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Former Employees: Racism & Abuse in Leading Religious Right Org.

By Sarah Posner

…ing continues to cite Tanton groups as authoritative, tellingly describing NumbersUSA as an “immigration reduction advocacy organization” in an August 2010 piece and citing FAIR in a story claiming that “illegal aliens” would “trump veterans at US medical offices.” Groening also praised a Mississippi immigration raid, citing the Mississippi Federation for Immigration Reform and Enforcement (MFIRE); listed on FAIR’s Web site as a “local group,” one…

Rebranding the Mormons

By Joanna Brooks

…image of ourselves and our community that young and urbane Mormons love. (Site designers describe the site’s design principles as “joyful, reverent, inspiring, authentic, and relevant.”) It’s also clearly an effort to address the major PR problems facing the Church as it continues to contend with century-old stereotypes about Mormons as clannish polygamists as well as with recent fallout from its heavy involvement in California’s Proposition 8 ca…

Catholic Church Bans Gay Film: This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…s related to the rise in anti-LGBT rhetoric. “This time around, government officials have even stoked the cacophony of hatred.” Some officials – including Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama and Security Affairs Minister Luhut Pandjaitan – have defended the LGBT community. “Whoever they are, wherever they work, he or she continues to be an Indonesian citizen. They have the right to be protected as well,” Pandjaitan was quoted as saying in The…

Why Atheists Should Fight For Establishment of State Religion

By Shanny Luft

…lina who have a habit of opening every session with a Christian prayer. An official meeting from December 2007, for example, began: “As we get ready to celebrate the Christmas season, we’d like to thank you for the Virgin Birth, we’d like to thank you for the Cross at Calvary, and we’d like to thank you for the resurrection. Because we do believe that there is only one way to salvation, and that is Jesus Christ. I ask all these things in the name…

What The Church Needs More Than a ‘Good Pope’

By Mary E. Hunt

…pe is not very different from election of a president or other top-ranking official in a hierarchical organization. S/he brings with her/him a whole entourage of lower ranking officials, much like in the U.S. when the Republicans are defeated by the Democrats or vice versa. The winner brings a team. So now it’s time for the people who lost the election to get out of the way and let Francis govern. Conservatives are not pleased with his views, and…

The Gospel of Contradiction: An Interview with Mary Gordon

By Nathan Schneider

…kes a place for maternity and childhood, we owe to Luke. The figure of the Virgin Mary and the early life of Jesus come mostly through him. Luke also has tenderness and lyricism, including some real poems. I felt a great attachment to that. Do you think that a text with such unique authority and power through history could be written now? Or does it seem like a kind of creation of which we’re no longer capable? The Gospels weren’t really written i…

Religious Freedom Historian John Ragosta on “Religious Freedom”

By Frederick Clarkson

…oclamation. Religious Freedom Day hasn’t exactly caught on, and there’s no official web site (although an evangelical education outfit managed to purchase the web address for Religious Freedom Day and make it look rather official). Since 2015, the Coalition for Liberty and Justice, an alliance of more than 60 civil liberties, human rights, and religious and secular groups (originally formed in response to the 2014 Supreme Court case, Burwell v. Ho…

Cloverfield: Sin & Redemption, with Monsters

By Gabriel Mckee

…n short, it’s self-absorption: the characters in this film search for cell phone chargers while the world falls down around them. In one key scene (that appears in the trailer), the monster hurls the head of the Statue of Liberty, which crashes down a few feet from the POV camera. Within seconds, people have lined up in front of it to take pictures with their cell phones. They’re distanced from what’s happening around them, oblivious to what it re…

Gay Men Detained and Killed in Chechnya, and More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…nly gay former US ambassador to the country. The New York Times profiled a number of everyday people, Muslims and Christians, who are taking part in legal challenges to the Trump administration overs its executive orders banning entry into the U.S. from a number of countries. Paul Harrison, an American man engaged to an Iranian man is among the individuals profiled: Like the other plaintiffs, the couple veer between dread and hope with each succes…

Why is Liberty Institute Still Defending Phillip Monk?

By Rob Shryock

…the claim that this evidence is “totally at odds with the Air Force’s new official explanation” willfully misleading. From the beginning, the Air Force claimed they moved up Monk’s redeployment when his replacement arrived early, making Monk’s continued presence in his old unit unnecessary and redundant, whereas he was needed in his new unit. Monk has, to the best of my knowledge, not responded to this charge. It’s apparent here just how weak The…