Religion Dispatches
…l said they stand ready to help Rekers mount a defamation case against the Miami New Times—the newspaper that snapped a picture of Rekers and 20-year-old “rentboy” Jo-vanni Roman as they arrived home from their European romp. Rekers has insisted he is not gay, despite Roman’s assertion that the contract he had with the 61-year-old doctor required daily nude massages where Roman has said Rekers became sexually aroused. As the story of all these ant…
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…youth contingent. The conference seems smaller than the 2022 conference in Miami, with a smaller ballroom. Along a narrow hallway, representatives of India’s BJP hobnob with US conservatives (as has been the trend); Orthodox Jews mingle with priests; fresh-faced college students hobnob with stalwart right-wing operatives. An array of right-wing outfits table in the hallway, doling out everything from stickers (“Biblical femininity, not feminism”)…
Read More…attendance, as was Archbishop Thomas Wenski and several other priests from Miami. In the wake of the Church’s continued involvement in the release of over fifty political prisoners on the island, last week’s inauguration is a material symbol of the easing tensions between the Cuban government and the Catholic Church. While Castro’s government never officially severed ties with the Vatican, the expulsion of various priests after the triumph of the…
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…his dinner plans and skipped NatCon to attend the evening’s Trump rally in Miami in the hope that he’ll be tapped to be VP. Instead, Vivek Ramaswamy waxed on about the values of “national libertarianism.” Ramaswamy, maybe to show that he, too, is still in Trump’s good graces, opens by bragging that he talked to Trump twice today, before discussing his plan to dismantle “the regulatory state,” nationalist protectionism, and how to usher in a “natio…
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…depiction in unsettling plotlines on crime shows like Law & Order and CSI: Miami. But in José Merced v. City of Euless, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that Merced, a Santería priest in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, was acting within his Constitutional rights when he sacrificed goats and other animals as part of the ritual home-practice that accompanied him from Puerto Rico. In fact, the court suggested that such Constitutional prot…
Read More…ttends services at Christ Fellowship Church, an Evangelical mega-church in Miami that his wife began attending in the early 2000s because of its strong programs for families. Jenkins notes that Rubio’s religious ambidextrousness can cut both ways. While it gives him the ability to speak authentically to a range of religious conservatives, it also has caused him trouble among some who suspect him of pandering: His spiritual authenticity was directl…
Read More…-sex weddings, particularly if the Supreme Court goes the way of a growing number of district courts (including today in Texas) and strikes down same-sex marriage bans as unconstitutional? I asked Caroline Mala Corbin, a First Amendment expert at the University of Miami School of Law, who told me, “Given that churches have long been able to discriminate against women without losing their tax exempt status, it seems highly unlikely that they risk l…
Read More…tax-exempt status. Caroline Mala Corbin, a professor at the University of Miami Law School, reiterated what she told me last year: that if the IRS and the courts had not applied the Bob Jones principle to revoke the tax exempt status of organizations that discriminated based on gender, it seemed unlikely that they would extend this principle to sexual orientation discrimination. What’s more, she said, federal law bans race discrimination, demonst…
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…nd Byron and I drove a U-Haul filled with my belongings from California to Miami. We were living in Guatemala at the time and he was here on a tourist visa. I was six months pregnant. Along the way, my husband at the wheel, we were pulled over by the police for going 10 miles over the speed limit even as other cars, going much faster, sped by. A look at my husband’s Guatemalan license and passport (with visa) and the officer escorted him to the pa…
Read More…y Lobby requires such a provision. On my bloggingheads show, University of Miami Law School First Amendment expert Carolina Mala Corbin discussed the impact of Monday’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case on LGBT rights. “Assuming the federal government passes laws that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” she said, ” you could very much expect to have corporations to object to these laws based on their religious beliefs.” The ques…
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