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

By Peter Montgomery

…should be put to death, responded to the massacre at the gay nightclub in Orlando by saying “there’s 50 less pedophiles in the world.” The Mail & Guardian reports that an anti-gay pastor in Cape Town, Rev. Oscar Bougardt, is planning to open two churches affiliated with Anderson. Bougardt, who calls homosexuals a “danger,” visited Anderson in the U.S. recently and they hit it off: Bougardt said that the Cape Town chapter of Anderson’s Faithful Wo…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…n response to the killing of 49 people in the Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando by an Islamic State sympathiser. This year’s expanded meeting is expected to be even more popular. An openly gay Church of England priest resigned from his parish and suggested that he cannot get a new job because he is “on a blacklist” and bishops are not willing to risk placing him in a parish. A British gay man escaped extradition to Turkey, where was charged and…

Religious Right Dream of Privatized Public Education Gets Boost

By Julie Ingersoll

…leaders in an eleven-city (Detroit, Phoenix, Los Angeles Cleveland, Tampa, Orlando, Chicago, Indianapolis, Pewaukee, WI; Sacramento and Newark), “Education Revolution Tour,” the goal of which is to renew “American Exceptionalism.” The result of these reforms is likely to be a fractured educational system incapable of serving the very purpose of public education: to ensure an educated citizenry capable of participating in a democracy. An RD comment…

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

…is to convey the enormity of the loss of life, to make otherwise abstract numbers visible. In the Oak Brook commemoration, each flag has attached to it a brief biography of the person killed, with color-coded 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,…

Mexican Marriage Marches Show Struggle Between Church and Secular State; Pro-LGBT Mormon Group Grows After ‘Apostate’ Declaration; Botswana Gives Anti-Gay US Pastor the Boot; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…march drew tens of thousands – or hundreds of thousands depending on whose numbers you believe – of anti-marriage-equality Catholics and evangelicals to Mexico City, the culmination of weeks of protest organized by the National Front for the Family. Days before, the Supreme Court ruled that adoption by same-sex couples should be considered, like other adoptions, according to the best interest of the child. In preparation for Saturday’s anti-marria…

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

By Peter Laarman

…onic when he wrote (in the wake of the ghastly Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando) that it is “theologically inconceivable” to implement real gun control in the United States: God gave us guns to show us who we are. Giving up the gun would be surrender to evil, taking us abruptly into eschatological time… The Gun is patriotic. The Gun is America. The Gun is God. In her highly readable and timely new book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second…

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

Despite an American Idol judging gig, a baby girl with Orlando Bloom on the way, and her new album Smile due out August 28th, Katy Perry hasn’t been capturing the public’s attention like she did with 2010’s Teenage Dream. Back then, songs from “Firework” to “E.T.” dominated the airwaves, and she reached the still unsurpassed height of tying Michael Jackson’s Bad for most chart-topping singles off of one album. And yet, separate from the ebb and f…

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

By Tony Keddie

…mic fundamentalist who slaughtered forty-nine people at a gay nightclub in Orlando in 2016. Many conservative Christians have believed that liberals’ campaigns for sexual rights would bring about God’s wrath. AIDS “may be a judgment of God on the nation,” Billy Graham proclaimed as gay men and other marginalized persons fought for their lives during the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s. Jerry Falwell concurred and added that homosexuality was “Sata…