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C Street Scandal, the Media, the Future of the Family: An Interview with Jeff Sharlet

By Bill Berkowitz

…e that bad or that unusual. First, there’s the fact that having written about this for a number of magazines that might be said to be sort of mainstream (Harper’s, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Mother Jones) and talked about it on very mainstream television programs (NBC Nightly News, CNN, etc.) and radio (Marketplace, Fresh Air, BBC, etc.), I’ve sort of established ownership of the story. That may be a good thing for my book sales, but it’s ba…

Catholic Bishops End Family Synod With Little To Say To Gays; World Congress of Families Has Plenty To Say, None of it Good; How Same-Sex Marriage Came to a Buddhist Temple in Japan; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…to take communion would be tantamount to heresy. But by refusing to rule out future changes that would make the church more inclusive, the final product could be seen as a blow to traditionalists’ hopes to put an end to the often fierce arguments that have roiled the church since Pope Francis called for an open debate soon after his election in March 2013. The often vague language of the concluding report also left the door open for Francis to ta…

Can Faith-Based Organizing for Gun Control Work?

By Sarah Posner

…he activists would focus not on the customer’s sin—no one wants to hear about their own sinfulness—but on that of the people inside the gun shop and gun show: how they look the other way at straw men purchases, how they’ve become a part of a background check system rife with loopholes, how they sold guns to someone who later shot people dead in a school, a church, a movie theater, a health clinic. Do you want to be part of that culture of death? Y…

Why Do Evangelicals And Dems Want Immigration Reform?

By Daniel Schultz

…re the only race-ethnic group where self-identified liberals (31 percent) outnumbered self-identified conservatives (a mere 21 percent). That’s a whole lot of reasons to want to get immigration reform today. If Democrats can push the platform through, they might be able to lock in the key demographic for the next forty or fifty years. For a politician, that’s almost as good as dropping an anvil on your opponent’s head. But why would the evangelica…

The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut

By Douglas Harrison

…the internet effect the politics of the gospel closet? What’s so good about YouTube is, first of all, it’s an incredible archive of old recordings and performances. But in the case of the gay subject, because people like Tonéx were interviewed on YouTube, there were thousands—tens of thousands of emails [and other responses]—can you use a curse word on Religion Dispatches? Oh, I think so. When Cadillac Kennedy did that anti-Eddie Long tape: “Di…

Catholic Church Bans Gay Film: This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…if you want to just take a leak at a McDonald’s bathroom, you can’t help but feel polluted,” a rep from the Alliance told local media. (What an odd thing to say to the press.) The rep also accused McDonald’s of “openly promoting gay issues” and miseducating children on sexual behavior. Shanghaiist quotes from a statement released by Chang Shou-yi, secretary general of the Alliance of Taiwan Religious Groups for the Protection of the Family: “Beca…

Is Torture Utilitarian?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…30, 2005, is a discussion that gives away the lie that this is a debate about utility. The CIA’s use of waterboarding is nothing like that allegedly used in US military training. For starters, a CIA prisoner may be subjected to two 2-hour “sessions” per day. In any given “session,” the detainee may be subjected to as many as six applications of water, each lasting up to 40 seconds. That is eight full minutes of the experience of drowning in a sing…

Why We Must Reclaim “Religious Freedom” from Christian Conservatives

By Bill Berkowitz

…ristian Right’s obituary, the theocratic coalition and the way it carries out its politics has dynamically evolved. “A number of Christian right legal agencies have produced manuals for churches and related institutions, to rewrite such things as job descriptions to extend the legal definition of ‘ministry’ in order to seek exemption from labor standards and civil rights laws, and to inoculate themselves against discrimination lawsuits.” Thus, ass…

Liberty University’s In-House Conversion ‘Therapist’ Retires, But Will the Christian School Cease This Discredited Practice?

By Lucas Wilson

…Richmond, VA, underwent several years of conversion therapy with Emerick, but what stands out in his memory is the emotional manipulation: “He would guilt trip me into confessing my ‘sin.’ And he always addressed me as ‘kid,’ like he was being sweet or something. And he often said, ‘I love you, kid.’” Tyler Milton, a 2016 graduate who also underwent conversion therapy at Liberty, remembered Emerick this way: “He was so warm, so friendly, and was a…

Who’s Scared of Polygamy? A Restrained Case for the “Slippery Slope” Argument

By William E. Smith

…ove that Ed Simon has thoughtfully cautioned against. Let’s think for a minute about how same-sex marriage went from novel idea to law-of-the-land in just a few short decades. The ascent of same-sex marriage in the United States gained much (but not all) of its initial support from churches. Many local Universalist Unitarian (UU), Disciples of Christ, and United Church of Christ (UCC) congregations, and some Episcopal churches, for example, starte…