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Alabama Senate Considers Giving Church Its Own Police Force; Irony Reportedly Dead

By Daniel Schultz

…d write about a drug raid at the school. Students were identified and cell phones seized. It was marijuana we heard, and LSD and even heroin, right there in the school that describes its “compelling trait” as a climate “where students are spiritually and intellectually equipped to serve Christ.” Drugs. Imagine. Parents begged for answers and so did we. At least half a dozen messages to Superintendent Barrett Mosbacker went unanswered. Others at th…

Fact-checking Scripture: “Those who do not work should not eat.”

By Daniel Schultz

…e stayed alive in those days. The exchange illustrates the difficulties of using scripture in politics. Protas’ Leviticus citation has in part social applications: Jews are told explicitly not to cheat in their business dealings, not to exploit immigrants or guest workers, and to pay all workers the wages owed to them. But it also prohibits shaving a man’s temples or beard, which is why many ultra-Orthodox sport earlocks; getting a tattoo, or cons…

Satanists Take Aim at School Spanking

By Joseph Laycock

…During the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, Satanists were falsely accused of abusing children. Now The Satanic Temple is able to claim the moral high ground over their conservative Christian opponents, some of whom have responded by alluding to Proverbs 13:24, “He that spareth his rod, hateth his son.” Springtown was chosen because of a 2012 incident in which a male assistant principal paddled two girls, aged 15 and 16, leaving serious bruises. One gi…

How the Catholic Church Broke the Health Insurance it Advocated For

By Patricia Miller

…ouldn’t have to pay for services that they didn’t use or approve of others using. When states began mandating the coverage of prescription contraceptives in the late 1990s, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops argued that insurers should be free to opt out of such coverage based on “conscientious objection or long-standing religious beliefs against such coverage.” This laid the groundwork for the bishops’ objections to the contraceptive mandate…

ACLU’s Religious Freedom Suit Against Trump Order: “Gerrymandered to Target Muslims”

By Sunnivie Brydum

…e condemned Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims, and has his own reputation of using “religious freedom” as an excuse for state-sanctioned anti-LGBT discrimination. Calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional. — Governor Mike Pence (@GovPenceIN) December 8, 2015 According to the ACLU, “religious freedom does not include the ability to harm others,” says Weaver. “And that’s an important line to draw in this sand, and…

You Are What You Eat: New Book on Cannibalism Reimagines What It Means to Be Made of Flesh

By Michael Schulson

…ascinated with the way both stories use violence to bring the divine down to earth. In this vein, he writes about a concept that he calls downward transcendence, borrowing a term from the great South Indian scholar-poet A.K. Ramanujan. We may imagine prayers and sacrifices as being directed upward, using symbolism to translate physical actions into something more ethereal. But, Shulman suggests, stories about human sacrifice and cannibalism seem t…

Pope Francis Says Teaching Gender Is Nasty; Far-Right Religious Groups Helping Mexico’s Anti-Equality Movement; Colombia’s Peace Deal Killed by Anti-LGBT Campaign?; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…during talks in Havana – as evidence that the government and the FARC “are using peace as an excuse to impose the ideology of gender.” For Claudia López, Colombia’s only openly LGBT senator and a supporter of the peace deal, antagonism from religious leaders toward the LGBT population was one of three key reasons for the deal’s defeat. She told AQ that she sees the controversy over gender as part of a larger cause of evangelical Christian churches…

Pope Francis Walks With LGBTQ People, One Step Forward, Big Steps Back

By Kaya Oakes

…pically been a reference to capitalism, he’s also gotten into the habit of using it as a description of same-sex marriage and gender fluidity. He’s also used the phrase in the Phillipines, Poland and Mexico. He seems to have picked it up from the African bishops, who used it to describe foreign aid that comes bound up with conditions about reproductive rights and sexual health. But after dropping the phrase in Georgia, Pope Francis told a differen…

Flouting SCOTUS, Religious Liberty Advocates “Give The Game Away”

By Sunnivie Brydum

…M) and the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence (CCJ) referred to Grimm using female pronouns—as “her” rather than “him”—including in the formal titles of those briefs. That’s a problem for the Court, and a clerk pointedly told the anti-LGBTQ groups so in a pair of letters. Stern illuminates the procedural background of the reprimand, which, in any other case, might be chalked up to a clerical error. But in a case that essentially asks the cour…

WA Supreme Court: LGBT Discrimination No More About Flowers Than Civil Rights Were About Sandwiches

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…yze the application of LGBT antidiscrimination laws to religious objectors using the rigorous “strict scrutiny” test. This test, used to evaluate government actions that specifically disadvantage religion, requires a law to be the least restrictive (to the religious objector) means of achieving a “compelling” government interest. In this latest opinion, State of Washington v. Arlene’s Flowers, the court did subject Washington’s antidiscrimination…