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Istanbul ‘Haven of Sorts’ For LGBT Syrians and Iraqis; Cayman Islands Affirm Marriage Ban with ‘Holy Bible Evidence’; No Room for LGBTs in Malaysia’s ‘Islam-Based’ Human Rights Policy; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…o come anyway if they’re opposed to Catholic views on the family.” Turkey: Istanbul provides LGBT Syrians and Iraqis ‘a haven – of sorts’ U.K.’s Independent reported on Sunday that LGBT Syrians and Iraqis “have found a haven – of sorts – in Istanbul.” The story by Bradley Secker begins at Tek Yön, a nightclub “where you’ll find gay exiles from every sect and ethnicity in the Middle East.” Says Subhi, from Syria, “Istanbul is a bubble of freedom an…

Will Istanbul Ever Be a Part of the European Union?

By Haroon Moghul

…ed to me: that sounded eerily like something Thomas Friedman would write.) Istanbul’s the only city of its size, prestige and power in a vast area of the planet—you have to go to Moscow in the north, probably Dubai in the south, central Europe in the west and probably India in the east to get this kind of economic power. It doesn’t deserve to be second fiddle to anyone, and with Turkey’s rise, I can see it playing a global role, in the near future…

Pricey Tickets, Cranky Citizens, and Priests Behind Bars as Philadelphia Prepares For Papal Visit

By Anthea Butler

…to continue to shrink into the insularity and disorganization that caused the Philadelphia Archdiocese to decline so precipitously? It remains to be seen. Meanwhile, faithful Catholics and others who want to see the Pope may be losing heart. 10,000 tickets for the Pope’s Speech at Independence Mall sold out in two minutes on Tuesday, with 394k people trying their best to get a few. Tickets are already being scalped at $100 and up on craigslist. I…

Don’t Call it a Turkish Spring

By Haroon Moghul

…rdogan’s divisive politics and rhetoric. Did you know he was going to name Istanbul’s third suspension bridge after Sultan Selim, an Ottoman monarch who’d massacred many Alevis—and, by the way, conquered much of the Middle East? (From Baghdad to Algiers—what have you done with your life?) Sitting, or more accurately pinned, against a wall in this lodge, I wondered if the protesters knew that religious Turks frequently echoed their concerns and sha…

Watching Man of Steel in Istanbul

By Haroon Moghul

…bit in West Virginia and, most recently, Man of Steel two nights ago in an Istanbul cinema. Watching movies in such circumstances becomes more than usually rewarding. There’s a reason travel sparks creativity; sitting in the theatre, it’s not just me watching the movie, but me engaging in an exercise of empathy—how do the people around me process American pieties? (Consider what happened when I watched Star Trek in Dubai.) So climbing up onto Isti…

Mile-High Identity Politics: What We Can Learn From the Same-Sex Seating Controversy

By Eboo Patel

…, not the fourth century … You’re not free to practice your religion in my airline seat.’ ‘This is male entitlement .. the height of male arrogance.’ One comment referred to this as a ‘back of the bus’ issue; as in, women being asked to move in such circumstances was tantamount to assigning them a lesser status as citizens and lower dignity as human beings. Other readers proposed that airlines set aside special seating for men requiring such accom…

The Key to Understanding the Federalist Society Isn’t Originalism — It’s This 800-Year Old Tradition

By Peter Schwartz

…notions of “human dignity” and “human flourishing,” Catholic natural law—an 800-year-old tradition dating back to Thomas Aquinas—is a lens that offers utter clarity to conservative Catholic jurists, activists, policymakers, and scholars as they observe, describe, and engage the world. The power and sharpness of this lens allow them to confidently snap every human movement—every human desire and motive and act—into its divinely appointed and proper…

International reax to US Marriage Ruling; Official violence at Turkey’s Pride; Marriage Advances in Mexico Over Church Objections; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…dicted that 30,000 people would participate in the service, but the actual number appeared to number around 2,000. “Our prayers will open the sky and the homosexuals will fall, we will be blessed with victory,” said Lee Young-hoon, head of the leading organization in the anti-LGBT coalition. Mexico: Supreme Court embraces marriage, Church and some political officials resist As we have been reporting, the marriage equality movement has been movemen…

Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

By Susannah Heschel

Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…

An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

By Haroon Moghul

…h buildings, starting right around the same time. Talk about luxury on the cheap; it’s hard to deny a feeling of similarity. (The tower is to the Burj as a certain toupee is to hair: might the Trump Tower inadvertently mimic an Islamic motif?) The regal twin palm trees in the foreground are the world’s tallest, at some 3,500 feet each. Recently a falling coconut crushed an entire apartment complex, punching a massive hole that has filled up with…