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Bree Newsome and the True Meaning of Civil Disobedience

By Sarah Posner

…the flagpole on the state capital grounds in Columbia, South Carolina this morning to remove the Confederate flag, Bree Newsome recited Psalm 27 (“the Lord is my light and my salvation…”) Led away in handcuffs by the police, Newsome recited Psalm 23 (“the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…) For taking down the Confederate flag, Newsome was arrested. She told police she was prepared to be arrested and did not resist. This is civil disobedience….

#SorryNotSorry: What U.S. Christian Denominations Teach About Homosexuality

By Stephanie Russell-Kraft

…uld be accepted by society. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) Members (as of 2010): 6,157,238 According to the LDS website, “the church’s doctrinal position is clear: Sexual activity should only occur between a man and a woman who are married. However, that should never be used as justification for unkindness. Jesus Christ, whom we follow, was clear in His condemnation of sexual immorality, but never cruel. His interest was al…

To Pray or to Prey: Racism, Religion and Violence in Charleston

By Willie Dwayne Francois

…of terror—namely under the banner of the Ku Klux Klan and American purity. Most notable among these is the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing September 15, 1963 in Birmingham. Black churches met fiery graves in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Massachusetts and Georgia across the decades of the 20th century. Equally troubling to the moral health of America, white southerners momentarily suspended worship or Sunday school to enjoy th…

What to Make of the Chechnya Connection? An Expert Weighs In

By Hussein Rashid

…eautiful tomorrow also for them.” Radon noted that believing in a better tomorrow is a powerful positive motivating and invigorating force. For him, it’s not coincidental, although very sad, that we see an uptick in xenophobic attacks during this period of severe economic downturn. By focusing only on each incident of mass violence by itself, and seeking one-word rationales for that violence, we miss the deeper issues we can and need to address to…

Ebola and Us: The American Roots of Liberia’s Trauma

By Peter Laarman

…iety, made in the image of a stratified United States. Although they never numbered more than five percent of the country’s population, the Americo-Liberians ruled over the indigenous people (with occasional help from the U.S. Navy) for an astonishing 133 years—1847 to 1980. It was only the Samuel Doe-instigated bloody civil wars that finally toppled Little America. The catastrophic civil wars are what in turn left Liberia a profoundly broken plac…

Global Precap: 5 Religion and LGBT Stories to Look For in 2015

By Peter Montgomery

…tolerates “bad behavior.” Being in the U.S., and in the global home of the Mormon Church, is likely to bring added attention to this year’s summit, which will push the religious right’s claims that LGBT equality and religious liberty cannot co-exist. The World Congress of Families withdrew its official backing for its 2014 Summit in Moscow after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, but the meeting went ahead and WCF officials and…

Obama Won’t Allow Religious Exemption for LGBT Discrimination

By Sarah Posner

…the exemption. (Link to my prior posts) The president reportedly will not, however, rescind a Bush-era executive order permitting religiously affiliated contractors to make employment decisions based on religion, as urged in a letter earlier this week. As I discussed with Columbia Law School’s Kara Loewentheil on bloggingheads, even though the executive order will not include the exemption, there will still be a gray area with the Bush era execut…

Is “Religious Freedom” Impossible After Hobby Lobby?

By Austin Dacey

…tantial burden” on the plaintiff’s “religious exercise” while failing to demonstrate that the burden was the “least restrictive means” of furthering some “compelling governmental interest,” in violation of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, or RLUIPA. The decision was unanimous. The ease of Holt may signal the solidifying of the Court’s doctrine of “religious freedom”—as noted by Kara Loewentheil here on RD—even as f…

Cruz Backs Bishops on Religious Liberty Claims

By Patricia Miller

…ngentially related to the church to make cultural pronouncements about the moral unacceptability of non-procreative sex. And the baseless charge about abortion coverage isn’t an accident. It’s no coincidence that the most successful religious liberty claims to date—Hobby Lobby, Little Sisters of the Poor—have involved baseless accusations about religious organizations being forced to cover abortion. Without this, the claims have much less resonanc…

2 Steps Forward, 3 Steps Back, 1 Step Sideways: The Chaotic Progression of LGBTQ Inclusion at Christian Colleges

By Donovan Ackley III

…has progressed markedly since the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed “homosexuality” as a psychiatric disorder from its diagnostic manual (DSM) in 1973, so equality for people who are transgender has advanced since the APA’s removal of “gender identity disorder” (the idea that being trans* is inherently pathological) from its DSM in 2013. © Paulmckinnon | Dreamstime.com – WorldPride Parade Law professors Andrew Koppelman of Northwester…