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Religious Conservatives Mobilize Internationally Against Spanish Nondiscrimination Bill; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…a: Asian feminists denounce murder of journalist Feminists who gathered in Thailand last week for the Asia Pacific Feminist Forum denounced the murder of Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh as “an emblematic example of the attacks our governments have enabled through their support to right wing vigilante groups and their own attacks on civil society feminism and human rights”: A fearless journalist, Lankesh wrote about and ridiculed the rise of author…

Chatting with Myanmar’s Buddhist “Terrorist”

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…h Gnanasara, but insisted that their agendas were separate. Nonetheless, a number of news reports claim that Wirathu’s 969 and Gnanasaara’s BBS movements are in league, and there are reports that Wirathu has been in contact with Buddhist monks from Thailand’s southern border with Malaysia, where pitched battles have been taking place between Buddhists and the Muslim majority in that locale. Wirathu said it wasn’t just Buddhists who were concerned…

Gay Mormons Tie the Knot

By Johnny Townsend

…, the friend I’d gone to the party with said, “Ask the host for that guy’s number. He was really into you.” That was the first inkling I had that Gary was even gay. A week later we had our first date. In discussing our histories, we learned some intriguing facts. We’d both been pre-med students. We’d both earned English degrees. We had both been teachers. We’d both been bank tellers. Oh, and we were both ex-Mormon, having both served missions in R…

Burma Bans Time Magazine’s “Buddhist Terror” Issue

By Alan Senauke

…to the consumers.” And in a new and worrying development, according to the Thailand-based independent news source for Burma, the Irrawaddy, “About 200 senior Buddhist monks convening in Rangoon on Thursday have begun drafting a religious law that would put restrictions on marriages between Buddhist women and Muslim men.” Bearing Witness: A Personal Background My first visit to the Burmese border was with a Buddhist witness delegation in 1992. This…

Morality Police, Jihadists, Religious Competition, Grindr, & Americans Abroad: Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…nes of arrestees to try to entrap other gay men. In related news, the smartphone app Grindr, which allows gay men to find each other, announced it would permanently disable an option that allowed people to see their distance from other users. There have been reports that police in Egypt and Iran have used Grindr to hunt and arrest gay men. Jamaica: Activist Drops Challenge to Sodomy Law in Face of Threats A Jamaican gay-rights activist dropped his…

Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

By Mark D. Jordan

…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…

The Sacred and the Dead: Operator, Can You Help Me?

By Maren Haynes

…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…

In the Aftermath of the “Himalayan Tsunami”

By Luke Whitmore

…(first as Uttaranchal) in 2000, the region has seen a massive rise in the number of visitors to the region, especially by the growing Indian middle class. Roads widened and hotels and visitor services grew exponentially. Building a new hotel or a restaurant by the side of the road felt like a smart investment—even when the road was near a river. Kedarnath saw the building of new cell phone towers, a railway reservation office, helicopter landing…

“You’ve Never Met a Muslim”

By Hussein Rashid

…slipped into the dorms we couldn’t get signed into, and posted hundreds of cheap notices printed on 8.5 x 11 paper. We’d invited a prominent imam to speak and ordered a delicious dinner, convinced that the perpetually elastic undergraduate stomach would be the gateway to the soul. The next morning, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were struck, thousands were murdered, New York City went into lockdown, and our community was sent reeling. Eve…

Recovering From Rejection: The Second Coming of Ted Haggard

By Wendy Norris

…nks. You have to determine that on your own.” Haggard’s weekly Oval Office phone calls and grip and grin NAE photo ops with former President George W. Bush are now mere vestiges of an old life, prior to what he calls the “crisis.” At New Life, which Jeff Sharlet described as “not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them,” worship services were extravagant multimedia, fog machine-choked productions, in which Haggar…