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Who Gets Paid to Make America Hate? The Roots of the Islamophobia Network | @rdispatches

Who Gets Paid to Make America Hate? The Roots of the Islamophobia Network | Religion Dispatches. We at Religion Dispatches have been covering this religious-political industrial complex, and its overlap with other elements of the far right agenda, for some time now.  (You must read Sarah Posner’s invaluable exploration, “Welcome to the Shari’ah Conspiracy Industry”.) But Fear, Inc. gives us a still-more exhaustive insight into the Islamophobia network’s leaders, strategies, and intentions.  With good timing.  We’re coming up on an election-year, in which major questions about the United States must be answered, or at least recognized.

Why the State Shouldn’t Be Marrying People

This case in Pennsylvania helps you understand why marriage is not in the State’s interest. Marriage is a religious interest. The state only needs to recognize unions, marriage or otherwise, for legal purposes of benefits. And what is this BS about Muslims can’t have their photos taken? I’m assuming it refers to some women who do not wish to expose their faces in public, but men have no excuse. (h/t Atrios)

Prisoner Treatment, Morality, and #Torture

Juan Cole is brilliant in his analysis of how the US lost the moral high ground on prisoner treatment, in part because of our torture polices. But I fear that the argument that the public humiliation of prisoners is against international law won’t take the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney. After the evidence surfaced that the US military took all those humiliating pictures of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to blackmail them by threatening to make them public, the US assertion of support for this principle of the Geneva Conventions will be met with, well, let us say…