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“Gotcha” Video & Pro-Life Bill Released Together

By Andy Kopsa

…s right to choose. Miram Yeung, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (who testified against this bill last year) told me PRENDA will become, “A communication point for those who would end all abortion.” A showpiece. But, because the suspension rules call for a two-thirds majority for passage, Yeung remains hopeful the bill won’t pass, “It could work in our favor as two-thirds would mean they [Republicans] would have to siphon off some De…

Ian Buruma on the Political Excesses of Religion

By Lisa Webster

…ke to think that there’s a real divide in Western civilization between the New World and the Old World, the U.S. and Europe, and I felt that, on reflection and reading up on it, that actually the divide is much less wide than people think it is. If there is a divide it’s often between Protestant countries and Catholic countries. Or countries such as the U.S. where the established Protestant churches were swept away a long time ago in favor of new…

Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

By Rachel Wagner

…imilar to the Wailing Wall’s email service. Worshipers email a prayer to Jerusalem, where it is printed out by a courier and inserted into the wall on their behalf. If they still wish to pray “at” the wall via computer, 24-hour webcams record what is happening on location. But is it really the same thing to email a message to someone who inserts it in the wall on your behalf as to go there yourself? Is God “closer” if you visit the physical wall t…

The Revolution Will Be Whispered: An Excerpt From Everywhere a Guest, Nowhere at Home: A New Vision of Israel and Palestine

By Kim Chernin

…ere from the houses. From this, the Israeli girl has decided that in their new world, people will build small villages. She knows the Palestinians are master builders, and she thinks it will be good for the Jews to work with their hands. Her Palestinian friend likes the stories she’s heard about the early kibbutzim, especially the one where the Jewish grandmother lived. It belonged to a socialist movement, Hashomer Hatzair. The people there believ…

Bad Scholarship A Poor Solution to Anti-Trans Politics: A Response to the New York Times’ “Is God Transgender?”

By Carolyn Klaasen and Jenna Stover-Kemp

In a recent New York Times article provocatively titled “Is God Transgender?” Rabbi Mark Sameth offers modern readers of the Bible a tantalizing vision of the past. The ancient authors of the Bible, he argues, lived in a cultural milieu in which gender fluidity was a mark of civilization. According to Sameth, the Bible intentionally reflects this environment by depicting gender-variant human characters and a god who is dual-gendered. As queer Jew…

Post-Zionism or Post-Judaism?

By Brian Britt

…Zionism. Restless, directed by Amos Kollek (son of the longtime mayor of Jerusalem), depicts the reunion of Moshe, a down-and-out Israeli poet in New York, and Tzach, the son he abandoned as a baby, now an elite sniper discharged from the Israeli Defense Forces. The Zohan, starring Adam Sandler (who also co-wrote and produced the film), resembles such willfully vulgar satires as Talladega Nights and Superbad. A renowned soldier and lover, Zohan gi…

What Fidel Castro’s Death Means for LGBT Rights in Cuba and More, in This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ation has became established within the UN system. The election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. President puts the world at a “pivotal moment in our fight for the human rights of key populations and people living with HIV within the U.S. and in countries where the U.S. has hitherto provided important leadership,” according to a November 22 statement from the Global Network of People Living with HIV. A federal judge ordered the U.S. Passport Agenc…

News Flash: God Has Revised the Laws of Physics

By Paul Wallace

…in the showroom.” What you see is not what you get. Don’t misread me: The world we live in every day is not reducible to quantum weirdness. But certainly it’s not reaching too far to suggest that life on the macroscopic scale, or some aspects of it, may be somehow dependent on quantum weirdness. That every now and again some of the apparently nonlocal or non-energy-conserving or non-deterministic or uncertain-in-principle elements at the subatomi…

Lou Engle Attempts To Backpedal On Uganda Anti-Gay Bill

By Sarah Posner

…pled stand to protect their people and their children from an unwelcome intrusion of homosexual ideology into an 83% Christian nation, an intrusion that is being pressed upon them by the UN, UNICEF, and other NGOs and Western colonialist powers.” As Throckmorton notes in a post-script to Sharlet’s post: I cannot know what the truth is but I would like Mr. Engle to speak clearly on this topic. Are Bahati and Oyet mistaken? Did they mislead Sharlet…

Did Uganda’s President Really Veto the Anti-Gay Bill?

By Kapya Kaoma

…eatedly?” (see the full letter below) International media outlets like the BBC, USA Today, and the Globe and Mail immediately echoed the Monitor article, asserting that President Museveni had blocked or even vetoed the bill—which was far from the truth—even after Pepe Julian Onziema, Director of Programs at leading Ugandan LGBTQ advocacy organization Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) tweeted that the Monitor article was misleading. Museveni didn’t e…