Religion Dispatches
…chool boards “to create and foster an environment” in public schools that “promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” In addition to state-approved textbooks, teachers “may use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze,…
Read More…institutions like the 1788 Constitution, the presidency, and the military code of honor. But at what costs do we maintain a revered institution like the military code of honor? Holocaust levels of genocide threaten the Syrian Kurds. Why isn’t the prospect of mass murder enough to make Mattis reconsider the politics of personal honor? If that grim prospect is not enough, what is? Mattis’ deferral to presidential rights, for instance, should challe…
Read More…ons with tax exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. Those changes were set in motion after record amounts of campaign spending by (c)(4) groups in 2012, and tea party complaints that their applications for (c)(4) status were improperly denied for partisan reasons. Although Congressional Republicans tried to make a scandal of the application process, further congressional investigation showed both conservative and progr…
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…gh the nation’s Supreme Court on August 1 overturned the part of the civil code of the state of Puebla that restricts marriage to a man and a woman. Canada: Christian landlord evicts gay tenant Caleb Pheloung was evicted from the Vancouver room he was renting when his landlord learned that he was gay and said it violated her “Christian values” to rent a room to him. British Columbia’s Human Rights Code, which bars discrimination on the basis of se…
Read More…f Family Watch International, and Scott Lively, who has traveled the globe promoting anti-gay policies. RD Contributor Jay Michaelson has published a Daily Beast commentary on Rick Warren’s work in Africa, which he says “may well reflect the sense among Christian conservatives that America has already been lost, but Africa may yet be saved. Here, the culture war has been won by Satan; there, it may still be won by God.” Churches, schools, and fait…
Read More…ion as seen in last year’s rally against revising Article 972 of the Civil Code to change the term “man and woman” to “two parties” in the article concerning marriage and the term “father and mother” to “parents” in the Civil Code. Philippines: Anti-Discrimination Ordinance Passes Quezon City Council The city council of Quezon City unanimously approved an anti-discrimination ordinance this week, expanding a law from 2003 that banned anti-gay housi…
Read More…eek on a legal ruling it said “rubbishes anti-gay law” in the country. The latest edition of The Legal Agenda, a quarterly magazine published by the non-governmental organization of the same name, reported Tuesday that, in January, Judge Naji al-Dahdah cleared a transsexual woman of having a same-sex relationship with a man, an act criminalized under Article 534 of Lebanon’s penal code. “It’s a big step; it shows we’re moving in the right directio…
Read More…legislation, notably the relevant provisions of the Aceh Islamic Criminal Code, which criminalizes sexual relations among consenting adults of the same sex,” as well as to “guarantee the rights of…[LGBT] persons, through effective legal action against incitement to hatred and violent acts, as well as by revising legislation that can have discriminatory effects.” Meanwhile, an effort by Islamist groups to include a ban on unmarried couples having…
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…oposed legislation that would update the Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code, so that “gender identity and gender expression would be considered a distinguishing feature of a person, and one’s right to live free of discrimination, harassment and violence based on that feature would be recognized and protected by the Canadian legal system.” Africa: A call for reflection on advocacy structures and strategies Last week Pambazuka News published “Wh…
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…ne. Humans should be mature enough to develop and maintain our own ethical code informed by scientific knowledge of its consequences, he argues, rather than rely on an ancient moral code inscribed in scriptural texts of human origin composed in a different era for reasons that no longer apply. Dawkins finally brings the story to where Rev. Adam Sedgwick feared that it would end 150 years ago when he read this pre-publication copy of Origin of Spec…
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