In a tweet on June 29, queer Christian artist Grace Aldridge, known professionally by their stage name “Semler,” shared a screenshot of the iTunes music charts for that day. Their new single, “Faith” was the No. 1 song on Christian…
Embracing a queer spirituality would have freed me from years of anguish, self-doubt and self-loathing
I was a junior in college, studying religion and serving as a youth minister when I first encountered the Southern Baptist Convention’s vitriol against women. Although a Southern Baptist church employed me, a not-yet-out queer woman, as a youth minister…
Supreme Court says evangelical web designer doesn’t have to serve same-sex couples
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of Lorie Smith, an evangelical graphic artist who says she wants to create wedding websites and is “willing to work with all people” but not same-sex couples. Her free-speech case was based…
10 reasons your church should be welcoming and affirming
It’s Pride month, and here at Williamsburg Baptist Church we are wearing rainbow stoles in worship, hanging our usual rainbow banner out front and have rainbow origami butterflies hanging all about our sanctuary. It is a delightfully colorful season in…
The Bible says nothing about queer people
For far too long the LGBTQ community has conceded Christianity to traditionalists and conservatives, allowing them to perpetuate the narrative that the Bible is clearly anti-LGBTQ and that being queer is a sin. But the truth is that most of…
Amid an already difficult immigration system, LGBTQ asylum seekers are in ‘grave danger’
The Biden administration’s asylum restrictions place LGBTQ migrants in grave danger by exposing them to longer waits in nations hostile to those with alternative sexual orientations and gender identities, immigration rights advocates said during a June 22 webinar. “It will…
Want to ‘protect the children’? Start somewhere other than fearing LGBTQ people
A rhetoric of “protecting the children” has been gaining momentum over the last two years, and it’s targeting the LGBTQ community. On June 9, the hashtag “LeaveOurKidsAlone” was used on Twitter to celebrate young kids trampling Pride flags. The hashtag…
Transvestigation: The new eugenics
Behind a sliding bookcase in the library of a house in Buenos Aires lies a secret room. There, in July 2017, federal police in Argentina discovered the largest cache of Nazi memorabilia in the country’s history. Most of the items…
Another study shows majority of Americans want to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination
A majority of Americans oppose using religious beliefs to deny employment, medical care and business services to LGBTQ people, a new survey shows. The study even found most religiously active people disprove of such discrimination based on sexual preference or…
‘Not that kind of Baptist’
Editor’s note: Woodland Baptist Church in San Antonio, Texas, is one of two churches recently expelled from the Baptist General Convention of Texas after being found out of compliance with the BGCT’s stance on sexuality. What follows here is the…
Passage of anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda rattles LGBTQ community in Kenya
As the LGBTQ community in Africa reacted to the strident new anti-homosexuality bill adopted in Uganda, attention quickly shifted to Kenya, where a similar bill with different nomenclature recently was tabled for consideration in Parliament. On April 7, George Peter…
Embracing the slippery slope
I was that kid. You know. The one who asked questions. Questions the teacher really didn’t want to answer. Questions like, “Did God really create the world in six calendar days? Don’t you know science tells us that it took…