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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…

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…

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”…

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…

SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

By Michael Schulson

…open to anyone “regardless of their…profession,” but I somehow doubt that sanitation workers outnumber investment bankers in SoulCycle studios (one of which is across the street from the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Tribeca). Classes with popular instructors sell out in minutes, and patrons can pay upwards of $70 per class in order to get priority booking. “Ultimately, this is what brand religion is all about: stoking emotion with a combination…

The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

By Frederick Clarkson

…ght Patriot movement where such prayers are standard features. It should be obvious how such prayers could be really lethal in their toxicity. They impart upon both the speaker and the hearer a kind of religious benediction and sanction for murdering and/or harming other people. Moreover, it not only sanctions such acts, it almost impels them—a serious devotee will take such a task upon himself as a spiritual duty. Which is a deeply disturbing pro…

No Fireworks, Only Candles: Our Work as Americans and Muslims

By Ayesha Mattu

…ce before the baby awakens. The festival begins. It’s one of those perfect San Francisco days, warm enough to enjoy the perpetual breeze. The band plays just beyond the walls of our roof deck, and soap bubbles float up close enough to pop from the crowded street below. All afternoon, friends join us. Music and sunlight stream in to the kitchen through the open glass doors. We eat dark strawberries picked the day before, drink homemade lemonade, an…

RD News Round-Up—Oct.14, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…pport for a ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage in California. The San Jose Mercury News reported that “SurveyUSA said the Proposition 8 campaign remains too close to call because of potential statistical error, the new poll is the first that shows the measure gaining strength since late September and potentially pulling ahead.” On October 3, Americans United for Separation of Church and State’s Sandhya Bathija reported on sitting in on co…

Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World

By Bruce Wilson

…a considerable resemblance to former fried-chicken mogul ‘Colonel’ Harlan Sanders.) Kicking off his lecture, Wagner tells the class: OK, first of all, I want to repeat something. You don’t have to write it down, because you already have it in your notes. But I want to remind you that the New Apostolic Reformation is the most radical change in the way of doing church since the Protestant Reformation. That’s what we’re dealing with. X number of meg…

Why Even Progressive Christianity Must Own Its Complicity in Anti-LGBT Violence

By Layton E. Williams

…GBT violence, and we hung a giant rainbow flag over the front doors of our sanctuary, which look out onto Chicago’s famous Magnificent Mile. My church has a long history of engagement in social justice and has been a welcoming space for LGBT people for years. But as the rainbow flag flapped in the wind above the prayer service, several church members present remarked that such a public statement of solidarity and welcome had never happened before—…