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Mexico’s Religious Conservatives Seek Anti-LGBT Constitutional Amendment, LGBT Activists Defend Secular Government; Cash From Qatar Funds ‘Traditional’ Family Activism Worldwide; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…In doing so it has readily joined forces with Mormons and the more reactionary parts of the Roman Catholic church. It has also helped fund a right-wing think tank set up by a former leader of Britain’s Conservative Party. In turn, these western groups seem content to accept support from a country where polygamy is legal, where gay sex — and, indeed, any kind of sex outside marriage — is a crime, where loveless arranged marriages are not uncommon,…

Holy Spit: Why Do Ultra-Orthodox Jews Spit at Christians?

By Shalom Goldman

…% of Israeli Jewish high school students polled did not think that Israeli Arabs are entitled to the full rights of citizenry. But despite the pessimistic tone taken by many, the organizers—committed to peaceful conflict resolution—ended the forum by announcing a series of lectures, tours, and encounters that would introduce Israeli Jews to the lives and concerns of their non-Jewish neighbors. And, somewhat encouragingly, they informed the attende…

The Return of Christian Terrorism

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…a assassin, saying that he acted with “righteousness and mercy.” Several years earlier, another member of Bray’s network of associates, Rachelle (“Shelly”) Shannon, a housewife from rural Oregon, had also attacked Dr. George Tiller as he drove away from his clinic in Wichita. She was arrested for attempted murder. When I interviewed Bray on several occasions in the 1990s, he provided a theological defense of this kind of violence from two differen…

The Moral Case for Trump?

By Eric C. Miller

…four decades of positioning themselves as a moral force in politics, they are in the awkward position of supporting—by wide margins—a profoundly immoral candidate. If Trump had been nominated by the Democrats, those evangelicals supporting him today would be howling at his glaring unfitness for office—and they would be absolutely correct to do so. But Trump is the Republican nominee, and white evangelicals have long dutifully supported the Republ…

“Mad to Be Saved”: On the Road as Cautionary Tale

By Jay Michaelson

…akens to the holiness of sex, embodiment, even sadness and rage. Ginsberg/Carlo Marx in the film On the Road, however, comes off merely as sexually frustrated. His sex with Dean isn’t redemptive, but a little pathetic, as Carlo yearns for a love that Dean can never fully give him. With the sensual spirituality (or spiritual paganism, if you like) secularized into mere “kicks,” the moral balance of On the Road lurches to one side. In the book, th…

OK Woman Politely Declines to Thank the Lord; Atheists Unite

By Becky Garrison

…atheist activism, RD reported last month that the Humanity Chaplaincy at Harvard, along with other nontheist organizations, raised significant funds to support two members of their community impacted by bombing during the Boston Marathon bombing, including one who lost both her legs. Also, according to Silverman, over 30,000 people showed up in person for the 2012 Reason Rally to present themselves as visible signs that nontheists do exist in a c…

What the Conservative Christian “Fake-Trans Bathroom Creeper” Has To Do With Suburban Anxiety

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…of gender identity as a tool for enacting it. And the people he wants to harm are the very people that patriarchal societies have imagined themselves to be protecting: those weak women and girls whose purity must be safeguarded. Now, what if we substitute “centers of commerce” for “public restrooms,” “modern secularism” for “fake-trans bathroom creeper,” and “Christian conservatives, especially suburban ones” for “those who care about protecting…

A Tale of Two Fascisms: ‘Douchey’ JD Vance vs. ‘Creepy’ Blake Masters

By Annika Brockschmidt

…gn. While Ohio has moved from swing state to red state over the last few years, Arizona has remained purple. While Trump won Arizona in 2016 decidedly, Biden beat him in 2020 by a thin margin. Masters, unlike Vance, was going up against an incumbent in Mark Kelly—always a disadvantage. Masters’ campaign also made a series of strategic mistakes, lagging far behind Kelly in raising money from donors (even with Thiel’s support), while Democratic atta…

Aliens, Nanobots, & Microbes: The Science of Secular Apocalypse

By Michael Schulson

…human extinction. You get things like Ray Kurzweil’s techno-rapture Singularitarianism [in which a superintelligence emerges and technological growth outpaces human understanding]. And then you get this new field of existential risk studies, where the conclusions are not dissimilar in many ways to a lot of the religious views. You know, there’s going to be some sort of catastrophic event in the future, perhaps we might even survive it, but we’ll…

I Ate A Bowl of Soup, and Now I’m Muslim

By Hussein Rashid

…o believing Muslims. Instead, we had Hydrox cookies, which were kosher, clearly marked by a little “k” in a circle. What I did not realize at the time was that it was an insidious Jewish plot to institute halacha in America, and thereby subject us to rule of a foreign law. The ultimate goal is to turn us all Jewish. If this story sounds outlandish, paranoid, and more than a little anti-Semitic, it is only the outgrowth of following the logic of Ro…