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What Fidel Castro’s Death Means for LGBT Rights in Cuba and More, in This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…… The ban comes after months of bitter speeches and threats from Tanzanian officials aimed at the gay community and at organizations treating its HIV/AIDS patients. This year, police raided two U.S.-funded HIV/AIDS organizations and seized confidential patient information and supplies, officials said. In September, the deputy minister of health, Hamisi Kigwangalla, accused HIV treatment organizations of “promoting homosexuality.” Tanzania has been…

Communication v. Excommunication: Catholic Women and the Church

By Mary E. Hunt

…plains, house church leaders, campus ministers, etc.—despite their lack of official recognition, in fact in spite of a recent Vatican pronouncement that excommunicated any women ordained and the bishops who ordain them. Another, in my view more promising, approach is the formation of the Women-Church movement. This consists of house churches in which small groups of women (and some men) engage in sacrament and solidarity as per the Catholic tradit…

Revealing Joseph Smith’s (Well-Known) Polygamy Doesn’t Address the LDS Church’s Bigger Problem

By Joanna Brooks

…fter journalists focused on Romney’s campaign revealed the extent to which officially sanctioned racist theology persisted at Church-owned Brigham Young University—did the LDS Church issue an official acknowledgment that past or present racism was condemnable. To this day, even in a recently-released historical essay comparable to the Joseph Smith polygamy statement, the LDS Church has still not fully acknowledged that it was wrong to exclude fait…

Global LGBT Recap: Francis’s First Year; Homophobia and Development; African Activists Push Back

By Peter Montgomery

…stians,” said a third. Gitonga, a powerful East African Pentecostal church official, is among a group of Kenyan leaders who have launched “Zuia Sodom Kabisa,” Kiswahili for “Stop Sodom Completely.” The campaign seeks 1 million signatures to petition legislation to criminalize homosexual acts in Kenya. Nzwili says that many clergy are grateful to Western churches for sending missionaries and making Christian converts, but feel a sense of betrayal o…

“Ex-Gay” NPR Report Closets Mormon Side of the Story

By Joanna Brooks

…conferences is understood within the Mormon community as something like an official seal of approval. Matheson wrote the official workbook for Evergreen and has received grants from Evergreen to develop his own research on root causes of homosexuality. Wyler has keynoted Evergreen conferences. According to sources in the gay Mormon community, both Matheson and Wyler are all-stars in the world of Evergreen. And both Journey into Manhood and Evergre…

For Men (and Heterosexuals) Only: A MEMO To Catholic Theologians and Educators

By Mary E. Hunt

…o simple but important ways. I urge us to implement these changes ahead of official reworkings that may be some decades away. Catholic theology is done by a variety of laborers in the vineyards: some who are part of the institutional church and others in the larger Catholic community. These observations come from the latter with the hope that the former might also implement them. First, official Catholic teachings on “The Sacrament of Matrimony” r…

Vatican Sexual Abuse Meeting Is Destined to Fail—To Stop the Problem or the Decline

By Mary E. Hunt

…inal Theodore McCarrick broke in late summer of 2018. High-ranking Vatican official Australian Cardinal George Pell was found guilty of sexually abusing young boys in December of 2018. How long does it take to get a plane ticket to Rome? Why not convene a Zoom meeting to save time, money, and face? Any PR flack knows that step one is to put out the fire ASAP. Heads of national bishops’ conferences are the last people needed for a constructive conv…

How Can You Exclude The NAACP and Liberal Protestants from Human Rights History?

By Austin Dacey

…” occurs in Frederick Douglass’ 1845 autobiography). The FCC maintained an official stance opposing racial discrimination and urging all denominations to work towards non-segregated religious communities and a non-segregated society. The FCC was one of forty-two nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that had secured an invitation from the Secretary of State to serve as “consultants” to the American delegation at the 1945 conference in San Francisco…

Rome Has Spoken and Rome Is Finished: The Vatican’s Sexual Abuse Summit ‘Failed Miserably’

By Mary E. Hunt

…east of all the much-touted and deeply disappointing pontiff. Instead, the official meeting featured videos of survivors at yet one more remove from the bishops, many of whom had never listened to survivors in their own dioceses. It’s no wonder. These stories are hard to hear. One woman in a video told of being forced as an underage teen into sex with a priest; he paid for her three abortions. Some bishops expressed genuine shock, leading observer…

Could Orthodoxy Be Having its Vatican II Moment?

By Chrissy Stroop

…n Crete is peaceful and determined. The Churches that have arrived for the official opening are already working on the draft message to be published at the end of the council. They are, of course, also saddened that some Churches have created this turmoil by changing their minds for no apparent (or at least no justifiable) reason. So the council will proceed and convene, while its decisions will be authoritative and binding, just as with the decis…