Religion Dispatches
…new Washington Post poll finds that 70% of white evangelicals support open service by gays and lesbians in the military (although this poll shows a wide differential from a Pew poll which found only 43% of white evangelicals support open service). Still, though, there are plenty of religious people and religious leaders who support repealing DADT. You could make just as strong a moral argument about that as about immigration or nuclear nonprolifer…
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…rs as Mormon. Sensing that the Church was pressing ERA-era strategies into service once again, she prepared to undertake the same donor-identification project for Proposition 8 at the Web site mormonsfor8.com. In early September, a surge of $25,000 donations began to appear in campaign finance records compiled by the California Secretary of State. Hansen and a crew of Mormon supporters of same-sex marriage began to comb large donor records to iden…
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…licitly religious venues—Christianity Today, Hollywood Jesus, Catholic New Service, and Plugged In—scarcely noted the religious symbolism teeming in the film. Catholic News Service seemed more concerned about the blood and pole dances than anything else, while Focus on the Family’s Plugged In review was also startling in its absolute devotion to the sex, violence, and drugs of the film. Christianity Today’s review makes one wonder why they even re…
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…they’re not necessarily going to invite people in. (Indeed, I’m aware of a number of churches whose social networking site pages are closed to outsiders. Hmmm?) A modestly tech-savvy minister will eventually come to the conclusion that engagement with believers today has to be both digital and mobile. Thus, I wasn’t surprised to read about an Anglican priest in Nova Scotia who offered a “grace for gadgets” service over Labor Day weekend during whi…
Read More…they now have a resource. I hope too that our findings will change the way services for LGBT youth conceive of families. We’ve trained 30,000 service providers and families since 2005. When we have visited LGBT youth service centers, we’ve found that the model that emerged in the 1970s was to not engage families, or even to position families as adversarial. Some say, “We don’t talk about families. It’s too painful” for the adolescents. We’ve done…
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…aphic Regions,” The University of Virginia Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. The University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service’s Demographics Research Group puts Bedford, Campbell, and Franklin counties in “west Central” Virginia and Halifax in “Southside” Virginia. [49] “Quick Facts,” The United States Census Bureau. [50] Jason Dunovant, “Supervisors Pass Resolution Supporting Volunteerism, Leave Out Militia,” The Frankl…
Read More…the history’s most stalwart defenders of the victimized and oppressed—into service. In doing so, he demonstrates a profound disregard for Bonhoeffer’s core ethical and theological commitments. Here’s why this matters: because Southern Baptists are not the Jews to LGBTQ advocates’ Nazi Party. And the analogy doesn’t work much better if you reverse it. What we can agree on is that gays, lesbians and transgender people have been, and still are, subje…
Read More…veral other military-commissioned and GAO studies have concluded that open service does not undermine military readiness, troop morale or national security. In addition 24 countries, including Israel, allow openly gay service members without any adverse affect upon military cohesion or readiness. As for natural disasters, Levin may want to study up on what causes earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes. I don’t see “gays and lesbians” listed among t…
Read More…onal Law, which opposed cuts in international aid to NGOs providing social services. Scott Lively, the American pastor who has fomented anti-gay extremism is Africa, Russia, and Eastern Europe, was profiled last week by Inigo Gilmore at Britain’s Channel 4. In an interview, Lively repeated his earlier assertions that he has “mixed feelings” about Uganda’s law and angrily denounced as “propaganda” the suggestion that he had inflamed anti-gay hyster…
Read More…ca, especially same-sex civil unions and same-sex marriage. No other Latin American country was more impacted by this “diffusion” effect than Argentina, a country that is predominantly populated by people of European descent, has high levels of social and economic development, and possesses Latin America’s richest history of organized activism around the issue of homosexuality. Not surprisingly, in both Spain and Argentina the campaign for marriag…
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