Religion Dispatches
…espite complaints by U.S. conservatives that it threatens Lively’s rights. India: Resistance to Re-Criminalization but Uncertain Future for Legislative Fix In a show of defiance against the Indian Supreme Court’s recent ruling re-criminalizing homosexuality, a record 5,000 people turned out for Mumbai’s gay pride celebration last Saturday. (See photos here.) The Voice of America explores the response of India’s gay community to the ruling: “Despit…
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…ern celebrity to don a bindi, or Coldplay the first English artists to use India as an exotic backdrop, the backlash from the Indian community was fierce. *** Breanna grew up in an atheist household in San Francisco, but lately she’s been searching for something more. “I’m in a physics program right now, and the more advanced you get in this stuff, the more you have to just shrug and admit you don’t know. So I started casting out for something to…
Read More…at his mother called their “ignorance” and “baggage” that they “bring from India.” They also began attending meetings of PFLAG in Toronto. May Warren wrote about the couple in The Star in April: Growing up in India, the Agarwals said, had no exposure to LGBTQ people and didn’t think that they knew any in their Canadian community. But once Rishi came out, they realized five of their friends’ sons were also gay. “Nobody would talk about it. They jus…
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…And most of its recent growth, in such developing Asian markets as China, India, and Russia, has been under the Amway name.” Despite hiring marketing executives to help revitalize the relaunch—and despite the fact that an FTC examination into Amway’s business practices concluded in 1979 that it was not an illegal pyramid scheme (because compensation is based on retail sales to consumers, and because salespeople are not paid for recruiting new col…
Read More…stice for Sisters criticized “dehumanizing” media coverage of the arrests. India: Legislature Rejects Decriminalization, UN Official Wants Court to Make ‘Enlightened’ Decision The legislature once again voted down a bill to decriminalize homosexuality. Juan Mendez, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment told Firstpost this week that he hopes the Supreme Court of India, which is reconsi…
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…s lived in distinct territories, and the Ottomans never ruled over greater India, a Muslim minority in India, under British rule, resented and feared British colonial aggression against an important symbol of their faith. So Shia and Sunni Muslims joined together to support what was traditionally a Sunni institution, the Caliphate. Fast forward a few decades to the Pakistan Movement, which grew out of concerns for the status of Muslim minorities i…
Read More…lating HAF with Dinanath Batra, the retired schoolteacher who sued Penguin India to “ban” the book in the Indian markets. “Similar to Mr. Batra,” Jerryson asserts, “Ms. Shukla considers religious organizations the controllers and arbitrators of academic discussion.” He then goes on to offer a dubious claim that he had been censored from offering comments on Shukla’s blog in the Huffington Post, since HAF—or any group or individual that writes for…
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…r evangelical opponents of yoga, part of the problem is that it comes from India. In discussing yoga’s roots in India, he characterizes it as “almost manically syncretistic.” Mohler warns that if that syncretism is allowed to further infect the United States, we will end up living in the unthinkable: a “post-Christian” nation. But this attempt to produce a monolithic vision of yoga ignores the fact that it, like religion itself, is anything but a…
Read More…cerns [the march] would provoke clashes between gays and their opponents”. India: Census Documents Nearly 500,000 Hijra We reported in May that India’s Supreme Court had ruled in favor of allowing transgender people to identify themselves as a “third gender” on official documents. Less than 30,000 people used that designation in registering for the recent general election, but data released from last year’s national census – which included a third…
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…s in allowing LGBT advocacy groups to register as nonprofit organizations. India: Mother places same-sex matrimonial ad Padma Iyer, a mother in India, garnered international attention when she placed the first same-sex “matrimonial ad” seeking a husband for her son. Some major papers turned down the ad, but Mumbai tabloid Mid-Day agreed to run it. Same-sex relationships have been illegal since a 2013 high court ruling reinstated a colonial-era sod…
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