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Mormons Fight Marriage Equality in Mexico; Is Catholic Church Italy’s Anti-Gay NRA?; Nigerian Anglicans Cut Ties With UK Diocese; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…reports BuzzFeed’s Lester Feder. Armenia: Folk dancing group kicks out gay American Kyle Khandikyan, a 23-year old American living in Armenia was kicked out of a folk dancing group after the instructor learned that he was gay. Khandikyan, who currently lives in Yerevan and first came to Armenia through Birthright Armenia as a volunteer with PINK Armenian, was told by the instructor that he did not belong to this “nation,” that he was “not Armenian…

Oklahoma Bill Would Violate Basic Freedoms, Rewrite the Ten Commandments

By Andrew L. Seidel

…would be a law—can tell an American to worship a god, let alone which god. Americans are free to be godless (as a growing number are), or, if they wish, to worship every god from every holy book. Olsen’s commandments would prohibit free expression and art by outlawing the creation of graven images; prohibit free speech by making it illegal to take the Lord’s name in vain; and, per the tenth commandment, it would criminalize thought (potentially co…

Religious Practices on Trial in Arizona: The Problem With “Experts”

By Johnny P. Flynn

…e the State Department of Health to draft regulations in consultation with American Indian spiritual leaders. The state legislature of Arizona might be surprised to learn that they already regulate sweat lodges—in the Department of Corrections. American Indian inmates are required to follow rules which include pictures of sweat lodges built in the Lakota style, not Navajo, which is the tribal affiliation of a good number of inmates in the Arizona…

Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…hed a new and vital dictionary that has had long lasting influences on the American populace. In the “Introduction” to his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, the polyglot, erudite Webster examines the “Origin of Language,” beginning with a synopsis of how God gave a divine decree to Adam to name the animals. In other words, the origin of language begins with Adam. Moreover, Webster hoped his dictionary would be a “useful instrument…

Trayvon Martin and American Exceptionalism

By Anthea Butler

…e. So much of what I teach is about the violence and pathos of the African-American experience, that I have to say what is in my heart. It grieves me to know Trayvon died in such a horrible way, but it does not surprise me. Violence is at the core of much of the African American experience. As a scholar, I know that black lives and bodies are cheap in the psyche of “white America.” If we aren’t dancing, catching a ball, or cleaning houses, we are…

The Lady Vanishes: Trump’s Communications Team Tries to Topple a Monument

By Spencer Dew

…emism, is just a partisan stance). This is doubly dangerous ground. First, American history has so spectacularly clashed with American ideals (see: slavery). Second, by dismissing Acosta’s reading of Lady Liberty as partisan, Miller switches the register of language used, from that of religious discourse—in which the statue has an eternal meaning, “has always” meant this, Acosta pleads, citing “what the country has always thought of”) to a drily h…

Russian Parliament Hosts U.S. Anti-Gay Activist Paul Cameron

By Chrissy Stroop

…l they might be to host an American billed by this source as a “well-known American psychologist” and a “leading American crusader against homosexuality”—and particularly since he said he had come “to thank the Russian people, the State Duma, and President Putin… in the name of the entire Christian world.” To thank them, that is, for their uncompromising stance against same-sex relations which, in Cameron’s fact-free worldview, are destroying West…

Tony Perkins: Soldiers Will Quit if Gays Can Serve Openly

By Daniel Schultz

…can people, no American way of life. Instead we have American ethnicities, American peoples, American ways of life, all stitched together in a big beautiful patchwork quilt. It’s probably too much to ask Perkins and Fischer, et. al., to realize this, but the sooner the rest of us come to understand that to the extent our armed forces fight for an ideal, they fight for the freedom of Americans to live as they please, the better off we’ll be. A quee…

What Happens When An American President Believes He is Above the Law?

By Spencer Dew

…omen like us, even including us. This reification of law is part of a deep American faith, coexisting with other explicitly religious worldviews but no less structuring of our lives. Belief in the reality of law, an ethics which understands true law as synonymous with justice, an eschatology—a vision of history and hope for the future—in which such ideal law can come to be instantiated on this earth: such belief permeates American consciousness, i…

The Sacred and the Dead: Ten Writers on the End of an American Adventure

By The Editors

…rican Pilgrimage by Varun Soni “Truckin’’” is not just the narrative of an American band on the road, but it is also an aspiration for a uniquely American adventure where the road trip is a pilgrimage and the real journey is one of self-discovery. _____________ Special thanks to Nicholas Meriwether at the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz as well as to photographers Herb Greene and Susana Millman for graciously allowing us access to their wor…