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Texas Pastor: Christians Claiming “Religious Persecution” Are Actually Just “Selfish”

By Sunnivie Brydum

It’s not every day that a Baptist pastor based in Texas urges his congregants to be kinder and gentler when thinking or arguing about religious liberty. But that’s exactly what Mark Wingfield, an associate pastor at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, did in his Monday column for the Dallas Morning News. Despite the conservative and legal hand-wringing, it’s not actually hard to tell the difference between “religious persecution and selfishness,”…

Gay Marriage Supporters Rally People of Faith for Washington’s November Vote

By Nicole Neroulias

…y adept at assuring voters that gay marriage won’t lead to polygamy. A few phones over, Howard Heller, 58, of Burien, enthusiastically told voters about his own “selfish” reason for wanting R-74 approved: so that he may legally wed Carla Robinson, whose Ohio birth certificate can’t be amended to reflect that she changed genders as an adult. “We would like to get married, but the only way we can right now is if I change my gender, and I’m not throw…

Did the Pope Embrace the Prosperity Gospel?

By Sarah Posner

…search of property records show James and Betty Robison live in a “modest” Texas home appraised by Tarrant County tax-assessors at $742,800. They also own one or more multi-million-dollar homes in Silverthorne, Colo., and have access to their large Robison ministry ranch and lodge in East Texas built with donor money. As I wrote last year, despite Trinity’s extensive investigation, the results of which it provided to the Senate Finance Committee,…

Pride Month & Prejudice; ‘Worrisome Time’ For LGBT People; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ciety,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report says human rights activists have been disappointed by President Joko Widodo’s “lackluster” defense of LGBT people. Sal…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…

Who’s to Blame for BP?

By David True

…those of us whose lifestyles are dependent upon a ‘religious’ devotion to cheap oil. The deepest irony of all is that BP, along with the other oil companies, has come to function as a god. The truth, buried beneath all the oil and punditry, is that our devotion to this false god has led to the suffering of innocents, in the oceans and beaches, in the marshes and ecosystems, and in our communities. We have been slow, too slow by far, to realize th…

The Racist Message of Do-Nothing Religion, Courtesy of Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick

By Kevin Healey

…tern is emerging. Perhaps it’s best captured in a recent headline from the Texas Tribune which read, “Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says America must turn to God to heal racism.” Is this the spiritual wisdom that will bring us together, or more of the same complacency with racialized religious privilege that has come to characterize today’s Republican Party? It depends, of course, on what (or who) you mean by “America.” And what you mean by “God.” Not to m…

Texas Man Indicted for Mosque Bomb Threat

By Hussein Rashid

Last week a Texas man was indicted on charges of obstructing religious freedom for threatening to blow up a mosque in Tennessee. The story is important in its own right, but it is also part of a pattern of a misdirected focus on Muslims in a culture of Islamophobia, a culture of hatred that has become so extreme that even conservatives are backing off. The same week this Texan alleged terrorist is indicted, a homeless man in NYC decided to “figh…

State as Executioner: Rick Perry Did Not Invent the Death Penalty

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ed statements of his confidence in justice as administered by the State of Texas. The Supreme Court took a slightly different view of Texas justice, and the reason has everything to do with the issue that is intimately bound up in the long history of the death penalty in America: race. In the second, sentencing phase of Duane Buck’s original trial, the prosecutor mentioned a statistical study suggesting that young black felons were far more likely…