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Shifting Talk on Mormon Racism Reveals Divisions within LDS Church

By Joanna Brooks

…efforts to have the talk edited before its publication in the Ensign, the official LDS Church magazine, in its semi-annual Conference edition. Some hoped that just as Elder Boyd K. Packer’s controversial October 2010 General Conference on homosexuality had been edited for publication, so too might Elder Dickson’s talk be edited to correlate with official scripture. But the talk will appear in print, unchanged. One month. Two high-placed LDS sourc…

Turkish Police Move Against Activists Who Defied Pride Ban; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…s and we cannot be open in public anymore.” The proposed bill emboldened a number of radical nationalist movements and, according to activists at Labrys, a gay activism group in Kyrgyzstan, led to a near 300 percent increase in attacks against the community. Activists fear things will get worse once a Russian-style anti-gay “propaganda” bill gets its final reading in parliament and becomes law; a restrictive definition of marriage was placed into…

Warships, Animals, Pubs Eligible For Blessings From Church of England, But Not Same-Sex Couples; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…each other,” he says. “We usually get curious and puzzled stares.” Poland: Official discourages same-sex couples married abroad from registering The Campaign Against Homophobia criticized Deputy Public Prosecutor General Robert Hernand for telling regional prosecutors that it is unacceptable for civil registrars to register the marriages of same-sex couples who married abroad. Kenya: Court orders registrar to register name change for five trans pe…

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

By Layton E. Williams

…at explicitly decries any unkind treatment of those who identify as gay. A number of other denominations whose official stances reject homosexuality still contain a significant proportion of members who believe it should be accepted by society. “The painful reality of our time is that, to whatever extent we are not vocally affirming that LGBT people are beloved nor explicitly countering claims that queerness is sinful, we are allowing Christian ho…

Pope Denounces Gender Colonization; Indonesian Court Considers Islamist Request To Criminalize Homosexuality; Egypt’s Grand Mufti Says No One Has Right to Harm Homosexuals; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ice arrest pride participants; parade cancelled under mob threat from govt official Organizers cancelled Saturday’s pride parade “after a tense meeting between a senior government official and one of Uganda’s top human rights lawyers,” reports BuzzFeed’s Lester Feder. The government’s Ethics Minister Simon Lokodo reportedly threatened to mobilize a mob if the event went forward. Earlier in the week police raided a gay pride event taking place at a…

Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

By Michael Schulson

…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…

Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…

Telling the World a ‘Big Story’: RD in Conversation with Karen Armstrong

By Laurie Patton

…compassion still to be done and we will be addressing this need in our Web site in the New Year. Each week there will be more issues to discuss, refinements and questions answered, and I hope to write a piece weekly about such topics as the compassionate interpretation of scripture, the importance of acquiring accurate information about other people, and what it means to “love” our enemies. There has been a lot of interest in the Charter. One of t…

Dialogue or Demonization? Where Gays are Concerned, Focus on the Family Wants it Both Ways

By Cody J. Sanders

…y has tempered their language about LGBT persons on the Day of Dialogue website, it only takes three clicks of the mouse to navigate directly from the Day of Dialogue site to the ADF “Marriage and the Family” page quoted above. This certainly doesn’t seem to be language conducive to genuine dialogue and does little to increase the credibility of the organizer’s newly visible anti-bullying stance. But it begs another question: What exactly are we t…

Are Evangelicals Suffering From Buyer’s Remorse with Obama?

By Bill Berkowitz

…service and hundreds of exclusive interviews with policymakers, government officials, academics and service members, the book shows the cruel and unaffordable costs of the current gay ban,” according to the book’s Web site. See here for Frank’s friendly visit last week with John Stewart on The Daily Show. ++++++++++ RD Tidbits Coral Ridge Ministries’ New Pastor: In mid-March, the members of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church (founded by the late D. J…