Fortunately, the actual parties to this lawsuit were not nearly as unreasonable as Mr. Gingrich, and they eventually agreed to settle the case after mediation. In his order approving the settlement, Biery includes an unusual “personal statement” directed at the many lawmakers who, like Gingrich, have painted him as some kind of enemy of religion:

To the United States Marshal Service and local police who have provided heightened security: Thank you.

To those Christians who have venomously and vomitously cursed the Court family and threatened bodily harm and assassination: In His name, I forgive you.

To those who have prayed for my death: Your prayers will someday be answered, as inevitably trumps probability.

To those in the executive and legislative branches of government who have demagogued this case for their own political goals: You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Biery also includes a clever dig and the many Christian right groups that have attacked him: “Any American can pray, silently or verbally, seven days a week, twenty four hours a day, in private as Jesus taught or in large public events as Mohammed instructed.”

Ready for the bighouse

Rich Land of the Southern Baptist Convention hit the two poles of overly emphatic rhetoric in one breath, first invoking the Holocaust by reciting Martin Niemöller famous poem “First they came…,” before comparing himself to Martin Luther King Jr. by saying he was ready to “follow in the footsteps” of the civil rights giant by dispatching letters from jail, if need be.

Hannity responded by asking the baker’s dozen religious leader, “how many of you would be willing to go to jail over this?” — all but three or four raised their hands.

But Father Jonathan Morris, a Fox News contributor and Catholic priest in New York City, one upped Land, saying he was ready to put his life on the line. “It’s very clear, people have died for those things that are absolutely essential for their faith. It’s not a question of are you willing to go to jail, it’s if I’m asked to do something that goes against my conscious, I’d better be willing to die for that.” He continued, “If I’m not willing to die for that, what am I standing up for?” Watch it:

Conservative commentator Michele Malkin also reached for the Holocaust invocation on this issue, and pastor Rick Warren, who spoke at Obama’s inauguration said he would be willing to go to jail.

But this is a silly offer of self-sacrifice, as there is no actual threat of jail time. While the final regulations have yet to be written, the penalty will be financial — not criminal — and regulated by the IRS, likely about $1,000 per violation, according to an expect contacted by ThinkProgress. As Andrew Sullivan notes, by their, Rick Warren should already be in jail, as he’s a resident of California, which has a stricter contraception mandate than the new federal one.

Marcia Walden

This week, the 11th Circuit ruled against Marcia Walden, a counselor for the Center for Disease Control’s Employee Assistance Program in Atlanta. The CDC had laid her off after a lesbian client complained that Walden’s need to refer her to another counselor for religious reasons made her feel “judged and condemned.” Walden sued, arguing that she was removed for her job in violation of her First Amendment religious freedom.

In the decision, the Court ruled that Walden was rightly fired — not for her religious beliefs, but for the way she insisted on imposing them on the gay clients they impacted:

We accept that Ms. Walden’s sincerely held religious beliefs prohibit her from encouraging or supporting same-sex relationships through counseling… Instead, the record is clear that Dr. Chosewood and Ms. Zerbe removed Ms. Walden because of the manner in which she handled Ms. Doe’s referral, and because they were concerned that she would behave the same way if a similar situation were to arise in the future.  And, significantly, Ms. Walden testified that it was not part of her “religious beliefs” to tell clients, including Ms. Doe, that she could not counsel them due to her religious beliefs or personal values.  Instead, she said she wanted “to be honest with my clients.” [...]

Ms. Walden contends she did not, in fact, insist upon voicing her objections to same-sex relationships in connection with future referrals.  Instead, she merely refused to state that she did not have experience in relationship counseling whenreferring clients.  But she also did not volunteer an alternative approach to future referrals.

Given how heated the rhetoric around so-called “religious liberty” has become, this decision is important to highlight, as it distinguishes between what a person believes and how a person acts upon those beliefs. Similar to the recent case when the 11th Circuit ruled against an Augusta State University counseling student who was expelled for violating professional ethics when it came to gay clients, Walden’s compulsion to inform patients that she does not approve of their lifestyles oversteps her religious rights. As the decision points out, Walden’s actions made an already vulnerable client “feel worse.”

Individuals have a right to believe and practice whatever religion they choose, but that does not entitle them to compromise the integrity of their work or the rights of others.

But this so-called “contraception rider” modification is already not sitting well with Catholics, who have been the most vocal opponents of the administration’s rule. “The concept…is you don’t have to do this, you just have to refer people to this. That seems to me like saying in your schools, ‘we’re not going to have pornographic websites in our websites, but we’re going to have to have referrals to where the kids can go to find those websites,” Cardinal Donald Wuerl told MSNBC’s Morning Joe just minutes after news of the compromise broke early Friday morning. “I don’t think it makes sense,” he said and went on to dismiss the fact that some women receive birth control prescriptions to treat health ailments, like ovarian cancer, that have nothing to do with pregnancy:

WUERL: Our concern is our basic freedom and I’m not sure it makes sense to say how about if we compromise away parts of your freedom? How about if this part is acceptable to us and this part isn’t? I would want to see exactly what we’re being offered. [...]

