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

By Peter Montgomery

…lm Evaluation Commission classified the film as “not advised, unusable and scabrous (indecent or salacious).” The Commission listed the film’s principal themes — described by critics as love and identity — as drugs and homosexuality. The result, according to its distributor Teodora Film, was that the film was shunned by the more than 1,100 cinemas which are owned by the Church and make up the bulk of Italy’s network of independent/arthouse theatre…

Is Torture Utilitarian?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ms. And that leads to some very bizarre moral reasoning. Utilitarianism is number-crunching, but of a very peculiar kind; in its crudest forms, 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 t…

Why We Must Reclaim “Religious Freedom” from Christian Conservatives

By Bill Berkowitz

…s of a teacher fired in a discriminatory way insulated the mainline church school from antidiscrimination laws under the longstanding ministerial exemption of the Civil Rights Act. We have seen this manifested in some Catholic school systems, where Church officials are trying to extend ministerial functions and enforcement of church doctrine on employees, whether or not they are Catholic. This is all part of the strategy of religious exemption fro…

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

By Lucas Wilson

…. In fact, in Liberty’s official announcement of Emerick’s retirement, the school describes Emerick as a “campus counselor and mentor,” who “leaves [a] legacy of love at Liberty.” Emerick’s “love”—his largely hollow sentimentality masquerading as care for queer students as queer students—was and is insidiously lacking. When we queers (inevitably) failed to meet the standard of sexual “purity” that Emerick “lovingly” established for us, we came to…

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

By William E. Smith

…s initial support from churches. Many local Universalist Unitarian (UU), Disciples of Christ, and United Church of Christ (UCC) congregations, and some Episcopal churches, for example, started blessing same-sex unions as far back as the 1970s, as work by Heather White and Mark Jordan has shown. Over the years the debate and activism by Christians continued to push the conversation until the national bodies of the UCC and Presbyterian Church (PCUSA…

Republicans “Evangelizing” Catholic Voters

By Patricia Miller

…-leaning Catholics over the next few months. The irony is that Bush, an Episcopalian convert to Catholicism, is in many ways the most traditional Catholic of the sizeable number of Catholics jostling for the GOP nod. Bobby Jindal has labeled himself a “Catholic Evangelical” and even hosted “The Response,” a prayer extravaganza that amounts to a full-out paean to Christian nationalism. Rick Santorum has long courted the Christian right with his ant…

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

By Bruce Ledewitz

…of our Constitutions, in fact, and it is true that the courts found anti-miscegenation statutes unconstitutional in the past on precisely that basis. Supporters have often compared bans on same-sex marriage to prohibitions on interracial marriage. But again, the analogy from interracial marriage to same-sex marriage is not inescapably clear. It convinces me, but does it have the sort of obviousness that a judge can point to in the face of strong p…

Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…xploring their spirituality in different ways.’ I think eventually a large number of those people will re-affiliate in some way, shape, or form—but when they do, the actual institutions of religion will be very different because of the demands those people make on new kinds of churches. I look at that whole arc of people who are leaving church because of the failure of the institution, and I don’t see that as threatening. I see that as a really ex…

5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Overthink the New Pew Data’s Impact on Politics

By Sarah Posner

…s new Religious Landscape Survey, its first since 2007: the decline in the number of Americans identifying as Christians (down eight percent in seven years, to 70.6 percent), and the rise in the number of Americans identifying as atheist, agnostic, and otherwise religiously unaffiliated (up six points in seven years, to 22.8 percent). Greg Smith, Associate Director of Research at the Pew Research Center, called the pace of the continued growth of…

More than Half of Mississippi GOP Primary Voters Believe the President is Muslim

By Sarah Posner

…ondents believe interracial marriage should be illegal; 24% of evangelicals did. Sixty-six percent of respondents in Mississippi do not believe in evolution; among evangelicals that number jumped to 74%. Of all the respondents, 29% believe interracial marriage should be illegal; among evangelicals that number was 33%….