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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

…ges, but the group organized members to have a significant presence at the microphones during Q&A sessions. In addition to presentations on strengthening anti-gay and anti-abortion advocacy globally, the conference included training sessions on a range of topics, such as a session on messaging from Frank Schubert, the notorious mastermind of the gays-as-threats-to-children ads used to promote Prop 8 and other anti-gay initiatives in the U.S. The c…

Can Faith-Based Organizing for Gun Control Work?

By Sarah Posner

…efense. Still, even if a faith-based gun control movement didn’t perfectly mimic (not that it would want to) the anti-choice movement, it seems self-evident to many religious progressives that gun violence is a pressing moral issue of life and death. “To me, gun violence is a natural because it’s such an obvious theological issue,” said Dean Gary Hall of the National Cathedral, and the chair of Faiths United Against Gun Violence. “Empathy for inno…

Why Do Evangelicals And Dems Want Immigration Reform?

By Daniel Schultz

…ics will drive minority growth above all. Their numbers will triple to 133 million by 2050 from 47 million today, while the number of non-Hispanic whites will remain essentially flat. Hispanics will double as a percentage of the population from 15 percent to 30 percent. The population of Asian Americans will also come close to doubling, going from 5 percent to 9 percent. The number of blacks, however, will grow only from 14 percent to 15 percent o…

Is Torture Utilitarian?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…it seems to imply that you can measure pleasure and pain, and that by maximizing the pleasure of the greatest number of people, you may be able to justify the infliction of pain on a select few. We see that strange logic at work in these memoranda. First, the CIA justified waterboarding with the “ticking time bomb” scenario. Can you justify torture if you know the prisoner possesses information about a dirty bomb that’s about to be detonated, or…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…we deem this agenda disrespectful to the culture and traditions of most Dominican families,” it reads. As we have previously noted, Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez and other religious conservatives have harshly criticized Brewster. Malaysia: Activists Protest Arrests of Trans women Justice for Sisters is protesting the March 2 arrests of 12 transgender women under a law that makes it a crime for a male person to pose as a woman. These o…

Why We Must Reclaim “Religious Freedom” from Christian Conservatives

By Bill Berkowitz

…, 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, assumptions most of us have…

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

By Lucas Wilson

…ers and thousands of sons.” This disturbing sentiment hints at the overwhelming number of students who were habitually subjugated to Emerick’s chaotic work. The question, however, remains: While neither he nor Liberty referred to him as a therapist of any kind, how was it legal for Emerick, someone who’s not a licensed therapist, to get away with offering such services? The first part of the answer is that for the majority of the time Emerick was…

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

By William E. Smith

…s. The Reformation proponents of polygamy, after all, only had polygyny in mind, and a very male-dominated version at that. Protestants today would almost certainly need to consider polyandry and, to use a clunky term, polygynandry. I agree with Douthat and Silk that Americans are going to need to think seriously about polygamy. Douthat is probably right in arguing that many of the arguments liberals put forth on behalf of same-sex marriage will b…

Republicans “Evangelizing” Catholic Voters

By Patricia Miller

…fficking. As I note in Salon: According to Pew, between 2009 and 2014, the number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration — and by inference the Democratic Party — was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent. This suggests that the war on religion is resonating with Catholic voters who increasingly see themselves on the losing side of a culture war and feel the need to assert their religious identity i…

The Great Secret of Constitutional Law: Why Proposition 8 Will (and perhaps should) Be Upheld

By Bruce Ledewitz

…great hidden truth of American constitutional law is that our law is determined by the wishes and commitments of the American people. Sometimes the effect of public opinion on the courts is crude and political, as when the United States Supreme Court gave up its opposition to the New Deal after FDR’s 1936 presidential election victory. Sometimes the effect of public opinion is broadly cultural, as when the Equal Protection Clause was held to prot…