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Mormons Prepare to March in LGBT Pride Parades Nationwide

By Joanna Brooks

…en taught my whole life?” For example, my eighteen-year-old son received a phone call from the bishop for an interview to set him on the road to preparing for his missionary service. So we are in the hall, and I’m telling him, “You need to call the bishop.” My son looks at me and says, “Mom, I can’t do this.” We talked over many things he was concerned about. One of them was that he has an openly gay teacher who, he told me, “is one of the most sp…

Egypt Goes After Gays to Silence Islamist Critics; South Africa’s ‘Open Mosque’ is Closed; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…Center for Justice and Human Rights President Kerry Kennedy spoke with the Washington Blade this week about the “global problem” of anti-LGBT legislation. “It’s really important to recognize that this is not just an Africa problem,” said Kerry Kennedy during a telephone interview from New York. “It’s a problem wherever it happens in the world.” From the story: Uganda is among the more than 70 countries in which homosexuality remains criminalized….

Marriage Equality Coming To Taiwan In Spite of Religious Objectors?; Anti-Gay Ruling Sought By Indonesian Islamists Threatens Women & Poor Couples; LDS Church Launches New ‘Mormon and Gay’ Site; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…oups and spaces in recent years, and reports that the country has accepted international conventions without implementing them. Latin America: Uruguay and Argentina top social inclusion index The Americas Society and the Council of the Americas released a report that calls Uruguay and Argentina the region’s most LGBT-friendly countries. Uruguay tops the Social Inclusion Index for the third year in a row. From the Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers:…

Anti-Trans Bus Tour Is Not Very Welcome In Spanish Cities; Gay Rights As A Weapon In Nationalist War On Muslims; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ity. India: New report calls for decriminalization, so does gay prince The International Commission of Jurists published the in-depth report: “Unnatural Offenses Obstacles to Justice in India Based on Sexual Orientation.” From its conclusion: In describing the challenges that queer persons in India face while accessing justice, this report makes a number of arguments: First – laws which must guarantee and facilitate the full range of queer persons…

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

By Diane Winston

…nth more than 20,000 HIV activists and researchers will meet in Washington DC, 22 years after the last American gathering of the International AIDS Conference. With some 34 million men and women worldwide currently living with HIV/AIDS, it’s no longer possible to call the disease (as it was initially) a “gay plague.” It’s equally easy to forget amid growing support for gay marriage that just thirty years ago a sentence with the word “legal” modify…

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

By Patrick Hornbeck

…and nuns, Christian and otherwise, live in monasteries and convents; and a number of historic Protestant churches, especially those best endowed financially, provide parsonages. But over time, an increasing number of clergy have made their own living arrangements. Churches found parsonages prohibitively expensive; congregants preferred to see their donations go toward services rather than clergy housing; and new religious ventures, especially the…

Vatican Reverses Anti-Liberation Policies in Mexico

By Ruth Chojnacki and Jennifer Scheper Hughes

…ate, an ancient institution revived by Vatican II. In 2000, 341 of Mexico’s 800 deacons served the Diocese of San Cristobal, the largest number of deacons in any Catholic diocese in the world. Vatican suspicion of Bishop Ruiz’s liberationist pastoral strategy resulted in a failed attempt to remove him in 1993. The deacon program came under particular scrutiny after the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, with reports that Maya catechists defied th…

Religious Exceptions Not So Exceptional According to New Study

By Patricia Miller

…most Catholic health care institutions have accepted the accommodation, a number of the nation’s 260 Catholic institutions of higher learning as well as Catholic nonprofits are seeking a broader exemption that would in 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 th…

Milquetoast Liberal Religion Won’t Challenge Conservative Values: A History Lesson

By Sheila D. Collins

…courthouses, parks and athletic fields, swimming pools, dams, bridges, and airports—drained malarial swamps, eradicated malaria, and exterminated rats in slums. They planted over 3 billion trees, essentially reforesting a country whose original forest cover had been decimated, taught farmers how to conserve soil after nearly one-sixth of the nation’s topsoil had blown away in the Dust Bowl, reseeded a large part of the Great Plains, restored wildl…

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…