Jimmy Carter leaves his church

[Buster's Uncle]

The crux, as I understand, is Paul's assertion that a Deacon should be "a man of one wife" (which has also been interpreted to mean un-divorced, without, I think, accuracy).

Sorry, I'm not following you; what do bans on polygamy have to do with the role of women in the Church?

(thanks for the item, BTW  )

I was mostly interested in ThunderCats and Voltron during the Reagan era, so I never really understood how the whole Religious Right phenomenon took off.  I read that Roe v. Wade was the initial impetus for the whole thing, but however much damage it's done to the American political process, I'm sure it's done worse to American Christianity.  Now we've got this gross militarism/Ayn Rand/Christianity hybrid standing in as the default American Christian identity; I think recent court rulings are going to cause a surprisingly abrupt volte-face on at least part of that, but the damage is done.

I was mostly interested in ThunderCats and Voltron during the Reagan era, so I never really understood how the whole Religious Right phenomenon took off.  I read that Roe v. Wade was the initial impetus for the whole thing, but however much damage it's done to the American political process, I'm sure it's done worse to American Christianity. 

Hmm. There's always a dead zone. That time period between where you usually ended the year in the history books, and the time when you remember events as they happened.

Roe v. Wade was important, but it took time . Meanwhile, you had the civil rights movement. After the blacks got recognition, the Democrats wanted to extend that to women with the Equal Rights Amendment, and to gays as well.

Well, that didn't square with the bible a lot of people were reading. They thought they were being pushed too far, too fast, and they pushed back. Televangelists like Jerry Fallwell, noted gay-basher, supported Reagan.

A lot of Catholic Kennedy Democrats decided that Reagan had the same views as them- anti-communist, anti-gay, anti- abortion, and that the Democrats had left them in the years between 1960 and 1980.

[ninja'd, but very much along the same lines]

I'm old enough to have become faintly politically aware during the 76 campaign, and to have gotten what a easy-answers-to-complex questions bill of goods Reagan was.  Unfortunately, your protestants coming out of the vulgar 70s were looking for easy answers; like with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, people want to believe, and Reagan profited (Obama has the same quality much more so -that many imagine lots about him- but it's ended up hurting him more than helping.)

The 60s and 70s were liberal, Carter stubbornly wouldn't take the easy/unwise way out of things, and a conservative swing of the pendulum was due -and thus the last time there was a real democrat living in the White House, it was Dr. Carter- and thus, Reagan and a world and decades of badmouthing the excesses of the left, real and imagined.

I'm too old for Thundercats, but do a mean Skeletor impression people your age LOOVVVVE anyway...

[Buster's Uncle]

The crux, as I understand, is Paul's assertion that a Deacon should be "a man of one wife" (which has also been interpreted to mean un-divorced, without, I think, accuracy).

Sorry, I'm not following you; what do bans on polygamy have to do with the role of women in the Church?

I see I never answered this part.  Elok, read what I said again; "a man".  I believe they seriously pick out those two words as not generic.  [shrugs]  There's a lot of misogynism crap in Paul; he may have actually meant it that way.