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Pride Month & Prejudice; ‘Worrisome Time’ For LGBT People; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ciety,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report says human rights activists have been disappointed by President Joko Widodo’s “lackluster” defense of LGBT people. Sal…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…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…

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…

Who’s to Blame for BP?

By David True

…those of us whose lifestyles are dependent upon a ‘religious’ devotion to cheap oil. The deepest irony of all is that BP, along with the other oil companies, has come to function as a god. The truth, buried beneath all the oil and punditry, is that our devotion to this false god has led to the suffering of innocents, in the oceans and beaches, in the marshes and ecosystems, and in our communities. We have been slow, too slow by far, to realize th…

At Jeffress’ First Baptist Church of Dallas, Trump Support Is Part of a 150-Year Tradition

By Daniel Silliman

…couldn’t quite pull that off, and he got bogged down in fights with other Texas Baptists. One critic accused him of trying to be “pope, boss and supreme dictator at will.” It was true he wanted influence. And the Texas Baptist and Herald did have some power. At its height, it had 20,000 subscribers. Hayden, a Confederate veteran who fought at Shilo and Chickamauga, didn’t eschew politics either. His newspaper defined Baptist issues for a lot of p…

State as Executioner: Rick Perry Did Not Invent the Death Penalty

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ed statements of his confidence in justice as administered by the State of Texas. The Supreme Court took a slightly different view of Texas justice, and the reason has everything to do with the issue that is intimately bound up in the long history of the death penalty in America: race. In the second, sentencing phase of Duane Buck’s original trial, the prosecutor mentioned a statistical study suggesting that young black felons were far more likely…

Men Without Guns: A Tribute to Larry McMurtry

By Amy Laura Hall

…What’s lost is already gone on the first page: the picture show version of Texas. McMurtry has the boys casually go to the last showing in the theater “an Audie Murphy movie called The Kid from Texas.” “It would have taken Winchester ’73 or Red River” to “have crowded out the memories the boys kept having.” The two best friends are ostensibly fighting over a girl, Jacy Farrow, but they’re also staring into their future in a town where “there aren’…

The Racist Message of Do-Nothing Religion, Courtesy of Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick

By Kevin Healey

…tern is emerging. Perhaps it’s best captured in a recent headline from the Texas Tribune which read, “Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says America must turn to God to heal racism.” Is this the spiritual wisdom that will bring us together, or more of the same complacency with racialized religious privilege that has come to characterize today’s Republican Party? It depends, of course, on what (or who) you mean by “America.” And what you mean by “God.” Not to m…

Texas Man Indicted for Mosque Bomb Threat

By Hussein Rashid

Last week a Texas man was indicted on charges of obstructing religious freedom for threatening to blow up a mosque in Tennessee. The story is important in its own right, but it is also part of a pattern of a misdirected focus on Muslims in a culture of Islamophobia, a culture of hatred that has become so extreme that even conservatives are backing off. The same week this Texan alleged terrorist is indicted, a homeless man in NYC decided to “figh…

An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

By Haroon Moghul

…h buildings, starting right around the same time. Talk about luxury on the cheap; it’s hard to deny a feeling of similarity. (The tower is to the Burj as a certain toupee is to hair: might the Trump Tower inadvertently mimic an Islamic motif?) The regal twin palm trees in the foreground are the world’s tallest, at some 3,500 feet each. Recently a falling coconut crushed an entire apartment complex, punching a massive hole that has filled up with…