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As Court Prepares to Rule on Sacred Apache Site, Religious Freedom Faces an American Right Prized Above All Others

…he First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978), and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993). This case has precedent working against them, however. In Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, the U.S. Supreme Court declared constitutional a plan to build a road and log trees in the High Country in Northern California, an area sacred to the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa peoples. Forty…

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State-Licensed Ministers Can’t “Pray Away the Gay,” SCOTUS Affirms

…in all 50 states. In fact, even the California minister who filed suit is free to practice the debunked “therapy”—he just can’t engage minors in the practice, and can’t represent himself as a state-licensed therapist offering that treatment. In his ministerial duties he is free to preach about the power of prayer (or, in some cases, more nefarious tactics) to “rescue” people from the bonds of queerness. But what he can’t do, according to the newl…

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Spiritualism and Sex Meet Evangelical Censorship, 19th-Century-Style

…lege-educated cohort who would enjoy discussing things like religion, sex, free speech, censorship, women’s rights, blasphemy, and obscenity. It was not finally an audience of specialists I dreamed of but free-ranging brainiacs—in other words, readers with some of the daring spirit of nineteenth-century amateurs. Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off? I am definitely hoping to offer my readers good, even artful,…

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Global Religious Right Asks ‘How Far Can We Get?’; And More in the Global LGBT Recap

…d to relocate to Romania. They have argued that the refusal violates their freedom of movement within the European Union. ADF International, the global arm of the US-based religious right legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, urged the court not to rule in the couple’s favor, which it said would amount to “EU-wide imposition of same-sex marriage.” Italy: Conservative religious activist charged with taking money to squelch human rights inquiry Bu…

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Australian Church Nixes Straight Couple’s Wedding Over Their Marriage Equality Support; and More in Global LGBT Recap

…ences such as radical gay sex education being taught in school, threats to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.” At Crikey, Amy Coopes responds to critics within the LGBT movement who dismiss the marriage equality movement as a form of assimilationism: Some in the Yes camp wish to paint this as, quite simply, a question about amending the Marriage Act to allow two consenting adults to marry, and in a sense, of course, that is true. But as wi…

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Is Wisconsin Union-Busting Religiously Sanctioned?

…party-oriented organization, Vision2America, joined the anti-union chorus today. DeMar promotes his views in a number of venues, each tailored to connect with a specific group. His American Vision is explicitly Reconstructionist, arguing that there is no neutrality and that all the positions he takes are rooted in biblical law. Vision2America, though, has a slightly different audience, so while the article focuses only on the Wisconsin budget cri…

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Sex Buys the Pulitzer Prize

…e commercials and stay up until the last segment of the news. Sex sells. A free society needs a free press, of that the Founders were certain. Investigative reporting is the true fifth column, a crucial further “check and balance” on the relentless consolidation of power in the electronic age. But with increasingly scarce resources, isn’t it important that investigative reporters are working to save lives, both at home and abroad, rather than titi…

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Faith in the Future is No Faith at All: Disney’s Weak Theology

…longside our own. It is a place where imagination and innovation are given free rein, where technology is not driven by markets or utility but by the sheer joy of play and exploration. This sleek, apparently classless, beautifully multicultural, and apparently infinitely-resourced tomorrow (or is it a parallel today?) takes a dark turn when its inventiveness leads to the discovery of a means of warping the space–time continuum and of, therefore, p…

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Beck’s Distortions Of It’s A Wonderful Life Mirror His Distortions Of Current Events

…banks, and that the good-guy local banks were successful because they were free from government regulation. This depiction matches his thesis about today’s economic problems: that too much government intervention in the form of bank bailouts is the inherent evil—as opposed to the absence of regulation that led to the banks’ implosion at the hands of, well, you know, greedy bigwigs. To Beck, the bank bailouts are evidence of socialism—the governmen…

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Secularist Activists Are Being Murdered in Bangladesh: An Ongoing Crisis Causes Many to Flee

…secular and democratic Bangladesh, where people have secure life and enjoy freedom of speech, freedom to publish, and freedom to express.” Still—what has he and his family lost? And what is Bangladesh losing as a result of this unchecked mayhem? Who Will Remain? As the attacks illustrate a deep problem in Bangladesh, these two stories illustrate a deeper success: since February 2015, more than a dozen writers, publishers, and activists—and, in som…

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