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Religious Right Attacks Federal Bullying Intervention

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…aws would protect any religious persecution, since religion is a protected class under federal discrimination statutes. On the demagoguery side of the spectrum comes Buddy Smith, Executive Vice President of the American Family Association who asserted that kids can condemn homosexuality without being a bully: ”Activist adults essentially are saying that American parents who want their kids to avoid high risk homosexual sex acts and remain abstinen…

Sex and the Ummah

By Amina Wadud

…he grounds are equal but the procedures are not. Okay, so we enter in the 21st century along with every one else and some of the issues get raised here amongst Muslims like amongst non-Muslims. Some of them are sticky. For example, women I know (and some men) are working to keep the marriageable age somewhere near 18 years for both males and females. A number of Muslim countries have provisional marriageable age for girls at 16. Some of them have…

Prominent Evangelical Pundit Accuses Obama of “Abusing” Faith-Based Office

By Sarah Posner

…or” by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.) Lee Fang, the Center for American Progress blogger who broke the story, has more details on the funding this week and told me that the Chamber’s use of foreign funding for political attack ads “is unprecedented.” Anything else? I asked Wehner, aside from going after that well-known friend of Jesus, the Chamber of Commerce? His replies included Obama’s “off-putting tone;” “comity” giving way to “com…

Mormons, LGBT People Respond to Packer’s Talk

By Joanna Brooks

…os Angeles, she recalled, would sometimes reach out to feel her head for horns. Late in her life, she and I talked about homosexuality—we talked about everything—and she recalled back in the 1950s a boy who grew up on her block in her middle-class Los Angeles suburb, a child who she always knew was different, and kindly she asked, “I wonder what has happened to him? I wonder if everything turned out okay for him?” Kindness was the core of her Morm…

Al-Qur’an and Me

By Amina Wadud

…cal construct, I had already come upon in the Qur’an—although by using the phonetics alone. About the only thing that slowed down this rabid pace was becoming a mother. So I had two children (including one born in Libya, where the knots in my ear and my tongue were loosened) before I had a chance to pick up my love again. After one year in graduate school I spent a year in Cairo specifically for an intensive immersion study of the Arabic language….

The Real Context Of The “Taliban Dan” Ad

By Julie Ingersoll

…curriculum, and Barton’s role in that.) They believe in an entirely second-class status for women (some believe women shouldn’t vote). They are virulently hostile to gays and lesbians. They believe that any social safety net should be eliminated and replaced by church programs—available only to believers. (And they succeeded in getting an exemption from the health insurance mandate for believers.) So whether the Grayson ad takes Webster “out of co…

Bullies Flourishing with Christian Support

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…mented for years. “He was threatened to get beat up every day,” friend and classmate Nick Hughes said. “Sometimes in classes, kids would act like they were going to punch him and stuff and push him. Some people at school called him names,” Hughes said, saying most of those names questioned Lucas’ sexual orientation. And just to show that bullying isn’t merely a high school problem, there’s news of a Rutgers University freshman who killed himself a…

TLC Premieres Polygamy Reality Show Sister Wives

By Joanna Brooks

…me? Why am I peeking into these windowless bedrooms at middle-aged, middle-class blondes in fuzzy slippers and sweats? Why am I spending an hour of my life watching a middle-aged advertising salesman in suburban Utah standing there in the predawn hours in his sweats explaining where he keeps his clothes? And perhaps because I’m tuned in on assignment as a religion columnist I’m disappointed by the near absence of religion in the episode. Early in…

Birthday Blog

By Amina Wadud

…asion that I would be unlikely to forget. But this is only for those round numbers. There’s nothing that rings out of 58. I’ve got two more years, if I live, before I need to find the next big celebration. I’ve got time to plan still. But, why 5-year increments? Seems a bit arbitrary. Because I accepted Islam in one of those round figures, and spent the first ten years in such constant transition: first the religion itself and learning new things,…

Interfaith: Whose Faith?

By Amina Wadud

…t closed for high holidays but then there’d only be a half dozen of us per class. When I left home at 14, I lived with families of different faiths: Jewish, Unitarian Universalist, Catholic, and atheist. Questions of ultimate concern always interested me, and as soon as I got to college I actively pursued the answers given to these from faith systems outside my own. Eventually I came to live in a Buddhist ashram and practiced according to the prec…