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These Are the New Battlegrounds for LGBT Rights Under Trump

By Sunnivie Brydum

…s us to the final and overarching point of how to agitate for equality in Trump’s America: Get to Your Statehouses Even before Trump’s unlikely electoral victory, each new legislative session brought a cornucopia of anti-LGBT bills introduced in state legislatures around the country. Oklahoma introduced a whopping 27 anti-LGBT bills at the beginning of the 2015-2016 session. By March, activists on the ground had defeated all of those bills, as had…

Can Religion Professors Save the Planet?

By Ivan Strenski

…etings, attended by well in excess of 9,000 attendees, require significant national and international air travel, nearly a week’s stay in hotels—not known for their commitment to a “green” environmental ethic—as well as increasingly cavernous convention centers, similarly unknown for their dedication to energy conservation, locavore provisioning or sustainability. More than that, we learn that Zoloth was responsible for pressing program chairs at…

Netanyahu’s Speech, Lane’s Trip, and the Impossibility of Boycotts

By Sarah Posner

…ecap: two left-leaning watchdog groups called on members of the Republican National Committee to forego the trip to Israel. Not surprisingly, RNC members did not much care what People for the American Way or the Southern Poverty Law Center think of the AFA, the American Renewal Project, or their Holy Land trip. Even the Anti-Defamation League calling the trip “inappropriate” failed to move these Republican Party leaders to reconsider their decisio…

Gingrich Downplays Adelson Money, Stokes Fear of “Second Holocaust” at Florida Church

By Sarah Posner

…rting Rick,” Jill Duggar, 20, told me. “He is a humble servant, he is the true conservatives in the race.” She insisted that support for Santorum is not wavering even in the face of polls showing him significantly behind both Romney and Gingrich. For this one-of-19 daughter of a reality show that depicts a fundamentalist Christian view of the role of women, motherhood, and reproduction, supporters look at Santorum and say, “hey, he’s like us, he’s…

Bishops Seek Expanded Definition of “Federal Funding” to Curtail Abortion

By Patricia Miller

…cally legal, logistically almost impossible to access. As a result, former national anti-abortion powerhouses like the National Right to Life Committee, which spent decades on futile attempts to pass a federal human life amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade, have faded to the periphery. In their place are the Catholic bishops, who use their religious authority to claim to represent broad-based ecumenical opposition to abortion. As Adele Stan noted in…

The Tea Party, the Blind Man, and the Elephant: Part 2

By Julie Ingersoll

…e Constitution. This doesn’t change my view about what is happening at the national level, what is at the root of many of the views these groups espouse, or what influence they are likely to bring to government should they gain control. But the disconnect between the national level and the local level is real. The invocation of “moral values” illustrates what is happening really well. While the “moral values” remained undefined at the local meetin…

MLK Monument That Never Was, is a Reminder of the King Too Often Ignored

By Ed Simon

…ential of America. As only the fourth non-president with a memorial on the National Mall, and the first African American, King’s statue would be rightly seen as a proud moment whereby the nation recognized historical injustices, and honored the seminal figure who fought against those injustices. However, from another vantage point the memorial can be seen as inadvertently eliminating that which was gloriously radical, subversive, revolutionary, em…

Espionage Allegations Against Russian Church Raise Religious Freedom Issue in Ukraine

By Katherine Kelaidis

…e calling it a success, claiming to have found cash in various currencies, Russian propaganda, and “dubious” Russian citizens inside the monastery—you know, the stuff you’re likely to find in a center for espionage. The raid was the most recent and visible example of a growing concern that the Russian Orthodox Church is operating as more than an instrument of soft power for the Putin-regime, but might actually be involved in subordinating Russian…

LifeSite Complains that Local Boy Scout Chapter is Not Homophobic Enough

By Katie Toth

…tely broke his church’s ties with the Twin Cities group, and announced the rupture to his congregation, after learning the group had permitted open homosexuality “for years.” Although the split was amicable, he said, he was alarmed not to have known about the Council’s divergence from national policy earlier. While LifeSite repeatedly emails the Boy Scouts to confirm how homophobic they are really, the 2.8 million-strong youth organization is deal…

The Religious Implications of Nudity

By Steve A. Wiggins

…Eastern,” my daughter observes. There it is, out on the table. All of our national xenophobic paranoias combined with our Puritan prudishness mixing to form conflicted visions of who is safe and who is dangerous. Who should be profiled and who should not? Perhaps the woman directing me to the scanner had been profiled herself. I’m old enough to remember when flying was fun. More than once I’d arrived at the airport gate breathless from waiting a…