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‘Anti-Romeo’ Vigilante Squads Target Men Suspected Of Being Gay; More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…he Washington Post reports. “Because, you know, it’s been banned.” Finland: 800+ same-sex couples married in first month; Lutheran priests barred from officiating More than 800 same-sex couples were married in March after marriage equality went into effect on the first of the month; 770 had already been in civil partnerships. The Lutheran Evangelical Church has decreed that priests are not permitted to marry same-sex couples and some bishops warne…

Snake-Handlers, False Messiahs, and a Few Great Souls: 14 Who Died in 2014

By Daniel Silliman

…ican religious history, including There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America and Martin Luther King: An Inconvenient Hero, Harding taught at Illiff School of Theology in Denver, Colo. for more than 20 years. Nelson Bunker Hunt A Texas billionaire remembered mostly for his business exploits, Nelson Bunker Hunt bankrolled the religious right. He underwrote many Campus Crusade’s projects, including the 1967 “Berkley Blitz,”the $6 mil…

Reading Beinart and Lerner as Gaza Burns

By Ira Chernus

…he [imagined] danger through aggression and power.” As Beinart argues, the number of American Jews who act out of fantasied oppression is declining. But their political strength remains much greater than their numbers. Yet curiously Lerner, the professional psychologist, downplays this and the other psychological wellsprings of support for militant Zionism. Instead he focuses time and again on compassion for the very real historical sufferings of…

Violent, Genocidal Anti-Palestinian Rhetoric Moving to US?

By David Sheen

…adventures of the Israeli government, regardless of the Palestinian death toll. But they have at least paid lip-service to the sanctity of human life and expressed regret for the souls lost on both sides. As Israel’s latest assault on Gaza enters its fourth week, however, we are witnessing a significant rhetorical departure. Yet as reprehensible as remarks from American Jewish leaders have been, the dehumanizing discourse among political and reli…

Why are Nuns and Monks in the Streets? (Parts I & II)

By José Cabezón

…of learning is being strictly regulated. In reality, there is no religious freedom in Tibet.” It may seem strange to an outsider that the regulation of monastic institutions—for example, the control of the number of monks in monasteries—should be such an important issue for Tibetans. Let me try and explain why monks and nuns risk years of imprisonment, and indeed their own lives, to protest this and other governmental policies aimed at controlling…

In ‘God Hates Fags’ Case, Free Speech Trumps Free Exercise

By Julie Ingersoll

…his religion (as well as his privacy rights). The Phelps case relied on a free speech claim instead of freedom of religion, and they won. So as the Supreme Court sees the right to freely practice one’s religion as “constitutionally irrelevant,” religion has been reduced in popular rhetoric to the right of the dominant religion to be free of any challenges to its dominance: wishing someone “happy holidays” in thought to violate the religious freed…

Palin’s Israel Trip

By Sarah Posner

…r her Israel trip, as it has done for other presidential hopefuls, instead booking it through a Christian tour agency. He thinks, perhaps, that Palin is miffed that he and other RJC board members have been critical of her, but that she’s unwise to rebuff them because they could be so helpful to her. But this is characteristically Palin behavior — with or without the criticism. She is, for example, the only GOP aspirant who has never spoken at the…

“I’d Be Stupid Not To Go Packing Now.”

By Rev. Irene Monroe

…beat down of Duanna Johnson, an African American transwoman, in a Memphis booking room that was captured on a surveillance video. “I’d be stupid not to go packing now.” Williams lives in Oakland, just outside of San Francisco, and he’s going to check out the San Francisco chapter of Pink Pistols. As a national organization that encourages lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender to arm themselves to prevent hate crimes the Pink Pistols are also a s…

The Theodicy of George Carlin

By Kathryn Lofton

…nfotainment” makes for disinformation and lousy entertainment. Whereas the freethinker and the comic once shared a tour schedule and booking agent, now they are bifurcated by genre and accessibility. Both are degraded by the absence of the other, as the quest for quick hard laughter and serious statistical proof press Carlin and Jacoby to extremist corners of inflexible insight. Jacoby, a self-described “cultural conservationist,” might be right t…

The “Obamosque” Smears and the Money Fueling Them

By Sarah Posner

Special Guests, a booking service that sends out daily press releases to reporters, producers, and radio shows, and which earlier this week described the proposed Park51 project as “Obamosque,” is today touting a Time magazine poll showing one quarter of Americans apparently believe President Obama is a Muslim. (A Pew poll out today shows that figure at 19%). Why do that many Americans believe that? Could it be the use of terms like “Obamosque?”…