Hemant Mehta is the founder and editor of FriendlyAtheist.com, a YouTube creator, and podcast co-host. He is a former National Board Certified math teacher in the suburbs of Chicago. He has appeared on CNN and FOX News and served on the board of directors for Foundation Beyond Belief and the Secular Student Alliance. He has written multiple books, including I Sold My Soul on eBay and The Young Atheist's Survival Guide. He also edited the book Queer Disbelief.
If I asked you to describe evangelical Christianity, “sex-negative” would undoubtedly be near the top of the list. The culture that embraces purity rings, abstinence-only sex education, and compares women who have fooled around to glasses of spit that no one would want to drink has warped a lot of people’s minds about what constitutes healthy, safe sex. It’s that attitude that pushed former evangelical Christian Brittany Machado and director Matt Barber to create a documentary about the relationship between Christianity and sex. It’s called Give Me Sex Jesus and the film is now online for the first time: Read more
Earlier this week, I post about Bremerton High School (WA) assistant football coach Joe Kennedy, who was leading his team in prayer after games: The District, after receiving a lot of media attention over this, promised to investigate the matter and how staff members were trained regarding the issue of prayer. That investigation is now over. No one’s getting fired. But everyone’s on notice: Read more
Readers of this site are surely aware of Ray Comfort’s anti-gay film Audacity. The movie is all about a Christian who tries to rescue gay people from eternal damnation because, you know, he loves them too much to let them suffer. For example, in an extended metaphor, the Christian doesn’t warn two lesbians that an elevator is broken. They eventually step inside and fall to their deaths. The Christian blames himself for not saving them. (Get it?) The overriding message in the movie is that homosexuality is wrong and Christians need to rescue gays and lesbians from the clutches of their disease. So you can imagine how it went over when Chris Routson recommended the film a lesbian colleague at work. Besides making for a really awkward future company picnic, Routson was also sending the implicit message that he thought a lot about her sex life and wanted to fix whatever she was doing in the bedroom. Read more
