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Is the Ryan VP Pick Good for Mormonism?

By Joanna Brooks

…in. I think his experience as a leader in the Church for the last 40 years will be totally ignored. Mormonism drops out of his official bio around age 21….

Photo of the Day: Uganda’s First Gay Pride Parade

By Peter Montgomery

…Earlier this month in the lake town of Entebbe (where the president’s official residence is located), Uganda’s first gay pride parade took place. Abdoulaye Bah writes: In spite of widespread homophobia on the part Ugandan politicians and the public, the event was reportedly well attended. Ugandan police raided the event and detained LGBT activists who were later released. Now this is courage: Photo courtesy of David Robinson…

Paul Ryan: “This Is Not Theology…”

By Peter Laarman

…slumps without ultimately leaving a crushing debt burden. In contrast, the royalist approach—trickle-down—or whatever you want to call it has been conclusively shown not to do jack to revive an economy in the kind of doldrums ours has been experiencing. So it is an ardent belief in the efficacy of things unseen that Ryan/Romney are selling us. It is fundamentally theological at its core. It has its Church Fathers (von Mises, Hayek, Friedman) and i…

Richard Land Steps Down, But Not Out of the Culture Wars

By Aaron Weaver

…ty has written that during the 2004 reelection campaign Land became the “unofficial spokesperson for the president on values issues, telling stories about personal encounters with Bush and his deep faith.” Noticing Land’s growing influence in American politics, Ted Olsen of Christianity Today asked in 2002 whether Richard Land was the new leader of the religious right. Without a Bush on the presidential ballot, Land lost his way in 20…

Archbishop of Chicago Accuses Emanuel of McCarthyism Over Chick-fil-A

By Sarah Posner

…y? One is welcome to believe that, of course; but it should not become the official state religion, at least not in a land that still fancies itself free. Surely there must be a way to properly respect people who are gay or lesbian without using civil law to undermine the nature of marriage. There’s an embedded fallacy there, of course, that gay marriage “undermine[s] the nature of marriage,” and that it’s somehow constitutionally impossible to gr…

Marriage Equality: A Civil Religious Moment

By Jay Michaelson

…ur country is a place in which ethical values are adjudicated, even if our official institutions officially deny it. Fortunately, one of those values has to do with the separation of church and state, so the zone of adjudication is somewhat limited. But there’s no sense in denying that civil religion is at play in these contemporary debates, and has been in similar debates for two hundred and thirty years. My intention is neither to be fatalistic…

The Curious Case of Mormons and LGBT Rights

By Alan Michael Williams

…t no longer wants to exclude. In December 2012, the Church launched the website “Mormonsandgays.org,” which points to a new tactic for a new generation; the “closet” is now considered an ecclesiastical hindrance. Openness about gayness can seem revolutionary on its face, but queer discourse is being sifted through church protocol with an aim to fortify “love the sinner, not the sin” ideology, rather than tear it down. As an example, in the summer…

Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ited Nations panel went to the heart of the matter in rejecting the church officials’ claims that they were responsible for enforcing the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child only within the geographical limits of Vatican City and not globally through their power over the Roman Catholic diocesan hierarchy.” Church officials and their conservative allies are angry over the report’s suggestion that the Catholic Church’s opposition to…

Historic Prayer by Woman at LDS General Conference Signals Growing Concern with Gender Equality

By Joanna Brooks

…Church’s global proselytizing missions—an advance that follows a surge in numbers of women missionaries. Some observers believe that the changes are part of a concerted LDS Church effort to bolster its rates of retention among younger women. Increased attention to the theology of gender and equality is also evident, both among rank-and-file Mormons and on the part of leaders. Last month, advocates of women’s ordination to the Mormon priesthood—a…

Conservative Mag: Glenn Greenwald Hates America

By Rob Shryock

…Wahhaj. CAIR, a Muslim civil liberties group, has long been a cog in any number of far-right conspiracy theories—Spencer refers to them as a “notorious Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood Front Group.” Although CAIR’s past isn’t entirely spotless, the overarching conspiracy theories are utterly bogus. According to an article in the Times, “more than one [U.S. government official] described the standards used by critics to link CAIR to terrorism as…