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Trayvon Martin and American Exceptionalism

By Anthea Butler

…even have the courtesy to check Trayvon’s phone for his mom and dad’s telephone numbers because it’s just a black criminal’s body to them. While Zimmerman the trigger man slept in his bed, the police ordered a drug and alcohol test for Trayvon’s lifeless body. A black body that was representative of evil against the whiteness of George Zimmerman. I hesitated to write about this story, because there are many good stories about Trayvon and his pare…

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…

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…

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…

How Obama Made Gun Control A Religious Freedom Issue

By Sarah Posner

…the president was Lucia McBath, whose son Jordan was shot dead in a car in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2012. McBath, the subject of the riveting 2015 film The Armor of Light, described to me in an interview last year how her own faith drove her to take on political advocacy for gun control after Jordan’s death. The film documents her friendship with the Rev. Rob Schenck, the religious right activist who has taken on a solitary battle to persuade his…

Islamophobia by PowerPoint

By Julie Ingersoll

…lam. At last week’s First Coast Tea Party-sponsored event in Jacksonville, Florida—“What Every American Needs to Know About the Koran”—Federer came equipped not only with a flashy video presentation and slideshow, but also with a vast collection of distortions and misrepresentations about Islam. Despite repeated assertions that the Tea Party is really about taxes, this was an out-and-out “God and country,” “Christian nation,” Islamophobia-promotin…

The Tea Party, the Blind Man, and the Elephant: Part 2

By Julie Ingersoll

…y officials, referring to the GOP. They warned that the “tea party” on the Florida ballot has been “uncovered” as a ruse by Democrats to “siphon of Republican votes.” But try as I might, I couldn’t get anyone to say much about religion—and I don’t mean just explicit religion. There was no talk of home schools or Christian schools, no real talk about the founders’ religious intentions. They value “moral leadership” but don’t define what that is. Th…

A Real-Life Truman Show?

By Lauri Lebo

The town of Rosemary Beach sits along a stretch of the Florida panhandle known for its alabaster sand beaches and clear aquamarine water. The community is a recreation of an Italian seaside resort, complete with stone cobbled streets and towering villas overlooking quaint shops in buildings in muted hues of cranberry and tangerine. I’ve stopped here on a tour I’m taking of the Gulf of Mexico coastline. I started my drive Friday from the Atlantic…

Glenn Beck’s History “Professor” David Barton On Racism and the Three-Fifths Rule

By Julie Ingersoll

A few weeks back I reported on a Florida Tea Party event, sponsored in conjunction with Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project, in which Frantz Kebreau of the National Association for Conservative People of All Colors (NAACPC) reimagined an American history in which slavery was not initially raced-based and the “Christian” founders were anti-slavery. Republicans, in this narrative, have led the fights for abolition, emancipation, voting rights, civil rights,…

Apocalyptic DADT Scenarios Simply Aren’t Happening

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…wing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, he said that no changes were necessary to protect chaplains’ rights. He maintained, “We’ve always been able to preach and teach” and anticipate little change in the future. None of the predicted breakdown in military readiness is coming to pass and it appears the military continues to be well staffed in both soldiers and chaplains. In the case of DADT, Gandhi’s old adage still holds true: “First they ignore y…