The Great God Pan Still Lives
Ed Simon reviews Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East
by Gerard Russell. Continue Reading →
Tag: genocide
Ugandan Genocide, On Schedule
The Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, also known as the “kill the gays” bill, never went away. We were just supposed to think it did. A debate of the bill is set to begin before Uganda’s parliament in the next few months, writes Warren Throckmorton, who last week interviewed the author of the bill, David Bahati. Continue Reading →
God-Led Government
Catch The Revealer founder, Jeff Sharlet, talking about his new book, C Street, on NPR’s “Fresh Air” today. Among the topics: the anti-gay bill in Uganda, the definition of homosexuality, and The Family, genocide. The discussion follows up on Jeff’s recent article, “Straight man’s burden,” at Harper’s magazine and “Dangerous Liaisons” at The Advocate. Continue Reading →
The Strange Moves of The Economist
By Jeff Sharlet
The reverence with which so many upper-middle class Americans read The Economist has always puzzled me. There’s much to admire about the magazine, but it generally performs the same function as Newsweek, boiling down events into centrist conventional wisdom, facts be damned. A report in the July 3, 2010 issue, “The religious right in east Africa: Slain by the spirit,” is a case in point. I’ve been reporting on the religious right anti-gay movement in Uganda from here in the U.S. and from Kampala for nine months now, so I’m in a good position to see The Economist’s strange moves; I wonder what I’d make of the article that follows it, on Somaliland’s elections, if I were as informed on that story. But one needn’t have expertise to debunk The Economist’s report; a Google search would do it, especially if you landed, as you likely would, on the well-documented blogs of gay activist Jim Burroway or evangelical scholar Warren Throckmorton.
The biggest error is The Economist’s declaration that the bill no longer calls for the death penalty. That’s propaganda put out by the bill’s defenders. In fact, as I learned by asking the bill’s author, Ugandan Member of Parliament David Bahati, it does. (I’ll be publishing those interviews in my forthcoming book, C Street.) Bahati acknowledges that the death penalty may drop out of the final version; but it hasn’t yet, and it’s dangerous for The Economist to say as much. Continue Reading →
Freedom Rides For the Unborn.
A new kind of liberation theology has taken over the “pro-life” movement, with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, Alveda King, at the wheel. Tomorrow in Birmingham, Alabama — “on the site where peaceful civil rights activists were attacked with dogs and water hoses,” as Fr. Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life, writes in an email — activists will come together to “work for freedom for the unborn.” Continue Reading →