SAM STEIN (HUFFFINGTON POST): What would you tell someone like that who actually requires birth control for her own health?

WUERL: The question of access is very different from the question of freedom. Access to contraceptives, access to sterilization, access even to abortifations is a reality today. You can purchase these things. you can get these things. I’m told it’s not quite as expensive to go in and buy contraceptives….but to say that because we want access you must lose your freedom… the question is freedom.

Watch a compilation:

Bishop William Lori, chair of the U.S. bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, has also described the Hawaii model as a failure, arguing that it forces Catholic institutions to make a referral “to a service that it regards as intrinsically immoral.”

“There has been a lot of talk in the last couple days about compromise, but it sounds to us like a way to turn down the heat, to placate people without doing anything in particular,” Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said in USA Today. “We’re not going to do anything until this is fixed,” and suggested that that would require removing the provision from the health care law altogether.

Republicans are also skeptical of the yet-to-be announced accommodation. As Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) tweeted out this morning, “Unless Pres Obama is reversing the #HHSmandate entirely, there’s no “compromise” when it comes to Americans’ religious freedom.”

The Cornwall Alliance calls environmentalism "one of the greatest threats to society."

A conservative religious organization with ties to the oil industry is lashing out at health-conscious evangelical leaders for supporting new federal rules on mercury.  They assert that protection of the unborn from toxic pollution cannot be called pro-life because the term does not mean “quality of life.”

The Cornwall Alliance is a group of conservative evangelicals devoted to spreading disinformation about climate change through its mission of  “free-market environmental stewardship.” In its Declaration on Global Warming, the organization says “we deny that carbon dioxide … is a pollutant” and that “we deny that alternative, renewable fuels can … replace fossil and nuclear fuels.”

Think Progress conducted a lengthy investigation of this pollution-pushing evangelical group in 2010.

Responding to a new video and radio ad campaign from the Evangelical Environment Network that encourages lawmakers to support new mercury standards in order to “protect the unborn,” the Cornwall Alliance issued a statement explaining its view that being pro-life does not denote “quality of life.”

The term pro-life originated historically in the struggle to end abortion on demand and continues to be used in public discourse overwhelmingly in that sense. To ignore that is at best sloppy communication and at worst intentional deception. The life in pro-life denotes not quality of life but life itself. The term denotes opposition to a procedure that intentionally results in dead babies. (Bold not our emphasis.)

This doesn’t mean we should ignore environmental risks. It does mean they should not be portrayed as pro-life. Genuinely pro-life people will usually desire to reduce other risks as well—guided by cost/benefit analysis. But to call those issues “pro-life” is to obscure the meaning of the term.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the new mercury rules will prevent 11,000 premature deaths and 130,000 asthma attacks each year. And the impact of high levels of mercury in unborn children are well documented:

For fetuses, infants, and children, the primary health effect of methylmercury is impaired neurological development. Impacts on cognitive thinking, memory, attention, language, and fine motor and visual spatial skills have been seen in children exposed to methylmercury in the womb.

Outbreaks of methylmercury poisonings have made it clear that adults, children, and developing fetuses are at risk from ingestion exposure to methylmercury. During these poisoning outbreaks some mothers with no symptoms of nervous system damage gave birth to infants with severe disabilities, it became clear that the developing nervous system of the fetus may be more vulnerable to methylmercury than is the adult nervous system.

A growing number of religious leaders — including the U.S. Conference of Bishops — has come out in favor of reducing mercury emissions because of their impact on the health of children.

“A new national standard to reduce mercury and toxic air pollution from power plants is an important step forward to protect the health of all people, especially unborn babies and young children, from harmful exposure to dangerous air pollutants,” said the U.S. bishops’ domestic policy chairman in response to the proposed rules on mercury emissions.

In stark contrast to mainstream religious leaders, the fringe Cornwall Alliance has called the environmental movement “one of the greatest threats to society and the church today.”

Perhaps they are referring to the leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI? Dubbed the “Green Pope,” Pope Benedict has been a vocal supporter of strong environmental standards, renewable energy, and action on climate change in order to protect “the whole of creation.”

