Terry Firma, though born and Journalism-school-educated in Europe, has lived in the U.S. for the past 20-odd years. Stateside, his feature articles have been published in the New York Times, Reason, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Wired. Terry was the founder and Main Mischief Maker of Moral Compass, a now-dormant site that pokes fun at the delusional claim by people of faith that a belief in God equips them with superior moral standards. He was the Editor-in-Chief of two Manhattan-based magazines until he decided to give up commercial publishing for professional photography... with a lot of blogging on the side. These days, he lives in an old seaside farmhouse in Maine with his wife, three kids, and two big dogs.
Scott Lively is not your average Christian homophobe. Most anti-gay Christians stop short of calling for the annihilation of gay people; and the occasional unhinged pastor, such as Steven Anderson, who wants the death penalty for homosexuals, has no serious political clout and no way of pushing the government into enacting such legislation. But Lively had just such a chance when, in 2009, he became involved in Uganda’s infamous Kill the Gays bill. Fortunately, that shocking legislation was first toned down to become the “Just Put Gay People in Jail for Life” bill, as our own Hännah Ettinger remarked archly, and was then defeated on a technicality back in August of this year. That doesn’t change the allegations that Lively, in the flesh, consulted with rabidly anti-gay Ugandan legislators, and in general fanned the flames of extreme anti-gay hysteria in that country, with fatal results for some. Read more
The Islamic holiday Eid al-Fitr is supposed to be a day of unity. For Nazim Mahmood, a British doctor, it appears to have been the day when his family rejected his being gay — with fatal consequences: A Harley Street doctor killed himself by jumping from his luxury penthouse apartment after his mother asked him to seek “a cure” for being gay, an inquest heard. Dr Nazim Mahmood, fell four storeys to his death from the balcony of his £700,000 flat in a mansion block in West Hampstead, London, in July. An inquest at St. Pancras Coroners’ Court heard Dr Mahmood had told his mother he was gay and was in a 13-year relationship with his fiancée, Matthew Ogston, just days before his death. Read more
The Almighty rewarded a devout Louisiana surveyor with a glimpse of a heavenly creature, an encounter that gave the man goosebumps and a spot on the nightly news. When Randy Marks went to work Wednesday morning, he never dreamed he would have a close encounter with what he calls “someone from above saying, ‘Hello.'” … What he saw was a fossil. Marks has found hundreds in his career, but this one was different. “As I picked it up and I saw it, to me, it looked like an angel. Actually, a bald-headed angel.” Heaven’s wig shop was evidently back-ordered when God took the angel’s imprint and placed it in a riverbed for Randy Marks to find. Read more
On Wednesday, less than eight hours before Texas inmate Scott Panetti was to die by lethal injection, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals granted him a reprieve. Panetti is on death row for killing his estranged wife’s parents in 1992. His lawyers argued that he was too mentally ill to qualify for capital punishment, and they sought the delay so Panetti could undergo new competency tests. They noted that he acted as his own attorney during trial — dressed in a purple cowboy outfit — and tried to subpoena more than 200 witnesses, including the pope and Jesus Christ. … The Hayward, Wisconsin, native had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1978, and had been hospitalized more than a dozen times for treatment in the decade before the shootings. At his trial, he took on an alternate personality, “Sarge,” to testify. The article makes mention of Panetti’s religion, but not the prosecutors’. It doesn’t take a great leap of faith to surmise that, like the convict, they’re Christians — perhaps even the pro-life kind. Read more
