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BYU Skinny Jean Controversy: Sexism, Sizeism, or Standards?

…rnal policing of dress standards in Mormon communities. Conservative dress appears to be taking on new prominence as a boundary marker for Mormons, separating observant from non-LDS and less observant LDS people. The Word of Wisdom—the Mormon dietary code that prohibits consumption of tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco—was upgraded from recommendation to commandment in the early twentieth-century, at a time when formerly isolated LDS communities in…

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UPDATED: Oklahoma Personhood Bill Not Dead…

…treat fetuses as persons at all stages of biological development. So what happened? Well, there was opposition, of course. People got nervous about the things that generally make a lot of people nervous about giving legal rights to fertilized eggs. What about in vitro fertilization? What about ectopic pregnancies? What about the liability of medical providers? The bill’s sponsors, Sen. Brian Crain of Tulsa and Rep. Lisa Billy of Purcell, and its s…

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Catholic Bishops End Family Synod With Little To Say To Gays; World Congress of Families Has Plenty To Say, None of it Good; How Same-Sex Marriage Came to a Buddhist Temple in Japan; Global LGBT Recap

…donesia’s conservative Aceh province has enacted a strict Islamic criminal code, local government officials said late on Friday, criminalizing adultery, homosexuality, and public displays of affection outside of a legally recognized relationship. Aceh is the only province in the Muslim-dominated country to adhere to sharia, Islamic law, which puts it at odds with other provinces where the vast majority of the population practices a moderate form o…

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In Russia It Is Now a Crime to Insult Someone’s Religious Feelings

…lassic liberalism and those of the communitarian critique of liberalism, I appreciate the classic US approach to free speech while recognizing that it cannot immediately be exported as one-size-fits-all. Still, I remain opposed in principle to prison time for blasphemy as such (that is, apart from other aggravating circumstances such as, say, direct incitement of violence against members of a religious group). I would caution against undue alarmis…

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Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

…attacks. “I call on The Gambia to fulfil its international obligations to promote and protect the human rights of all persons without discrimination, to repeal all provisions of the Criminal Code that criminalize relations between consenting adults and to put in place an immediate moratorium on arrests on the basis of such laws,” the High Commissioner said. Amnesty International also sounded the alarm on Gambia this week, highlighting the detenti…

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Famous Atheists, Fat Ministers, Papal Tweets, and a Mega-Hoax

…atican, and the World Evangelical Alliance have worked together to issue a code for how Christians ought to evangelize. No word on how this code effects the use of Chick Tracts. A village in the Philippines celebrates its patron saint, John the Baptist, with a Mud People Festival. Reminds me of my weekend at Bonnaroo 2004. The Pope tweeted—from an iPad, no less. It’s all part of the Vatican’s new multimedia news portal, news.va. Biblical criticism…

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Black Women and the Sacred: With “Lemonade,” Beyoncé Takes Us to Church

…cularly black religious folk traditions? To make lemonade out of lemons is code for powerful spiritual practice in the hands of women. Since the beginning of chattel slavery in this country, black women have been magically making something from nothing, conjuring up lives for themselves and their families with nothing but crumbs, dust and ashes. “By giving us an ensemble cast of black women and girls, with songs of joy and pain, beauty and sorrow,…

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Creationism: Don’t Use the “C-Word”

…nts of the law will try to make them sound representative. The same thing happened in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005 when school board members decided to grab onto the phrase (not the reality) of “intelligent design” to promote religious doctrine. The board members, as in Livingston, Louisiana, were as ignorant of the limits of the scientific case against strict Darwinism as they were of the content of intelligent design theory. The scientists and p…

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Should I Scream and Shout, Should I Speak of Love?: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, Part 2

…n of the hermaphrodite in Fellini’s Satyricon. To be sure, Bowie’s a freak—code for “fag” among the real-life Jeff Spicolis in my junior high class, righteous dudes whose idea of total radness is firing up a beer bong, dropping the needle on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and watching The Wizard of Oz with the sound turned off. But he’s so heart-stoppingly beautiful, in such a confusingly feminine way, that he short-circuits my teenage brain,…

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Alums Speak Out Against Anti-Gay Christian College

…agons and strenuously defending the “homosexual practice” forbidden in its code of ethics, the school is reaching out. 51 of the school’s 92 faculty members responded, seeking “forgiveness for ways we might have added to your pain.” “We’re hoping to do a better job of talking to and loving each other and holding true to our scriptural principles,” said Jane Higa, the school’s vice president for student life. That doesn’t mean the school’s policy w…

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