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Gay Marriage Opponents Running on Empty

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…. At the first, about a dozen volunteers spent the night making almost 300 phone calls and collecting pledges of volunteer support and contributions from 50 new supporters. Add that to the five other locations holding similar phone banks or collecting post cards of support, and I’m sure we easily got our 300 today. In addition, Equality Maryland hosted an interfaith meeting to mobilize supportive faith leaders. It was so great to see such a wonder…

Should NASA Have Given $1.1 Million to a Theology Institute?

By Michael Schulson

…e walls tumbling down? When the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts your phone call on hold, you don’t hear muzak. Instead, the phone system plays a homegrown jingle featuring lines like “Everyone is tired of your piety / get off your knees and get to work” and “We’ve got to fight the battle of church and state / or the walls come tumbling down.” The receptionist told me that FFRF co-president Dan Barker, a former evangelical preacher and occasi…

Cloverfield: Sin & Redemption, with Monsters

By Gabriel Mckee

…onds, 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 really means. Many reviewers have made the obvious connection to 9/11, and it’s certainly true that the monster’s initial rampage eerily evokes that day’s images. But there’s a deeper level to it. At one point, the characters are caught in the middle of a firefight between the monster and a Na…

Religious Hostility to Gay Nigerians; The Pope’s Visit To Africa; Ireland’s Religious Schools Can’t Discriminate Against Gays; Orthodox Church in Georgia Leads Anti-Gay Forces; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…homosexuality in the Africa is important to the future of the church for a number of reasons: It may well be that Pope Francis decided that a six-day whistle-stop tour of Africa was not the place to raise an issue of such delicacy. Debate on the place of gays in the church would require time for a more softer, gradualist approach. But the issue is a double impediment for Francis — and one which he should have begun publicly to address. It is a mas…

The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…et of Americans respond to leading questions, posed by strangers, over the phone. But it’s science! Public opinion polling ends up existing in a strange gray space between science and journalism. A Pew report is definitively not a scientific paper: its goal is to serve media outlets, not to advance a body of academic inquiry. It’s not peer-reviewed. Its methods lack the scope and rigor of a formal social science study. That doesn’t make these repo…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…heir religious practices. None of this necessarily gets picked up over the phone, by a surveyor working through a scripted questionnaire. Gauging something as amorphous and context-rich as religiosity, within the framework of something as amorphous and vast as The Public, is difficult work. It’s even harder because The Public doesn’t like to answer its phones. Some people are more difficult to reach than others, such that these representative samp…

Mormons Prepare to March in LGBT Pride Parades Nationwide

By Joanna Brooks

…ty [women’s auxiliary] meeting was a Proposition 8 organizing meeting—with phone trees and the bishop coming in and saying you’ve got to do this. We just left shaking, and she hasn’t gone back. She never set foot in that building again. Through my kids’ eyes, I see things in a fresh way. So I was thinking about the Utah Pride Parade, which is now almost bigger than the Days of ’47 [Pioneer Day parade commemorating Mormon pioneers]. This is a para…

Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…ce. The latest to pile on is the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Last Wednesday, issues of the magazine hit newsstands with a front cover showing an Orthodox Jew pushing a turbaned figure in a wheelchair with several caricatures of the Prophet on its inside pages, including some of him naked. In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera last Friday, the editor defended his decision to publish these cartoons arguing that the problem is the i…

Will Catholic Voters Support LGBT Rights in Washington State?

By Joanna Brooks

…the decision will be made. We are participating in a Catholic-to-Catholic phone bank that Washington United for Marriage has set up on Wednesday nights and we assist with the larger phone bank at the Jewish synagogue downtown. A great deal of our work is communicating with Catholics on our email list and Facebook. As a Catholic, how does your faith shape your views on marriage for LGBT people? My faith blossomed in the 1960s after Vatican II. I h…

A Tale of Religious Tolerance… On Reddit

By Joanna Piacenza

…e online community site. The image, of a young Sikh woman playing with her phone while waiting in line, included the caption “i’m not sure what to conclude from this.” No, “european_douchebag” wasn’t questioning which game the woman was playing on her phone, he was referencing the abundance of facial hair on the young woman’s face—a nod towards her Sikh beliefs of not altering her body image. Unaware that others around him might practice faiths be…