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Burma’s Spirit Festival, and More in This Week’s Global LGBT Roundup

By Peter Montgomery

…mber – though other surveys put the opposition percentage lower. India and United Kingdom: 50 years after decriminalization in UK, India hangs onto colonial era law At The Times of India, Vikram Doctor notes that the United Kingdom’s parliament voted to decriminalize homosexuality in 1967, asking why India “still hangs on to this colonial legacy” fifty years later. His piece includes history about the anti-sodomy law in the U.K. and the “morass of…

Marriage equality comes to Slovenia, continues to spread in Mexico; Civil Union legislation approved in Sicily, debated in Peru; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…f childcare centers, is criticizing “hostility to Christian values” in the United Kingdom. She was reportedly fired after giving a lesbian colleague a Bible and telling her God is not OK with her sexuality. She told her employers that she would refuse to read a book featuring same-sex couples to children. More from the London Evening Standard: “There is a feeling in the UK that Christianity does not need to be respected and can be disparaged. With…

Gambian Prez Rails Against Gay ‘Evil Empire’; Irish Priest Comes Out During Mass; Trans Talk on Tunisian TV Sparks Debate; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ics that there may be differences of opinion in this room, but what we are united on is the fundamental truth that is at stake in this century, and that is the truth of the beauty and dignity of marriage and family. And I believe, instead of fear, or being depressed, or being negative, we need an optimism with our faith, to say that no culture can long stand that neglects or denies the truth, the simple truth that marriage is the union of a man an…

Unreleased Religious Freedom Manifesto Isn’t the Culture War Compromise It Hopes to Be

By Frederick Clarkson

…ates the “torture and death” faced by “our brothers and sisters in Christ” internationally, with “the greatest single threat to religious freedo m in the United States”: same-sex marriage. Religious liberty, he suggests, is in danger of being “lost in America.” Other members of the drafting committee include: Os Guinness, an evangelical drafter of the Williamsburg Charter (an influential antecedent of the current project); Jacqueline Rivers, co-fo…

Exclusion is Causing Great Harm: A Conversation With Suspended UMC Pastor Rev. Cynthia Meyer

By Joel Pitney

…riends. I have a daughter who is 21, and she really has no interest in the United Methodist Church at this point. That’s a sad loss. So many people who might otherwise be attracted to the United Methodist Church—with its care for the larger world and commitment to social justice—are put off by the stance on these issues. Those who are LGBT, or who have family members or people important to them who are LGBT (and that includes about everybody), now…

The United Methodist Church to LGBTQ People: You’re ‘Sacred,’ But Not Welcome

By Pamela R. Lightsey

…ere efforts to show themselves to the world as “one body,” denominations can only make this claim in the spiritual sense. With the looming impasse on LGBTQ full inclusion into the life and ministry of the denomination, it may very well be that the United Methodist Church has reached the end of being “united.” If this is the case, shame on us, for we will repeat our own history of segregation, bigotry and schism and will put the final nail in the c…

‘Spooky Action’ of Quantum Physics Offers an Alternative Frame for War in the Middle East and the 2024 Election

By Peter Schwartz

…ion in the Unholy Land and the political and religious situation in the Disunited States of America. Other correlations of this sort exist throughout the world. They are a product of the Great Dis-Ordering of global relationships since the end of the Cold War, which have reproduced and spread as we’ve transitioned from a stable world order governed largely by the United States to a multi-polar world governed by… no one. Hyperlocal affinities Let’s…

‘Cult’ Is an Inaccurate, Unhelpful and Dangerous Label for Followers of Trump, QAnon, and 1/6

By Catherine Wessinger

…860s, and the “Ghost Dance” movement among Native Americans in the Western United States in the late nineteenth century. In the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, white people, especially farming families and people living in rural small towns, felt that their way of life and ownership of land and property were threatened by their inability to keep their farms and agriculture-related businesses due to government lending practices; their inabili…

Predicting the Future of Religion: A Thought Experiment

By Ed Simon

…next Pope won’t come from Asia, Africa, or South America. A Pope from the United States seems unlikely, as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has myopically acted as a virtual rung of the Republican Party. Whatever the American bishops have in common with the wider church, GOP policies on economics or militarism are foreign to church teaching whether the pope is Francis or Benedict XVI. As a result, despite theological conservatism…

Trump’s “Muslim Ban” A Gift to Terrorists

By Ali Olomi

…kept a Qur’an near his bedside and the other framers were adamant that the United States would be a land of religious liberty for Christians, Jews, and “Mahometan.” The first country to recognize the young independent United States of America was the Muslim sultanate of Morocco. In 1805 Thomas Jefferson even hosted an Iftar dinner in the White House. Muslims participated in the Civil War and ran businesses as far West as Arizona. After the disinte…