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Marriage equality comes to Slovenia, continues to spread in Mexico; Civil Union legislation approved in Sicily, debated in Peru; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…lation. Singapore: Gay blogger fined for questioning court; trans activist deals with fame Alex Au, a prominent blogger was fined for questioning the high court’s timing in hearing two constitutional challenges to the law banning gay sex. According to the Associated Press, “The 62-year-old blogger is one of the few dissidents who continually tests the limits of Singapore’s closely policed media environment. He is gay himself and in his writings ha…

Aasif Mandvi on Islamophobia, Acting, and the Long Shadow of Jon Stewart

By Haroon Moghul

…en we are crossing the line into something else. How do you feel Hollywood deals with diversity—is it getting better, or is it getting worse? We are definitely seeing more diversity today, in television and in movies. Probably more than we ever have. There are certainly more Asians, more South Asians, more people from the Middle East, portrayed on television today, as compared to when I started out. But in Hollywood, Caucasian is still the norm. Y…

New Mormon Anti-Gay Policy Sparks Mass Exodus From Church; Christian AID Workers in Africa Refuse to Help Gay Refugees; Ukraine Rejects, Then Accepts EU-Required Gay Rights Law; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…s favours to powerful colleagues and turning a blind eye to shady property deals, as well as allowing addresses to be used as red-light establishments…. One particular Vatican department, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, has been highlighted in the list. It owns hundreds of high-value properties in central Rome, worth hundreds of millions of euros. Two years ago it emerged the Vatican had purchased a €23m (£16m) share of a Rome a…

Why I Won’t Leave the Mormon Church Alone

By Holly Welker

…reason I cannot and will not leave the church alone: it continues to exert its influence in areas that affect my life and the lives of people I love. Most of what I have written recently about the church deals with gender and sex; as long as the church has opinions that move it to action on these topics, I will have opinions on the church’s actions, which I claim the right to express….

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…ded meditation, and a debrief Q&A with one of MNDFL’s 27 teachers. Special deals are available for your first month of visits. “In this branded form, it offers both health benefits and pleasure, and it can be delivered in the context of a straightforward consumer transaction.” Not counting the orgasmic meditation chain OneTaste, MNDFL is the East Coast’s first for-profit meditation studio. As a cynic might point out, it looks an awful lot like a p…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…ilm as “recommended” but signal that it is also “problematic” and might be best viewed in the context of a debate or a discussion on the issues raised. Recent examples in this category include “The Danish Girl”, a drama about a transgender artist, and Oscar-winner “Spotlight” which deals with clerical sex abuse in Boston and was classified as “complex.” Only very rarely does the guidance make it clear the Church does not want a film shown at all w…

Satanic Temple Protests Pseudoscientific Therapies for Satanic Abuse and Witchcraft

By Joseph Laycock

…e Satanic Temple is trying to draw attention to a serious issue. The ISSTD deals with highly controversial and discredited theories such as dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder), repressed memories, and hypnosis. These theories were key to a panic in the 1980s over “Satanic Ritual Abuse” in which numerous people underwent therapy and became convinced that they had suffered abuse at the hands of Satanic cu…

Pope Francis’ Love Letter is an Opportunity Lost

By Mary E. Hunt

…lex’ or ‘irregular’, ‘imperfect’ or the result of ‘human weakness’. At its best, an intact same-sex family is defined out; a divorced and remarried couple of any sexual orientation is an ethical also-ran. There are some feeble efforts to make such people feel welcome in the Roman Catholic Church, but just as long as they realize they are on moral thin ice. In postmodernity, families come in all sizes and shapes. Either you acknowledge that and ent…

What Pence and Kaine Reveal About Divides in Catholicism

By Patricia Miller

…olicism that freed up Catholics to affiliate with whatever political party best met their priorities: social justice issues for left-leaning Catholics and sexual restraint, law-and-order, and a muscular national defense for right-leaning Catholics. And, as Jack Jenkins notes at Think Progress: …if this sort of dissenting spirit was unique among modern American Catholics, one could plausibly argue that the United States has created an environment t…

Lincoln, Clinton, and Trump: From Strategy to Spin to Straight-Up Bullshit

By Martin Jay

…The second difference between Clinton’s and Trump’s approach to mendacity deals with the very nature of lying itself. The fundamental structure of the speech act we call lying involves four distinct features: (1) the speaker knows or thinks he knows the truth. (2) He or she utters a deliberate falsehood, asserting the opposite of what he or she knows to be the case. (3) This false utterance is performatively designed to persuade the listener that…