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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

…ongregations in Jamaica when he visited in May, for example. Conversations about LGBT human rights have never before reached this level with the Catholic Church, which considers gay and lesbian sexual behavior a sin and restricts marriage to unions of one man and one woman. Berry’s focus however is not on marriage, but on the twin foreign policy issues of violence and discrimination. That strategy, Berry hopes, allows for common ground with the Va…

Taking Aim at Religion Itself, Apostles Prime Networks For Real-World Violence

By Frederick Clarkson

…nd of revolution for this nation.” He goes on to float a conspiracy theory about how the criminal indictments against Donald Trump are “not about things that he’s done wrong,” but the result of an unnamed “they” who are trying to keep him out of the presidential race. Hood then claims (this was prior to Trump’s January 6 indictment), that “they” want to convict him of “treason” and “execute him to make a point to anybody else that comes up and sta…

A President “Anointed By God”: POTUS Shield and Religious Right’s Affair with Trump

By Sunnivie Brydum

…ely flouts democratic values and undermines American ideals. That question about cynicism is important, I think. Sometimes I wonder if Trump’s campaign statement, about how he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters, was more prophetic than we realized. Is there’s anything you think that Trump could do that would cause these groups to revoke their support? I think it’s hard to know what it would take, really,…

Like the Bible? You’ll Love a ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ T-shirt — How AI Marketing Shapes Identity

By Lauren Horn Griffin

…es and our communities. They also shape (and reshape) the way people think about “the media” itself, raising concerns about democracy in the digital age. In the original Facebook post, the evangelical pastor at first expressed dismay at why a Christian website would advertise a political t-shirt, especially one that included such an inflammatory message and euphemism for profanity. Commenters quickly explained that it most likely wasn’t the websit…

The Quixotic Task of Debunking David Barton

By Paul Harvey

…rton’s target audience is that his book, The Jefferson Lies, is not really about Jefferson at all; it’s about Barton’s own skewed view of the context of historical scholarship and the academic enterprise—and, for that matter, of what constitutes “truth.” Barton spends a good deal of his Jefferson book not on Jefferson, but on his supposed bogeymen of the academic world, “Deconstructionism, Poststructuralism, Modernism, Minimalism, [and] Academic C…

It’s Not Just About Ground Zero

By Mark S. Byrnes

…but it doesn’t seem a stretch to suggest that, for him, it is Biblical law. His problem is not with religious law, as long as it is the right religious law. When people react with such vehemence against the building of mosques, they are revealing far more about themselves than about Muslims. They are projecting their own theocratic political vision onto their perceived enemies. While I’m not suggesting that people like Fischer and Thomas are crypt…

Citizen Speech in an Age of Data: Or, Why I’m Transcribing My Tweets Into Cuneiform

By Andrew Aghapour

…fascinating, and feature descriptions that would fit in any great work of science fiction. I have spent the last 48 hours as an active investor in the Åzone market, and here’s what I’ve discovered: under the auspices of a marketplace, the Guggenheim has created a social network where users share the news of today in order to estimate the shape of tomorrow. Central to Åzone is the role of “Hot Tips”— news articles that must be shared or cited with…

Blame Series Bonus: Why We Want That Dish For Free, an Uncut Interview with Bertram Malle

By Andrew Aghapour

…up the institution, the collective behavior? None of this we normally know about an institution, and even if they haven’t done anything bad yet, just watching them you’d wonder why exactly and who exactly does what. But of course we care the most about institutions when they perform some kind of good or bad behavior. Institutions have power. They have an enormous influence, they can withhold goods or they can confer goods—and in your case, Jet Blu…

Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

By Andrew Aghapour

…ttos. As a result, Rothstein told me, “African American family incomes are about 60% of white family incomes, but African American wealth is about 5% of white family wealth. And that difference is heavily attributable to federal race-based housing policy.” It might be psychologically satisfying to blame unemployment on individual laziness, or segregation on prejudiced white homeowners, but this would miss the forest for the trees—or, better yet, t…

Anti-Vaxxers Illustrate Danger of Overly Broad Religious Freedom Laws

By Kara Loewentheil

…e version of a “natural”/”organic” lifestyle has metastasized into vaccine science denial. There is a debate about whether the purpose of religious exemptions is to give religion special privileges or simply to protect religious people from discrimination, especially people of minority religions who may be disproportionately impacted by general laws that are made by people of a majority religion. But regardless of the reason, most religious exempt…