Jesus loved sinners and Jesus would rather be dancing with me in West Hollywood on a Friday night than lugging through a swamp luring ducks into a trap with a duck caller made by a clan who think that my sexual actions are similar to that of an individual having sex with an animal.
To be able to walk down the street holding the hand of the one you love is a great feeling and an action that some of us aren’t able to perform without fear.
A line has been drawn in the sand between those who support gay rights and those who do not. While some call it being on the “right side of history,” I simply now refer to it as not sounding and looking like a bigot in the halls of history and in the various books, Facebook posts, and Tweets that our children will one day read. Continue reading “Yes, You’re a Homophobe by John Erickson”
Is care the beginning of ethics? Has traditional western ethical thinking been wrong to insist that in order to reason ethically, we must divorce reason from emotion, passion, and feeling?
In Ecofeminist Philosophy, Karen Warren criticizes traditional ethical thinking–advocating a “care-sensitive” approach to ethics. Traditional ethics, as Warren says, are based on the notion of the individual rights of rational moral subjects. Like so much else in western philosophy traditional ethics are rooted in the classical dualisms that separate mind from body, reason from emotion and passion, and male from female. In addition to being based in dualism, western philosophy focuses on the rational individual, imagining “him” to be separable from relationships with others. Western ethics concerns itself with the “rights” of “rational” “individuals” as they come into relationship or conflict with the “rights” of other “rational” “indiviudals.”
Matthew Shepard died October 12, 1998 – fifteen years ago. This month I have already attended three events memorializing his death. The first was a screening of the Emmy-award winning teleplay The Matthew Shepard Story (starring the amazing Stockard Channing as Judy Shepard), where I served as the moderator for an impassioned question and answer session for the monthly meeting of Comunidad, the Ministry of Gay and Lesbian Catholics group where I serve on the board at St. Matthew’s in Long Beach, CA. I also recently attended two productions of Beyond the Fence produced by the South Coast Chorale, in which my friend Robin Mattocks performs. This musical created by Steve Davison and others moved me to tears several times—and I know and teach the story of Matthew Shepard every year at this time—I have already done so four times this month. I attended with a friend the first night and because I am a professor the director let me come to the Gala the next night where I met Matthew’s real life best friend Romaine Patterson.
Author (L) at Beyond the Fence with Matthew Shepard’s best friend and panelist speaker, Romaine Patterson
Romaine is described in the casting call for this show as “a 19 year old lesbian in a leather coat, fun loving, strong best friend (in other words—a butch dyke). Romaine was a featured panelist at the event. Romaine was also the one who created the “Angel Action” — the wall of angels which effectively blocked the Shepard family from having to walk by Fred Phelps and his band of religious homophobes at the trials of the murderers of Matthew. Phelps and his ilk held signs aloft with slogans such as “Matt dies! God laughs!” and “Fags burn in hell!” The Angel Action activists wore wide white wings that extended, due to an ingenious construction, that created wings a few feet above the heads of the wearers (mostly Matthew’s college friends) and hid the protesters behind the wings of angels. The Angel Action launched in 1999 has been copied all over the world.
Most people really love this time of year and I share much of that. Living in South Central Texas we actually only have two seasons, with a perhaps two to three weeks in between what we laughingly call spring and fall. Because the winters are not harsh here, the step into spring feels different from those whose winters are frozen for months on end. We do experience some relief when our temperatures finally drop a bit in October. Even then those drops are only teasers. When we do finally get a briskness in the air in the wee, early morning hours of dawn but when the sun rises overhead, any memory of that coolness is forgotten. This morning at 5:30 am, when I woke, it was 54 degrees. I stepped outside to smell and feel the air, so clean and cool. And yet, now it is 85 degrees and rising, it once more feels like summer. We don’t have the sudden frosts that turn our trees to vibrant reds, yellows and browns. Yes, the leaves eventually turn and fall to the ground, but we have no heavy freeze and so our colors are pale compared to those in the North and colder climates.
Many Texans think the emotional feel for our two seasons is backwards, believing that summer, with its blazing sun, is the time to withdraw. Then in winter, when the weather is mostly mild, that’s the time to come out to play. This is a reversal of pagan thinking about the seasons in North America. Continue reading “Feeding the Dead by Deanne Quarrie”
In this post I interview Lyz Liddell, Director of Campus Organizing at the Secular Student Alliance. I first got in contact with Lyz about the idea of building a Humanist Center at my school, Claremont Lincoln University. She was very helpful and inspiring. I then had the pleasure of meeting her face-to-face when I gave a presentation on “Atheism and Interfaith” at the Secular Student Alliance’s Annual Conference in Las Vegas. So once again, I give you an interview with a strong female non-believer:
Lyz Liddell of the SSA
Can you give us a little background to how you became interested in secular activism and how you became the Director of Campus Organizing for the Secular Student Alliance?
