Using money, mass mobilizations and culture wars, church leaders get their members — and sometimes themselves — elected to office.
Tim Thompson engineered a school board takeover by recruiting and financing candidates who run against race, religion and gender identity policies.
Campaign leaders say gender identity is not a factor. They say they want two newer councilmembers out for reasons including being anti-business, soft on crime and holding meetings in Spanish.
Danny Gonzalez, one of three members elected in 2022 who voted to report transgender students to their parents and ban critical race theory, has left the board.
Culture wars rage as school board puts $93,000 in new library books in storage and bans titles by Judy Blume and Dr. Seuss.
Pre-exposure prophylaxis can save lives, but patients seeking the medications face numerous obstacles.
Social and bureaucratic hurdles have caused unnecessary delays in obtaining what can be a lifesaving antiretroviral medication.
Ball culture, the subject of the 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning, is the backdrop for Filipino-American playwright Boni B. Alvarez’s new play, Fixed
Dustin Lance Black’s When We Rise presents a unique opportunity to not only entertain, but to also enlighten people. Which makes its failings that much more disappointing.
Gay historian, activist and kindhearted bohemian bon vivant, Stuart Timmons passed away peacefully on a recent Saturday morning, not long after recovering from a bout with pneumonia.
Is the Pope a tease? Not really. He’s trying. He challenged the neoliberal economic system just a month into his papacy and brought up one of its difficult byproducts: growing inequality. And last week, at his recently convened synod on the family, he attempted to coax his bishops to expand their definition of the family, acknowledging yet another difficult issue: the rapidly expanding fact of gay marriage. For a brief moment, it appeared the Church was not only poised to liberalize its definition of the family, but it might even be ready to jumpstart Vatican II and go so far as to overturn one of its most cherished catechisms: denial.
It all started with an October 13 press release that included this hopeful language for LGBT Catholics (the draft was credited to a Pope Francis appointee, Monsignor Bruno Forte, a theologian known for his progressivism):
“Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community.