Religion Dispatches
…period, indigenous scholar Pablo Tac (1822-1841), who was born in Mission San Luis Rey and went to Europe to study, dying tragically young. Or if I must reach back to the Spanish era, I would consider Tongva medicine woman, Toypurina (1760-1799), who led a revolt against the San Gabriel Mission in 1785. She was captured and tried, and during her testimony, she indicted the padres for their unjust treatment of native lives, lands, and cultures. Ne…
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…prayer in its myriad forms, how many actually thought about the victims—in San Bernardino, as well as in the other 352 mass shootings that have happened in the U.S. this year? The tragically familiar experience in San Bernardino is not about prayer, but the policies in the U.S. that create virtually unrestrained and unregulated access to firearms and the exacerbated culture of death-dealing. Defenses of prayer can be just another guise for the Rig…
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…iverse voices, covering the usual rhetoric with a veneer of tolerance, and promoting the speech as completely new and different (including calling it “the most difficult address I’ve ever had to make”) is, what I call, argument laundering. And he does it because it works. The media love a kinder, gentler tone. Indeed, apart from the reactions noted earlier, in the hours following Friday’s speech, some outlets applauded Oaks and characterized the “…
Read More…Katherine Zappone, made a video for the Marriage Equality campaign that is promoting a referendum coming in May. According to Pink News, she and her partner married in Canada in 2003 but the High Court in Dublin refused in 2006 to recognize her marriage. Uganda: Magazine gives LGBTI Ugandans a voice The Advocate profiles Bombastic, a new magazine “by and for LGBTI Ugandans” and its editor Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera. Reclaiming messaging from anti…
Read More…hether to carry out these ceremonies and, if so, whether the relationships sanctified by them should be registered under English law as same-sex marriages or civil partnerships. Islam: Gay Imam on Engaging the Koran The German website Qantara, an effort by the German government and the Goethe Institute to promote dialogue with the Islamic world, has published an interview with South African Imam Muhsin Hendricks, in which Hendricks discusses his s…
Read More…ves the signal that, in this city, love is the same for everyone,” cheered Marino Sindaco. (Translation courtesy of Google.) No cheers from the Catholic Church, which disparaged the move as an “ideological bluff.” Pink News reports that the editor of the website for the Rome diocese called the civil unions vote “a symbolic stage in an anti-family itinerary that opens up disturbing horizons damaging children.” Colombia: Conservative activist asks P…
Read More…, and in what manner to express or not express these rights. It’s when the code that translates these rights for us somehow ceases to function properly in the background that problems result. I want to suggest that often when problems crop up around religious or religiously-motivated speech in the United States, they often have less to do with rights per se than with the unwritten code that determines how these rights are to be taken. At least tha…
Read More…positive depictions of LGBT lives. The MDA Free to Air Television Program Code states that “music associated with drugs, alternative lifestyles (e.g. homosexuality) or the worship of the occult or the devil should not be broadcast.” The Free to Air Radio Program Code says “information, themes or subplots on lifestyles such as homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexualism, transsexualism, transvestism, paedophilia and incest should be treated with utmost…
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…interests, for some this incident revealed that the people controlling the code have a lot of power. If one thinks that marketing agents put “Bible” in the code, then they might think of them as predatory, or presumptuous about U.S. Christians and their political affiliations. They might become angry that companies have such power in shaping the public’s perception of Christianity and, indeed, in shaping Christians’ own ideas about their communiti…
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…ement policies in respective regions or countries, and develop programs to promote religious freedom.” But given Brownback’s history of using “religious freedom” as a sword to discriminate against LGBT people, his nomination offers the strongest evidence yet that, when the Trump administration talks about “religious freedom,” it actually means “Christian supremacy.” Though Brownback an equal-opportunity excluder: the Council on American-Islamic Re…
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