I first became interested in secular activism via our Executive Director August Brunsman, close to ten years ago. The editor of our newsletter had recently acquired some fame (that was Hemant Mehta, with the fame from his experience of selling his soul on eBay) and was no longer able to commit to the regular editorial schedule; I was asked to step up, and since I had some editing experience, I took it on. Up until that point, I had been a “layman,” if you will – secular for sure, but not really an activist. Through several years of editing that newsletter, I learned what secular student groups were doing, and what was happening in the secular movement at large. The more I encountered, the more enthusiastic about it I was. I started going to conferences to get more information and news for the newsletter, and got more involved with the organization’s staff and volunteers and affiliates. When the campus organizer position opened up in late 2008, I stepped up into that position, and we’ve grown it from there (2 full time staff and some volunteers, a board of mostly college students) to the professional organization we are today (9 full time staff, 4 part-timers, a professionalized board and dozens of dedicated volunteers; we’ve grown from ~100 affiliates in 2008 to over 400 today).
As some of you may know, I run a project called “Interview an Atheist at Church Day.” This project aims at bettering understanding and furthering dialogue between atheists and Church-going religious persons. So far we have had over a dozen interviews take place, and we have more in the making. If you are a pastor interested in interviewing an atheist during service, or an atheist willing to be interviewed, please contact us here.
Our most popular interview so far is with Neil Carter (atheist) at a church in Mississippi. You can read up on it here and watch it below. At Feminism and Religion, I have made it my task to highlight some strong atheist women, and discuss some of the ways in which they can work together with religious women (sometimes this can cause a little friction). Gretta Vosper, a pastor in Canada, is just such a woman. She was interviewed as an atheist IN HER OWN CHURCH! If you are not familiar with her work, I highly recommend it. Another strong atheist woman who has participated in this project is Sarah Kaiser. She works with the Center for Inquiry promoting LGBTQ rights. Continue reading “Interview an Atheist at Church Day by Kile Jones”
Part of my research is focused on how the social sciences relate to “religion” and religious studies. More specifically, I spend time examining the sociology of religion. I look at stats, demographics, and polls. I look at rates of attendance, frequency of prayer, levels of “religiosity,” apostates (or the less religiously-loaded term “exiters”), and political outlooks. I also look at how bias this area of study is in favor of religion. One facet of this work that has always interested me, is the differences in “gender” and “sex” as they relate to religious beliefs and observances. Accepting the fact that there are spectrums of sex, gender, and identity, and the presence of difficult philosophical questions surrounding self-identification and the limits of labels, some really interesting facts and statistics crop up time and time again. In what follows I will lay out a couple of these interesting facts, along with some thoughts on them: Continue reading “5 Interesting Facts about Women and Religion by Kile Jones”
If a conservative religious traditions can’t give their mothers or sisters full equality, how can we expect them to give a GLBT individual the time of day?
Outrage. Anger. Fear. Hatred. These are just a few of the words that flashed across my Twitter feed as I woke up on that fateful Wednesday, June 26 morning when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act (or DOMA) was unconstitutional and that supporters of Proposition 8, the hotly contested voter initiative in California that banned same-sex marriage, had no standing. People were mad. However, it wasn’t just the typical kind of mad that is associated with hatred, it was a type of mad that was met with impossible anguish because what I was reading and feeling was a result of one thing: there was nothing more they could do.
What does all this mean? Questions from friends and family were filling up my inbox and although I wanted to take a moment to just hit “Reply All,” and input the words: Equality, I had to hold back and start to examine the notion that although equality may now be firmly on the proverbial table, there is still a lot of work to be done, specifically for gay marriage and those wanting to marrying inside the traditional church spaces they grew up in and not just the ones that have come out as open and affirming in recent years towards LGBT individuals. Continue reading “To Have and to Hold: Gay Marriage and the Religion Question”
So far, as a regular contributor to Feminism and Religion, I have interviewed a “pro-science” woman and one who started an online community for grieving unbelievers. In this post, I will interview Amanda Brown, an atheist activist who co-founded a project called We Are Atheism. Amanda grew up in Independence, MO, in the Assemblies of God and the Restored Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Since then, she has been involved in helping atheists “come out” and share their experiences. So without further ado, here is the interview:
Why did you start “We Are Atheism”?
I started We Are Atheism because I saw a gap in the age of atheists coming out of the closet. I also wanted a way for people to see for themselves that atheists are real people. We Are Atheism is focused on the fact that atheists are mothers, fathers, teachers, brothers, friends, and so much more. When I was at the 2011 Secular Student Alliance Conference in Columbus, OH, I heard most of the leaders tell stories about their groups and how many of them didn’t know other atheists. I thought this was horrible, and being a person who was in the same position, I wanted to start something that would bring our community together. Those who met on the internet could take their community from online to the neighborhood. Continue reading ““We Are Atheism” and Amanda Brown by Kile Jones”
I recently went to see Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. I saw it two times actually. Readers familiar with my posts about cosplay and video gaming will not be surprised to learn that I am also a fan of comic book heroes and heroines; and Superman was my childhood favorite.
I was both attracted to and wanted to be like Superman, specifically, Christopher
Christopher Reeves as “Superman.”
Reeves’ Superman. One of my strongest childhood desires was also to fly like a bird. I remember jumping off the end of my parent’s bed over and over again, convinced that if I flapped hard enough and kept on trying that I could fly. The older I got, the more I realized that I also did not want to be “rescued” by Superman. Rescue from the difficulties in my life was an unattainable fantasy. So, I desperately wanted to be Superman. Though I knew this too was impossible, perhaps I had only to try. Continue reading “What’s Your Super Power? (And Who’s Allowed to Have It?) by Sara Frykenberg”
Feminism and Religion 