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Global LGBT Recap: Ugandan Law Unleashes Vigilantes, Anti-Gay Americans Want to Boost Homophobia Exports

By Peter Montgomery

…vists in Uphill Battle Anti-Gay Revision to Constitution According to ILGA-Europe, the Slovak Parliament is scheduled to discuss a constitutional amendment to limit marriage to “a man and a woman” when a new legislative session begins next week. A press release from the group quotes Paulo Côrte-Real, Co-Chair of ILGA-Europe’s Executive Board: “Recent and similarly restrictive constitutional amendments in Latvia, Hungary and Croatia demonstrated th…

Dispatches From the Site of a Massacre

By Haroon Moghul

…slim people who resemble puddles left by a receded tide, stranded in a new Europe that has little room in its imagination for them. My journey is deeply personal, and urgently universal. The 1990s war over Bosnia had global effects: it gave ammunition to radicals and it challenged the project of European unity; but it also hit very close to home, forcing Muslims like myself (I was twelve when the war started) to confront an assumed compatibility o…

Tweeting ISIS Attacks: A Lesson in Not Learning a Lesson

By Haroon Moghul

…ch of our age of “Freedom fries” and condescending attitudes—remember “old Europe” and “new Europe”? The overwhelming majority of Muslims condemn and reject terrorism, but many Muslims are too busy fighting ISIL to offer their denunciations of extremism. They’ll let putting their lives on the line speak for them. ISIL is already a significant threat: We don’t need to feed into their narrative. We want to defeat them, not help them recruit. If you…

ISIS is the Islamic “Reformation”

By Ed Simon

…nse to the new and horrific violence that modern religion had unleashed on Europe. He claims that the modern western political order, far from being an intellectually inevitable result of ideological currents of the time, was actually a pragmatic necessity when religious violence had made Europe ungovernable. In other words, reformation didn’t produce liberalism, liberalism was the cure for reformation. Once you familiarize yourself with the bruta…

Pope Backs Anti-Gay Referendum; Islamic State Executions Include Gay Syrian; ‘Conscience Clause’ Debated in Northern Ireland; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…country’s constitution in June, making it one of four countries in Eastern Europe to do so since 2012. The first of three questions before voters on Saturday’s ballot, which asks if marriage should be defined as between a man and a woman, won’t change the legal status quo in Slovakia. But the second question would also ban adoption for same-sex couples, and the third allows parents to withdraw their children from sexual education classes. Feder no…

“I ‘Came Out’ For Marriage Equality”: An Anti-Gay Activist Changes His Mind

By Welton Gaddy

…ening and, I think, paralyzing for our public discourse today is the large number of people who cling to beliefs without ever examining them; with no reason or reflection. And so that brings me to ask you: What hope does your experience offer for improving this kind of gridlock of thinking in our society? Well, that’s a good question, and it’s a real issue for our society. It’s something that I talk about a lot when I’m over here in Europe. Americ…

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

By Amina Wadud

…t it, it’s very similar to the wearing of the niqab in the public space of Europe and North America. If it had absolutely no impact, it would go away. Trust me on that one. For me personally, I chose to wear the niqab way back in the mid-1970s in the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia. I was strongly influenced by a few things. Once I had accepted to practice Islam, I became very ambivalent about my relationship to all things not Islamic, especi…

Palin Cries ‘Blood Libel’: Can Words Harm Us?

By Susannah Heschel

…f blood libel myths in their anti-Semitic propaganda, which found a primed European audience. By the end of WWII, the blood libel left Europe and was resurrected in the Middle East. The alleged Jewish longing for blood, no longer Christian, was now often represented as money or land. The Arabic translation of The Merchant of Venice, for example, presents Shylock seeking not a pound of flesh from Antonio, but, as a Zionist, appropriating land from…

Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…

Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

By Michael Schulson

…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…