In a five part series he wrote a few years ago, blogger J. Brad Hicks breaks down how, in the mid-1960s, the Republican party made a conscious decision to rebrand themselves as the party of Christians, and in doing so, how they had to shift the ideology of the churches to what he calls a "
false gospel".
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posted by quin
on Sep 15, 2010 -
208 comments
Time's comprehensive archives allow us to see how the magazine's discussions of
homosexuality have evolved from pathologizing and stereotyping . . . to awkward attempts to view gays humanely while continuing to refer to their sexual orientation as a disease . . . to a gradual acceptance of gays as upstanding members of society who are struggling for equal rights. Articles from 1956, 1966, 1969, 1975, and 1979 inside.
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posted by Jaltcoh
on Jun 20, 2010 -
27 comments
It
looked legit and not entirely out of the realm of
possibility in today's heated political climate: an anti-gay resolution being introduced in Utah to expel homosexuals from the state. Except that it was an entire, elaborate
hoax courtesy of the
Yes Men.
posted by Leezie
on Mar 9, 2010 -
28 comments
Fans know him as Tonéx. His eccentric style and vertiginous high notes helped make him one of the most acclaimed praise singers of the past decade, and, for a time, one of the most successful. ... This past September, the television host known as Lexi broadcast an interview [Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3] with Tonéx on the Word Network, a gospel channel, in which he made his clearest public statements about his sexual orientation. He is, within the church world, the first high-profile gospel singer in history to come out of the closet. Within hours, he started to realize what he had done. His relationship with the mainstream gospel industry was effectively over.
From a fascinating
article in the most recent New Yorker [abstract only].
This podcast [freely accessible] with the author of the article, Kelefah Sanneh, delves into the
rarely discussed "secret" in the black church that many gospel musicians have been and are gay. Sanneh touches on the stories of both
James Cleveland, the creator of the modern gospel sound who died of AIDS in 1991, and one of his backup singers, Carl Bean, who became famous for the 70s disco hit
"I Was Born This Way." One contemporary preacher and gospel singer that Sanneh discusses in relation to Tonéx is
Donnie McClurkin, a man made infamous during the Obama campaign for railing against homosexuals in Southern Black churches. McClurkin has admitted to
engaging in homosexual acts for 20 years but does not identify as gay and believes a strong Christian faith can deliver a person from the "sin" of homosexuality. He recently delivered a sermon directed at young black homosexuals in the church, specifically calling out Tonéx. [McClurkin sermon
Part 1 /
Part 2 /
Part 3]
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates
on Feb 2, 2010 -
44 comments
Iris Robinson [
wiki] is, at the time of writing, under acute psychiatric care in a Belfast hospital, after a BBC Northern Ireland documentary revealed that she had, at the age of 59, solicited £50,000 from two property developers to help fund a business run by her 19-year-old lover, Kirk McCambley.
posted by billysumday
on Jan 22, 2010 -
55 comments
NYU recently invited a Law Professor from Singapore, Thio Li-Ann to teach "Human Rights in Asia".
Thio, also a former Member of Parliament, is infamous for having strong views against homosexuality.
As expected, she is
not warmly welcomed by NYU students.
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posted by merv
on Jul 15, 2009 -
75 comments
The Surge is working [tm] -- but for gay Iraqis who face
a murderous new spate of violence by theocrats and militiamen,
notsomuch. "More than 430 gay men have been murdered in Iraq since 2003... [but] many officials say they feel that in a country at war, there are more pressing concerns than gay rights."
posted by digaman
on Aug 27, 2008 -
58 comments
Cheer Up Emo Kid! Writer
Ekaterina Sedia argues that the lack of a consistent definition of homosexuality, conflation of sexual orientation and gender, conflation of heritability and inherited, conflation of correlation with causation, conflation of biology and genetics, non-random recruitment for twin studies, and other factors make the argument for a genetic basis for homosexuality and other complex human behaviors "not only misguided, [but] downright foolish."
posted by joannemerriam
on Jun 1, 2008 -
61 comments
Laud Humphreys was studying to be an Episcopal priest in the mid-1950s when he learned, shortly after his father's death, that his father, Oklahoma State Representative
Ira D. Humphreys, took trips to New Orleans to have sex with other men. After being dismissed as an Episcopal priest in the 1960s, Laud Humphreys then enrolled as a sociology grad student where he completed a dissertation about men who had sex with other men in
public bathrooms in St. Louis, which Humphreys researched by agreeing to serve as a
"watch queen", looking out for the police. After writing down the license plate numbers of the men having sex, Humphreys traced the men's addresses and contacted them in disguise, claiming to be collecting data for a public health survey. The research, which was condemned as
unethical for its use of
covert methods, was published in 1970 as
Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places.
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posted by jonp72
on Sep 8, 2007 -
58 comments
