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Religious Opposition To LGBT Equality Softening

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…nd other Christians marching together at Pride. In recent years, the small number of Christians who turn up to protest against Pride have been vastly outnumbered by the Christians participating in it. Hill also noted religious support in the UK last April for a new law “to allow religious elements in civil partnerships, while last year the Quakers became the first major Christian denomination to resolve to carry out same-sex marriages.” Even here…

The Anti-Trans Hate Machine’s Conspiracies Don’t Stop at the US Border

By Annika Brockschmidt

…per, Die Welt, escalated the mainstreaming of right-wing talking points. A number of researchers wrote an op-ed, in which they accused the ARD and ZDF, the independent, state-funded TV news stations (the German version of the BBC) of “indoctrinating” kids with “gender ideology” in order to sexualize and “re-educate” them. The article hits all the right-wing bullet points of a shadowy conspiracy at work: The media, driven by secretive “trans-lobbyi…

New Report: Angels & Aliens in Texas Schools

By Mark A. Chancey

…des of Hanna-Barbera’s The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible. The number of Bible courses in Texas has gone up since 2007, when Texas passed a law encouraging schools to offer them. Texas is not alone in having such a statute; in recent years, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Arizona have passed similar laws, and Bible bills are currently making their way through the Wyoming and Arkansas legislatures. While these laws typically urge teac…

Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act

By Peter Laarman

…Employee Free Choice Act will fix this fatal imbalance in straightforward ways. First, it will impose real penalties for labor law violations so that employers would no longer find it cheaper to take the penalty than to obey the law. Second, it will provide for impartial arbitration of first contract terms if no agreement has been reached within 120 days of union recognition, thus preventing the common employer practice of dragging out negotiatio…

Francis Must Make Changes to Have a Real Effect

By Patricia Miller

…s remained fairly steady in recent decades is “the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S.,” which has masked “the large number of people who have left the Catholic church.” According to Pew, approximately one-third of those raised Catholic have left the church and 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics. If you were a business losing one-third of your customers, wouldn’t you want to make some changes? Sur…

Religious Leaders Need ‘Empty the Pews’ Which Chronicles the Darker Side of the ‘Nones’ Phenomenon

By Kaya Oakes

…e in the introduction, when they met, they discovered they had both moved away from the worst aspects of Christianity, what they called “the repression, the shame, [and] the hypocrisy,” due to the realization that many church teachings were “actively harmful.” While a few contributors to Empty the Pews acknowledge that their post-institutional faith is still a work in progress, for the most part these writers have departed religion without much in…

‘My Name is Legion’: Sources and Forces of White Supremacy in the U.S.

By R. Drew Smith

…hate group and white supremacist group content has skyrocketed—even as the numbers of those groups have themselves noticeably increased. For example, the number of known hate groups is reported to have increased from roughly 600 in the year 2000 to 930 in 2014. Moreover, major television networks such as Fox TV have ushered hate content and white supremacist content into the media mainstream, featuring racialized rhetoric that ranges from disparag…

The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church

By Paul Gorrell

…o take their spiritual business elsewhere. We have seen an increase in the number of American politicians who are asked to remove themselves from communion lines and, recently, priests have even denied parishioners communion if they vote for a political candidate who favors abortion rights. This exclusion from the sacrament is essentially a form of excommunication. Dogma Over Diplomacy Ironically, at a time when many earnest believers are being tu…

Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…and Eric Teetsel, heaped praise on Pope Francis’s opening remarks. At New Ways Ministry, Francis DeBernardo reviews differing interpretations of Francis’s remarks, which included the formulation used by anti-marriage-equality advocates that every child deserves a mother and father. DeBernardo notes that while some viewed the speech as the pope bowing to pressure from conservatives, he saw it as a continuation of Francis’s practice of “defending t…

Does Religion Condemn Homosexuality?

By Michael Bronski

…ency to conflate religion and values. Many Americans believe that the only way to have values and be moral is to be religious, and then, only in a Christian way. This is not how the terms “morality” or “values” are being used here, however. Buddhism offers an important counter to the usual ways of framing this issue as a matter of the morality of heterosexuality versus the immorality of homosexuality. In both branches of Buddhism, Theravada and Ma…