Watch the video ad campaign from the Evangelical Environment Network below:

This isn’t just wrong and contrary to Supreme Court precedent, it is disastrously wrong. In this case, Santorum, Romney and Boehner all believe that conservative Catholic bishops should be able immunize themselves from a contraception regulation, but the truth is that there is no limit on these three men’s misreading of the Constitution. Indeed, as superlawyer David Boies explained on MSNBC last night, if one employer can immunize themselves from one law simply by claiming that it violates their religion, then any employer can use this tactic to immunize themselves from any law. Boies cites the minimum wage, safe working conditions, workman’s compensation, age discrimination laws & taxes as examples of laws that employers could ignore simply by claiming they object to them. Watch it:

Santorum, Romney and their co-ideologues like to claim they are defending “religious liberty,” but the truth is that they are really fighting against the rule of law. It cannot be the case that employers can treat their workers however they choose simply because they object to the law requiring them to behave otherwise.

This president is attacking religion, and is putting in place a secular agenda that our forefounders would not recognize. He, uh, he took a position which I thought was interesting which is he said, instead of a church being able to say who their ministers are, the government has to approve who you say your ministers are. He made that decision, and by the way, the church involved went to the Supreme Court, ultimately, to see if they could reverse that decision by the Obama Administration . . . did you know that the Supreme Court voted 9-0 against the president to retain religious liberty.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Romney really shouldn’t ape Santorum’s inability to get his facts straight. For starters, the Obama Administration did not even come close to saying that the government has to approve church ministers. Rather, as conservative Chief Justice John Roberts explained in the unanimous opinion Romney refers to, the Obama Administration’s position is that “it would violate the First Amendment for courts to apply [anti-discrimination] laws to compel the ordination of women by the Catholic Church or by an Orthodox Jewish seminary.”

Nor is it true that this Supreme Court decision ended some nefarious Obama plot to impose unwanted clergy upon churches. The case that Romney refers to, Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, dealt with a school teacher who spent most of her time teaching secular subjects, but who also spent some time providing religious education at a religious school. The school claimed this teacher was actually a minister — and thus unprotected from the federal law that makes it illegal to fire her because she has a disability — while the teacher (and the Obama Administration) believed that she should not be treated the same way as Catholic priests or Orthodox rabbis because the overwhelming majority of her job duties were secular. Ultimately, a federal appeals court agreed with the teacher, and the Supreme Court agreed with the school.

No one in this saga ever claimed that the government can pick and choose a church’s ministers. Rather, the most important issue in the case was a very narrow factual dispute over what a single woman’s job was. But, of course, for Romney to realize this, he would actually have to spend some time learning basic facts before opening his mouth. And he has much more important things to do, like finding ways to copy Santorum’s successful strategy of telling falsehoods to GOP primary voters.

SANTORUM: They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is the government that gives you right, what’s left are no unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we do and follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.

Watch it:

In a reflection of the Jewish community’s ongoing commitment to caring for the planet, 50 Jewish leaders from across denominations signed the Jewish Energy Covenant Campaign to protect the environment in a ceremony in Manhattan on February 6, on the eve of Tu Bishvat, the Jewish festival of trees. The campaign’s declaration, titled the “Jewish Environment and Energy Imperative,” reads:

Out of concern for the wellbeing of all nations, and with a particular concern for the poorest among them as well as for future generations, our support for more sources of clean, renewable energy and for energy efficiency is a matter of justice. Enlightened stewardship is not only a religious and moral imperative; it is a strategy for security and survival.

The Covenant Campaign sets a bold vision for the Jewish environmental community. To support their commitment to cutting greenhouse-gas pollution by 14 percent in 2014, signatories pledge to support clean-technology innovation, encourage investment in Jewish environmental organizations, conduct energy audits, promote sustainability in their own communities, and advocate for the reduction by 83 percent of 2005 emission levels by 2050.

Led by the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, or COEJL, a network of nearly 30 national organizations and over 100 community groups, the campaign has brought together leaders from the Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist movements in a unified effort to protect the environment.

“There’s a growing ecological consciousness in the Jewish community—a lot of concern about global warming, our energy policy, and energy security,” says Sybil Sanchez, COEJL’s director.

The declaration came on the eve of Tu Bishvat (or Tu B’Shevat), the Jewish festival of trees. The holiday, this year falling on February 7 and 8, traditionally involves a celebration of fruit trees and the coming of spring. Many communities observe the day by planting trees.

Over the years, environmental groups have elevated Tu Bishvat to something of a Jewish Earth Day, moving beyond planting trees to actions and advocacy that support the environment as a whole.

“Recently people are talking more and more not only about trees but about nature and the environment in connection with Tu Bishvat,” says Evonne Marzouk, founder of Canfei Nesharim, an Orthodox environmental-education organization. “‘What does it mean to appreciate trees today?’ The Jewish environmental community has both caused and responded to that.”

Though Tu Bishvat is the most overtly “green” festival, most Jewish holy days have an ecological undercurrent. “Each holiday is tied to the seasons; but [with Tu Bishvat] you can’t get more environmentally connected than trees and the land,” says Sanchez.

