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Houston’s Pastor Subpoenas: A Meme Made for Fox News

By Sarah Posner

…e agitators against the supposedly oppressive state. It’s almost as if the city of Houston wanted to help the Pastors’ Council raise money. UPDATE: The Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance and an advocate for both LGBT rights and religious liberty, has penned a letter to Houston’s Mayor Parker and City Attorney David Feldman, opposing the subpoenas. “I will work as hard to defend the freedom of speech from the pulpit for those w…

Hope for an End to Mexico’s Narco-Violence: Response to Jennifer Scheper Hughes

By Stephen Andes

…ce, Father Hugo Valdemar, spokesman for the archdiocese of Mexico, accused Mexico City’s recent abortion law of killing more innocents than the drug cartels, implicating Mayor Marcelo Ebrard’s administration along the way. Ebrard promptly sued the cleric and the row continues. The culture wars, just as with Church-state conflict in the 1920s, are having a profound ability to distract Catholics from confronting the social and economic bases of drug…

Blankets, Booties, and Jesus: Spiritual War on the Uterus in Rick Perry’s Texas

By Sarah Posner

…e to Abortion: Jesus Most crisis pregnancy centers in Texas, including Beltway 8 and the Houston Coalition for Life bus, are privately funded. Under Perry’s watch, however, the state has launched a program to subsidize crisis pregnancy centers in an effort to provide “Alternatives to Abortion.” In 2008, 1,462,400 women in Texas between the ages of 15 and 44 needed publicly supported contraception, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Thirty-five…

The Gospel Gestalt: From Joyful Noise to Whitney Houston

By Douglas Harrison

…’ll stipulate that as popular cinema goes, the movie isn’t half as good as Houston’s worst music. But like Houston’s career (she was booed at the 1989 Soul Train Awards by those who thought she’d sold out to white mainstream audiences, and perceptions of Houston as pop-music race-traitor persisted throughout her professional life), Joyful Noise is tangled up in a longstanding debate embedded in gospel music about race and cultural authenticity in…

Church and State in Mexico: A Political Party Wavers on Women’s Rights

By Ruth Samuelson

…month. The wave of legislation began in reaction to a groundbreaking 2007 Mexico City law allowing abortions in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. But it swelled as PRI leaders, seeking to gain conservative support in the 2009 elections, began forming alliances with local church leaders. Undoubtedly, Mexican politics has become more religiously conservative since the National Action Party (PAN) claimed the presidency in 2000 and again in 2006. The…

A Pope, a Poet, and a Drug War

By Stephen Andes

…the first—some 200,000 strong—was initiated in Cuernavaca and traveled to Mexico City’s main square, the Zócalo, where marchers demanded that the government pay attention to the victims of the drug war. Until that point, President Calderón and his administration had claimed that the vast majority of those being killed in Mexico were complicit in drug crime. The innocent death of Sicilia’s son, and the sons, daughters, brothers, and fathers of so…

Like Azusa Street Baptized into Bureaucracy: Mexico’s Flourishing LLDM Church Loses its Apostle

By Michael Schulson

…to be Guadalajara. It was an unlikely base for a Protestant movement. The city, Mexico’s second largest, is also its most Catholic. At least one neighborhood during this time had a warning system—a bicyclist ringing a bell—that helped locals identify and expel door-to-door evangelists. But Aarón had military connections in local government, and roots in the region. Elisa had been born in the city. After two decades of civil war and social reform,…

Mexican Marriage Marches Show Struggle Between Church and Secular State; Pro-LGBT Mormon Group Grows After ‘Apostate’ Declaration; Botswana Gives Anti-Gay US Pastor the Boot; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ex marriage legalisation, if it’s even possible in this country, is a long way away. Adoption and surrogacy are not allowed for homosexual couples. Transgender individuals can’t change their legal title to the one that befit their gender identity. A law guaranteeing basic rights for all people is sorely needed. Sadly, the gender equality bill released last year didn’t quite deliver its promised equality. China: Man challenges ‘cure therapy’ he was…

Mexico’s War on Saint Death

By Joseph Laycock

…r on drugs by demolishing shrines of Santa Muerte. Shrines can be found in Mexico City and Tijuana, as well as almost every town on the Mexican border. Devotees leave offerings of flowers, fruit, tequila, rum, and tobacco. Immigrants crossing the border illegally have been found with icons of the saint. While no one is certain where the movement originated, some have speculated that Vatican II deprived Mexican Catholics of devotional practices, ca…

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…