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London’s ‘Big Gay Iftar’ And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…s the need for the guidelines: When they reach Canadian soil, gay refugees fleeing repressive, homophobic regimes face a maddening challenge. Fearing being beaten, jailed, tortured or killed in their home countries, they hide their sexual orientation all their lives. In Canada, they face a 180: to secure status as a persecuted minority, they are asked to prove their sexuality on the spot. This means furnishing refugee boards with detailed document…

Even Amid Controversy, ‘My Soul Still Sings,’ Says UMC’s First Lesbian Bishop

By Sunnivie Brydum

…ard for the episcopacy in June 2016, they awoke to news of the massacre at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, where 49 mostly LGBTQ Latinx people were murdered. That “confirmed the need” for Oliveto’s voice in the upper eschelons of church leadership, she explained. “Too often, LGBTQ people and queer folk are talked about, instead of talked with,” Oliveto said. “And lives are turned into issues. And when we turn anyone into an issue, it makes it easier to…

Oh Say, Can You See?: 9/11 Flag Displays and the Flag’s Symbolic Power

By Spencer Dew

…ribbons differentiating civilians and flight crews from first responders. Orlando, Florida, on the logic that far more were injured in both visible and “invisible” ways, has opted to erect 250,000 flags. It is not death that is primary here, in any case. The flag’s sacrality, to use an oft-invoked religious term for the societal roles this emblem plays, is linked to its resistance of a single straight meaning. The flag’s power resides in its exce…

A Locked and Loaded Covenant: The Religious Roots of America’s Gun Culture

By Peter Laarman

…n-toting obligations; Likewise, once Africans were being imported in large numbers, Southern white men were required to arm themselves and perform slave patrol duty (police terms like “patrol” and “beat” and “stake out” all derive from the slave patrol regime); The mainstream literary and political culture of the 19th century conspired to create the romantic myth of the noble white hunter/warrior: e.g., James Fenimore Cooper’s best-selling “Leathe…

Christian Schools Invoke Religious Liberty to Reopen Despite Warnings of Health Experts

By Chrissy Stroop

…deed, one nine-year-old student at Circle Christian School in the affluent Orlando suburb of Winter Park, Florida, tested positive for COVID-19 last week. As a result, the school has shifted to online instruction only until August 24, which is more than two weeks from when the boy tested positive. But while this move may seem responsible, it should be noted that, according to local reporting, the school previously required masks “except at recess,…

Katy Perry’s Evangelical Hangover

By David Mihalyfy

…the larger culture include fairly few faithful evangelicals, but a decent number of people who’ve fallen away from those churches. Oddly enough, though, these latter figures tend to bear marks of the religious tradition that formed them, including a dislike of spiritual rigidity and a fervent sense of social mission. Surprisingly, Hempton sees this dynamic at work, not just in distant personages like George Eliot and Vincent van Gogh, but also in…

‘God Made Them Male and Female…and Eunuch’: Why the Biblical Case For Binary Gender Isn’t So… Biblical

By Tony Keddie

…ptic book called The Unhappy Gays, homosexuality had been the cause of the Flood and the Babylonian captivity and remained “part of the buildup of the ‘perilously evil times’ that are prophesied for the last days.” The apocalyptic urgency of conservatives’ political agenda against equal rights for LGBTQ+ people has experienced a resurgence in the benighted epoch of Trump. Vice President Pence has echoed the Evangelical influencers by prophesying t…

Beneath the ‘Wacky’ Paula White Video is a Dark and Deeply Undemocratic World Propping Up the President

By Frederick Clarkson

…n most others had lined up with Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) or Marco Rubio (R-FL). White, Kenneth Copeland and Robert Jeffress were part of this group that met with the future president at Trump Tower in 2015. During the 2016 presidential campaign Trump credited White with his conversion and becoming a “baby Christian.” She went on to deliver the invocation at his inauguration and to become chair of Trump’s White House evangelical advisory board. Mea…

Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting and Gaslighting of Obama Paved the Way for Trump

By Ian Reifowitz

…m, and had merely sought to “help” journalists better understand why large numbers thought the then-president was. Limbaugh then used the opportunity to repeat the same sentiments, further implanting the doubts about Obama’s Christianity into the minds of any listeners who had missed the previous broadcast. That’s how you spread hate, fear, and lies while deflecting any charges that that’s what you’re actually doing. I’ll also add that the whole s…

Religious Right Dream of Privatized Public Education Gets Boost

By Julie Ingersoll

…ouisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is proposing education reforms based on the Florida model that includes public-private partnerships for charter schools, in which businesses would help fund on-site charter schools. The funding business would have a significant voice on the governing board and reserve half of the seats in the classrooms for children of employees. These efforts and others will be supported during the upcoming National School Choice…