Liberty Counsel

Always beware of the Religious Right when it’s bearing gifts, as was the case at a recent conference attended by roughly 950 pastors in Austin, Texas. Read more

If you want to start a church, all you need is your own television show. So says the Internal Revenue Service, anyway.

A recent report by National Public Radio (NPR) told the puzzling story of Daystar, a televangelist network based in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. The network, which is run by Marcus and Joni Lamb, is “dedicated to spreading the Gospel 24 hours a day, seven days a week” to its potential audience of 2 billion worldwide. Read more

You could say that the American Family Association (AFA) isn’t pleased about today’s Supreme Court rulings on marriage equality.

By a 5-4 vote, the high court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), meaning that same-sex couples who are lawfully wed in states with marriage equality will have access to a range of federal benefits. This is a pretty big deal. Read more

Texas legislators appear to have too much time on their hands. Members of the House of Representatives just passed legislation protecting everyone’s right to say “Merry Christmas.”

That’s right. It’s mid-May, and some Lone Star lawmakers are worried about Christmas and how it might be acknowledged in public schools. They’re so worried, in fact, that they’ve passed a bill guaranteeing the right to say “Merry Christmas” and display certain holiday symbols in schools. Read more

We’re just a few months removed from the 2012 elections, and the Religious Right is already hard at work trying to lure churches into partisan politics for the 2014 elections.

This week, Mat Staver’s Liberty Counsel, which is affiliated with Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University, said it is gearing up to help fundamentalists take “dominion” over the United States and make us a “Christian nation.” Read more

The broken record that is Mat Staver, founder of the Religious Right group Liberty Counsel, is at it again: Christmas is under attack. Christmas is under attack. Christmas is under attack.

You could have fooled me. I stopped in a local mall last weekend, and it sure looked to me like Christmas was in full swing. On my way there, I passed more than one church with a Nativity scene on its lawn. Based on the decorations on my block alone, which include both the secular and the sacred, you’d have a hard time not knowing it’s Christmastime. Read more

As election season heats up, we’re sure to see an increase in the number of houses of worship intervening in partisan politics by endorsing or opposing candidates.

Churches are tax-exempt nonprofits, and most pastors know this is illegal and inappropriate. But a small percentage – often prodded and provoked by Religious Right legal groups – is determined to violate federal tax law and drag partisanship into the pulpit. Read more

It might not seem much like Christmas time – with temperatures in Washington, D.C., approaching 100 degrees – but we got an early present courtesy of the Santa Monica City Council.

The California community decided recently to prohibit all unattended displays in a public park in reaction to the stir some of those displays caused in December 2011. Read more

Sometimes government entities manage to do something right and something wrong simultaneously.

The Giles County School Board voted unanimously last week to remove the Ten Commandments from a hallway display at Narrows High School in Narrows, Va., according to The Roanoke Times. Read more