America is a one party state. The Democratic Party is the sole political party in the US now.

The Republican Party is no more. It is not a political party; as David Brooks noted "the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party."

It has become...

Foreigners, visitors from another planet and Americans living in a bubble of reasonable or educated people might not know this but the reality is that the debt ceiling confrontation is by, for and the result of America's evangelical Christian control of the Republican Party. It is the ultimate expression of...

This is an excerpt from frank Schaeffer's new book. Writing in the Washington Post, Jane Smiley called Sex, Mom and God "laugh out loud funny" and her review concluded like this: "Frank has been straightforward and entertaining in his campaign to right the political wrongs he...

Both sides on the "life issues" remain totally invested in being morally "right." The purists on both sides also refuse to admit that most Americans (if public opinion polls are to be believed) occupy a -- sensibly conflicted -- middle ground on "the issue."

Abortion must be legal...

I just got home from the 4-day Wild Goose Festival held in Shakori Hills, N.C. Peeing in the woods at night was better than using the porta potties and when the breeze died down it was hot and humid. But with a beer tent, old friends from the...

According to governor Rick Perry of Texas what America needs is prayer. We need to pray in order to restore our moral direction. And the people he wants to lead those prayers are conservative Evangelicals, Roman Catholics and Jews, or at least the good kind of Jews: observant,...

Reconstructionists are not about to take over America, the world, or even most American Evangelical institutions. But their influence has been like a drop of radicalizing flavoring added to a bottle of water. As reported in the Huffington Post, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 42 percent...

The Weiner Problem is a bigger problem (no pun intended) than one man's sick folly: It is a metaphor for a whole post-60s generation of American progressives that became more interested in winning culture war battles and fucking around personally than in the traditional lefty agenda of unions, organizing, workers,...

As the New York Times reported about Sarah Palin's latest efforts to blow off the media, no one has gone as far as Palin to both dismiss the media and cash in on its attentions:

What was most striking about the bus odyssey was the apparent relish...

The 5,000-plus emails and letters generated by my memoir Crazy for God (about why I left a leadership position in the religious right) made it clear that I still had questions to answer about my family's role in the rise of the American extremism, even violence.

People...

(This is an excerpt from my new book Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway.)

I was wrong when I was an anti-abortion activist.

I changed my mind.

Today, I am...

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 4 -- "The-God-Of-The-Bible's Unauthorized Biography" -- of Frank Schaeffer's new book, Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics -- and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway (Da Capo Press, 2011)....

If you're not at the Wild Goose Festival this June you'll have missed the most important spiritual gathering in the US to take place in decades. Can a group of Christians save the reputation of Christianity from the "Christian" Right?

Join me and many others (see the inclusive...

The Archbishop of Canterbury worries that we shot an "unarmed" bin Laden. Michael Moore says we've lost something of "our soul" by killing bin Laden. Maybe President Obama's critics on this issue have indeed lost something: their sense of perspective, not to mention empathy with our troops.

Both men...

An Open Letter to the Republicans:

This morning I got up at 4 AM to walk across the street to congratulate my Marine son (now home safe with his wife and two little children after 5 years service and war) on having been a small link in the chain of...

Franklin Graham (son of evangelist Billy Graham) has become the anti-Obama, homophobic, anti-Muslim Donald Trump-style self-anointed "leader" of big time American religion. He is a far right Birther publicity hound and a disgrace to American politics, Evangelicalism and Christianity. I first met Franklin when we were...

How is it possible that a significant portion of the American population believes, or says it believes, that President Obama was not born in America, that Donald Trump would make a great president, that Sarah Palin is fit to lead our country, that Michele Bachmann is telling the truth, that...

The "disappointed" left says President Obama sold out. The racist-laced, Medicaid-mugging, billionaire-coddling right staggers under the weight of terminal "birther" mythology (now trumpeted by birther-come-lately Donald Trump). Meanwhile President Obama continues to bide his time and looks down the road to the post-2012 reality when his patience with an impatient...

Post "the sixties" everyone likes to be called an iconoclast. Irreverence for this or that convention (let alone for the "establishment") is considered a requirement for being cool. Almost none of the people who are thus described deserve the outsider label. They may be radicals to their enemies but in...

The other day my two-year-old granddaughter vomited on me. I love her, didn't mind and cleaned up. I don't love the Tea Party and the Republicans who are presently puking on America. I won't forgive them. But I will help clean up: in 2012.

As a former Republican disgusted...