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Catholic Bishops End Family Synod With Little To Say To Gays; World Congress of Families Has Plenty To Say, None of it Good; How Same-Sex Marriage Came to a Buddhist Temple in Japan; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…lming public support for marriage equality – 70 percent in a 2013 poll by Haaretz – legislation has not been able to survive the country’s “contentious parliamentary politics.” Israeli marriages are performed under laws inherited from Ottoman times that grant each Israeli religious community’s state-recognized leadership sole jurisdiction over marriage. These Ottoman religious communal structures, called millets, were continued by the British mand…

Google’s Benevolent Interfaith Big Tent

By Lucia Hulsether

…this is Yusuf.” Every evening they flew kites together, before stealing jhajariyas from the sweet shop owned by Yusuf’s family. A harsh reality interrupts these wistful recollections: “When partition came, we had to relocate to India overnight. … I miss Yusuf a lot.” The grandfather’s voice breaks, and now we understand. Geopolitical conflict, ongoing over six decades later, tore him away from his beloved friend. Distant memories keep the wound o…

Refusing the Monsters on Maple Street: A First-Person Commentary from the Mass Hysteria at JFK

By Marion Grau

…nter-terrorism programming. If terrorism is geopolitical, it’s because it damages psyches as much as bodies. In emphasizing the geopolitical aspect of its “War on Terror,” has the West missed the fact that it has been colonized by a psychic terrorism—one inspired as much by the hypervigilant paranoia of homeland security and law enforcement as by any actual terrorist activity? This is the hypothesis I have grappled with after my experience earlier…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…ind priests willing to perform marriage rites in Tampere, Helsinki and Vantaa, at least. But in Kotka, southeast Finland, the local diocese has issued a ruling banning even prayers on church premises for same-sex couples who have exchanged wedding vows. The ban extends to prayer sessions held by priests for gay couples who have tied the knot in civil ceremonies. Kotka clerics also decided to discontinue the practice of reading wedding announcement…

Breivik’s Manifesto on Islam vs. “Christendom” as “Demographic Warfare”

By Sarah Posner

…lowing as he reads Breivik’s 1,500 page screed), the “Demographic Winter” paranoias, well documented by Kathryn Joyce, are a staple of Christian right panics about declining Christian population. As Joyce has written, though, the World Congress of Families, a purveyor of population hysteria, works on an interfaith basis with non-Christians, including conservative Muslims. Still, though, the demographic winter panic feeds on both anti-feminist and…

Will Istanbul Ever Be a Part of the European Union?

By Haroon Moghul

A thought that immediately occurred to me as we crossed back from Asia to Europe last night after dinner: Istanbul will never be a part of the European Union. It doesn’t fit. (In writing this, a thought subsequently occurred to me: that sounded eerily like something Thomas Friedman would write.) Istanbul’s the only city of its size, prestige and power in a vast area of the planet—you have to go to Moscow in the north, probably Dubai in the south,…

Uncertainty About US Role In LGBT Human Rights Under Trump; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ality reviewed the “remarkable and inspiring leadership” provided by the Obama administration. At a confirmation hearing, Trump’s nominee as ambassador to the United Nations, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, said American values “do not allow for discrimination of any kind to anyone.” But Trump’s transition team sent the U.S. State Department a questionnaire asking if PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Pan for AIDS Relief, had become “a massive, in…

RD News Round-Up—Nov. 4, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…Period Regardless of the outcome of the presidential election—if Senator Barack Obama wins, expect a spate of “The Religious Right is Dying/Mortally Wounded” articles—the Religious Right will not disappear from the American political landscape in the near or distant future. In fact, if you follow the money, which is what Americans United for Separation of Church and State is doing, you’ll see that “the nation’s leading Religious Right organizatio…

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

By Daniel Silliman

…ivil rights activists. He helped Martin Luther King, Jr. make the argument against Vietnam, drafting King’s “Beyond Vietnam”speech in 1967, broadening the concern of the movement and alienating some moderate civil rights supporters. Author of numerous works on American-American 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 Th…

Norway Massacre Suspect Anders Behring Breivik, Hitler, & the Jerusalem Post Editorial

By Sarah Posner

Anders Behring Breivik’s extensive document “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” has a subsection entitled, “The great Satan, his cult and the Jews,” contained within a broader section headlined, “The Conservative Revolution – the only Solution for free Europeans.” Breivik’s manifesto is described by Chip Berlet, an expert on right-wing extremism, as stating “that ‘Political Correctness’ should be called ‘Cultural Marxism’ and is the r…