"Like all great satire, the book is cerebral, irreverent and hilarious, while also edifying" — Publisher's Weekly
"This book is hilarious... [Lanham] didn't skimp on his research. The book provides a telling overview of the religious right's leadership, the beliefs they espouse, and just how incredibly absurd and hypocritical they are." — The Campaign to Defend the Constitution
Editor's Pick: "From the author of The Hipster Handbook comes this irreverent navigation of all things Evangelical. Learn enough slang to fit in at a church picnic or why SpongeBob SquarePants is an agent of the Devil" — Chicago Sun-Times
"This guy has written quite a funny book." — Alan Colmes, Fox News
"A funny book with some funny cartoons on everyone from Rick Warren as the evangelical Jimmy Buffett to a guide for Christian haircuts that is hilarious... I was chuckling until I saw that I am the postscript" — Mark Driscoll, pastor of the largest megachurch in Washington State
"Every good little liberal will have this book on order as a stocking stuffer come Jesus' birthday." — Time Out
"A handbook for coping with bible thumpers.... When considering the power and influence evangelical Christians wield in this country, you have to laugh to keep from crying. Robert Lanham... understands this well and offers much needed, totally biased comic relief." — Village Voice
"Not only is this an important book, it's a funny book." — Marc Maron, Air America Radio
"Author Robert Lanham is an observer... but with his latest, The Sinner's Guide to the Evangelical Right, Lanham's keen eye has hit perhaps his most entertaining target." — Metro Paper
"It’s hard to remember a more pointed and scathing attack… Lanham launches a focused, sustained barrage on the Pat Robertsons and James Dobsons of the world… He’s done his homework. The book is thoroughly researched and packed with quotes and analysis of the famous and not-so-famous leaders of the evangelical right… the research is truly impressive. " — The Reader
"An utterly biased, humorous one-stop guide to the major evangelical players." — Details
"Check out Robert Lanham's (author of the fabled Hipster Handbook and former Bible Belt resident) Sinner's Guide to the Evangelical Right. It's funny because it's true." — Elizabeth Spiers, founding Editor of Gawker
"Like the Daily Show or The Colbert Report, it's humor reveals the basic truth. Which is to say that the "sinners" of the world may be closer to Jesus and the divine than those who use God's name for personal enrichment, power building, and political gain." — Buzzflash
"The book does for religion what Jon Stewart does for politics." — CanWest News Service
"Informative, laugh-out-loud funny and horrifying at times, check out this snide, leftie-geared guide to the major evangelical players... Robert Lanham has a writing style that resembles... McSweeney's, and the irony-stacked humor of TV programs such as "The Daily Show" — Style Weekly, Richmond VA
"Hilarious... go out and buy this book now." — Sam Seder, The Majority Report
"This book should lay at the lifeless feet of your corpse as a silent, yet
powerful and all encompassing explanation as to why you took your own life."
— David Cross, Arrested Development
The Supreme Court's conservative majority handed anti-abortion forces a major victory Wednesday in a decision that bans a controversial abortion procedure and set the stage for further restrictions.
For the first time since the court established a woman's right to an abortion in 1973, the justices upheld a nationwide ban on a specific abortion method, labeled partial-birth abortion by its opponents.
The 5-4 decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.
The law is constitutional despite not containing an exception that would allow the procedure if needed to preserve a woman's health, Kennedy said. "The law need not give abortion doctors unfettered choice in the course of their medical practice," he wrote in the majority opinion. READ IT ALL
Early on a a windy Saturday morning in November, Rhonda Arias drove her Dodge Caravan past a Wal-Mart at the end of her block and onto the Interstate. She was beginning the 50-mile drive from her house in southwest Houston to Plane State Jail, where she is, as she puts it, an “abortion-recovery counselor.” To Arias, that means helping women at the prison who have had abortions to understand how that procedure has stained them, and how it explains what has gone wrong in their lives. The prisoners’ abortions, she told me, “have a great deal to do with their pain.”
Arias, who is 53, often wears silver hoop earrings and low black boots, and she has a weakness for edgy zingers. She started doing post-abortion counseling 15 years ago. After what she describes as a revelation from God, she decided that her own pain and unhappiness were rooted in the abortion she had in 1973, when she was 19. “It was the year Roe v. Wade was decided, and I remember saying, ‘No guy in Washington is going to tell me what to do with my body!’ ” Arias said with a sharp laugh as we were driving. But after the procedure, she says, strange feelings washed over her. “I remember having evil thoughts, about hurting children,” she said. “It was like I’d done the worst thing I could possibly do. A piece of evil had entered me.”
In 1983, Arias became pregnant again and planned to keep the baby. But in the fourth month, she says, she became scared about raising a child alone. She called her obstetrician. He scheduled her for a second-trimester saline abortion the following morning. Arias said she woke up from the anesthesia to the certain knowledge that she had killed her child.
Because of this knowledge, she is now equally certain, she slipped into years of depression, drinking and freebasing cocaine. One night when she was in her early 30s, she got as high as she could, lay down in the dark in a bathtub filled with water and slit her wrists. In her mind, all of her troubles — the drugs, the suicide attempt, the third and fourth abortions she went on to have, the wrestling match of a marriage she eventually entered — are the aftermath of her own original sin, the 1973 abortion. It’s a pattern she sees reflected everywhere: “In America we have a big drug problem, and we don’t realize it’s because of abortion.”
In the ’90s, Arias volunteered and then was on staff at the Women’s Pregnancy Center, a Houston group that tries to persuade women to keep their pregnancies. In 2001, after being ordained as an evangelical preacher, she founded her own abortion-recovery ministry, Oil of Joy for Mourning, named after a verse from the Book of Isaiah. She now operates 10-week counseling programs at seven penitentiaries in the state, including Plane State Jail.
