Religion Dispatches
…’s refusal to serve a lesbian couple at their commitment ceremony. The New Mexico Supreme Court held that the state human rights law, which prohibits discrimination based on, among other things, sexual orientation in public accommodations, did not violate the photographer’s Free Speech or Free Exercise rights, nor did it violate the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The photographers sought review from the United States Supreme Court on o…
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…them to wealthy settler colonists who pursued their own unjust logics. And Mexico controlled California for only a short while before U.S. imperial aggression severed Alta California from Mexico, and finding gold in its mountains, U.S. colonists invaded the land and rapidly transformed Alta California into a state, extending and expediting the population decline and attempted cultural genocide of native peoples. It is precisely the place of Califo…
Read More…ompare Indiana’s newly minted RFRA to the one assessed by the court in New Mexico. The Indiana RFRA departs from New Mexico’s RFRA and the federal RFRA—on which many other state laws are modeled. How? Indiana’s RFRA expressly provides that a person can assert a “claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.” This new statutory language is…
Read More…or does Florida’s RFRA, which was passed in 1998. Nor does the RFRA in New Mexico, which was enacted in 2000. In 2013, in the Elane Photography case, the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that a photographer could not raise the state’s RFRA as a defense in a lawsuit, brought under the state’s anti-discrimination law by a lesbian couple denied service by the photographer precisely because, in the court’s words, New Mexico’s RFRA “is inapplicable in th…
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…The fact is that the second most important source of external revenue for Mexico are the remittances that folks send back. We have Sisters in Mexico, and they’ve tried to create micro enterprises where people don’t have to leave. They tried to get Mexican government funding for it, and the Mexican officials said “oh no, we couldn’t do that because the remittances are so important for the people in the countryside to survive.” This is a complex is…
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…ea, Australia, and across Latin America and the borderlands of America and Mexico. The number of apparitions in the U.S. seems to keep rising, but not because of Belgian immigrants to Wisconsin. What seems to be an increase in apparitions is probably a jump in reports of apparitions and manifestations of the Virgin. Rumors of miracles and visions now fly around the globe via the internet, rather than moving locally through the whispers of neighbor…
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…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…
Read More…health, Dainius Puras. The explanatory note accompanying the bill defines non-traditional sexual relations as “sodomy, lesbianism, and other forms of non-traditional sexual behaviour.” It bans the dissemination of information in the media and on the Internet, as well as the organization and participation in peaceful assemblies on these issues…. For his part, Mr. Forst warned that “the draft law not only discriminates against a specific subset of…
Read More…t’s put that cheap argument to bed. At Patheos, Benjamin Corey shakes that cheap argument awake: Can we stop complaining about this bogus idea that American Christians are persecuted now? I mean, really. Can we stop? The world needs us to turn from ourselves and focus on this real persecution, because it’s evil and must be exposed and stopped. However, our own self-centeredness as Americans is getting in the way of the discussion on real anti-Chri…
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…retired general (played by Cuban-American actor Andy García), a principled nonviolent resister (played by telenovela heartthrob Eduardo Verástegui), a dashing priest-turned-general, an arms-smuggling urban heroine, and an altar boy whose martyrdom at the hands of a local army officer will remind viewers of the gruesome fixations of Mel Gibson. The villains, also from central casting, include the dastardly officer, the altar boy’s vacillating godfathe…
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