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Heterosexual Martyrs and Gay Saints: Did AIDS Coverage Clear the Way for LGBT Equality?

By Diane Winston

…als and to eventually see them as worthy of ordination and entitled to the sanction of marriage? Did reporting on these believers’ struggles around AIDS predispose other news consumers to rethink their own opinions? What about gays? Did the crisis affect their feelings about “straight” institutions such as religion and marriage, inadvertently fueling a desire to normalize? If so, did coverage of supportive congregations and loving families make a…

Clergy May Soon Find Taxes Soaring As Result of an Under-the-Radar Ruling

By Patrick Hornbeck

…700 to $800 million in lost tax revenue annually, according to one nonpartisan analysis. Crabb’s conclusion that this exemption violates the Establishment Clause is legally not farfetched. While there’s room to debate whether providing a tax exemption is identical to subsidizing religion directly, it’s hard to avoid reaching the conclusion that an exemption available only to clergy favors religious employees over secular ones. But like “under God”…

Religious Exceptions Not So Exceptional According to New Study

By Patricia Miller

…n effect bar their insurers from providing contraceptive coverage as specified under the accommodation designed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a consolidated case challenging the exemption in the spring. The large number of Catholic nonprofits currently using the accommodation and potentially seeking a broader exemption means that potentially thousands of women could lose contraceptive covera…

Malta Adopts Marriage Equality Over Objections of Catholics and Evangelicals; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ang Dipertua Agong is Malaysia’s monarch and responsible for defending the sanctity of Islam. He said the screening of such a movie would also be an insult to the Yang Dipertua Agong, who is the head of religion defending the sanctity of Islam in the country. ‘What is their intention, in promoting the movie and wanting to show it,’ Nordin told the Malaysian Insight. ‘It is as if there is an agenda to make homosexuality something acceptable. ‘We ur…

Kirk Cameron Joins the Anti-Mormon Chorus
(Sort Of)

By Julie Ingersoll

While 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…

The Sacred and the Dead: Truckin’ as a New American Pilgrimage

By Varun Soni

…the Grateful Dead collectively formed an intentionally itinerant community numbering in the tens of thousands, with their own customs, vernacular, art, and economy. In his explanation of the lure of the Grateful Dead to thousands of Deadheads around the country, Garcia ruminated, “maybe we’re just one of the last adventures in America.” Indeed, the promise of a great American adventure animated Deadheads to undertake an annual pilgrimage across th…

The New Age Fantasy of a Celtic Church that Revered Nature and the Divine Feminine Never Existed — So What?

By Ed Simon

…’s day. Fr. Ryan Jones, an Episcopal priest at the Eucharist Church in San Francisco, wrote last year that while he’d long dismissed the holiday as “an excuse for people to get sloshed on green beer or talk about leprechauns and four leafed clovers,” he’s come to see St. Patrick’s Day as a “powerful means of enfleshing the gospel.” For Jones, his appreciation for the saint was inculcated in the community of which he’s a member, an ecumenical fello…

“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…en and Ina May Gaskin, plus a few hundred of their hippie friends from San Francisco, had founded The Farm, an intentional community in Tennessee. There Ina May helped to start a midwifery center, and in 1977 wrote Spiritual Midwifery, for which she became well known. In her way, Ina May and her midwifery colleagues from The Farm were, like the BWHC, trying to reclaim women’s health for women. Like the BWHC, Gaskin continues to call for greater in…

New Anti-Gay Snake Oil for Religious Right

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…he faculty at Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Francisco.” Oh, and she has a female spouse, Academy Award-nominated ﬁlmmaker Dee Mosbacher, M.D., Ph.D., with whom she has a 35-year long relationship. Her research showed that children raised by lesbian parents “were rated signiﬁcantly higher in social, school/academic, and total competence and signiﬁcantly lower in social problems, rule-breaking, aggressive, and external…

Pastor of Kentucky Church Severed From Baptists Over LGBT Inclusion: Not Activism, Just Honesty

By Mike Greer

…years. I came about the time that folks from Burma began arriving in large numbers and uniting in membership with Crescent Hill, and much of my time in those early years was spent trying to figure out how in the world we might be able to be a unified body that includes people who don’t speak English, who have a completely foreign background and cultural experience. It took a lot of hard work but we reached a place a number of years ago where, whil…