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Biggest, Best & Worst LGBT Religion Stories of 2016 and more in Global LGBT Recap

…m Khomeini International University. Sunni teaching holds that someone’s “true gender” cannot be altered, Kariminia told BuzzFeed News, but Ayatollah Khomeini’s understanding of Shiite teaching is that surgery reveals their “true gender” that may be hidden within. In fact, Khomeini had ruled that sex reassignment was allowed by religious law two decades before Molkara showed up on his doorstep. He wrote about the issue in 1965, just after he was s…

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Data-Mining The Denominations: The Southern Baptists in Four Charts

…change drastically, a new baby boom isn’t going to lift the boat. By now, new church start-ups in the base states run the risk of cannibalizing already-established communities. And while the South changes more slowly than the rest of the country, it’s not immune to the rising tide of disaffiliation. That leaves reaching out to black folks and learning Spanish. The Southern Baptist Convention will have to start looking like the millenial South if…

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Rev. William Barber Calls Jeff Sessions Nomination A “Moral Crisis”

…Barber also accused conservative white evangelicals who rallied to Donald Trump of engaging in “theological malpractice,” saying they used their faith to “endorse hate and discrimination.” Barber cited a passage from Isaiah that he said people of many faiths embrace: “Woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their rights and make women and children their prey.” After the press conference, clergy lined up and streamed two blocks toward…

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The Uncertain Post-Obergefell World of Religious Exemptions

…y of same-sex couples and the imperative that they be treated equally. The word “dignity” appears nine times in the majority opinion in that case. It appears just once in Hobby Lobby–in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurring opinion (for those who believe in a “divine creator” and “divine law,” “free exercise is essential in preserving their own dignity and in striving for a self-definition shaped by their religious precepts.”) For the women affecte…

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Suspicion of the Modern Age: The Pope Regresses

…mmed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels,” he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion…

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Religious Freedom Historian John Ragosta on “Religious Freedom”

…as the best way to promote true religion. Our original national motto speaks to the way that our religious, ethnic and racial diversity is a source of greatness: E Pluribus Unum–out of many, one. This is nowhere more true than in religion. Jefferson once explained that the normal rule in politics was reversed when talking about religion; for religion, “divided we stand, united we fall.” Our diversity itself protects us from government trying to co…

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Evangelicals Looking for Walker to “Do Nothing” in 2016 Election

…ust one sign that the campaign rhetoric on this issue will be subject to a new kind of scrutiny. Instead of talking about opposition to marriage equality, evangelical activists say, religious freedom has become the new defining mantra. Unlike marriage equality, on which white evangelicals, particularly Millennials, are divided, religious freedom unifies them like no other issue but abortion. “What will matter to evangelicals,” Moore wrote in his W…

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“You Lie!”: Messing with American Mass

…joint sessions of Congress. But individualized heckling, not so much. The rules of ritual don’t need logical consistency to be powerful or sacred; they need only to be generally recognized as how things must be done. To break the rules in such a moment does not simply signify bad manners—Americans are used to that. Instead, it jars us viscerally because, however unconsciously, it seems like a profanation. Nancy Pelosi wasn’t calculating that look…

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Secede, For The Kingdom of Bernie Has Come Near

…Orthodox Jews dominating a local school system, for example, or Islamberg, New York, a hamlet founded in the Catskill mountains by Muslim migrants. True, they’re not really secessionist: the first is more a takeover of existing institutions, and the second is founding those institutions for yourself. Still, if you want to go the separatist route, there are some clues as to how it could be done. Or maybe the Sanders folks might go the secession-in-…

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DeSantis is More Polished and Less Bombastic Than Trump — But is He Less of a Threat to Democracy?

…’t represent a break with fascism. He doesn’t even represent a break with Trumpism. Trump, the person? Perhaps. But ‘Trumpism’ is what we’ve been calling this particular American version of fascism, which DeSantis embodies as much as anyone.” As a trained historian and scholar of fascism, I have bad news for those who believe fascism will wither and die after being “defeated at the ballot box”: fascism doesn’t care for the will of the electorate….

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