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Belize Overturns Sodomy Law Defended by Religious Right, Ugandan Officials Will Continue to Suppress Gay Groups, And More on the Global LGBT Recap

…r backers of the proposal based on their “blackmail tone.” Georgia’s Civil Code already defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The purpose of the now rejected referendum was to write the same specification into the Constitution, effectively banning same-sex marriage. Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili has promised that if the Georgian Dream Party wins a sufficient majority in the October 8 election, a constitutional ban on same-se…

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What’s the Problem With a Good Placebo?

…ldare to ER. In Chinese culture, acupuncture is similarly reinforced and encoded as effective therapy. Antibiotics, and apparently also acupuncture, work regardless of your belief system—but they work better if you believe in them. Double-Blind The history of medicine up until the last century was essentially the history of the placebo effect. Double-blind, randomized control trials are now the gold standard in medical research and have only been…

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Clashing human rights visions for LGBTs at United Nations; More Mixed Messages from the Vatican as Family Synod Begins; Timeline of Worsening Homophobia by Turkey’s AKP Party; Global LGBT Recap

…nterviewer, “Gays must have legal protections in terms of their rights and freedoms.” But in 2004 the government removed language protecting LGBTI people from a draft penal code, with the justice minister at the time saying it was “unnecessary to add sexual orientation because gender already covers it.” The timeline tracks anti-LGBT statements from columnists and party officials, including one made in 2010 by Aliye Kavaf, “the then state minister…

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CPAC Speaker Admires Geert Wilders

…to “shari’ah law,” and did we need a party like Geert Wilders’ nationalist Freedom Party in the Netherlands? In his answer, McCarthy said he was an admirer of the incendiary, far-right, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant Wilders, who has likened the Qur’an to Mein Kampf. Although Wilders’   Freedom Party had one goal of banning the burqa, McCarthy nonetheless suggested that the U.S. should be be “like France” and ban the burqa. Instead, he maintained, th…

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Packed with Threats of Political Violence, Media Largely Ignore the NAR’s ‘Million Women’ Rally in DC

…torate, and encouraged them to download his voter mobilization app (the QR code for which was projected onto the Jumbotrons placed around the mall). This may have been the largest voter mobilization event this election season. Illustration in Mario Murillo’s essay, “The Daughter of Lies” Wallnau has been engaged in election mobilization all year, notably on The Courage Tour, which seeks to register and mobilize evangelicals in 19 key counties in n…

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Know-Nothing Christians Irate Over Obama Comments

…is speech, assured his Turkish audience that he understands the difference between religious claims and Constitutional claims. And in so saying, he was implicitly reminding them of the value of American-style secularism to the current situation in Turkey. One Religion, Indivisible What many of the religious voices raised in protest over President Obama’s speech assume is that America is a Christian nation, not a secular nation at all. And in so sa…

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The Blockbuster Spirituality of John Green’s “The Fault In Our Stars”

…icrobe cells, mutated cells. We are built, too, of our parents, of genetic code and flesh and blood and bones that grow inside of flesh and blood and bones. So we come again to the parents: “There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re sixteen, and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer,” Hazel tells us. Green, who is now the parent of two children, told The New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot, that his own…

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Tinkering with Creation: Intelligent Design 2.0

…, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana became the first governor to sign an “academic freedom” bill into law. Observers on both sides of the issue are now waiting for the first school district in the state to adopt a curriculum based on this new language. Of course, these academic freedom bills, along with the “teach the strengths and weaknesses” wording in Texas are merely a watered-down version of intelligent design—what Judge John E. Jones III, in his rul…

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This is not a Religion Column: Sarah Palin, American

…somebody should take the hide off Peg because the stuff inside is so much better than the varnished surface which blinks in the sunlight of public approval.” That’s not to say Peg was a sweetie underneath. He was an angry man through and through, born into hatred of Hearst inherited from his father, responsible for the “Hearst Style,” a populist tongue of blood and cliché, expressive of the sentiments of working people but emptied of any real pol…

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The Biblical Circus of William Stringfellow

…re are contradictions everywhere. He leaves us with no plan for action, no code of behavior for the modern world, and no school of thought to belong to. These things we have come to expect from our moral theories, and “faith-based” politicians depend on them. There is no proof for the existence of God or that this Jesus really walked on the earth with which to combat the nonbelievers—I may be one myself, but I won’t let it keep me from reading Str…

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