When Arias talks about the effects of abortion, she’s so fervent that it’s hard to maintain her gaze. But the idea that abortion is at the root of women’s psychological ills is not supported by the bulk of the research. Instead, the scientific evidence strongly shows that abortion does not increase the risk of depression, drug abuse or any other psychological problem any more than having an unwanted pregnancy or giving birth. For Arias, however, abortion is an act she can atone for. And this makes it different from the many other sources of anguish in her past. As a child, she was sexually abused by her stepbrother, she told me. An older boy forced her to have sex when she was 14; seven months later, she says, she woke in the middle of the night to wrenching cramps and gave birth to a baby girl who was placed for adoption. A year later, Arias’s father, a bricklayer to whom she was close, plummeted from several stories of scaffolding to his death. She left home and fell out of touch with her mother and two brothers.
New York's highest court ruled Thursday that social service agencies run by the Roman Catholic Church and other faiths must provide birth-control coverage to their employees, even if they consider contraception a sin...
The organizations "believe contraception to be sinful," the Court of Appeals said. "We must weigh against (their) interests in adhering to the tenets of their faith the state's substantial interest in fostering equality between the sexes, and in providing women with better health care." READ IT ALL
September 29, 2006
Another Reason To Never Attend A Pro-Life Rally
Click above to watch the video.
August 22, 2006
Preacher—Who Was Most Likely Beat Up By Girls Behind The Jungle Gym In Grade School—Defends Firing Of Woman
Pastor Tim LaBouf: Sounds awful French to us. Let him know what you think: tklabouf@msn.com
US preacher defends belief women can't teach men A U.S. Baptist preacher has publicly defended himself for firing a female Sunday School teacher after more than 50 years on the job because he believes the Bible bans women from teaching men.
Watertown First Baptist Church Pastor Tim LaBouf, also a city council member in Watertown, N.Y., said women could fulfill any role or responsibility they wanted to— outside the church.
"My belief is that the qualifications for both men and women teaching spiritual matters in a church setting end at the church door, period," LaBouf said in a statement on the church Web site (http://www.nnyinfo.com/firstbaptist).
LaBouf and the church board fired Mary Lambert, 81, earlier this month in a letter that cited the scriptural qualifications for Sunday School teachers, Lambert said.
"They quote First Timothy Two, 11-14: A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, she must be silent," Lambert said, reading from the letter.
"I was astonished," she said. "I would not go back and teach as long as this is their thinking." Watertown is 250 miles northwest of New York City.
William Carlsen, executive minister for American Baptist Churches of New York State, said U.S. Baptist Churches are autonomous and that there would not be many other Baptist Churches that share LaBouf's view.
"A considerable number if not a majority of American Baptist Churches have been quite aggressive in affirming the place of women's leadership roles within the church," Carlsen said.
The board of the Watertown First Baptist Church said in a statement on its Web site that the scripture rules concerning women teaching men in a church setting had only played a small part in Lambert's sacking.
"Christian courtesy motivates us to refrain from making any public accusations against her," the board said.
The minister of a church that dismissed a female Sunday School teacher after adopting what it called a literal interpretation of the Bible says a woman can perform any job -- outside of the church.
The First Baptist Church dismissed Mary Lambert on Aug. 9 with a letter explaining that the church had adopted an interpretation that prohibits women from teaching men. She had taught there for 54 years.
The letter quoted the first epistle to Timothy: "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent."
Former Survivor star and host of The View, Elisabeth Hasselbeck freaked the fuck out this morning discussing the morning-after pill. Evidently, taking the pill is a sin, even if your dad rapes you. Hasselbeck delivered a primetime speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention, which, of course, is the true sin. [via Gawker]
August 01, 2006
Picture Of Aborted Fetus To Be Flown Over Cleveland
What would Jesus do, you ask, if he were alive and well on Earth today? He'd rent an airplane and terrorize Cleveland with pictures of aborted fetuses. After all, it's much cheaper than feeding the homeless people down below. [From Cleveland Plain Dealer via Talk2Action]
As a shock tactic, a national group that opposes abortion plans to fly a billboard-size picture of an aborted fetus over Cleveland beginning Monday.
The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, which frequently employs such attention-grabbing advertising, hopes to jar people into reconsidering their support of abortion, director Gregg Cunningham said.
He said the banner would be the most graphic picture ever displayed from the air.
"It will be categorically the most shocking we have ever done," he said. "The imagery is so horrifying that I can't almost stand to look at it."
Federally funded "pregnancy resource centers" are incorrectly telling women that abortion results in an increased risk of breast cancer, infertility and deep psychological trauma, a minority congressional report charged yesterday.
The report said that 20 of 23 federally funded centers contacted by staff investigators requesting information about an unintended pregnancy were told false or misleading information about the potential risks of an abortion.
The pregnancy resource centers, which are often affiliated with antiabortion religious groups, have received about $30 million in federal money since 2001, according to the report, requested by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.). The report concluded that the exaggerations "may be effective in frightening pregnant teenagers and women and discouraging abortion. But it denies the teenagers and women vital health information, prevents them from making an informed decision, and is not an accepted public health practice."
A spokeswoman for one of the two large networks of pregnancy resource centers, Sterling-based Care Net, said that the report is "a routine attack on us that's nothing new."
Care Net's Molly Ford said the centers criticized by Waxman received federal grants for abstinence-only programs they conduct, but not for pregnancy counseling. "The funds are kept entirely separate," she said.
Huge Blow To Roe, Abortion Procedure Outlawed, No Exceptions To Protect The Health Of The Mother
Bill McCartney
