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RD News Round-Up—December 15, 2008: Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative after 8 years; ‘War on Christmas’ mash-up; Religious Right layoffs and cutbacks, ‘Prop. 8—The Musical,’ Prop. 8 Gear, and the first Vietnamese American elected to Congress.

Prop. 8 opponents frame the struggle in the context of the larger civil rights movement. But what if the right to marry for LGBT people is actually a question of religious freedom?

The original bad girl, the Che Guevara of sex, Billy Graham’s right-hand woman: Bettie Page was many things to many people, and the story of her life spans American culture from burlesque to Christian Missionary.

Peter Manseau’s first novel, Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, takes on themes of Jewish-Christian enmity, the trials of translation, and the idea of language as a virtual homeland.

A major newsmagazine gets theological, and infuriates conservatives. But the Newsweek story doesn’t even scratch the surface of contemporary religion scholarship on gay marriage.

The tension between an anti-death penalty activist and her conservative father, author David Horowitz, echoes the nation’s tension.

The winner of Old Spice’s “Art of Manliness” competition isn’t just any Conservative Christian—he’s a card-carrying member of the theocratic Christian Reconstructionist movement that encourages women to submit to their men and to abstain from voting. Does this war on “metrosexual pretty boys” mark the beginning of a political career for Matthew Chancey?

A young Iraqi woman, frustrated and in tears, explains to her classmates: “If Iraqi people come at you with shoes, you have lost their hearts and lost the war and God help us all.”

Newsweek actually gets religion, writes the author of the recent gay marriage issue. It’s the Christian Right culture warriors who claim that God possesses their prejudices who are mistaken.

Forget the standard litany of the best-selling books and most popular movies… This year’s list includes comics, rock bands, Battlestar Galactica, “Hava Nagila” sung to the tune of “The Twist,” and “I Am the Walrus” translated into Aramaic.