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Religious Hostility to Gay Nigerians; The Pope’s Visit To Africa; Ireland’s Religious Schools Can’t Discriminate Against Gays; Orthodox Church in Georgia Leads Anti-Gay Forces; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…incidental that the application was made in the same week that a prominent American same-sex marriage opponent, Ryan Anderson, was giving two talks here and just days after a Supreme Court ruling that same-sex partners of Bermudians should be given the same rights as heterosexual spouses. She added: “This island is odd.” Ms Hayward-Harris said it was “very courageous of both of them” to make the application and potentially make legal history as th…

Campaigns of Omission

By Sarah Posner

…an Sekulow, the son of Jay Sekulow, head of the Robertson-founded American Center for Law and Justice, and himself a Regent graduate, tweeted, “A warning for liberals tonight – don’t mess with Regent Law.” McDonnell sure didn’t campaign on his Regent cred; he left that to his opponent, Creigh Deeds, who probably spent too much time pounding McDonnell’s controversial graduate thesis and not enough time laying out his own platform. By letting Deeds…

Crisis Pregnancy Centers and Obama’s Faith-Based Initiative

By Sarah Posner

…ces) to push federal funding for ultrasound equipment for crisis pregnancy centers. Sheppard: Crisis pregnancy centers—often run by religious groups—received $30 million from HHS between 2001 and 2006 for abstinence-only programs and other projects, according to a 2006 House Energy and Commerce Committee report. The HHS grant database indicates another $9.3 million in grants were given to CPCs since 2007. But even the Obama administration has cont…

Violence of the Lambs: The Legacy of Anti-Choice Extremist Father Norman Weslin

By Kathryn Joyce

…neighboring crisis pregnancy center, A Woman’s Touch Pregnancy Counseling Center, where Weslin’s attorney served on the board of directors. In a way, it’s a funny overlap for the anti-abortion movement, where crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) have increasingly sought to present themselves as the moderate face of the cause, going so far as requiring volunteers to pledge to not engage in public sidewalk demonstrations outside abortion clinics in orde…

“I Had No Intention to Write Atheistically”: Darwin, God, and the 2500-Year History of the Debate

By Edward J. Larson

…followers, whose numbers comprised a virtual social register of the Anglo-American moneyed elite, typically embraced Darwinism as well. In his Autobiography, for example, Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie recalled the day in the 1870s that his reading of Darwin’s Descent of Man, Haeckel’s History of Creation, and various books by Spencer transformed his life. “I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear. Not only had…

The Evangelical “Plummet” from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck

By Sarah Posner

…lummet from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck. In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined “revival” and “turning America back to God” that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement. Moore goes on to criticize not just the left but the right as well, for politicizing religion and n…

Why Religious Exemptions Matter

By Sarah Posner

…s include Concerned Women for American, Americans United for Life, and the American Center for Law and Justice. As to private employers, the proposed rule takes note of the fact that private employers are not entitled to religious exemptions under other federal laws, such as Title VII, prohibiting discrimination in employment. Based on that precedent, the administration declined to extend an exemption to private employers here. The expansion of t…

Marriage Debate in Australia Shifts To Push For Religious Exemptions; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…se brought by Adrian Coman, a Romanian man seeking legal residency for his American husband, which the New York Times’ Kit Gillet says “will have major implications for the legal recognition of same-sex relationships across Europe.” Coman and his American partner were married in Belgium in 2010 but “the authorities in Bucharest refused to recognize their relationship for the purposes of residency.” As we have reported previously, U.S.-based religi…

Espionage Allegations Against Russian Church Raise Religious Freedom Issue in Ukraine

By Katherine Kelaidis

…It was also in 2016 that the Russian Orthodox Church opened its “spiritual center” in the heart of Paris, which is widely suspected of serving as a base for Russian intelligence. And in Finland, where the Orthodox Church of Finland (an autonomous church under the authority of the Patriarchate of Constantinople) enjoys the status of being one of two national churches, there are whispers that a church under the jurisdiction of Moscow was recently tu…

Kenneth Starr in the “Athens of Texas”

By Randall Balmer

…was that his university would become a magnet for Christian scholars and a center—perhaps the center—for Protestant intellectual life. I was in Waco to write a feature article for Christianity Today, and I confess that I was intrigued by the audacity of Sloan’s plans. Modest, but steady increases in tuition over a period of years, combined with an orchestrated scheme to tap into the wealth of Texas Baptists, would allow Baylor to embark on an ambi…