Search for "cheap airline tickets to chicago o"

Pride Month & Prejudice; ‘Worrisome Time’ For LGBT People; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…e said. “I want to be the role model I didn’t have. You see somebody that looks like you and you say, maybe I can be a part of this.” Finland: ‘Intense’ debate over marriage equality in Lutheran Church The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland is “the only Nordic national church which doesn’t celebrate same-sex marriage,” reports Evangelical Focus. Lutheran churches in Sweden, Iceland, Denmark and Norway celebrate same-sex marriages. Marriage equ…

An Open Letter to CEO Jeff Smisek On United Airlines’ Blasphemous Safety Video

By Austin Dacey

…allowed halls of Western art music, smothered under a featureless musical goo and carried off to further mutilations I will not relate here. Mr. Smisek, I am not a religious person. If I can be said to adhere to any confession, it is that primordial, preliterate one that has sprung forth everywhere ever since we beings were human: the covenant of sound. You and your associates have desecrated a work of transcendent beauty and blasphemed Music. I d…

What the Lost Finale is Really About

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…of the soul) damned.” To be lost is not merely a geographic problem for marooned airline passengers, or for men unwilling to stop and ask for directions—it’s a spiritual and moral condition. These days a google search turns up over 500,000,000 hits (that’s half a billion); not too surprising for a basic and often-used term. Similar numerical results come from google searches on terms like “run” and “hide.” Meanwhile, “found” yields over 1.3 trilli…

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Men “Stand Up” for “Religious Freedom”… On a Plane

By Kara Loewentheil

…emption regime would lead to chaos, but I didn’t think it would happen so soon. Apparently I underestimated myself. The Economist reports that ultra-orthodox Jews have been disrupting flights when they’re seated next to women, which, they say, their religion forbids.* According to the report, the men will sometimes even attempt to bribe the women to move. Ok, so no huge deal there—it’s annoying, perhaps, but hey, that’s the free market economy at…

Invited by Allah

By Amina Wadud

…airline ticket and was in contact with the family of one of my graduate school friends. They would pick me up from the airport and host me during my stay and the days of ritual. Nice plan. So I went to the embassy to get the visa and was denied because (as an American) I needed proof that I was Muslim. How do I prove I have been a practicing Muslim for a decade? I went to the famous al-Azhar university and secured a shahadah document in French, Ar…

What’s More Frightening Than Snakes on a Plane?

By Devin Kuhn-Choi

…ut getting one’s way–and making sure everyone else has to do it your way, too–than about genuine claims to religious freedom. Further, wouldn’t standing in the aisles nearly guarantee an encounter with women? Because anyone who has ever had to navigate around another person in an airplane aisle knows there will be some sort of contact as you move past; the space just isn’t big enough for most people to avoid that. If your goal is sincerely to avoi…

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

By Marion Grau

…international airports seized up as panicked reports of “multiple active shooters”—later discredited as false—swept through the terminals, sending passengers, law-enforcement, and airline workers scrambling for cover and eventually onto the tarmac. The responding authorities found neither shooters nor evidence of any shots fired. The most likely explanation offered for the panic was that the cheering of Olympics fans for Usain Bolt’s performance i…

The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

By Kaya Oakes

…she’s got everything I need, A breeze in the pines and the sun and bright moonlight, lazing in the sunshine yes indeed. ~ “Sugar Magnolia” My childhood home was equidistant between two of the Grateful Dead’s regular Bay Area venues: Berkeley’s Greek Theater and Oakland’s Kaiser Convention Center. When the Deadheads came to Berkeley, they camped in the parking lot behind my high school, and when they came to Oakland, they camped behind my mother’s…

How Not to Support Obamacare

By Peter Laarman

…aw was supposed to achieve, is redistributive by its nature. And that’s a good thing. It’s the only way 30 million uninsured are going to have their health attended to as a basic human right. It’s bad enough that the president has been silent about the huge number of low income people of color who are being altogether stiffed in states that won’t expand Medicaid coverage. It’s bad enough that, in a little-discussed provision of the ACA, hospitals…

Hookers for Jesus: Sex and Salvation on the Strip

By Nicole Greenfield

…Lobért appreciates the allure of her former lifestyle. Calling herself a hooker for Jesus, she has set out to “hook, help, and heal” those still in the industry. Lobért, a curvy peroxide blonde, has been unabashed in flaunting her God-given gifts to draw attention to her Vegas-based ministry, Hookers for Jesus. At the 2008 Adult Entertainment Expo, for example, a 40-year-old Lobért (dressed in a tight black tank top with strategically placed pink…