Religion Dispatches
…s Facebook profile shows him wearing patches of the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia and sitting on a car with a license plate bearing the words “Confederate States of America.” He reportedly said, after sitting for an hour next to Pinckney and other worshippers at Emanuel, and after shooting them, and after a worshipper attempted to talk him out of reloading his gun, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our…
Read More…than 450 LGBT Ugandans leave the country, with 130 escaping to places like South Africa, Europe, and the United States. Fewer than 100 Ugandan LGBT refugees are known to other human rights and refugee organizations in the area, and those trying to resettle in the West can spend months or years waiting for their visas. Ugandan human rights workers say they know none of the individuals evacuated by FNUR nor the identities of FNUR’s Ugandan partners….
Read More…n moving forward with legislation to reflect the Supreme Court’s decision. South Africa: Call for inclusive sex education Advocates for sexuality education in South Africa are urging schools to move beyond the “when a boy loves a girl” narrative that is “totally dominant in sex education.” According to Pink News, “Despite South Africa in 2006 becoming the fifth country worldwide to legalise same-sex marriage, homosexual sex and relationships is a…
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…esn’t matter anyway. Their combination of gently-mocking disbelief in, and appreciation of, Joseph Smith’s revelations are already well known from a 2003 episode of South Park, “All About the Mormons,” which ends with a teased Mormon kid defending his faith: Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life, and a great family, and I have the Book of…
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…de a brick each for the Taung Pyone pagoda, leaving gaps in the walls. And apparently what keeps Min Gyi and Min Lay happy is chain smoking, dancing, and drinking their favourite tipple. “My nat likes to drink beer, wine, Johnny Walker and champagne”, says Mg Mg Kyi, who has been a nat-kadaw, or spirit medium, for 40 years – since he was 13. His first husband fell in love with him when he saw him dance. Most nat-kadaws are gay or transgender. Gay…
Read More…inence of openly lesbian and gay people in the anti-apartheid struggle led South Africa to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation when drafting its constitution of 1996 — the first country in the world to do so. Brazil’s post-junta constitutional guarantee of health care as a fundamental human right led the country in the 1990s to become a global pioneer in providing free and universal HIV medications. More recently, Argentina’s path-…
Read More…xecutive director, Sibongile Ndashe, described by Human Rights Watch as “a South African feminist lawyer.” The government also announced it had “suspended the business” of CHESA. From Pink News: In Tanzania, male homosexual sex carries a sentence anywhere between 30 years and life in prison. Their Colonial-era penal code criminalises anyone who “has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature.” Earlier this year, Tanzania stopped he…
Read More…ng the Bishop of trying to get Western countries to use their influence in Africa to help accomplish the “acceptance of homosexuality in Africa.” The IRD, bankrolled by conservative funders like the reclusive Howard Ahmanson, has, since the early 1980s, made it its mission to cause splits and dissension in Protestant denominations. According to Jim Naughton of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, who conducted an extensive study of the IRD: The IR…
Read More…, and in what manner to express or not express these rights. It’s when the code that translates these rights for us somehow ceases to function properly in the background that problems result. I want to suggest that often when problems crop up around religious or religiously-motivated speech in the United States, they often have less to do with rights per se than with the unwritten code that determines how these rights are to be taken. At least tha…
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…interests, for some this incident revealed that the people controlling the code have a lot of power. If one thinks that marketing agents put “Bible” in the code, then they might think of them as predatory, or presumptuous about U.S. Christians and their political affiliations. They might become angry that companies have such power in shaping the public’s perception of Christianity and, indeed, in shaping Christians’ own ideas about their communiti…
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