Religion Dispatches
…s “weird.” The news set off a wave of speculation that weird was, in fact, code for Mormon, and that Obama and team planned to use the word “weird” as a dog-whistle to stoke voters’ antipathies towards Mormonism in 2012. The news set off a wave of cringes among Mormon politicos as well. Because Mormons do recognize “weird” as a word that sticks to us in the American imagination. In 1995, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley declared in an inter…
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…when applied to homosexuality, unhealthy. For our community, “change” is a code word for repression, distortion, and fear. So LGBT people must either abandon repentance or queer it. If we are not to reject it, we must make it our own, make it more complex, set aside its oversimplifications. The good news is that this is a gift to everybody else. Total surrender to heteronomous ethics is unhealthy, period. It may be prescribed by some, but it is al…
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…upon the visual. White LBGTQ persons have always had the option of simply code-switching when beneficial. Sexual orientation is rarely worn on one’s sleeve, face, or hair texture. Thus the particularity of white supremacy and legalized racial discrimination in previous epochs resists hackneyed comparisons to the black freedom struggle by those advocating other issues, regardless of how right or just these issues may be. At the same time, we all m…
Read More…of a new documentary, The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code. Also distributed at the press conference were excerpts from A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California Indians by the Spanish Missions, by Elias Castillo, which include Serra ordering whippings for Indians who fled the mission. The statement by Amah Mutsun Tribal Band chairman Lopez concluded: The Catholic Church will someday realize that canonization of Serra h…
Read More…lthy gays and lesbians want to end our “religious freedoms” — which is the code phrase for “they want to pass hate crimes laws that make it illegal for us to call them the filthy sinners they are.” As a Christian, who just also happens to be a lesbian, I take offense at this continuing campaign on the religious right to promote this false dichotomy of gays vs. God. No one in the gay and lesbian community wants to curb anyone’s “religious freedom.”…
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…tinue to romanticize the “conservative resurgence” and “biblical fidelity”—code for continuing to deprive women and LGBTQ folks of power—in his commentary on the new report for Christianity Today. After all, both major architects of the power grab and purge of moderate and liberal actors from SBC institutions that SBC partisans euphemistically call “the conservative resurgence”—Paul Presser and Paige Patterson—now stand credibly accused of sexual…
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…who used sex to lure men to their deaths while Adele Farrington, in a pre-Code romp called The Devil’s Bondwoman (1916), portrayed a woman whose sexual appetites were so insatiable that she attracted Satan himself. By the 1940s, a comic book entitled Madame Satan [see image left] told a similar story to adolescents of a seductive woman who, using Satan’s supernatural power, attempted to lead men to destruction. Doesn’t the story of a high school…
Read More…tals and so forth. So if one had to bring Boudway’s original analogy up to code, one would have to say this: Imagine you live in a country where the default way to buy food is buying it from your employer. You get a job, and your employer negotiates with companies who in turn have agreements with grocery stores and growers, shipping companies and meat processing plants, and so on. The end result of all this is that you get a card, which you presen…
Read More…terpretation will remember that John’s Revelation was written as a kind of code to an audience hard-pressed by persecution and loss. Few believe that its message was intended to be taken literally—much less as a roadmap to events two millennia in the future—but rather to provide comfort and reassurance to a struggling community. It is a bitter irony therefore to see it taken out of context and used to attack a politician offering a platform of hop…
Read More…es. “Deviant,” “diseased,” and other descriptors of sexual minorities were code words for homophobia and transphobia. Moving the discussion of Section 377 away from systemic inequality and toward the putative best interest of Indian society was emblematic of the right-wing attempt to erase sexual diversity. Although right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi has remained silent on Section 377 since his election campaign in 2014 (during hearings in Ju…
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