The news this week that Justice Anthony Kennedy, above, is retiring from the US Supreme Court is ‘an ominous development for our civil liberties’, according to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which said Trump’s list of replacements ‘includes the worst of the worst’. In an article yesterday headed “We’re in big trouble with Kennedy’s Supreme […]
We in the US lurched some big steps closer to full-on authoritarianism and even fascism this week (as we do most weeks). Am I sure we’ll end up there? No, but nor am I confident we won’t. We’re terrifyingly helpless to do anything about the relentless lurches. The nightmare of the children grabbed away from […]
Back in May, I penned a column for the weekly Spanish newspaper, Round Town News about the the increasing involvement of evangelicals in Trump’s administration (click here to read it). This deeply upset Alan Roberton, resident minister at the English Church in Benidorm (click on image below): My reply, due to appear in RTN next […]
Canada has just voted to legalise the use of cannabis. In the UK, Theresa May’s useless team of ditherers is currently tying itself in knots over the issue. And in godly Oklahoma some church leaders are urging their flock not to vote to legalise cannabis when a ballot takes place on June 26. Said the […]
Pastor Robert Jeffress, one of Trump’s many crackpot advisers, is not a happy chappie because two billboards erected by his church in Dallas, Texas, have taken down for being ‘anger provoking’. And there was anger, to be sure. According to this report, the day after the billboards went up, the Dallas Morning News published two articles characterising […]
US evangelist Franklin Graham hit out at Robert De Niro this week after the Hollywood actor said ‘Fuck Trump’ at the Tony Awards – and got a standing ovation for doing so. As it was live TV on a delay his speech had to be bleeped. Reacting, Graham used Facebook to criticise De Niro for […]
James Kelly, above, a Labour member of the Scottish parliament, has accused the government of ‘treating the Catholic community with complete contempt’ because a working group set up to define sectarianism contained no representatives of the Catholic Church or Irish community. According to this report, during a debate last week, Kelly said: I welcome the setting […]
Ever since he took office, Donald Trump has been feverishly working alongside evangelical Christians to remake America in their own image: an idiocracy. Fortunately, America still has writers who have the courage to stand up to this trend: writers like Lauren Ritchie whose op-ed in yesterday’s Orlando Sentinel excoriated Florida schools that teach “fake science […]
Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin, above, has angrily reacted to reports that Austria’s right-wing government plans to shut down seven mosques and expel up to 40 imams. Kalin said the move was the result of an “Islamophobic, racist and discriminatory wave” in Austria and was an attempt to target Muslim communities for political gains. He […]
Two lawyers involved in a High Court challenge to Northern Ireland’s abortion law predict that the law could change soon because the court today found that the law is in breach of human rights: it is ‘untenable’, ‘disproportionate’, and needs ‘radical reconsideration’. Mary-Rachel McCabe of Doughty Street Chambers and Janet Farrell of Bhatt Murphy Solicitors, […]