Religion Dispatches
…tals and so forth. So if one had to bring Boudway’s original analogy up to code, one would have to say this: Imagine you live in a country where the default way to buy food is buying it from your employer. You get a job, and your employer negotiates with companies who in turn have agreements with grocery stores and growers, shipping companies and meat processing plants, and so on. The end result of all this is that you get a card, which you presen…
Read More…ur trans female employee as a woman, which means she’s violating the dress code when she arrives to work wearing clothing that meets your company’s guidelines for women. When she inevitably sues for wrongful termination, you’ll have a federal judge on your side—at least if you live and work in Michigan. That stunning decision is an outlier among current case law, and is likely to be overturned on appeal, says Elizabeth Platt, director of Columbia…
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…hnya. The disappearances, confirmed by Novaya Gazeta, a Russian opposition newspaper, and reported by the New York Times on Saturday. It began, Novaya Gazeta reported, after a Moscow-based gay rights group, GayRussia.ru, applied for permits to stage gay pride parades in four cities in Russia’s predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region, of which Chechnya is a part. The group had not focused on the Muslim areas. It had been applying for permits for…
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…ptance of legal equality? And, more crucially, what are the limits of this newly articulated tolerance? “Holy cow… we can’t repeal the fall of man” As it turns out, Mero’s call for religion to get out of public politics extends to his own hesitance to prescribe specific policy solutions to the current stalemate between “religious freedom” and LGBT rights. During a two-hour conversation with RD, Mero repeatedly sidestepped requests to clearly ident…
Read More…-side on her finely-crafted sofa we knew the jig was up. They knew, and we knew they knew. They never said a word, and their hospitality continued to be perfect – but we were suddenly tired, and needed to go to bed. I wonder, to this day, if we had told them at the beginning that we were gay if they would have rented the room to us. The uncomfortable silence as Buchanan spewed his vitriol that night makes me think they might have told us they were…
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…his wasn’t 100 percent.” As we’ve moved from an election dominated by fake news to a new Trump administration run on the principle of “alternative facts,” it’s worth taking some time to ponder what seems to be contemporary conservative credulity. We should certainly be reminded of the term “truthiness” that Stephen Colbert invented in October 2005 to capture some of the pronouncements of the George W. Bush administration. As he explained then, tru…
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…action. They would need to support the efforts of groups like the anti-war Code Pink that resorts to reason, empirical evidence and visibility to challenge U.S. development policies, or the Platform for the Movement for Black Lives, (one of the most advanced and inclusive political visions ever articulated), or the Fight for $15 movement that successfully campaigned to raise the minimum wage in many parts of the country. It would mean standing in…
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…facto decisions about what counts as a religion and what doesn’t. The tax code makes implicit judgments about religious legitimacy in parceling out breaks to some groups and not others. Those rules, however, are fairly broad, and they don’t target certain religions as enemies of American society. Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump made repeated promises to curb Muslim immigration to the United States and institute a registry of Muslims in the co…
Read More…rom Northern Cyprus after he posted a provocative video on social media on New Year’s Eve that reportedly said “Are you still celebrating the New Year while so many journalists are under arrest, so many children are being harassed or raped, corruption and bribery are over the top, and bigots share crap on the streets together with religious annunciators. Drown in your crap, Turkey.” He has since called his comments a “satire against discrimination…
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…ent months about helping anti-equality activists in Mexico and launching a new chapter in Nigeria. Last Tuesday, the group wrote about the assistance it is providing Christian groups who are opposing the advance of marriage equality in Taiwan. BuzzFeed, the polling firm Ipsos, and the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law collaborated on a survey of public attitudes toward transgender people in 23 countries. (ILGA released a mapping report…
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