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UPDATED: Oklahoma Personhood Bill Not Dead…

…e for their unwillingness to put their reassurances in writing, proposed a number of amendments. So did other legislators, such that by the time SB-1433 was scheduled to be voted on, it was groaning under the weight of amendments.  But the real turnaround came when Speaker Steele proposed an amendment to an amendment that, in essence, would have given teeth to the reassurances that the Oklahoma bill would do no more than the Missouri language. Tha…

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As New Poll Finds “Increased Xenophobic Streak,” Republicans Heighten Anti-Muslim Rhetoric

…grants are a burden on the U.S. due to their economic impact and a similar number (58%) report that coming into contact with immigrants who do not speak English bothers them. After Paris, Trump, already on record for border walls and mass deportations, proposed surveilling mosques and even shutting some down. In an appearance on Morning Joe yesterday, Trump said the elimination of a New York Police Department program to spy on Muslims in the city’…

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Lessons from the Defeat of the Oklahoma Personhood Bill

…for Reproductive Justice who did their own lobbying, and ultimately a good number of legislators themselves. It seems that’s when the personhood battle really became a power struggle between the personhood lobby and the Republican leadership. With so many amendments and so much public controversy surrounding the bill, the Republican leadership opted not to bring the bill forward. This raised the ire of Personhood USA and Oklahomans for Life, who c…

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Hajj Journal: Using the Toilet at the Grand Mosque

…sque is gigantic, full of beautiful and elaborate designs, with an immense number of repetitions to them. The stairs and the escalators are deceiving, taking two for each floor in one tower and only one escalator per floor in another tower. I never did figure out which was which. I knew the fastest way up to the third floor from my hotel, but this was always early and therefore less chaotic. It also involved a wide ramp straight from the outer fro…

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Gen Z’s Religious Affiliation Stats Are Confusing … But Only When Viewed From a Christian-Centric Perspective

…ay they “believe in God without a doubt,” broken down by generation: Gen Z numbers drop off precipitously since the late nineties. The second showed the number who say they “believe in some higher power.” Here, Gen Z showed an equally precipitous rise, since around 2012. Thompson’s tweet betrays some exasperation with the apparently contradictory results: “Depending on how you ask the question,” he wrote, Gen Z was either “leading a stunning athei…

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Mormons Prepare to March in Seven LGBT Parades this Weekend

…then, Mormons for Marriage founder Laura Compton writes, there have been a number of subtle but observable changes in Mormon positioning on same-sex marriage, including: – The Church Handbook of Instructions no longer includes a request that church members should lobby governments to deny same-sex marriage rights (and rites) via legislative actions. – LDS rhetoric about same-sex marriage rights is shifting to focus on the need to protect religious…

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Census Reveals Gay People are Shockingly… Normal

According to new census figures, the number of people reporting that they are living with a same-sex partner has risen 52 percent in the last decade. That’s almost 902,000 people who are living all across the United States. Even here in my own incredibly conservative state of South Carolina, the number of same-sex couples increased and a quarter of them are raising children. It’s those kinds of facts that have right-wing media like the Christian…

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The “Mormon Moment” Yields… Not So Much

…lves:  down from 65% of Americans surveyed to 61%. Some measurable gains have been made among mainline Protestants: 28% surveyed in 2011 said they have “a lot in common” with Mormons; now, that proportion is 42%. And when asked to give a one asked to give a one-word descriptor of Mormonism, the number of respondents offering a positive word like “good,” or “honest,” increased from 18% in 2011 to 24% in 2012.  All of these gains were concentrated a…

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Will the Pope’s Woman Problem Alienate Young Catholics?

…’s blind spots when it comes to women, fearing that they will perpetuate a number of injustices and lead to an exodus from the church—particularly among millennials. The forum, convened by Call To Action, Catholics for Choice, CORPUS and nine co-sponsors, was especially appropriate coming in the midst of a robust discussion of Pope Francis’ relationship to women in the Catholic Church. Writing in the American Prospect, Adele Stan argued that if Fr…

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Trump is a Nightmare, Sure, But Can He Actually Do Anything?

…January, opening email yields at least one urgent call to action from any number of progressive groups. As a journalist who’s spent the better part of a decade reporting on the LGBT community, I’m no stranger to the motivational value of panicked predictions of impending legislative disasters. That kind of all-hands-on-deck organizing has long proven crucial to forming a unified front of resistance, and indeed worked well to build broad coalition…

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