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French “Burqa Ban”: It’s Not About Religion

By Amina Wadud

…t purely a religious discussion. We become intensely involved in public or international debate over the dress of fewer than 2000 women in France because they choose (or are influenced to choose) to wear the niqab. The niqab covers the face, except the eyes, with a cloth; usually black and usually also accompanied by a full black garment. The burqa is specific to the regions of Afghanistan, but sometimes the term gets called in for any extreme for…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…s I watched talented African American actors hamming up “African-ness” for cheap laughs. It brought to mind the long, shameful history of Americans—black and white—performing blackness (often in blackface) on stage for white audiences. The Book of Mormon wants to have it both ways. It wants to make fun of The Lion King and its African stereotypes by substituting more authentic stereotypes. It wants to be transgressive and conventional, blasphemous…

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…cation, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourg…

Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…top thinking about us in bed! Remind me again, who’s the perv here? If the number of partners one has, the amount of time one spends in clubs, and what kind of sexual abuse one has suffered in their lifetime makes a person gay, then I suppose I ought to turn in my lesbian card. I can count the number of sexual partners I have had in 49 years on two hands and have some fingers left over. Not because there weren’t offers, but because, as a general r…

It’s Not About Cake: Anti-Gay Vendors Want a Constitutional Right to Discriminate

By Sunnivie Brydum

…ices without regard to a number of protected characteristics—including, in Washington and Colorado, an LGBT identity. (Washington updated its statewide non-discrimination law to include sexual orientation and gender identity in 2006, and Colorado followed suit in 2008.) Those laws, duly enacted by state legislatures, are what Masterpiece Cakeshop and Arlene’s Flowers are really looking to undercut in the name of “artistic expression” and “religiou…

The Washington Post’s Marriage Counselor

By Sarah Posner

Today the Washington Post published a piece by W. Bradford Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson originally headlined, “One way to end violence against women? Stop taking lovers and get married.” The subheadline, even more unbelievably, read: “The data show that #yesallwomen would be safer hitched to their baby daddies.” The headline, after criticism and mockery on Twitter, was quickly changed to “One way to end violence against women? Married dads” a…

Santorum and the New Catholic-Evangelical Alliance

By Sarah Posner

…, and, finding it tepid, deciding not to jump in. For a deep dive into the Washington scene, Charles Pierce’s 2003 piece about Opus Dei in the Boston Globe magazine adds important context not only to Santorum’s flourishing into a rigid Catholic ideologue, but to the Beltway political culture in which such conservative politicians were groomed. The piece also helps explain, rather presciently, how a conservative Catholic like Santorum could be winn…

What We Don’t Know About Black Social Gospel: A Long-Neglected Tradition Is Reclaimed

By Gary Dorrien

…espouse protest politics and social gospel theology; supposedly, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois were not involved with the social gospel, so the social gospel does not illuminate Washington versus Du Bois; supposedly, religious intellectuals no longer mattered by the end of the nineteenth century, so it doesn’t matter if we ignore whatever black religious intellectuals might have existed; supposedly, the social gospel petered out in the…

UNESCO on Religion, Culture and SOGI in Asia; Orthodox Family Sues to Stop Cremation of Israeli Trans Woman; Struggles of Iraqi Queer Activists; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…-private partnership the State Department manages with the U.S. Agency for International Development,” reports the Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers. Marriage equality became the law in 2013; the country will host a global LGBT rights conference in April 2016. Bolivia: President apologizes for ‘lesbian’ remark President Evo Morales apologized after saying publicly to his health minister Ariana Campero, I don’t want to think you’re a lesbian.” He s…

More Bleak Times For Indonesian LGBTs; South Africa Bans Extremist Anti-Gay US Pastor; Mexican Marriage Struggle Heats Up; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…eelings toward LGBTQ people.” The report examines problems that arise from international organizations assuming “a model of social change based on European and North American histories, cultures and styles of government.” Indonesia: More on ‘bleak time’ facing LGBT community The Australian Broadcasting Company reported on the “bleak time” facing Indonesia’s LGBT community, which has been under rhetorical assault from religious and political leader…