Religion Dispatches
…t hear them. The horrifying reality of the cardinal’s deafness is that the Philippines bishops’ conference spent years blocking access to contraception after it colluded with the country’s leadership to mandate a national family planning program that only offered natural family planning. Just this spring the Supreme Court finally upheld an historic measure to restore contraceptive funding after the bishops challenged it as a violation of the const…
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…elieve that homosexuality is (an) unnatural act that cannot be supported,” India’s current home minister and former president of the BJP, Rajnath Singh, said in 2013. Earlier this year, however, India’s supreme court said it will reexamine the ban on gay sex. Bermuda: Premier says he will vote for civil unions Premier Michael Dunkley urged voters to be on the “right side of history” when they cast their ballots in a June 23 referendum, reports the…
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…at to call it. “Female feticide” is a little different. Almost everyone in India uses it to refer to sex-selective abortion. To a Western feminist, it sounds quite jarring, because it echoes the kind of language that the American anti-abortion movement uses. Since there isn’t much of an anti-abortion movement in India, there’s less sensitivity about such rhetoric. Still, some people there worry that the campaign against sex-selective abortion coul…
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…oversy embroiled him from the mid-’90s because he loved, and painted from, India. Politically-minded Hindu partisans objected to his portrayal of women. He painted not just women but Hindu goddesses, and he painted them as they have been painted for centuries: unclad. But secular Indian courts allowed advocates for the Hindu right to bring a case against Husain. He was accused of causing harm to the sensibilities of others. He faced not one case b…
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…. He had Muslims with him in the struggle in South Africa. He came back to India and had Muslims with him in the struggle for Indian independence, including Ghaffar Khan and many others I mention in the book. Unfortunately, even within South Asia, some of that has been obscured by the fact that his chief antagonist or counterpart was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, who had a different vision for Indian Muslims than Gandhi and wanted…
Read More…re. India: US Offers Asylum While Exporting Homophobia Speaking of aslyum, IndiaWest reported last week that an Indian gay couple who had been held for six months in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in El Paso, Texas, were granted asylum in December. Jagdish Kumar and Sukhwinder Sukhwinder left India in June 2012 and travelled by various means for a year through Dubai, Cyprus and several South and Central American countrie…
Read More…Shourie, journalist, occasional politician, and author of Missionaries in India, surveyed Indian Catholic missionary literature and concluded that it “sounds more like … the Pentagon, than like Jesus.” Moreover, just as critics of Muslims in America suggest that Islam is intolerant and therefore incompatible with American democracy, Indian authors such as these have criticized Christianity and its cousins for their claims that they alone possess…
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…ause, “We came here to tell you about the success story of conservatism in india—the defeat of the left liberal marxist radical Islamist cabal in India.” Perhaps sensitive to the significant religious differences between Hinduism and the ‘Judeo-Christian’ traditions championed at NatCon, Madhav suggested that his movement’s goal was not for “theocracy” but for a “restoration of India’s cultural-civilizational glory,” similar to the Ten Commandment…
Read More…number of celebrated figures and other possible means. The objective is to promote and solidify homosexuality. Al-Azhar, in a previous statement, reiterated that the amoral and satanic propaganda launched by these various, vicious, parties has the purpose of destroying the human moral order respected by all religions and schools, because this moral order is in line with humanity’s innate quality (fitrah) created by Allah. Promoting homosexuality a…
Read More…Lawmakers voted to allow lesbian women access to artificial insemination. Philippines: First Transgender Member of Congress Elected Geraldine Roman became the first transgender person elected to a congressional seat in the Philippines. Elected to the presidency was Rodrigo Duterte, a strongman mayor who has bragged about the number of extrajudicial killings during his tenure. Duterte has spoken in favor of LGBT equality and said he would consider…
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