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Why Do We Miss Our Common Humanity and Make People Religious Scapegoats?

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Have you ever thought about the fact that “religious” people all over the world – I mean everyday people, not elite thinkers or those who use religion to push their career and political agendas – care about the same things when they practice their religions? I’ve been observing that in my formal studies and teaching as a historian of religion for over fifty years. The religious thinkers, philosophers, theologians, and organizational leaders can give us all the great theories, scriptural quotations, logical cosmologies, and great doctrines all they want. And when these experts talk about various religions, that’s usually what they tell us theirs is. Likewise when people refer to other religions they like to speak in terms of those doctrines when the majority of the people who visit their shrines, temples, mosques, and churches couldn’t care less. How many people think that Zen (Ch’an) temples are places where all that contemplative Zen philosophy we read about in books is being taught a
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Why We Need Local PFLAG Chapters More than Ever

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How many of those supporting LGBTQ people thought that achieving marriage equality back in 2015 was the end of the struggle for equality? Not Michelangelo Signorile in his wisely skeptical warning It’s Not Over , written in that same year. He warned us that a resulting “victory blindness” seduces us into thinking that LGBTQ people have made it, pulling advocates back from what is merely another step while the enemies of equality were obviously continuing to plan to chip away at rights the way they slowly chipped away at Roe v. Wade . State by state, local election by local election, a backlash of forces of inequality slowly and with a long-term strategy worked to return the US to a culture that kept them in privileged positions they feared they were losing. While others responded by concentrating on building huge national organizations to rub shoulders with those at the top of the federal government, these radically right-wing forces knew that the real work and funding needs were at gr
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Don’t Fall for Any Anti-LGBTQI+ Psychological Malarkey

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Are you as tired as I am of all the hocus-pocus used to attack LGBTQI+ people by those who are just plain prejudiced? Are you sick of all the pseudo-science bigoted people spout to project their own issues on LGBTQI+ human beings? Then you’re not alone. All the major psychological, counseling, psychiatric, educational, and medical professional organizations have been for years. That’s because science progresses as it learns more, gains new information, and continues to question its previous assumptions. When doctors get more information from their patients' further tests, they change their diagnoses to fit those new facts. That’s how any social or hard science differs from people who cling desperately to religious beliefs that might by objective measures not even work for their own health. It’s no wonder that it took the Roman Catholic Church 350 years to admit it was wrong in condemning Galileo for determining that the earth orbits around the sun. Even though religions usually e
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Resolve Now to Make 2024 the Year We Take Back the Language

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Something that to us might seem small, maybe even picky, is one of the most crucial, yet easiest, things we can personally do to change the discourse in our country. The right-wing learned to do this long before more progressive people.   It shouldn’t be a new idea for us because for a quarter of a century, well-known linguist George Lakoff has been crusading for its importance and explaining scientifically why it’s crucial . Why it hasn’t caught on among people with progressive agendas is beyond me. Yet the right-wing continues to use it to commandeer the mainstream media into enforcing its frame of reference as it has for generations now. Think of how they like to call the Democratic Party “the Democrat Party” in what seems to be only a silly but intentional misnomer. But you hear the right-wing’s ideals enforced anytime anyone uses words like “tax relief,” “pro-life.” “entitlements,” “school choice,” “parental rights,” “the homosexuals,” “the gay lifestyle,” “sexual preference,” and
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