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Lessons from the Defeat of the Oklahoma Personhood Bill

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…tment. Nevertheless, some supporters of the bill continued to claim that SB-1433 was nothing more than a statement of pro-life principles and wouldn’t affect Oklahomans’ access to assisted reproduction, emergency medical treatment, and their chosen form of birth control. The problem for personhood supporters, though, is that amendments started to seem like a very good idea to some key parties: Oklahomans who formed Facebook pages and called their…

Two Women and a Mosque: A Convert Community Grows in Panama City

By Aliyya Swaby

…ery year, a group of black Muslims in Colón hosts an event to celebrate Eid-ul-Udha, a holiday that marks the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.They invite all the children in the neighborhood, regardless of religion. This year, dozens of children circled around a hired clown, who tied together balloons to entertain them. Several children took turns reciting the first several verses of the Quran in Arabic. Not all of them came from Muslim fami…

Mormons Prepare to March in Seven LGBT Parades this Weekend

By Joanna Brooks

…protect homosexuals in housing and employment. While there are large carve-outs for church-related/owned businesses, the ordinances in SLC inspired a number of other Utah and Idaho towns and cities to follow suit and opened many conservative Mormon’s eyes to some problems they’d never before considered. – There have been no church-sponsored efforts aimed at mobilizing Mormons to fight same-sex marriage at the polls the way Mormons were mobilized…

The Anti-Trans Hate Machine’s Conspiracies Don’t Stop at the US Border

By Annika Brockschmidt

…shing what the writers perceive as sexual deviancy—still stands. Its editor-in-chief, Ulf Poschardt, a right-leaning libertarian, published an op-ed in which he claimed the anti-trans op-ed was wrong, but still frames the debate over trans rights as legitimate political discourse. He calls it a “prelude to a debate that we will conduct broadly and openly.” Meanwhile, he adopts the anti-trans talking points of the original article on his LinkedIn p…

Leper Messiah: A Jesus Freak’s Search for the Meaning of Bowie—A Critical Novella

By Mark Dery

…seemed truly Not of This World, especially to teenagers trapped in the have-a-nice-daymare of ’70s suburbia. He was a spiked cocktail of ladyboy vulnerability and George Grosz grotesque, the Frankensteinian spookiness of his shaved eyebrows and morgue-slab pallor clashing with his androgynous physique and feline grace. Even his weirdly mismatched eyes—the result of a boyhood fistfight that left one pupil permanently dilated and different-colored—m…

A Jewish Perspective on Reparations

By Moriel Rothman-Zecher

…to murder its Negroes systematically instead of little by little and catch-as-catch-can. If Coates is right that reparations at least partially correlated with German societal and cultural reckoning, then one can see their fruits in Germany today. Last month, following a number of horrid, hateful slogans chanted at Jews (in the context of otherwise legitimate protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza), and a number of violent incidents, there was…

No ‘Christian Compassion’ in Tony Perkins’ Response to Anti-Gay Bullying, Suicides

By Andrew Marin

…rganization regularly hosts, bringing together all kinds of people—from non-Christian LGBT people to gay Christians to conservative and liberal straight Christians and non-Christian straight people—closing with these words: “If the church is to ever have an impact [on] today’s culture it has to start by giving up its power. We don’t win anything by using power; rather we are [here] to influence with love and service.” Therefore I ask you, Mr. Perk…

It’s The Apocalypse, Stupid: Understanding Christian Opposition to Obamacare, Civil Rights, New Deal and More

By Daniel Silliman

…ism in the 1960s and the 80s and the 90s and 2010. In 2010, writing as a 91-year-old, he believed this message was one of the most important things he could leave behind on this earth. In this book he says the signs are now clearer than ever. He’s written a lot of books, but five on apocalypticism? I don’t know that he’s covered any other topic in five books. At the same time, I want to be very clear: postwar evangelicalism grew far more diverse t…

The Religious Right Goes Global with “Demographic Winter”

By Kathryn Joyce

…meuppance has a name, one being fervently hawked among a group of Christian-right “pro-family” activists hoping to spark a movement in secular Europe. It’s called the “demographic winter,” a more austere brand of apocalypse than doomsayers normally trade in, evoking not a nuclear inferno but a quiet and cold blanket of snow in which, they charge, “Western Civilization” is laying itself down to die. How so? Europe is failing to produce enough babie…

It’s Bring Your Gun to Church Day

By Bill Berkowitz

…k community, Lowery’s relationship with Moon dates back at least to the mid-1980s when Moon served an eighteen-month sentence for tax fraud, obstructing justice and committing perjury. At the time, Moon’s Unification Church tried—and were somewhat successful—in lining up supporters in minority communities, particularly among African American clergy, by claiming that Moon was being persecuted because of racial and religious intolerance. In the inte…