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‘Rising Global Tide’ Of Anti-Gay Crackdowns; More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…later brought some respite for the city’s embattled LGBT community, whose members were able to socialize more openly at house parties and bars. But that respite came to an abrupt end after the military takeover that brought President Abdel Fattah Sisi to power in 2013. Hundreds of gay and transgender people have been rounded up, part of a broad crackdown that has seen political dissidents jailed, public protests harshly put down and the country’s…

Orthodox TV Channel Offers Gays One-Way Ticket Out of Russia; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…us grounds,” notes Bloomberg. According to The Independent, all six Muslim members of parliament voted in favor of marriage equality. Merkel, who said she recently changed her mind about gay couples adopting children and decided to allow a question-of-conscience vote after having dinner with a lesbian couple who care for eight foster children. about adoption, voted against the law but 75 members of her conservative coalition joined left-wing parti…

On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

By Ilana E. Strauss

…Physicsworld.com user asks, “What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?” Where infinity merges with the earth When you dig into pi, you encounter questions that are as much theological as mathematical: is there a pattern to the universe? Or is it fundamentally random? And how do we reckon with the infinite? Some people have always insisted that there must be a pattern behind pi. If only h…

Like Azusa Street Baptized into Bureaucracy: Mexico’s Flourishing LLDM Church Loses its Apostle

By Michael Schulson

…eligious institution. The 2010 Mexican census reported only around 200,000 members, but that number may well be low (the Mormon church in Mexico has argued that the religious count was inaccurate). Independent scholarly estimates for LLDM’s worldwide population range as high as seven million. Still: LLDM is big. And it’s not easy to classify the church that has emerged. In terms of theology and ritual, its flavor is firmly pentecostal and charisma…

What Will Orthodox ‘Republicanity’ Look Like?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…that Democrats need to get better at telling stories than at crunching the numbers, in this battle of the budget, the numbers actually matter. Hell, it’s a fight about numbers. And balance. And the virtue of justice. What this latest budget battle, and the question of raising the debt ceiling, and the straw polls are revealing, is just how Tertullian a wing of the Republican Party has become. It not only offers absurd arguments with a straight fac…

Busy Days For ‘eBay of Prophecy’

By Bill Berkowitz

…cular Coalition for America, “an organization representing atheists in the military” has petitioned Obama “to take steps to eliminate what it calls ‘an overall culture of religious intolerance’ in the armed forces.” Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said: “The usual critics of religious expression in the public square have broadened their religion-scrubbing complaints to the military, based on little more than the…

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…cation, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourg…

The March for Life: Grassroots Movement or Agitprop?

By Patricia Miller

…for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people…

Diplomatic Suckerhood: Why Israel Is Fighting Toward its Own Demise

By Ira Chernus

…en were those demands not being made, the idea that a nation with far more military power than any of its neighbors is being “driven to its knees,” simply because people want them to stop expanding settlements (which are illegal in the first place) seems out of touch with reality. And, to be precise, it’s not just “people” who want them to stop expanding settlements. It’s the most powerful person in the world, the President of the United States. W…

Tutu’s Daughter Marries Woman & Loses Anglican Priest License; Romanian Anti-Marriage Activists Get 3 Million Signatures; Australian State Apologizes For Harmful Sodomy Laws; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…nths period. Homosexuals and transsexuals are not required to serve in the military. Prior to the ratification of the new regulation, both categories were exempt from military draft under a section of the law which classified homosexuality and transsexuality as a mental disorder. However, after the ratification of the new regulations, although homosexuality and transsexuality are still categorized as mental disorders, a specific section of the law…