Tu Bishvat seders, or feasts, use symbols, through various fruits and wines, to represent the planet’s complex system that requires careful stewardship to maintain ecological balance and support life. A verse spoken at seders reads:

Look at My works! See how beautiful they are, how excellent! See to it that you do not spoil and destroy My world, for if you do, there will be no one after you to repair it. (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:13)

Jewish environmental groups are redoubling efforts to put this charge into action as addressing climate change and carbon emissions becomes more urgent. Tu Bishvat, the springtime holiday, is seen as a symbolic season of renewal. This week Jewish leaders in New York and around the country called for renewal of the planet as well as the soul.

On May 8, 2008 — upon suspending his first campaign for the White House — Romney received the Fund’s prestigious Canterbury Medal for “Courage in the Defense of Religious Liberty” and delivered a speech titled, “Freedom Requires Religion.” He began his talk by joking about his Mormon faith and questioning his own religious convictions:

ROMNEY: I can tell you, I’m not an enormously religious person. I try to be a religious person and I’m a lot more religious by virtue of having married her, she keeps me on the straight and narrow. And any reward I get in regards to religious liberty is associated of her having taught me the power of faith in my life and the lives of my sons and daughters and law and grandchildren. [...]

Mormonism says you can’t drink, you can’t smoke, you can’t have coffee and you can’t have sex outside of marriage and they tell us that that gives us a longer life. I don’t believe it. It just makes it feel like it’s a longer life.

Watch it:

The clip reveals the depths of Romney’s connection to the Fund — to which he subsequently donated at least $25,000 — its efforts to defend those who wish to discriminate against gays and lesbians and the questionable foundations that continue to fund it.

But his comments about his faith undermine his biographical details. Romney, after all, presents himself as a religious man who spent part of his youth in France as a missionary and served as a Mormon stake president for eight years. Since entering public life, Romney has stated that he still believes in and lives by Mormon doctrine. His wife Ann, meanwhile, was converted into Mormonism by George Romney.

Women’s advocacy groups have enthusiastically backed the new requirement and Planned Parenthood has unveiled a new ad campaign touting the rule. The commercial, which will air in Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin, praises President Obama and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for standing up to pressure from religious groups to widen the conscience protection and notes that doing so would have deprived hundreds of thousands of women working for religiously-affiliated groups of birth control. Watch the ad:

Religiously-affiliated employers who do not qualify for the exemption and are not currently offering contraceptive coverage may apply for transitional relief for a one-year period to give them time to determine how to comply with the rule, the Obama administration decided. Twenty-eight states already require employers, including most religiously affiliated institutions, to cover contraception in their health plans. The only change is that now they must cover the full cost. In fact, the administration will be expanding conscience protections in eight states, where all religious institutions are required to offer birth control coverage.

Romney’s meme may play well in front of conservative audiences, but it has no grounding in actual policy and is a complete misrepresentation of the regulation and conscience protection laws around the country. Below are five reasons why Romney is wrong:

1) Religious liberty is protected in the regulation: “The Departments seek to provide for a religious accommodation that respects the unique relationship between a house of worship and its employees in ministerial positions,” the interim regulations says. As a result, houses of worship and other religious nonprofits that primarily employ and serve people of the same faith will be exempt and religiously-affiliated employers who do not qualify for the exemption and are not currently offering contraceptive coverage may apply for transitional relief for a one-year period to give them time to determine how to comply with the rule.

2) The regulation expands conscience protections in 8 states: Twenty-eight states already require employers, including most religiously affiliated institutions, to cover contraception in their health plans. The only change is that now they must cover the full cost. In fact, the administration will be expanding conscience protections in eight states, where all religious institutions are required to offer birth control coverage.

3) The regulation does not cover abortions: No matter how much Republicans are hoping to conflate contraception with abortion, Plan B is not an abortifacient. It works in exactly the same way as regular birth control pills.

4) Greater access to contraception reduces unwanted pregnancies and abortions: An overwhelming majority of Americans — virtually all women (more than 99 percent and 98 percent of Catholics) — rely on contraceptives to prevent unintended pregnancies and the regulation protects the religious liberty of women who use birth control for reasons of private conscience. One study has estimated that birth control provided at publicly funded clinics helped prevent almost two million unintended pregnancies and that number will only grow as a result of the new rules.

5) Courts have upheld contraception coverage rules: Courts have upheld challenges to coverage laws, finding that a neutral, generally applicable law not targeted at religion does not burden the right to free exercise of religion. In fact, there is the possibility that a broader exemption would violate the law and allow religious institutions to pick and choose which regulations to follow. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has found that the exclusion of prescription contraception from an employer-sponsored health plan constitutes sex discrimination because it only burdens women.

