Religion Dispatches
…though this, the men would hover around the tent entries, send notes, make phone calls, actually get their phone cords recharged, and send food and drink through every possible opening in the tent. As far as I could tell, it was always the men hanging around our tent and not the women hanging around the men’s tent. Pretty funny if you think about it. They were like lost puppies without their women. Yet patriarchy would have us think they are the m…
Read More
…agenda for Africa and Asia,” Carroll told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. France: Conservative Catholics resisting ‘revolutionary notion’ of individual freedom “Gay marriage fires up the conservative Catholics,” writes Anne-Sylvaine Chassany in a Financial Times story about the continuing resistance to marriage equality in France. This streak of French Catholic conservatism goes back a long way. In 1905 Catholic conservatives fought anticlerical…
Read More
…this weekend. To paraphrase an American poet, there is nothing wrong with France that what’s right with France can’t fix. There is no figure that better embodies the French character than Montaigne, the writer who in many ways invented the modern person. A Catholic, he was horrified by the terror enacted in the Paris massacres. For him humanity is best if it stands before the divine with an attitude of skeptical humility, and if humans stand amon…
Read More
…community and creates a space that is very profound and spiritual for me.” France: Gay Flight Attendants Seek Opt Out From Flights to Iran Earlier this month, gay flights attendants for Air France sought the ability to opt out of working flights on a new route to Tehran; female flight attendants were previously given that option after some objected to the requirement that they wear a head scarf when deplaning in Iran. Malaysia: Top Cop Says LGBT P…
Read More
…immigrant community of North Africans who have often felt marginalized in France. At first glance, then, this would appear to be another case in which an angry and depressed person takes out his hostility (and it is almost invariably a “he”) in a violent way. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel joins the sad list of crazed attackers that includes the killers at the Columbine and Sandy Hook schools. On the other hand, he was ethnically a Muslim, which automatically…
Read More
…of forced “conversion therapy” involving drugs and electroshock treatment. France: Paris moves to create LGBT movement archive The Paris city council is planning to open an archive to “preserve documentation of the LGBT movement in France from the 1960s onwards.” Russia: Activists attacked with acid at LGBT family conference A man reportedly threw some kind of acid on six activists leaving an LGBTIQ+ family conference held in Moscow on November 11…
Read More
…s caught in a nightmarish bureaucratic Catch-22 in which the government of France—where one of the men is from—will not recognize their marriage and thus their adoption of their son. Pink News reports that there are at least a dozen same-sex couples in a similar situation who “have been told that they need to get divorced if they want legal rights.” The Washington Blade reports that activists in Latin America are watching the Trump administration’…
Read More
…the story, she returns home, opens Google India, and tracks down the phone number for the sweet shop her grandfather mentioned. Within seconds, she has called the store on her smart phone, and Yusuf’s grandson—who answers—has likewise opened Google to research visas for a reunion too long denied. We can understand the implications of this storyline by putting it into conversation with its longer historical context. The logic of the plot—that Googl…
Read More
…r pledge cards and enlist volunteers to canvass potential voters and staff phone banks. He said that the positive responses to his phone pitch for Prop 47 were an unexpected surprise. “It’s been amazing to see how many people were supporting this,” Hakim said. “There are more people that think about justice than I realized!” The momentum for collaborative Muslim faith-based activism around Prop 47 began to build earlier this year, when Jawaid and…
Read More
…serious danger to women and trans men, were introduced by Herndon. In her phone interview with RD, Abbott brought up the December 22 service as an example of likely illegal political organizing by a tax-exempt church, which she says is one of her biggest concerns. A self-described “fourth-generation Bonner County girl” who forthrightly states, “I deeply care about consensus issues; I hate political parties,” Abbot referred to the year of Trump’s…
Read More