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Here’s a quick quiz. Guess who wrote the following words: “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: That his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and…

The Vatican’s attempt to conceal the meeting casts Pope Francis as double-faced: publicly courting progressives on one hand, and privately supporting the Christian Right’s anti-sexual rights agenda on the other.

Some Christian Right activists have lost hope that a Christian Nation can be achieved in the United States through the formal political process—including a high-level GOP operative. They are calling for martyrs and thinking about religious war.

In many ways, The Rich and the Rest of Us is political sustenance for the already converted to liberal and leftist causes. Quoting historian Howard Zinn and looking to the insights of filmmaker Michael Moore probably will not convince many conservatives to rally to the cause—and when Smiley and West rely on Barbara Ehrenreich, they are drawing upon a fellow dissident. Put simply, they are preaching to the choir—but choirs need encouragement too. This is what Smiley and West accomplish: they provide the Occupy generation with a text to rally around.

Before the November 2012 elections, 37 states had voted on statewide ballot measures seeking to restrict marriage equality in this country. Each time, voters in these states—family members, friends, neighbors, and co-workers of LGBTQ people—approved the anti-LGBTQ position, often by large margins.

“Models of idealized family structure lie metaphorically at the heart of our politics,” writes linguist George Lakoff in his 2002 book Moral Politics. “Our beliefs about the family exert a powerful influence over our beliefs about what kind of society we should build.” Certainly, many Christian Right leaders would agree with him.

Human Rights Day was celebrated this week, on December 10.

During the election campaign in 2008 it was clear some people on the political Right were becoming agitated about the potential for a Black man backed by liberals to become the next President of the United States.

While The New Right used democratic processes to further a reactionary agenda, neoliberalism engaged in opposing democratic goals.

It is the poor and dispossessed as a class whose ethics and struggle must be centered if we are going to have a real moral revival — not the ethics of the “religious left” or of progressive Democrats.