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

By Peter Montgomery

…f having long hair. One month later, two allegedly gay youths, aged between 15 and 17, were attacked and beheaded with their heads thrown in a rubbish bin, said a witness to the attack. A subsequent attack on a Baghdad brothel, thought to have been carried out by the same militia, killed about 34 people, most of them women. Turkey: A Country Divided on LGBT Issues Rev. Irene Monroe writes this week about Turkey being a conflicted country, both a s…

Lessons from the Defeat of the Oklahoma Personhood Bill

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…for Reproductive Justice who did their own lobbying, and ultimately a good number of legislators themselves. It seems that’s when the personhood battle really became a power struggle between the personhood lobby and the Republican leadership. With so many amendments and so much public controversy surrounding the bill, the Republican leadership opted not to bring the bill forward. This raised the ire of Personhood USA and Oklahomans for Life, who c…

Contrary to Claims of Anti-Trans Muslims, LGBTQ+ Acceptance is Widespread in the History of Islam

By Ali Olomi

…least among the more educated.” A similar change swept through Iraq in the 1960s according to psychiatrists Ihsan al-Issa and Brigitta al-Issa: “The previous almost complete acceptance of homosexual practices is now undergoing some change. Some students who had been brought up in the old traditional pattern have expressed anxiety to the authors about their homosexual practices in the university student hostels in Baghdad.” Clearly what today pass…

Why Even Progressive Christianity Must Own Its Complicity in Anti-LGBT Violence

By Layton E. Williams

…, self-harm, and suicide among LGBT youth and adults. Of course, a growing number of churches and denominations today have rejected such a destructive understanding of human sexuality. Religion Dispatches recently compiled a list of the official positions on LGBT issues currently taught by various Christian denominations. According to this list, mainline Protestant denominations such as the United Church of Christ and the Episcopal Church claim th…

‘Imagine Better’: Can Harry Potter Change the World?

By B. Howell Belser

…elease date of a Harry Potter movie—in this case, The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 on Nov. 19. The Deathly Hallows campaign will run for nine months—the time between the two final movies—during which time the HPA will be organizing fans to destroy seven real world horcruxes (an evil magical object used to attain immortality). This campaign is designed to run as a parallel between the actions of Harry, who must destroy Voldemort’s seven horcruxes before…

Is Army’s New “Humanist” Designation Just Semantic Hooey?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ounseling and gathering spaces for Humanist groups. It also means that the numbers and distribution of Humanists in the military can be tracked along with those of other religious groups, potentially inviting a reshaping of the military chaplaincy, which critics complain is inappropriately weighted in favor of Christian, and specifically Evangelical Christian, denominations. A study by the Military Association of Atheist and Freethinkers (MAAF)—t…

Naked Jihad

By Kate Blanchard

…ld soon be feeling the need to leave her home country. Not surprisingly, a number of Western women felt moved to show their support for Amina. An international movement called Femen staged bare-breasted protests in European cities, in which the writings on their chests echoed Amina’s, along with “Freedom for women” and “Fuck your morals.” (Be warned: photos contain nudity and strong language.) But Femen did not have the last word. Almost immediat…

American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

By Kaya Oakes

…but as human instinct. After the Catholic Church published Humanae Vitae in 1968, the Vatican’s disapproval of birth control meant that the vast majority of Catholics who used it—and continue to use it—no longer felt the church was an authority on sexual matters. This relationship with the confessional was further eroded in the wake of the sex abuse scandal, when the secrecy of the confessional became a convenient cover for the molestation of chil…

The Progress of Christ in Commercial America: A Review of Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult

By Peter Laarman

…ow during times of the most acute public suffering, like the depressions of 1837, 1857, 1893, etc., almost all Protestant thought leaders served up new formulas for individual self-improvement rather than challenging the presumption and arrogance of wealth. Hence his title, “The Money Cult”: in what many are pleased to regard as a Christian nation, the functional faith of most believers has usually boiled down to a sanctified form of acquisitive i…

Don’t Blame Black Voters: The Obama Non-Effect

By Jonathan L. Walton

…nce of these demographics on the state electorate in relation to the small number of African Americans, it is inconceivable to argue that African Americans are to blame. The fault lines of a progressive coalition to resist Prop. 8 were seemingly regional and religious as opposed to racially determined. Do Black Folks Need an Elton John? Scapegoating black folks is descriptively flawed because it pits a racial group against a multiracial reality. B…