Some conservatives may also see Romney’s effort to “defend” religious protections as a departure from his policies as governor of Massachusetts. In 2005, Romney vetoed a “widely supported bill” making the morning-after pill available over the counter and requiring hospitals to offer emergency contraception to rape victims. But after the legislature overrode his veto, he asked his Department of Health and Human Services to require Catholic hospitals to provide emergency contraception medication to rape victims.” “My personal view in my heart of hearts is that people who are subject to rape should have the option of having emergency contraceptives or emergency contraceptive information,” he told the Boston Herald.

Since announcing his candidacy for President, however, Romney has said that he would support broader federal conscience protections for health care workers and pledged to eliminate the Title X program which provides “reproductive health services like birth control” to millions of women.

Part of what’s fresh about The Surrogate is the movie’s efforts to actually get us inside Mark’s head for the minor irritations as well as the traumas. “Scratch with your mind,” he tells himself during a long night in his iron lung. “Scratch with your mind.” When his iron lung is disabled during a blackout and he drops the stick he needs to call for help, his reaction is muted and practical, rather than panicked, even though he lands in the hospital. When he meets Susan (Deadwood coworker Robin Weigert), who is working as a volunteer in the hospital, she asks him, “Are you religious?” “Yes,” he tells her, with humor rather than bitterness. “I would find it absolutely intolerable not to be able to blame someone for all of this.” Mark’s disability has neither canonized him or crushed him.

When it comes to sex, the movie is quietly resolute on the question of whether people with disabilities can have fulfilling sexual lives or can be sexually desirable. Mark decides to see a sex therapist and then a sex surrogate when his reporting for another piece introduces him to Carmen, a woman in a wheelchair who tells him how good her sex life is (in somewhat hilarious detail). He gets a sign-off from Father Brendan, the new priest at his Catholic church, explaining “this isn’t exactly a confession. I haven’t done the deed. I’m hoping to get a quote in advance.” Once the process is underway, The Surrogate has respect for Mark’s stress, good intentions, and utter lack of experience—even in scenes where he’s experiencing premature ejaculation or behaving awkwardly with Cheryl (Helen Hunt), the surrogate he agrees to work with. Good sex, the movie argues, is a matter of practice for everyone, whether they’re able-bodied or not. When Mark’s caregiver Vera explains to the clerk at the hotel where Mark and Cheryl that the two are working on simultaneous orgasms, the clerk, who has full use of all of his limbs if somewhat attenuated social skills, has no idea what she’s talking about.

There’s no question that The Surrogate follows some predictable arcs. But it’s an illustration of the fact that those dramatic forms can still be powerful if they’re used to frame different kinds of stories about different kinds of people. And with its careful attention to what actually constitutes good lovemaking, The Surrogate is a rebuke to in-heat movie love scenes everywhere. Actually talking about sex is, it seems, still a radical act.

DOCUMENTARIES

Under African Skies: It says a lot about how wonderful I thought the music-making part of this story about Paul Simon’s Graceland, and his return to South Africa decades later, that I’m willing to forgive its less-than-stellar work on the cultural boycott of South Africa. It’s a debate about the responsibility artists owe politics that’s too heavily weighted in one direction. But the video footage of the recording sessions is amazing, as are the interviews with South African musicians about everything from what it was like to have this strange Paul Simon dude show up and want to work with them to what it was like to be able to go to Central Park without a pass.

The Invisible War: There’s nothing particularly stylistically innovative about Kirby Dick’s documentary about the epidemic of rape in the U.S. military. But the movie falls with the force of a sledgehammer, exposing as ineffective and dishonest the brass in the armed forces responsible for keeping women and men safe, and making it clear that an epidemic of sexual assault is hurting both men and women, and driving out of the armed forces exactly the people the Pentagon should most want to keep there.

The Atomic States of America: Based on Kelly McMaster’s memoir of growing up in a town on Long Island polluted by atomic runoff, the movie is the story of an agency captured by powerful interests and backed up by powerful presumptions of authority, and the ordinary citizens who have fought back against the industry they believe is poisoning their communities. I’d have been curious to hear more about how citizens in other countries that are more dependent on atomic energy than we are, but it’s amazing looking into our past romance of the peaceful atom—and thinking about what it means for our uncertain energy future.

Love Free or Die: Bishop Gene Robinson’s story has been told before, and the first openly gay Anglican bishop is hardly a retiring figure. But Macky Alston’s wonderful documentary isn’t just about him. It’s about the difficult process of organizing within the Anglican church, which shut Robinson out of the Lambeth Conference, to make it a more welcoming and affirming institution for the gay people who have kept faith with it. And the movie argues that a gay rights movement without the faith community is leaving power and influence on the table, and risks making gay people choose between love and faith.

