Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, nicknamed the “Ten Commandments judge” for his refusal to remove a monument from the state judicial building in 2003, has been suspended and faces a possible second ouster from the bench he reclaimed in 2013….
When wielding power can be healing
“Money and power.” That’s what the gentleman who telephoned me from Mississippi said. The pressure on his home state and on my home state of North Carolina for recent legislative and gubernatorial actions, viewed widely as discriminatory, are all about…
The real reason the Religious Right opposes trans equality. (It isn’t bathroom predators.)
We are stuck at this unproductive impasse, fixating on bathrooms, arguing about a threat that both sides know is nonexistent.
Bill would list schools asking for LGBT exemptions to Title IX
A Massachusetts congresswoman has introduced legislation to require the government to publish the names of colleges and universities that request religious exemptions to federal regulations that bar discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) unveiled…
Theologian says gender identity a ‘last wall’ in civilization
Allowing children to use the public restroom in school that corresponds to their perceived sexual identity if it differs from their birth biology is a line in the sand for Bible-believing Christians, the leader of an organization that affirms that…
BJC, others, oppose discrimination by federal contractors
The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty was among 42 religious, education, civil rights, labor and women’s organizations opposing an amendment to a defense policy bill that would exempt religious organizations from a 2014 executive order by President Obama barring…
Joyless about ‘Amoris Lætitia’
The Catholic Church, a multi-century institution, moves at glacier speed. Pope Francis’s recent post-synodal apostolic exhortation finally moved the Church into the 20th century. Like his earlier apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (EG), Francis attempts a joyful evangelical call for a…
N.C. Baptist church joins fight against transgender bathroom bill
More than 50 people were arrested Monday night at the North Carolina state capitol in a protest of the state’s new law curtailing LGBT protections — a protest organized in a town hall meeting last week at Raleigh’s Pullen Memorial Baptist…
The lawyers behind the recent wave of anti-trans bathroom bills
The speed at which they’ve emerged across the country, often with similar or identical language, raises the possibility that these bills are part of a coordinated effort.
Missouri’s proposed religious freedom amendment sets old allies at odds
The battle over religious freedom and LGBT rights has moved from Arizona and Mississippi to Missouri.
Baptist newspaper supports ‘bathroom bill’
A Southern Baptist state newspaper editor says Tennessee lawmakers should put children’s safety ahead of money when considering a controversial bill that would require public school students grades K-12 and higher to use the restroom that corresponds to their sex…
That’s not your seat: Regulating the seating arrangements at God’s dinner party
“That’s not your seat” is a phrase used by Morgan DePerno, a student in my church history class, as the title for her recent review of Martin Luther King Jr’s Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. For Morgan, “that’s not…