Religion Dispatches
…presentatives turned away nearly two hundred Mormon women seeking stand-by tickets to a restricted men’s-only session of the faith’s semi-annual global conference. Mormon women travelled from as far away as New York, Florida, and Germany to take part in the collective action organized by the group Ordain Women as a gentle and symbolic demonstration against pervasive gender segregation in LDS Church administration and leadership. All observant men…
Read More…ass. A stranger, upon learning that I don’t have one of the highly-coveted tickets to the Sunday Conference sessions, spontaneously offers me his last extra. Mitt Romney would blend right in amongst the crowds here. But so would Marco Rubio. Or Antonio Villaraigosa. Or any clean-cut man in a white shirt and tie, any woman in Sunday dress with a baby stroller. I try to strike up a conversation with an African woman dressed in a pagne. “Where are yo…
Read More…” I was flabbergasted at what I was hearing—a staunch Republican switching tickets. It wasn’t long before my shock increased when my mother later that same morning said of McCain, “I can’t vote for him. He acts like he’s supposed to just be elected without doing anything.” When I asked if she would vote for Obama, she hedged. “I don’t have to vote for anybody.” True, she doesn’t, but I hate to think she might not vote for Obama simply because he’s…
Read MoreWhile a number of conservative Christian leaders raise questions about Glenn Beck’s Mormonism, Worldview Matters’ host Brannon Howse continued his attack in a conversation with Kirk Cameron about why Cameron did not participate in Glenn Beck’s Divine Destiny. Howse marveled at the “thick irony” wherein Cameron (the actor who played Buck, the converted journalist warning about the “demonic spirituality of a one world religion” in the Left Behind m…
Read More…er skirt. Second, it seems hypocritical: you’ll host a concern for and buy tickets to see a female performer sing songs about things that are totally haram (according to different opinions), but not if she’s wearing clothing you find inappropriate? From the artist’s point of view, it also seems like a seems like an affront. It compromises the artists’ “package deal” of music, image, and stage presence, the latter two of which sometimes include sca…
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…addressed, I wouldn’t find it so disturbing. Were Detroit’s finest giving tickets to Speedo-clad gentlemen terrorizing Americas beaches and public pools, I think they’d have a case. I think it’s safe to say that for most people what is ultimately repugnant about the aforementioned policies in some Islamic societies today is not their religious inspiration, but their ultimately tyrranical nature, the imposition of the opinions of one segment of so…
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…ents, booked an on-campus venue, and began to advertise the event and sell tickets. Then, 11 days before the drag fundraiser was set to take place, WT President Walter Wendler, who has a record of inserting his right-wing Christian bias into his public roles, unilaterally canceled the performance via a pedantic email. Seidel tells the story of the drag show cancelation at West Texas A&M (clip=5.5 minutes): Much of the moralizing communique was cou…
Read More…Back from my Bloggingheads hiatus, I talk with Get Religion’s Mollie Hemingway about whether Mitt Romney’s plan to discuss his Mormonism tonight at the Republican National Convention benefit his candidacy: And we also discussed the significance of the fact that Barack Obama is the only Protestant on both presidential tickets: …
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…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…
Read More…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…
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