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‘Anti-Romeo’ Vigilante Squads Target Men Suspected Of Being Gay; More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…married in first month; Lutheran priests barred from officiating More than 800 same-sex couples were married in March after marriage equality went into effect on the first of the month; 770 had already been in civil partnerships. The Lutheran Evangelical Church has decreed that priests are not permitted to marry same-sex couples and some bishops warned that those who do would face “consequences.” From a March 1 story: In spite of the church rulin…

Pope Denounces Gender Colonization; Indonesian Court Considers Islamist Request To Criminalize Homosexuality; Egypt’s Grand Mufti Says No One Has Right to Harm Homosexuals; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…urders, 32 attacks and three suicides in Turkey last year. It believes the number of such murders over the past six years is more than 50. Syrian gay refugees in Turkey suffer even more, as their legal status is precarious – they are usually undocumented and most are reluctant to report assaults to police, our reporter says. The Turkish authorities cited “safeguarding security and public order” as the reason for banning Gay Pride in Istanbul this…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…s I watched talented African American actors hamming up “African-ness” for cheap laughs. It brought to mind the long, shameful history of Americans—black and white—performing blackness (often in blackface) on stage for white audiences. The Book of Mormon wants to have it both ways. It wants to make fun of The Lion King and its African stereotypes by substituting more authentic stereotypes. It wants to be transgressive and conventional, blasphemous…

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…

Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

By Lisa Miller

…houris, dark-eyed women. We all know that Mohammad Atta, who flew American Airlines flight 11 into the Twin Towers on 9/11, was inspired by this promise. But among progressives, the sex promised to the righteous in the Qur’an isn’t sex as we know it, but something mysterious and sublime for which sex is a poetic stand-in. Second, what happens to our bodies in heaven? This is my favorite part of the heaven conversation. For if you believe in heaven…

An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

By Haroon Moghul

…h buildings, starting right around the same time. Talk about luxury on the cheap; it’s hard to deny a feeling of similarity. (The tower is to the Burj as a certain toupee is to hair: might the Trump Tower inadvertently mimic an Islamic motif?) The regal twin palm trees in the foreground are the world’s tallest, at some 3,500 feet each. Recently a falling coconut crushed an entire apartment complex, punching a massive hole that has filled up with…

Marriage Debate in Australia Shifts To Push For Religious Exemptions; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ber bullets and detained 10 people to suppress the event, according to the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet. One activist said he feared that rising nationalism hurts the LGBT community because it makes people believe “we cannot be the descendant of our supposedly glorious ancestors.” Another activist warned that the government’s attack on secularism is “extremely dangerous.” “The public were told that secularism was the enemy of Islam and its values. B…

5 Reasons the Muslim Brotherhood Won’t Turn On Israel

By Haroon Moghul

…analysts and pundits initially expressed surprise by the vehemence of the Turkish government’s reaction to Israel after the Gaza flotilla incident. But in part it wasn’t a foreign policy decision so much as a requirement to respond to real anger on the ground in Turkey. This doesn’t mean that Egypt is going to go the way of Iran. Even Turkey, for all its rhetoric, attempted to make a gesture of reconciliation during the recent forest fires in Is…

The Next Islamists: The Wide Green Smudge That’s Changing Our World

By Haroon Moghul

…itarianism as well as their treatment of some of their Muslim populations. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan slammed China for its treatment of the Uighurs, much as he chastised Israel over the Gaza crisis—yet in the latter case, he did not downgrade ties. The Turkish Parliament turned down an American request to host part of the invasion of Iraq, and yet continues to push close ties with the West. While Turks assert their right to practice a…