Religion Dispatches
…lthy gays and lesbians want to end our “religious freedoms” — which is the code phrase for “they want to pass hate crimes laws that make it illegal for us to call them the filthy sinners they are.” As a Christian, who just also happens to be a lesbian, I take offense at this continuing campaign on the religious right to promote this false dichotomy of gays vs. God. No one in the gay and lesbian community wants to curb anyone’s “religious freedom.”…
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…tinue to romanticize the “conservative resurgence” and “biblical fidelity”—code for continuing to deprive women and LGBTQ folks of power—in his commentary on the new report for Christianity Today. After all, both major architects of the power grab and purge of moderate and liberal actors from SBC institutions that SBC partisans euphemistically call “the conservative resurgence”—Paul Presser and Paige Patterson—now stand credibly accused of sexual…
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…who used sex to lure men to their deaths while Adele Farrington, in a pre-Code romp called The Devil’s Bondwoman (1916), portrayed a woman whose sexual appetites were so insatiable that she attracted Satan himself. By the 1940s, a comic book entitled Madame Satan [see image left] told a similar story to adolescents of a seductive woman who, using Satan’s supernatural power, attempted to lead men to destruction. Doesn’t the story of a high school…
Read More…tals and so forth. So if one had to bring Boudway’s original analogy up to code, one would have to say this: Imagine you live in a country where the default way to buy food is buying it from your employer. You get a job, and your employer negotiates with companies who in turn have agreements with grocery stores and growers, shipping companies and meat processing plants, and so on. The end result of all this is that you get a card, which you presen…
Read More…e subject of an investigation about whether he violated his town council’s code of conduct, which includes a clause saying that councilors must treat other people with respect. In the U.S. meanwhile, a congressional candidate who blamed gays for tornadoes and autism won the primary and will be the Republican challenger to Rep. Jan Schakowsky. Taiwan: Church-Sponsored ‘Happy Family’ Rally Draws Pro-Equality Protesters, Including Buddhist Nuns On Su…
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…when applied to homosexuality, unhealthy. For our community, “change” is a code word for repression, distortion, and fear. So LGBT people must either abandon repentance or queer it. If we are not to reject it, we must make it our own, make it more complex, set aside its oversimplifications. The good news is that this is a gift to everybody else. Total surrender to heteronomous ethics is unhealthy, period. It may be prescribed by some, but it is al…
Read More…sally the case. Such was not the case, for example, for Kimberly Hivey, an Indiana community college professor who was denied full-time work after her employers learned she is a lesbian. And, while Tuesday’s 8-3 ruling by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination based on sexual orientation represented a victory for Hivey, and Lambda Legal, which brought the case, it had no bearing o…
Read More…d) will be free to focus on the crucial matter of the latest Dan “Da Vinci Code” Brown adaptation. As of this writing, we are still waiting for advance word on the subject of Obama’s graduation speech. As any professor can tell you, a college commencement address frequently falls into one of three genres. The first strives to inspire with insipid platitudes equal to the occasion. (“Your graduation is a change I can believe in.”) The second ignores…
Read More…words, as Nones. The economists involved in this study focused on the zip code where a clergy sex scandal had occurred. They found a “large and statistically significant effect” on charitable contributions in those zip codes after a scandal, and not only to Catholic-based charitable organizations. The researchers theorize that perhaps once a person stops attending church, the social pressure to be charitable declines. Interestingly, however, thes…
Read More…imself and his family. At least in those days, the Southern Baptists had a code about divorce, but these days, Southern Baptist churches are routinely led by divorced men—the most famous being Charles Stanley. Despite divorcing his wife in 2000, he remains the pastor at the mega-sized First Baptist Church in Atlanta. Divorce has been a growing problem for the faithful. A Barna poll from 2008 revealed 33 percent of couples overall get divorced. Bor…
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