Rap Sheet
Links on R&P from around the web
With or without Romney, D.C. a Surprising Mormon Stronghold
posted on May 14, 2012CNN.com’s Religion Editor Dan Gilgoff documents the Mormon community of Washington, D.C., writing, “The nation’s capital has become a Mormon stronghold, with Latter-day Saints playing a big and growing role in the Washington establishment.” There are “13,000 active members within a 10-mile radius of Washington, though the area’s Mormon temple serves … 148,000 Latter-day Saints” from up and down the East Coast.
Mitt Romney’s Pitch to the True Believers
posted on May 14, 2012At Buzzfeed, McKay Coppins reports on Mitt Romney’s commencement speech at Liberty University on Saturday. “Mitt Romney did his best to speak the language of the true believers,” Coppins writes. ‘It’s a dialect in which he’s conversational, if not fluent.” Of Romney, he notes: “In less than 20 minutes, he managed to name-check more than a half-dozen key Christian figures, including C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Chuck Colson, Billy Graham, and, of course, Jerry Falwell.”
What Should Never Be For Sale
posted on May 14, 2012In City Journal, Nicole Gelinas reviews Michael Sandel’s new book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, which “examines where markets and morals conflict.” Gelinas writes: “For the most part, Sandel convincingly argues that employing markets where morals or other considerations should reign can sometimes corrode behavior rather than correct it.”
Black Churches Conflicted on Obama’s Gay Marriage Decision
posted on May 14, 2012In USA Today, Dennis Cauchon reviews how Black church ministers around the country spent Sunday reacting to Obama’s support for same-sex marriage, noting “the result was conflicted.” He closed the article with a quote from Keith Ogden, a Baptist pastor in Asheville, N.C.: “I support my president and love my president, but I think he is wrong.”
The Myth About Marriage
posted on May 14, 2012In the blog of The New York Review of Books, Garry Wills asks, “Why do some people who would recognize gay civil unions oppose gay marriage?” He continues, “Certain religious groups want to deny gays the sacredness of what they take to be a sacrament. But marriage is no sacrament.” He goes on to document the lack of “sacramental” history of marriage in the Bible.
Read at The New York Review of Books
White House Reportedly Reached out to LGBT and Religious Leaders around Obama’s ABC Interview
posted on May 11, 2012At The Huffington Post, Amanda Terkel reports that “Obama’s decision to announce his support for marriage equality on Wednesday was a tightly kept secret, even within the White House. He consulted with a very small group of advisers—just six or seven people.” But once the interview aired, Terkel reports Valerie Jarrett called leaders at the Human Rights Campaign and Obama personally called the Rev. Joel Hunter, one of his spiritual advisors, who pastors a church in Florida. (NB: Joel Hunter is a National Advisory Board member of the Danforth Center on Religion & Politics, the home of this journal.)
U.S. House Chaplain Talks about Conflict and his Unusual Congregation
posted on May 11, 2012The Oregonian conducts a Q&A with Father Patrick Conroy, chaplain to the U.S. House of Representatives. When asked if the House was “the most reviled congregation in the country,” as The New York Times put it, he answered: “Well, I was a chaplain at San Quentin (prison, California), too—and I’m not making a comparison there.”
NARAL President Nancy Keenan to Step Down
posted on May 11, 2012In an exclusive interview, The Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff reports that NARAL President Nancy Keenan plans to step down. Keenan tells Kliff: “There’s an opportunity for a new and younger leader. Roe v. Wade is 40 in January. It’s time for a new leader to come in and, basically, be the person for the next 40 years of protecting reproductive choice.”
Meet the Lonely House Republican Defending Planned Parenthood
posted on May 11, 2012At GQ, Marin Cogan covers the press conference of Rep. Robert Dold, a freshman Republican from the suburbs of Chicago. On Wednesday, Dold introduced a bill meant “to prevent members of his own party from stripping federal funding for Planned Parenthood.” He told Cogan, “I think we need to put people before politics and progress before partisanship.”
Poverty’s Poster Child
posted on May 11, 2012In his May 9 column, The New York Times’ Nicholas D. Kristof documents poverty on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He writes: “As many as two-thirds of adults may be alcoholics, one-quarter of children are born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, and the life expectancy is somewhere around the high 40s … Less than 10 percent of children graduate from high school.” The high rate of alcoholism led to Kristof’s previous column, in which he criticized Anheuser-Busch for supplying alcohol to the reservation.