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What the Latest ‘God’s Not Dead’ Gets Egregiously Wrong — and Right — About Homeschooling

By R.L. Stollar

…bill’s hearings learns the plight of the co-op and invites the parents to Washington D.C. to testify against the bill. In D.C., the parents justify homeschooling before a hostile government committee, eventually swaying public opinion against the bill. The movie ends with the judge, who originally ruled against the co-op, dramatically ripping up her order against them. What We The People gets wrong There’s so much We The People gets wrong about h…

Do Polls Show American Public Favoring Bishops’ Position on Contraceptive Coverage?

By Sarah Posner

…Meanwhile, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is meeting this week in Washington to map its next steps. Bishop William Lori, chair of its Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Freedom, told the Religion News Service that they hope to “restart” talks with the Obama administration: Lori said the bishops “do not have a monopoly on the church” but are nonetheless “responsible for a large part of how this works and for the Catholicity of all the instituti…

Former AIPAC Spokesperson Rallies Conservatives to Attack CAP, Media Matters as Anti-Semitic

By Sarah Posner

…y lays bare the McCarthy-esque tactics the supposedly “pro-Israel” camp in Washington is willing to deploy. Block writes in his email to the listserv (which, with a brilliant lack of self-awareness, is called the Freedom Community): This kind of anti-Israel sentiment is so fringe it’s support by CAP is outrageous, but at least it is out in the open now — as is their goal – clearly applauded by revolting allies like the pro-HAMAS and anti-Zionist/O…

World Congress of Families Draws Anti-LGBT Activists to Budapest; More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…urt, who is now a church pastor, said she would try to avoid flying Qantas airlines due to the company’s public stance in favor of marriage equality. In response, Martina Navratilova called for changing the name of the Margaret Court Arena, a site of the Australian Open. A few years ago, Court had written a letter to a newspaper denouncing an article about the birth of a baby boy to a gay couple’ in the letter she described herself as “a patron of…

Are Tea Partiers Pro-Gay and Pro-Choice?

By Sarah Posner

…g partners of the Eleison Group, the political strategy consulting firm in Washington devoted to helping Democrats speak to “religious” voters, is out with some really questionable advice for the Democrats over at the Huffington Post. Sapp sent the piece to me, an ill-conceived proposal for Democrats to win over conservative voters who might be initially wooed by the tea partiers. “This is more of a divide and conquer strategy,” he wrote to me, “b…

Free Yiddish Lessons, Vacation Liberty School, and Brangelina’s Universalism: The Week in Religion, Poetically

By Michael J. Altman

…ation is removing the word “Islam” from all descriptions of terrorism. The Washington Institute of Near East Policy disagrees with the decision and claims that “radical Islamic extremists” can be identified as such “without denigrating Islamic religion in any way.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s On Faith blog has a forum of posts on both sides of the question, “What to call terrorists?” Church rating sites are making it easier for the pious to f…

Don’t Ignore the Role of “Christian Values” in Conservative Conspiracy

By Carmen Celestini

Michael Gerson’s recent piece in the Washington Post on the conspiratorial mindset of conservatives in the Trump era argues that conspiracies, such as those about the death of Seth Rich promoted by Sean Hannity, are symptomatic of a legitimized conspiratorial thinking under the Trump administration. The following day MSNBC national correspondent Joy-Ann Reid, wrote an analysis of Gerson’s article, via a Twitter thread. https://twitter.com/JoyAnnR…

A Writer’s Murder Raises Fears of Death-by-Decree

By Shalom Goldman

…tion in the U.S. (no mention in the New York Times, a brief article in the Washington Post) is striking, some would say disgraceful. In the U.K., the case got a bit more attention—see Nick Cohen’s impassioned article in The Observer: “The Deafening Silence of a Good Man’s Death.” Rafiq Tagi, a physician and journalist, had been a persistent critic of Azerbaijan’s authoritarian government and of the influence of Iranian clerics in Azeri politics an…

Neither Radical Nor Secular: The West Struggles with the New Islamism

By Blain Auer

…ew York Times headlines, such as “Tumult of Arab Spring Prompts Worries in Washington,” and “The Dangers Lurking in the Arab Spring,” reflected the fear and apprehension of what was essentially a series of anti-authoritarian movements. The Economist was forced to fully retract and apologize “unreservedly” for attributing a number of false statements to Rachid Ghannouchi, one of the leading Islamist figures of post-authoritarian Tunisia. Among them…

Catholic Archbishop Takes On Jesuit Magazine’s Slam on “Ecumenism of Hate”; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…st dangerous cities.” Freddy Funez, a local LGBT rights advocate, told the Washington Blade the first Pride parade in Honduras’ second-largest city took place in 2000. He said people lined the streets on Saturday and watched the parade as it made its way through the city. “What we want is that our vote, our voices are included in these public political processes,” he told the Blade. Funez told the Blade a group of “homophobes” shot guns into the a…