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International ‘Pro-Family’ Summit Calls for New Anti-Gay Laws: Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ced in the country’s Senate earlier this year. Cuba in 2008 began offering free sex reassignment surgeries to trans Cubans under the country’s national health care system…. Angélica Lozano, a former councilwoman in the Colombian capital of Bogotá, earlier this year became the first openly LGBT person elected to the Colombian Congress. Jaime Parada Hoyl in 2012 became the first out political candidate elected in Chile after he won a seat on the mun…

Gay Black Church: An Interview with Bishop Yvette Flunder

By Lisa Webster

…hat African people would do, because they’re cursed. We still wouldn’t get free. There’s no freedom anywhere. And that it was God’s idea—it was not white people’s ide it was God’s idea that we be in that place. And there was a church in Welshneck, South Carolina that, when the Emancipation proclamation came and African people were freed, a group of them went to this church and wanted to become members of the church. Now of course they couldn’t si…

Israel Votes to Limit Sheldon Adelson

By Sarah Posner

…imed at limiting the free distribution of Israel Hayom (Israel Today), the free newspaper owned by American casino magnate and Republican super-funder Sheldon Adelson. The same Sheldon Adelson who, at the inaugural meeting of the Israeli American Council in Washington on Sunday, said, “I don’t like journalism.” Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer explains the anti-Adelson bill that advanced today: The law, proposed by MK Eitan Cabel (Knesset) and sponsored b…

The Deadly Burqini, Or, What Exactly is an “Islamic Swimsuit”?

By Shabana Mir

…I would like to go swimming but not in a one-piece from Wal-Mart. You are free to disagree with me, but I am also free to feel the way I do. There are people who feel free to go to work without deodorant, or underwear, or appropriate coiffure, with worse consequences than a burqini might have on others. I wish people would take up arms against those offences. In my opinion, given how I perceive swimsuits, it’s extremely unfair and sexist to requi…

What 19th-Century Marriage Controversies Can Tell Us About The Fight Over Gay Marriage

By Eric C. Miller

…ange understandings of marriage. Polygamy (nineteenth century Mormons) and free love (some groups of Perfectionists) were two dramatic attempts to change marriage that were based in religious and often explicitly biblical justifications. Religion can be a malleable tool in negotiating the meaning and significance of marriage in public life. The perceived connection between marriage and the future of the nation also has a long history. Commentators…

Corporations, Religious Conscience, Citizens United, and Contraception

By Sarah Posner

…urt. Judge Carol E. Jackson dismissed O’Brien’s claims under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Free Exercise, Establishment, and Free Speech Clausees of the First Amendment. On the RFRA claim—one that conservative opponents of the HHS rule have portrayed as more or less open and shut—the judge ruled that the coverage requirement does not “substantially burden” (the relevant legal standard) O’Brien’s religious practice: Frank O’Brien i…

Orthodox Church’s Authoritarian Anti-LGBTQ Statement Poses Serious Threat to Academic Freedom

By Sarah Riccardi-Swartz

…he OCA, the Synod of Bishops have the authority to restrict their right to free academic speech and thought. Academic freedom, which was arguably founded in Medieval Christianity, has always been subject to institutional affiliation. But the OCA document doesn’t specify who might be at risk. Does it pertain to OCA lay members employed at institutions and/or writing academic articles for publications unaffiliated with the OCA? There is (or at least…

How Breivik’s “Cultural Analysis” is Drawn from the “Christian Worldview”

By Sarah Posner

…deo-Christian” values and nations. Lind worked at the Paul Weyrich-founded Free Congress Foundation as its Director of its Center for Cultural Conservatism, a position he left in 2009. Berlet dates Lind’s first significant writing on “cultural Marxism” to 1997. Berlet: Most significant is a collection of essays published by the Free Congress Foundation in 2004 on cultural Marxism, political correctness, and multiculturalism. The editor of that col…

The Fire Next Time: Tibetan Protests Spread

By Megan Sweas

…ts could douse the flames. As an Indian who has worked for Students for a Free Tibet, Raha has seen young refugees who were more interested in hip-hop culture than Tibetan culture reconnect with their roots in recent years. Since March 2011, 29 people inside Tibet have protested China’s increased repression by lighting themselves on fire. Their photos hang on posters in the center of the city’s Tibetan refugee settlement, personalizing the strugg…

Is Christianity Simply About God Entering the Uterus of a Jewish Virgin?

By Eric Reitan

…selves. God had to create a space between Himself and us, in which we were free to chart our own path, to mature in our own way, to tell our own stories. Hopefully, these stories would be love stories that would eventually bring God’s creatures back to Him: fully formed selves who were Other than Him, but united with Him and each other in love. But our freedom carried with it the capacity to do otherwise. It carried with it the capacity to reject…