Religion Dispatches
…r being has a mission for me in my life—a reason for me to be here.” That “higher being” isn’t God. That higher being is America. Again, after another telling of the Hanoi Hilton conversion, he proclaims: “This is my faith, the faith that unites and never divides, the faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in humanity. That is my religious faith and it is the faith I want my party to serve, and the faith I hold in my country.” Later, in his 2008 con…
Read More…nty High School taped copies of the Ten Commandments on their lockers. The high school allows students to display personal messages on their lockers, like “Go Team” and “Happy Birthday, Suzy,” so, they argued, they should be allowed to display statements related to their faith. The TV station WSLS reported: School officials would not confirm to WSLS what happened, but did reveal their policy on posting to lockers. Principal Barry Hollandsworth sa…
Read More
…r sister who is in a relationship with another woman. India: Response to High Court Ruling Rages As we reported in the last recap, the Supreme Court of India on December 11 reinstated a colonial-era law criminalizing homosexuality several years after the law had been struck down by the Delhi high court. Activists organized “Day of Rage” protests in India and around the globe. In the U.S. leaders of the Hindu American Foundation criticized the ru…
Read More…orida Republican woman put it, “[W]e’re talking about a 17-year-old boy in high school with testosterone running high. Tell me, what boy hasn’t done this in high school?” Both the sweeping religious liberty claims made by conservative forces like Priests for Life and the assertions made by Kavanaugh’s defenders come from exactly the same place: a desire to reassert traditional, patriarchal sexual mores. Under these rules, men can’t be expected to…
Read More
…een-year-old Jasiel Favors, a Junior Varsity running back for Stony Pointe High School in Round Rock, Texas, was reportedly paralyzed from the waist down in a “helmet-to-helmet collision.” Two days later on Friday, September 4, football led to tragedy in Louisiana, where Tyrell Cameron, also sixteen, of Franklin Parish High School, died after breaking his neck on a punt return. The day after that, a linebacker for Georgetown University named Ty Wi…
Read More…r being has a mission for me in my life—a reason for me to be here.” That “higher being” isn’t God. That higher being is America. Again, after another telling of the Hanoi Hilton conversion, he proclaims: “This is my faith, the faith that unites and never divides, the faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in humanity. That is my religious faith and it is the faith I want my party to serve, and the faith I hold in my country.” Later, in his 2008 con…
Read More…week at a Salt Lake City vigil against gaybashing. These women don’t have high-ranking positions in LDS institutional life. They don’t make doctrine or policy. Very, very few women in Mormonism actually do. But they speak for an increasing number of everyday Mormons who know that gay people are our relatives. Family. Saints. Us. Are views on homosexuality evolving in Mormonism? You bet, and like so many changes in the history of religion, that ch…
Read More
…atural power, attempted to lead men to destruction. Doesn’t the story of a high school cheerleader who seduces and then devours men more or less replicate this tradition? I prefer to see powerful religious and cultural paradigms more thoroughly subverted than this. Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer—in which another high school cheerleader is revealed as “the Chosen One” who slays monsters rather than becoming one—provides a good example. Buff…
Read More…school’s anti-queer teachings. “When I started going to public schools [in high school],” he tells RD, “and when I started sort of unlearning the homophobia that I had learned in that school, I started to wonder if I myself might have been homosexual. I’m not but it took me a while to sort of square those different ideas and to actually explore that possibility in a healthy way, and then it would take me a long time because of that to be able to u…
Read More…how they assimilate their sexual, religious and ethnic identities within a highly homophobic culture. Utilizing notions of homoerasure and homohysteria (McCormack and Eric Anderson, b), and examining the intersection of identity conflict and new social movement theory, we highlight four strategies that participants use to negotiate the dissonance of living with conflicting identities in a context of religious homophobia: (1) privileging their Isla…
Read More