Religion

The world has hundreds of religions, and each impacts the culture and politics of certain regions differently. In the U.S., common Christian or Catholic understandings of religion have immensely impacted American culture and politics, though the Constitution attempts to keep separate the ideas of church and state.

Iraq’s Planned Child Marriage Bill Threatens the Rights of Women and Girls

Iraqi lawmakers’ proposal to amend the country’s family law and grant religious courts the authority to legalize marriages for underage girls is being pushed by the country’s Shiite parliamentary factions, as part of their appeal to conservative voters ahead of the country’s October 2025 elections, if not sooner.

The proposal has sparked a firestorm, particularly after initial reports suggested it could allow marriages for girls as young as 9 years old. Some experts contend the bill could also further fracture Iraq’s stability.

A Trump Victory Could Reinvigorate a Global Antiabortion Pact: ‘Women Are Going to Die’

Abortion is one of the most pivotal issues that will determine whether Trump returns to the Oval Office. The Republican nominee routinely brags about his role—via three Supreme Court nominations—in overturning Roe v. Wade in a 2022 ruling that inevitably limited abortion access for millions of people in the United States.

Less known is the work that Trump and his appointees did to prevent women in other countries from obtaining the procedure.

Evangelical Power, Spiritual Warfare and the Christian Right: The Ms. Q&A With Talia Lavin, Author of ‘Wild Faith’

Journalist Talia Lavin’s second book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, reports that a huge swath of the U.S. body politic—at least 10 million people—subscribe to the Evangelical notion that spiritual warfare is necessary to create God’s kingdom on earth.

A deep distrust of secular authority, she writes, coupled with rigid ideas about gender, sexuality, and power has led many Evangelicals into conservative political activism.

Lavin spoke to Ms. reporter Eleanor J. Bader several weeks before the book’s October 15 release.

Florida Just Banned Sex Ed in Public Schools. Project 2025 Calls for the Same Ban *Nationwide.*

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If you don’t live in Florida, you may be inclined to distance yourself from the news that they just banned public school districts from teaching sex education—including lessons on consent, HIV transmission, abuse prevention, and the existence of LGBTQ+ people.

But this is not a “Florida problem”—it’s a national preview. Because Project 2025 calls for a federal ban on sex education too. It’s just hidden, snuck in as part of their ban on pornography. 

‘Artificial Timelines Put Parents on a Constrained Roadmap to Make Decisions About Their Life’: Rep. Hillary Scholten on Faith and Preserving Choice 

If there had been a 15-week abortion ban in place at the time that U.S. Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-Mich.) was 14 weeks pregnant, she would have never been given the freedom, space and time to make the choice not to have an abortion.

“It made me recognize how incredibly grateful I was that I was able to make those choices free from government interference, free from the overreach of people who just wanted to score political points, and how I was free to make the best decision for me and my family, which in my case was to choose not to have an abortion and to give our daughter every chance at life that we possibly could,” Scholten told Ms.