The Queen of Versailles: Tons of ink and miles of film have been devoted to chronicling American excess in a recession age. But it’s hard to imagine that anything will do better than this story about David and Jackie Siegel, who built an empire selling time-shares to people who couldn’t afford them and then pushed themselves to the brink of financial ruin by building what would have been the largest house in America. Whether it’s expertly breaking down the housing crisis’ role in the crash or chronicling the horrifying wastefulness of the Siegel’s consumer spending, The Queen of Versailles is funny, biting, and utterly American.

FICTION

Keep The Lights On: This tender gay love story has two things going for it. First, it’s an unconventional romance that bucks the Hollywood insistence that the story ends when a couple gets together or decides to stay together. It’s tremendously refreshing to see a movie that chronicles the rise and fall of a relationship, insisting that just because two people can’t continue to be together doesn’t mean it’s a failure. Second, it’s a warm, funny, explicit look at what it means to be gay and in love in a post-AIDS era. The movie’s specificity, whether it’s the results of an HIV test, the documentary the main character Erik is working on, or changes in the hookup scene give the movie wonderful roots.

The Surrogate: The funniest, warmest sex comedy I saw at Sundance is also one of the better movies I’ve seen in a long time about disability, intimacy, and independence. John Hawkes, of Deadwood and Winter’s Bone fame, which will certainly escalate after this performance, is marvelous as Mark O’Brien (a real-life journalist), who decides that though he spends most of his life in an iron lung due to childhood polio, he’s going to lose his virginity. The acting is top-to-bottom fantastic, and the movie is a forceful rejection of the idea that folks with disabilities are asexual, humorless, or mere victims.

Red Hook Summer: The community of critics who liked this movie (as opposed to the ones who savaged it, I’d argue unfairly) is growing. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I remain in the minority in my adoration of this movie, which takes on everything from the black church to asthma rates in Red Hook in its exploration of a New York summer. Centered around three pivotal church sequences and an amazing performance by Clarke Peters, transcending his acting on The Wire, this is a gorgeous, moving, unrepentantly and uncompromisingly black movie, and whatever Hollywood thinks, better for it.

Compliance: A terrifying look at what our trust in the police and other authorities can lead us to do to each other, Compliance is based on a true story of a man who convinced restaurant employees to commit more than 70 incidents of harassment and assault by pretending to be a police officer over the phone. As fast-food outlet manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) searches, detains, and ultimately sets cashier Becky (Dreama Walker, who should get real notice for this) up to be sexually assaulted, the movie raises deeply uncomfortable questions about what we’d do in the same situations.

Beasts of the Southern Wild: Joyous, strange, frightening and loving, this beautiful movie is about everything from global warming to the appropriate psychological response to Hurricane Katrina. If you like apocalypses, dire beasts from the past, gorgeous landscapes, great music, and remarkable little girls as your protagonists, run, don’t walk. If there’s justice, this would be a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-type phenomenon, a wonder from another country within our own. A warning: once you’ve seen it, you may experience profound irritation at standard Hollywood fare for a period of time afterwards.

I think it’s very smart for the trailer — and perhaps the show — to play up Melisandre’s role, and the role of religion in general, in Westeros. Over the course of the novels, one of the things I’ve come to find most fascinating in them is the duel between the rationality of realpolitik and the rationality of religion. There are a lot of purely rational or strategic actors, both on the state and individual level, in George R.R. Martin’s novels. Littlefinger is probably the most prominent example of that phenomenon: he’s cold, calculating, not particularly attuned towards conventional morality (including killing his wife or making sexual advances on his teenaged ward who happens to be the daughter of the only woman he’s ever loved) if he can find a way to turn events to his advantage. Illyrio Mopatis is motivated less by a desire for power than for profit, to the extent that he’s willing to see an entire continent destabilized to fulfill his aims. Someone like Ayra Stark, who has been essentially abandoned by the Gods, has made vengeance her religion and is extremely tough and strategic in pursuing that goal.

Then, there are the mystics. Part of what makes Stannis Baratheon unpredictable — and thus makes him more powerful — is the fact that he makes decisions that aren’t purely governed by rational strategic calculations. Melisandre’s advice makes him think more than some of his competitors about how the common people of Westeros understand leadership and moral authority, and to take actions like fortifying the wall or going after Ramsay Bolton. The neglect of the wall and the continued empowerment of a psychopath are both stains on Westeros that have major ramifications for both the stability of the realm and the integrity of law in the nation. By trying to address both of those problems, Stannis puts himself and his forces at risk, but he has an enormous amont to gain both strategically and morally from taking on tasks that his rivals ignore. Similarly, the High Septon acts as a wild card, surprising Cersei by reasserting the importance of moral purity and using his power to enforce norms in a way that affects her standing as a rational leader.

In fact, the whole series is really about what happens when you try to assert purely rational governance in a world where fairy tales and Gods reach out into the world and muck up your affairs. It’s one thing to play the Game of Thrones when the rules are stable and the motivations of the actors you’re dealing with are predictable. It’s quite another when dead men walk, dragons return from extinction, and even humans are governed by things other than pure self-interest.

