Camille is a twentysomething working in the LGBT nonprofit industry. She runs an LGBT news blog at gaywrites.org.
How many people in the United States are gay? Depending on who you ask, a lot of people may say the answer doesn’t matter; that rights should be afforded to people on the very basis that they are rights, regardless of how many people they impact. Some conservative Christians would disagree. That’s why Michael Brown, a writer for the Christian website Charisma, is both delighted and outraged by a recent study that suggests fewer Americans are LGBT than we may assume. Read more
President Obama took a huge step earlier this month when he signed an executive order barring anti-LGBT discrimination in workplaces that receive federal contracts. In response, the National Catholic Reporter took a surprising stance: Obama’s exemption was especially contentious among faith groups because it did not expand religious exemptions (though he did respect a Bush-era executive order allowing religious groups “some leeway” in hiring and firing on religious grounds). That’s why it’s so refreshing that in a staff editorial, NCR praised the executive order loudly and proudly, a far cry from the expected (and observed) Catholic response. Read more
In light of the Hobby Lobby ruling, religious groups everywhere are jumping at the chance to deny women fundamental health care on the basis of the owners’ religious beliefs. The Satanic Temple is using the same principle to do just the opposite. In case you’re not familiar with them, The Satanic Temple is an organization whose mission is to “encourage benevolence and empathy among all people, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense and justice, and be directed by the human conscience to undertake noble pursuits guided by the individual will.” In their next pro-human move, the group has just announced that it will assert a religious exemption from state-mandated “informed consent” abortion laws, and they say the Supreme Court’s decision strengthens their case. Read more
It’s becoming easier and easier for religious groups to defend their bigoted beliefs. We obviously saw this in the Hobby Lobby decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the religious beliefs of certain corporation owners trump the needs of their employees, but the “religious exemption” claim has come up before, too — Christian-owned businesses refusing to serve LGBT people, for example, or Christian schools trying to shut out LGBT teachers and students. One school in Massachusetts recently made a loud plea for legal, religious-based anti-LGBT discrimination, but thankfully their efforts may get cut short. Read more
Mark Regnerus, the Christian sociologist infamous for a miserably flawed study about LGBT parents, is upset. He’s upset because earlier this month, researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia released the world’s largest study of same-sex parents and their kids. The study found that on certain measures, children of same-sex couples seemed better off than children of different-sex couples. Regnerus disagrees with those findings, as his own study will tell you. And he’s upset that we’re not as outraged as he is. Read more
