Religion Dispatches
…t care who’s on top.” Update: Via Brian Tashman, some more background on Molotov: @sarahposner Molotov also made anti-choice terrorist movie bit.ly/j3zQlw & backed Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill youtube.com/watch?v=EmWdEx… — Brian Tashman (@briantashman) December8, 2011…
Read More
…e especially striking interview, given current events in Uganda, is with a Ugandan woman with HIV who Robinson met in England, talking about how much she and her family have been helped by gay people. Other notable voices include Bishop Jon Bruno of Los Angeles, who notes that the church has a tendency to “claw on the carpet” while being dragged from the past; retired bishop Otis Charles and his husband Felipe; and Bishop Tom Shaw, an openly gay c…
Read More…ire additional staff to work on the problems facing LGBT people in Russia, Uganda, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. India: US Offers Asylum While Exporting Homophobia Speaking of aslyum, IndiaWest reported last week that an Indian gay couple who had been held for six months in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in El Paso, Texas, were granted asylum in December. Jagdish Kumar and Sukhwinder Sukhwinder left India in June 2012 a…
Read More
…ential for goodness and holiness as heterosexuality. One need only look at Uganda to realize the violent, if not deadly, effects that anti-gay evangelical efforts can have on the safety and peace of LGBT persons. Following the Funding But I believe there is an ever more disquieting question that arises out of this situation. What is the real reason that progressive evangelicals try to sidestep taking a stance on welcoming gays and lesbians into c…
Read More
…piritual mapping” project. It is currently operational in Central America, Uganda and the Middle East. Otis’ history in Middle East dates back more than two decades to when his father George Otis Sr., a close friend of Ronald Reagan and former Lear Jet executive, set up the High Adventure radio ministry in Lebanon in 1980. Otis put the station in the hands of Christian Falangists during the Israeli occupation. The US State Department tried to shut…
Read More
…ue, where witch hunting, particularly of children, is really scary, and in Uganda, where the hunting and persecution of sexual minorities is driven at least in part by the view that homosexuality is caused by satanic spirits. And even here in the states, casting out of demons can be a scary business. (I remember a story Carlton Pearson, who knows this world well, told me about Ted Haggard, with whom he attended Oral Roberts University: that Haggar…
Read More
…Nigeria), to “kill the gays” instigators Yoweri Museveni and David Bahati (Uganda), and finally to our very own criminal-in-chief, Donald John Trump. Homophobia, misogyny, and contempt for the poor (aka the un-chosen) are so very much taken for granted and accepted as “Christian” within The Family that its principals are able to say, with a perfectly straight face, that they have no political agenda when they support and subsidize authoritarian le…
Read More
…sound hilariously inflated to an outsider, while the war-torn and corrupt Uganda where they’re proselytizing remains flat, one-note, and unimaginative. To write out the show’s insensitive portrayals of, well, everyone is in some ways to ask for a different show entirely. So be it, many say. The world has changed its tune about this one-time monster hit. We’ve developed new languages to name indecencies and grown spines to say them out loud. A tit…
Read More
…ities (Beta Israel of Ethiopia), emerging Jewish communities (Abayudaya of Uganda), or communities who maintain traditions of “lost” Jewish identities (Conversos and Black Jews in the Americas) is fair game. I believe there’s an aphorism about gooses and ganders that fits this present predicament. The chosen or the damned All of which brings us back to the issue of chosenness and who the “true” Hebrews or Israelites are. The ideas shared by Irving…
Read More…reachers, like Pastors Rick Warren and Scott Lively, who actively fund and promote homophobia in Africa In neighboring Nigeria, a draconian anti-gay law passed the House at the end of May. While international human rights advocates have mounted a campaign this month calling on the country’s president not to sign the bill, some American religious right groups have praised the law. Mass Resistance called it a “bold” move by Nigeria to fight back aga…
Read More