GINGRICH: Now, I think we need to have a government that respects our religions. I’m a little bit tired about respecting every religion on the planet. I’d like them to respect our religion.

Watch it:

“The Obama administration is engaged in a war against religion,” Gingrich began. “Their decision last week that they would impose on every Catholic institution, every Jewish institution, every Protestant institution the Obamacare standard of what you have to buy as insurance is a direct violation of freedom of religion, an example of the dictatorial attitude of this administration,” he charged, ignoring the regulation’s religious exemption. He then went after Romney:

GINGRICH: Let me just note that in a similar circumstance, Governor Romney imposed activities on the Catholic hospitals against their opposition. Refused to allow them the right of conscience in Romneycare. Just as, by the way, he eliminated serving Kosher food to elderly Jewish residents under Medicaid.

Watch it:

In reality, Romney’s position on allowing religious institutions like Catholic hospitals to opt out of providing emergency contraception to rape victims is more complicated. In 2005, the governor vetoed a “widely supported bill” making the morning-after pill available over the counter and requiring hospitals to offer emergency contraception to rape victims, even after pledging to support such measures while running for governor. By September, the state legislature “easily overrode” his veto, but the Department of Public Health, which is overseen by Romney, began drafting regulations that exempted religious hospitals from the requirement.

Then suddenly, in December 2005, Romney “abruptly ordered his administration to reverse course… and require Catholic hospitals to provide emergency contraception medication to rape victims.” “My personal view in my heart of hearts is that people who are subject to rape should have the option of having emergency contraceptives or emergency contraceptive information,” he told the Boston Herald. Romney has since said that he would support broader federal conscience protections for health care workers and pledged to eliminate the Title X program which provides “reproductive health services like birth control” to millions of women.

Romney also angered the Jewish community in 2003 after he “nixed the funding of about $5 per day” that allocated additional dollars for “poor Jewish nursing-home residents to get kosher meals.” The governor warned that the subsidy would lead to an “increased rate for nursing facilities,” but the Massachusetts Legislature “approved an amendment to restore the $600,000 to finance the kosher meals.”

For a movie significantly set in and around a church, there’s something fitting about the structure of Red Hook Summer, which follows two narratives that rise together like the arcs of a masonry vault, each held in place by the keystone that is Clarke Peters’ performance as Enoch Rouse, bishop of struggling Red Hook church Little Piece of Heaven.

The first arch involves the search for a villain, or at least a source of menace in the neighborhood where Flik finds himself spending the summer. The first candidate is a white gentrifier in the neighborhood who is outraged when Flik and Chazz, the neighbor girl who attends Little Piece of Heaven faithfully with her mother Colleen, write their names in the fresh cement outside her house. “Are you two out of your minds?” she screams at them, all out of proportion to the slight, which a less proprietary homeowner might view as a sweet touch of the neighborhood. “Come on, show me what you got! Go back to your home and stay there!” as if by confining Flik and Chazz to the housing projects, she can have the Red Hook that she wants.

Later, the sense of menace shifts from gentrifiers to a new generation of neighborhood residents, specifically Box, a Blood gang leader who used to attend Little Piece of Heaven with his mother, Sister Augustine. On his arrival, Enoch warned Flik to stay away from Box, but Flik can’t resist trying to interview Box as part of his neighborhood tapestry. “What kind of questions?” Box wants to know when Flik makes his request. “Like what you do to make my granddaddy so mad?” the boy explains. Enoch told Flik from the beginning that he should “be careful with that thing out here,” when his grandson seemed determined to see the world through the lens of his iPad 2, and it’s Box who proves that the power to witness, and to record, can be threatening, and make the observer a target.

The second arch revolves around a series of three services at Little Piece of Heaven, which seem likely to be the most misunderstood parts of the movie (and already one place many critics are suggesting cuts), but are a powerful and subtle exploration of the growth of faith, the role politics play in people’s lives, and the power and fragility of community. There are three important elements in each of these sermons, each of which contributes in a significant way to the movie’s powerful denouement, which happens at the end of the third church service.

First, there’s the element of chastisement and conversion. In the first service, Enoch singles out Flik as the person in the sanctuary who needs Jesus, humiliating him. In the second, he singles out Deacon Z, the drunken, but still effective, chief elder of the church. “Why you so hard on me, Brother Enoch,” Z asks Enoch after the Bishop singles out his drinking as proof he needs the intervention of the Lord. “There ain’t but 3 men in the church. All in the late Octobers of life, looking for a few Aprils.” His call for Enoch to be more tolerant in services is coupled with a suggestion that Bishop Enoch be more tolerant towards Mr. Kevin, a young white man who runs a summer camp for Red Hook children. “He’s even helped a couple of them get into college,” Z tells Enoch. “What’s he doing that we’re not?…He’s saving those kids.”

