Religion Dispatches
…ious liberty.” Certainly, the religious right has made “religious liberty” code for “we reserve the right to discriminate against LGBT people with impunity,” but I think some businesses ought to have the right to deal with who they want to deal with. A photographer, or a baker, for example, should be able to serve who they please. If their refusal to serve an LGBT person (or anybody else for that matter) leads to a lawsuit or a boycott, that’s the…
Read More…areers for women; and reforming the media such that 1950s gender norms are promoted and “sex and the city lifestyles” are discouraged. He claims the only other alternative to these “reforms,” which he acknowledges are restrictions on women’s rights, is “the creation of a network of surrogacy facilities in low cost countries and basically ‘outsource breeding,’” with the state as foster parent because “career obsessed” women would not prioritize car…
Read More
…nd active commitment to “social justice,” something that Beck has said are code words for Communism and Nazism. Look, Frank Capra wasn’t exactly known for his subtle messages. Yet, somehow, Beck manages to reinterpret the movie through an unregulated free-market ideological Ayn Rand prism and message of Christian conservatism. For real? Either Beck has never watched the movie, or he’s so conservatively deluded that he thinks Mr. Potter is the hero…
Read More…e antebellum South. And many people of color are well versed at linguistic code-switching depending on the context. So why should I be offended by Senator Reid’s astute observation? If anyone should be offended it should be the critical mass of Americans, of all racial, ethnic and political perspectives, who are so informed by the logic of white supremacy that they fail to interrogate the correlations between dark skin tone and negativity or light…
Read More
…gaging in religious offense (listed under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code) can face a prison sentence, a hefty fine, or an extra-judicial killing. Whatever the trigger is, and whether or not arrests are made, we see that violence often takes place shortly after. Often, these rumors spread via Facebook or WhatsApp. Soon, a mob will gather. They will destroy homes, shops, and places of worship belonging to the minority community. Law enforceme…
Read More…ay messages when spoken by anti-gay people, even if it is spoken in pretty code. Michael Jones over at Change.org celebrated Osteen’s appearance at the inauguration: “But give both Osteen and Parker some credit. Today was a day for the history books for LGBT politicians, and also a day where a socially conservative evangelical leader and a progressive lesbian mayor found some common ground in celebrating a victory.” This was written before Iloff’s…
Read More
…Kyrgyzstan, an impoverished country of 5.5 million, adopted a new criminal code in 1998 that made it legal. Kazakhstan and Tajikistan have also taken similar steps but the two other ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, have not. Kyrgyzstan would, however, be the first of them to ban “gay propaganda” among minors… “We supported this bill, because it reflects the hopes and expectations of our voters willing to protect th…
Read More…the only person who thinks this is an insane provision to have in the tax code? Medical science is evidence-based and faith is the “evidence of things not seen,” according to the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews. So I guess they’re really the same, right? Let’s fund them both! But no, no, and NO to any federal dollars for abortion, saith the good senator from Salt Lake. Hatch narrowly lost his push to get this prohibition into the Se…
Read More
…for the possibility of material support of terrorism charges under 18 U.S. Code § 2339B. Or, more justly, the concept of FTOs (and SDGTs) is dismantled especially in light of the recent evaluation by the Joint Regional Intelligence Center, a DHS-funded fusion center, that their influence is “diminished.” It’s naiveté to believe that de jure law will translate into de facto equity; however, the current inequities also must not stand. White national…
Read More…ana will be on Utah ballots in November). I’m no expert on Utah’s criminal code, but I have a strong suspicion that it might have something to say about Kirby’s actions. In Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Kate Manne argues that in patriarchal cultures, “a woman is regarded as owing her human capacities to particular people… her personhood is held to be owed to others, in the form of service labor, love, and loyalty. ” It seems obvious to me that…
Read More