaders “to be less promotional and more personal in their posts,” aiming to cultivate a new user group for the website.
McGurn: Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame
posted on June 5, 2012William McGurn at The Wall Street Journal poses the question: “Does the Indiana Democrat running for the U.S. Senate support Notre Dame’s lawsuit against the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate?” Joe Donnelly, an alumnus of Notre Dame’s undergraduate and law schools, has not come out in support of the lawsuit. McGurn writes: “The contraceptive mandate has now put Mr. Donnelly in another squeeze. He claims he wants a solution that would protect religious groups. But he rejects a legislative solution and declines to say outright that he wishes Notre Dame victory in its suit.”
Read at The Wall Street Journal
Contraception? Gay Marriage? Abortion? GOP Holds Fire on Culture Wars Aims at Jobs, Economy
posted on June 5, 2012Laurie Kellman writes that Republicans would like social issues to take a backseat to the economy as the presidential election approaches. She comments: “Republicans stung by the culture wars that dominated the nation’s political discourse this year are standing down on social issues.” The reason? “There is a growing sense among Republicans that … social issues generally are losers for the party at a time when the GOP is trying to appeal to swing voters.”
After Mubarak Conviction Anger and Political Maneuvers
posted on June 4, 2012Kristen Chick reports for The Christian Science Monitor that former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the deaths of some 850 protestors, killed during the uprisings last year. Yet over the weekend, in cities across Egypt, large numbers of protesters took to the streets, angered that Mubarak and his sons were acquitted on corruption charges, and that several security officials were acquitted on charges that they participated in the mass killings. “The shoddy case prepared by the prosecutors highlights the lack of institutional change after the uprising in Egypt, where the president fell but his regime remained intact,” Chick writes.
Read at The Christian Science Monitor
Is Mitt Romney’s Mormonism Fair Game?
posted on June 4, 2012Jason Horowitz, The Washington Post reporter who has broken some of the most controversial stories about Romney and Mormonism this election cycle, explains how the Romney campaign has come to “determine whether coverage of the candidate’s Mormonism has crossed a line.” Horowitz writes that Romney spokespeople have developed a “test” to determine if journalists would have written a similar story about another candidate’s religion: they substitute “Jew” or “Jewish” every time a story identifies Mitt Romney as a “Mormon” or refers to the candidate’s “Mormonism.” According to Horowitz, “the campaign’s response gets at a crucial challenge for the news media: to educate the public about an unfamiliar faith unusually central to a candidate’s formation without treating Mormonism as biographical exotica that could fuel prejudices.”
One Last Journey into the Night
posted on June 4, 2012The Boston Globe’s David Filipov travels to Auschwitz-Birknenau with Israel “Izzy” Arbeiter. Arbeiter barely survived the Nazi concentration camps, but his parents did not. The 87-year-old Arbeiter says that he made this return trip to Poland and Germany “to make my peace with what happened.” Filipov writes that Arbeiter “encounters kindness and good will, and a sincere effort among Poles and Germans to atone for the sins of the past. But peace, no. Peace eludes him at every turn.”
Crowd Cheers Mormons in Utah Gay Pride Parade
posted on June 4, 2012The Salt Lake Tribune reports that this past Sunday, hundreds of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) marched in Utah’s annual gay pride parade through downtown Salt Lake City. The parade’s grand marshall and Big Love screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, who grew up Mormon, tweeted that such the public support from such a large number of “straight, active Mormons” left him “in tears.”
Untangling a Rape Case in Crown Heights
posted on June 4, 2012The New York Times’ Alan Feuer and Colin Moynihan profile the ongoing racial and religious tension in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, where black and Orthodox Jewish residents live in an uneasy peace, often broken by periods of violent unrest. At the center of the community’s latest controversy is a rape case. “On one side is the [Jewish] girl,” writes Feuer and Moynihan, “who is now a woman of 22 and says that for the better part of a decade, a group of local thugs forced her into prostitution, ensuring her submissiveness with a steady diet of beatings, threats and rapes. On the other side are the accused—four older black men—who deny the woman’s charges and contend that she herself was a kind of predator: a troubled teenager who crossed Crown Heights’s racial divide with an appetite for sex.”