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Synod ‘Fight for Soul’ of Catholic Church, Flap On English Translation of Key Report; Anti-Gay Law Advances in Kyrgyzstan; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ruth.” The truth, he added, is that homosexuality is wrong, and taking a so-called non-judgmental approach to it can only encourage its growth. “There is something worse than murdering a child,” Levin said. “Because, as the Talmud says, when you kill someone physically you don’t touch them spiritually. But when you lead a person into heinous sin, you kill them spiritually in this world and the next world.” All the hoopla led to a bit of bactrackin…

Policing Academic Freedom: A Book, a Controversy, and the Ominous Aftermath

By Michael Jerryson

…ization with around 8,000 members, is dismayed by Penguin Books India’s out-of-court settlement in which it has agreed to withdraw and destroy all copies of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History. This decision undermines freedom of expression and academic freedom, both of which are the foundations of serious scholarship. That Penguin India has made this decision absent a court decision and under pressure from an advocacy group is…

Norway Massacre Suspect Anders Behring Breivik, Hitler, & the Jerusalem Post Editorial

By Sarah Posner

…in Western Europe (with the exception of the UK and France) as we only have 1 million in Western Europe, whereas 800,000 out of these 1 million live in France and the UK. The US on the other hand, with more than 6 million Jews (600% more than Europe) actually has a considerable Jewish problem. But please learn the difference between a nation-wrecking multiculturalist Jew and a conservative Jew. He then offers clues as to why he targeted fellow Nor…

Heterosexual Martyrs and Gay Saints: Did AIDS Coverage Clear the Way for LGBT Equality?

By Diane Winston

…rested in the gay community and assumed their view reflected the population-at-large. The only stories that roused them were marked by sensationalism or conflict. As the dimensions of the AIDS epidemic emerged, these two themes—gay libertinism and religious condemnation—became frames for seeing the disease as a moral as well as medical problem. Even stories that were not about religious responses to AIDS often evoked the moral/medical axis. As the…

Arrests Made in Murders of Atheist Bloggers in Bangladesh, But Int’l Response to Violence Remains Anemic

By Murali Balaji

…thorities also worked closely with a radical Islamist group known as Jamaat-e-Islami to exact vigilante punishment—in the form of rapes and mass violence—on anyone seen as disloyal to West Pakistan. Hasib writes: “My family bears personal scars–my father, a Major was ambushed in his home and taken prisoner. His remains were discovered a year later in one of seven mass graves where five hundred bodies were buried. My mother and little sisters were…

The White Nationalist Fantasy of Ancient Christian-Muslim Conflict Would Get an ‘F’ in History Class

By Tony Keddie

…enesis 9:3-6 and are required of Gentiles according to Acts of the Apostles 15:19-20 in the Syriac version of the Bible and other texts popular among Syriac Christians. They are also stipulated in the Qur’an (5:3). Based on this and other common practices, scholar Holger Zellentin has described Syriac Christianity and early Islam as sharing a common legal culture. Earliest Islam fit within the spectrum of Eastern forms of Christianity so much that…

Make no Mistake, if There’s a War Between Russia and Ukraine, it Will be a Religious War

By Katherine Kelaidis

…g for land on which to build their New Jerusalem, ensuring that lots of non-Western Europeans suffered and died as a consequence of this internal conflict. Similarly, the tensions that motivated the terrorists in New York, Paris, and London, were largely internal to Islam; they were responding to debates over how Muslims ought to respond to Western modernity, after centuries outside, and frequently in opposition to, its powerful allure. As the upr…

Turkish Police Move Against Activists Who Defied Pride Ban; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…its own military base outside Bishkek, before enthusiastically copying anti-western legislation in the Kremlin’s legal arsenal. First came a virtual clone of Moscow’s offensive on NGOs, with legislation demanding all groups receiving external funding declare themselves as “foreign agents”, targeted at human rights groups, including those advocating for the LGBT community. Then, in March 2014, MPs from the ruling coalition announced the “anti-gay p…

Is Bill Barr’s Belief in a Powerful President Actually Religious? A ‘High Papal’ Fable

By Ivan Strenski

…Jesus with the ideal of monogamy by “conceptualizing desire” in binary homo-/hetero- fashion. Holland celebrates the way that Jesus’ teaching here permits Kraft-Ebbing to put his compassionate stamp of approval on homosexuality. How, one might ask? Well, provided that homosexuals remain monogamous, they are all right with the savior! Is this a variant of “the seamless union of Christian sin with Christian love,” or just clever dialectic? How, as w…

Country Trumpkins

By Daniel Schultz

…attempted to make the case that Democrats had betrayed “inner city African-Americans.” It was a curious choice of topics, given that West Bend is a small—very white—city in an exurban area about 45 minutes from downtown Milwaukee. Trump literally spoke in the main hall of the county fairgrounds. I happen to know so much about it because one of my former churches is in the same county. They called it a town, but it wasn’t even a wide spot in the r…