Religion Dispatches
…be here. And he wants you to hurry up and have those American babies, because if you don’t, we’ll run out of workers, and if we run out of workers the United States will get “knocked off its global perch.” Because that’s what’s at stake, ladies and gentlemen—American domination. So, my (heterosexual) compatriots, take off your clothes, take off your condoms, take out your IUDs and diaphragms, stop swallowing your birth control pills, have your va…
Read More…. I reassert my rejection of the criminalization of journalistic work, the use of the Penal Code to imprison journalists, and the trial of civilians in military courts. Azerbaijan: Activist Flees Persecution, Struggles in Germany Alturi.org has published a profile of Cavid, an Azerbaijani human rights and pro-democracy activist who founded an LGBT rights group in 2012. When photographs of his engagement went public, he and his fiancé fled the coun…
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…out as gay to my Sikh family.” After coming out to his supportive but confused parents, he realized there was no literature or support in the Punjabi language. I decided to provide life coaching and spiritual counseling to LGBTI South Asians because every time I would return back from a human rights deployment abroad, the state for South Asians LGBTI’s in the UK was the same. Dire, closeted, in fear and hidden. There has never been any literature…
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…e “God is mighty,” or “God is in control.” J. Kameron Carter knows this is code language that allows religious people—but especially Christians—to remain aloof from the darkness that consumes the marginalized. This aloofness goes directly against God’s hope that her cry of protest will cause others to cry out as well. The Spirit of God cries with the same moans and groans the black mothers Yolanda Pierce, Kelly Brown Douglas and Beyoncé write abou…
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…ntion to things we might not otherwise notice. But caricatures cease to be useful when they’re confused with the real thing; when the critic invites his audience to deride the real thing based on the absurdity of the caricature. This is what Dawkins does in his little “note” to potential Free Inquiry subscribers. And it isn’t helpful. There is such a thing as helpful satire, as comic lampooning that highlights the truth. And then there are caricat…
Read More…any legal recognition of gender change or transgender status. The language used by the parliamentarians echoes anti-transgender language used by religious conservatives who refer to gender reassignment surgery as “mutilation” and insist that a strict biological binary supports the principle of “complementarity” between the sexes. Estonia: Court overturns ruling that favored lesbian couple A court decision requiring immigration officials to grant a…
Read More…series of denunciations that the National Republican Senatorial Committee used in its ad condemning it. Democrats should’ve stuck up for him, saying, yes, we’re sick of these moralizing right-wingers who want to tell us that Christianity demands legal protections for zygotes and none for gays, and try to tie rights for others to a “big government” that’s “on our backs.” Conway was right to point out that the moralizers like to impose their views…
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…ons, such as a Sikh who successfully sued the Army in 2015 over a grooming code that would have required him to shave his beard and remove his turban. Justice, not to mention old wisdom about geese and ganders, demands that our judicial system should treat like cases alike. Either sincere religious conviction should be a defense, or it shouldn’t. There should be a healthy debate about the place and extent of religious exemption in contemporary, pl…
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…nd genocide should predispose Jews against systematic policies of wanton abuse. The State of Israel has a mixed record of living up to these Jewish ideals. Torture as a means of prisoner interrogation was officially sanctioned until 1999, when it was outlawed by the High Court. The infamous “ticking bomb” defense—the notion that torture will prevent an imminent attack, which has proven more relevant on 24 than in reality—was not deemed sufficient…
Read More…conservatism. To show how definitions of “religion” and “spirituality” are used rhetorically we need only consider how AA Toronto Intergroup, when charged with discrimination on the basis of creed back in 2014, defended itself by invoking section 18 of the Human Rights code, which allows a religious group to restrict participation to the faithful. So while AA presents itself to the public as a “spiritual” program, distinguishing itself from “relig…
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