Yes, the decision by the Boy Scouts to open its doors to gay boys but not to gay men is an awkward compromise, but social progress often proceeds by awkward compromise. The fact is that it is now officially possible to be both openly gay and, in Scouting lingo, “morally…straight.” And that’s what’s got conservative religious leaders’ knickers in a twist.
It’s an established fact that religion makes people happy. Or that happiness makes people religious. Or anyway, that religion and happiness go hand in hand.
Even as Newark molester-priest Michael Fugee was being arrested and arraigned on charges of criminally violating a court order barring him from ministering to minors, his superiors in the archdiocese were once again changing their story.
There were no churches among the religious organizations apparently targeted for heightened scrutiny by the IRS. Want to know why?
Michael Dukakis is as sharp a policy wonk as ever — and as uninterested in culture war politics.
Newark Archbishop John J. Myers got back from his trip to Poland this week and, according to his spokesman, will shortly make his first public statement on the latest revelations about Michael Fugee, the molester-priest who, in contravention of a court order, was permitted to minister to minors at two New Jersey parishes.
Phil Lawler, the redoubtable conservative Catholic commentator, has come to the conclusion that Pope Francis is a simple pastor.
Today is Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks — one of the three big holidays, hagim, when Jews journeyed to Jerusalem to make a sacrifice at the Temple. It was in the first instance an agricultural festival, marked out by biblical injunction as 50 days from the barley harvest at Passover to the wheat harvest.
In St. Paul yesterday, a vote in the State Senate assured that Minnesota will become the 12th state in the Union to legalize same-sex marriage. As has happened in other states where SSM has been approved by legislative action, virtually all the Democrats voted in the affirmative, all the Republican in the negative.
It is not surprising that Cardinal Sean O’Malley should decide to skip this year’s commencement at Boston College, at which the archbishop of Boston customarily gives the benediction.
