Search for "airline tickets websites for cheap phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Egypt Goes After Gays to Silence Islamist Critics; South Africa’s ‘Open Mosque’ is Closed; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ch of the press treated it as a real same-sex wedding — a first for Egypt. Websites associated with the Muslim Brotherhood — the now-banned Islamist movement that just over a year ago was ruling Egypt — began featuring the wedding video as a sign of the moral decline in Egypt under the military-backed regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who ousted it from power last year with the help of the army. Egyptian officials have been enforcing moral…

Missing the Forest for the Witches

By Joseph Laycock

…Hunter and the ACLU filed a lawsuit against a local library for censoring websites about Wicca and Native American religion. News coverage poked fun at the witchy names of the town (Salem) and its librarian (Glenda). Impassioned comments even popped up on the library’s Google maps site. But in focusing on a narrative of a backwoods town with a prejudiced librarian, it is easy to ignore a much more alarming source of censorship: a software company…

WikiLeaks’ October Surprise: With “Spirit Dinners,” Conspiracy Goes Mainstream

By Carmen Celestini

…in 1996, which culminated in a cookbook of aphrodisiac recipes. Conspiracy websites and sites such as everipedia have linked Spirit Cooking with a ritual called “Cakes of Light,” from the religion of Thelema, founded by Alistair Crowley, in which honey, oil, menstrual blood and sperm are used. Wikileaks tweeted: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/794450623404113920 Linking the occult, Satan worship, and New World Order to the American Presidency…

The Religious Origins of Fake News and ‘Alternative Facts’

By Christopher Douglas

…cial media. The restaurant quickly “got hundreds of death threats on their phones and social media.” Then a North Carolina man decided to investigate the pedophilia ring himself, bringing an assault rifle that he fired in the restaurant. (No one was hurt.) As the man later explained about the absence of child sex slaves there, “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.” As we’ve moved from an election dominated by fake news to a new Trump administrati…

The Most Ridiculous Responses to the Vatican’s Call-out of the Catho–Christian Right

By Patricia Miller

…lging in paranoia about obscure theocratic Protestants and fringe Catholic websites, and ultimately critiquing every kind of American religious conservatism. Now, for one, Spadaro and Figueroa mentioned “obscure theocratic Protestants,” namely Dominionist Rousas John Rushdoony, not to conflate him with the modern Christian right but to explain his influence on the “theopolitical vision of Christian fundamentalism” that has infected the Christian R…

Marriage Debate in Australia Shifts To Push For Religious Exemptions; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…candals that receive exceptional media attention. … The way that most news websites covers incidents of arrest of LGBTQ individuals creates a state of moral panic in society. The method used, through which LGBTQ individuals are demonized, defamed and represented as subhuman, includes sensationalist, exaggerated headlines such as, “The capture of the largest ring of sexual deviants”. The media also uses terms, that are morally charged and that deni…

Exactly 30 Years Before Illinois AG’s Devastating Sexual Abuse Report, a Plan for Prevention was Implemented, Then Scrapped

By David Clohessy

…at six Illinois bishops are refusing, even now, to post, on their diocesan websites, the names of some 149 clerics accused of sexually abusing children who are or have been in Illinois. And why, apart from the fact that it’s obviously the right thing, should the bishops do this? Because, as the state’s top law enforcement authority stresses, each of these men is already listed on official public church websites elsewhere and is deemed “credibly” a…

The Religious Origins of Fake News and ‘Alternative Facts’

By Christopher Douglas

…cial media. The restaurant quickly “got hundreds of death threats on their phones and social media.” Then a North Carolina man decided to investigate the pedophilia ring himself, bringing an assault rifle that he fired in the restaurant. (No one was hurt.) As the man later explained about the absence of child sex slaves there, “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.” As we’ve moved from an election dominated by fake news to a new Trump administrati…

More Mixed Signals from Pope Francis; Church of England Wrestles with Rifts; Faith Groups Lobby Pro & Con on Irish Referendum; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…e group did not get a private meeting with Pope Francis, but was given VIP tickets to the pope’s weekly audience in St. Peter’s square. Religion News Service reports that several bishops, including “San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone – point man or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ battle against gay marriage – had written a letter to the Vatican on their behalf.” A group of LGBT Catholics from London who met up with the New Ways…

Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…applaud this news, a murmur through the convention hall, Blackberries and iPhones tweeting on all sides of me. “When you come out of the closet, shut the door behind you because you won’t need it anymore,” he continues. (Who’s he talking to? He’s preaching to the choir, isn’t he? As far as he knows?) “If you don’t have a deity,” he says, “you are an atheist.” I’m an English teacher and I agree this may indeed define an atheist—someone without a g…