Second, and speaking of kids getting saved, the services trace Flik’s growing openness to the gospel that Enoch’s pushing on him so aggressively. He’s slumped crankily with Chazz in a front-row pew during the first service. But in the second, he’s beginning to respond to the choir’s worship music in the second. And by the third, he’s singing and clapping along with Chazz and the rest of the congregation, an expression of joy and new faith that only makes what happens later in that third service, after the call to accept Jesus, even more shattering.

Third, the services are one of the many places where Red Hook Summer’s characters get into politics. One of Spike Lee’s many virtues is that he may be the director in America who most understands — and more importantly, values — the role that politics play in ordinary peoples’ lives and thinking about the world around them, and Red Hook Summer is no different. I would say there’s something bizarre about the fact that Hollywood focuses on characters who seem to have next to no interest or investment in politics, but in its obsessive focus on young, white, affluent people, Hollywood’s chosen a subset of characters who have the least to gain from engagement with or attention to the political process. When critics like GeekyTyrant complain about the fact that with Lee’s movies, “you know you’re going to get a lot of political talk and rants about how bad America is right now with everything going on,” they’re betraying a lack of awareness that it’s the lack of opinions or views that ought to be considered strained in movies, not the presence of them.

When Enoch preaches about pollution in Red Hook, telling his congregation, “Those cruise ships are docked, blowing out black smoke and giving our children asthma,” or Mr. Kevin says he wanted to work in Red Hook in part because of the residents’ higher rates of asthma and heart disease, their questions are not academic. “Why you suckin’ wind like that?” Chazz’s mother asks her, after catching Chazz and Flik post-flight from the gentrifier. “Those inhalers cost a ton of money.” And without spoiling things, that ongoing conversation also plays a critical role in setting the stage for the movie’s most critical scene (which I’ll discuss after the movie’s been released and people have had a chance to see it). Politics are not academic when pollution and drug costs are literally a matter of your survival.

There’s no question that there are flaws in the movie, among them a disruptive and deeply unnecessary reference to The Wire, and a less-disruptive though very funny swipe at Tyler Perry in a background movie poster. But I’m surprised to see critics complaining about things like switches in the cinematography, a clear sign of when we’re seeing things through Flik’s eyes, or through his camera. And absolutely, the language of the script is frequently intentionally artificial, but in particular, I found Chazz’s mannered nature charming rather than distancing, evidence of a child constructing an identity. If these occasional lapses in discipline are the price we pay for Spike Lee doing everything else he does so powerfully, it’s almost impossible for me to comprehend how they wouldn’t be worth it.

“We live right, but sometimes stray,” a chorus sings after the movie’s climax. “We’ll have to answer for our lives.” Red Hook Summer is a gorgeous testament to that ability to, as Ray Bradbury put it, behold beauty yet perceive its flaw, whether the object of our gaze is humanity or a housing project. If the movie is dismissed because Spike Lee has the courage to tell the truth about Hollywood and black Americans, or because it aims less to be entertaining than profoundly moving, that would be a real loss.

Gingrich has previously attributed his infidelities to fervent patriotism, telling CBN, “There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate. “

On the stump, Gingrich strongly defends “traditional marriage,” referring to marriage equality as one of the biggest threats in the “war on religion.” The National Organization for Marriage applauded Gingrich’s South Carolina win this week, praising his commitment to “preserving marriage as the union of one man and one woman.”

The conservative leader — who regularly condemns gay people, “churns out brochures that compare same-sex marriages to those bonds which might exist between a man and a horse,” likens gays to terrorists, calls LGBT rights a battle of “good versus evil,” and claims gay teens kill themselves because they know that they’re “abnormal” — expressed concern about Gingrich’s personal past, but also raised questions about the wisdom of asking about his marriage during the debate. Ultimately, he suggested that Evangelical Christians are “not judgmental” and understanding, and could embrace a candidate who has sinned:

PERKINS: More than anybody, Evangelicals understand the story of Redemption, that people make mistakes and there can be a turning point. The tension becomes — have we reached that turning point on these issues and were they mistakes, were they character flaws that remain….People don’t want to be seen as that judgmental, because they’re not judgmental, but at the same time, they’re having some serious questions about the character of the candidate.

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The hypocrisy between Gingrich’s private life and his public policies is staggering. The former House speaker describes same-sex relationships as a “temporary aberration” and promises to “support sending a federal constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman to the states for ratification.” All the while he has been married to three different women and has cheated on at least two of them. Yet for “not judgmental” conservatives like Perkins, this kind of behavior is far more acceptable than allowing for the recognition of monogamous same-sex relationships or even the very existence of gay people.