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Mexican Marriage Marches Show Struggle Between Church and Secular State; Pro-LGBT Mormon Group Grows After ‘Apostate’ Declaration; Botswana Gives Anti-Gay US Pastor the Boot; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ts for all.” The photographer who took the picture we posted last week of a 12-year old boy standing with arms outstretched to block one of the anti-equality marches, says he has been subjected to death threats since the photo went viral. In a controversial response to the Catholic hierarchy’s anti-equality activism, a group of gay activists last week “unveiled a list of Catholic leaders who have maintained homosexual relationships,” including pri…

Welcome to the Shari’ah Conspiracy Theory Industry

By Sarah Posner

…im organizations fall into lock-step with it, stems solely from a single 20-year-old document written by a single Brotherhood member in 1991. In the controversial terrorism financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation, which first resulted in a mistrial in 2007, and convictions in a 2008 re-trial, federal prosecutors introduced a document, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” Gaffney and others h…

Pricking the Conscience of Churches: From AIDS Activism to Ending World Hunger

By Susan Henking

Donald E. Messer is a 70-year-old writer, United Methodist theologian, and retired college (and seminary) president who tells us here that he believes his career may have begun in earnest only after he retired and began to work full time for the organization he founded, the Center for the Church and Global AIDS. In fact Rev. Messer has been on the front lines of AIDS activism since the 1980s in his pastoral and academic leadership, his writing,…

Public Shrines to Treason: Charlottesville and the Cult of Confederate Memorialization

By Spencer Dew

…with kek-meming internet trolls—some suited up in armor and others in khaki-and-polo combos possibly patterned off of the president himself—the organizers created an orgy of radicalization. Rally participants chanted together, “Jews will not replace us,” “fuck, you, faggots,” and “blood and soil.” The focus was not a public memorial of military history on a plinth in a city park, but, rather, fantasies of genocide and separation, narratives of rac…

Russian Attack on LGBTs at UN Rejected; Gay Cake Controversy Rages in N. Ireland; Bishop Calls for Marriage Referendum in Puerto Rico; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…owns Ashers Baking Company. The hundreds who couldn’t make it into the full-to-capacity hall sang “Amazing Grace” on the sidewalk. A bakery supporter said it seems as though Christians “have no rights.” One pro-marriage-equality columnist, Fionola Meredith, said she was supporting Ashers in the name of free speech and said that forcing the company to endorse same-sex marriage would to “nothing to advance the cause of equality.” United Kingdom: Tha…

Worse Than Madoff: Amway Launches Domestic Revival

By Bill Berkowitz

…eneurs left only with garages full of products, motivational tapes, and get-rich-quick books doing little but gathering dust. If you’ve watched any television at all since the holidays, you might have wondered why a company called Amway Global ran so many commercials. Were these ads for the same company that has, over the years, been widely accused of running a pyramid scheme, paid nearly $20 million in fines in a Canadian criminal fraud case, and…

Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam

By Mark LeVine

…the scale of the movement, but that would have made it too crowded. But the 16-page photo insert in the middle of the book has enough crowd and concert photos to get the idea across. Is there a book out there you wish you’d written? Which One? Why? I wish I could have been in Nietzsche’s head when he wrote Beyond Good and Evil or perhaps Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Discovering these books as a teenager totally changed the direction of my life. He was…

Racial Justice Will Be Top Priority for New Prez of the United Church of Christ

By Frederick Clarkson

…There will be less reliance on or need for religious experts: namely, full-time, seminary-trained, ordained or authorized clergy. “Membership” as currently defined by (and deemed essential for) the institutional church will have no meaning in a postmodern, emergent world. People will belong in both an organic and fluid way to those groups or cohorts that provide their lives with meaning, that meet their spiritual hungers, that equip them to encou…

Duterte Cites Catholic Heritage in Opposing Marriage Equality, and More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ing that he did not take issue with anyone’s sexuality. Two of his brothers-in-law, and some of his cousins, are gay, he said. But he stressed: “Wherever God has placed you, stay there.” He noted that no one was empowered to “erase the great divide between a woman and a man.” Australia: Priest takes on ‘gay panic defense’; hate speech change debated The parliament of Queensland abolished the “gay panic” defense – a term for the theory that a strai…

Mormons Fight Marriage Equality in Mexico; Is Catholic Church Italy’s Anti-Gay NRA?; Nigerian Anglicans Cut Ties With UK Diocese; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…im was rejected by Greece will be sent back to Turkey,” reports AFP: The 46-year-old man arrived on the Greek island of Lesbos after the EU struck a deal to send some failed asylum seekers back to Turkey in a bid to stem the bloc’s worst ever migrant crisis. His application was rejected by Greek asylum services and a board of appeal ruled that it was safe to return him to Turkey, said Fotini Barka from NGO the Greek Council for Refugees. Norway: P…