It seems that it’s not only in Trump’s America that religious zealots have gained the power to force lawmakers to adopt regressive social policies. We’ve just learned that, after extensive consultations with leaders of ‘all religions’, Indonesia’s government is set to pass a new penal code that criminalises consensual sex outside marriage. And if this isn’t bad enough the Muslim-majority country plans to introduce stiff penalties for insulting its President, Joko Widodo and Vice President Jusuf Kalla. The new criminal… Read more
September 19, 2019
Indonesia: religious leaders spark war on sex outside marriage
September 19, 2019 By Barry Duke
10 Comments
September 19, 2019
Op-ed: Happy Science, Margaret Thatcher and the issue of balance
September 19, 2019 By Robert Stovold
11 Comments
EARLIER this month we carried a piece entitled ‘Thatcher to give her views on Brexit … from beyond the grave’. Happy Science, the Japanese outfit that was organising a series of seances aimed at conveying the late British Prime Minister’s views on Brexit, took grave offence at our report and demanded its deletion. We published their complaint as an update to the original report, as well as on our Facebook page (please feel free to like it). Freethinker contributor ROBERT… Read more
September 18, 2019
Former Catholic priest likely to die in prison for child abuse
September 18, 2019 By Barry Duke
5 Comments
ARTHUR Perrault, 81, has been handed a 30-year prison sentence for multiple sexual assaults on a young New Mexico altar boy over a two year period in the 1990s. In sentencing Perrault, who fled to US to settle in Morocco where he reported abused other youngsters, US District Judge Martha Vazquez described his offences as: The worst case that I have ever handled and ever seen. Perrault was convicted in April of seven federal counts for the assault of a… Read more
September 18, 2019
Violent gay exorcism: police investigating an Oklahoma church
September 18, 2019 By Barry Duke
9 Comments
THE First Assembly of God Church in Blackwell, Oklahoma, is currently under police investigation after a young man claimed to have been subjected to a vicious ‘pray-away-the-gay’ session in which he was held down and punched. In an interview with KFOR-TV this week, Sean Cormie, 23, above, said that his family had been urging him and his partner, Gary Garner, to attend services at the Pentecostal ever since he came out as gay last spring. After months of persuasion, Cormie… Read more
September 17, 2019
Barmy Brexit Baptist castigates The Rocky Horror Picture Show
September 17, 2019 By Barry Duke
66 Comments
EVER since its launch in London in 1973, The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been delighting audiences across the globe – and pissing off foam-flecked Christians. Why? Because it pushes boundaries “and has become a cultural icon which promotes empowerment of self-creation and all sexual orientations.” Which is precisely why Pastor Peter Simpson, inset, minister at the Penn Free Methodist Church, is furious that the show opened today in the city of Chester. Simpson, who believes Brexit is God-ordained, handed… Read more
September 17, 2019
Christian teacher forced to resign over her support for gay marriage
September 17, 2019 By Barry Duke
0 Comments
AN Australian LGBT advocacy group has taken up the case of a teacher who was allegedly forced to resign from a Christian college because she disagreed with its anti-marriage equality agenda. Rachel Colvin, above, has lodged a discrimination case against Ballarat Christian College with the support of Equality Australia. Colvin, a “committed Christian” was an English teacher at the private school from 2008 until February 2019. She said that in August last year the school informed her she would no… Read more
September 16, 2019
Christian racist shuts down Facebook page. Ploy badly backfires.
September 16, 2019 By Barry Duke
13 Comments
AT the beginning of September a Mississippi events venue – Boone’s Camp Event Hall owned by Donna and David Russell – found itself at the centre of a row after a woman believed to be Donna Russell turned down a booking for a mixed race couple. The reason she gave in a video shot by LaKambria Welch, who approached the company for her brother’s wedding, was: We don’t do gay weddings or mixed race, because of our Christian race –… Read more
September 15, 2019
Oh Carroll, look where your prayers have landed you!
September 15, 2019 By Barry Duke
21 Comments
ROBIN Bartlett Frazier, above, a former member of the Carroll County Board of Commissioners Maryland, is not a happy bunny. The devout Christian is more than a little dismayed that board, which has been involved in a protracted legal battle with the American Humanist Association over Christian prayers at public meetings, has finally buckled, agreeing to halt the prayers and to pay the AHA and other plaintiffs $25,000. In March 2014, US District Court Judge William D Quarles, Jr, issued an injunction… Read more
September 15, 2019
Abuse survivors furious over NY diocese’s bankruptcy move
September 15, 2019 By Barry Duke
7 Comments
SNAP, the Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests, has reacted angrily to news that the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester in upstate New York filed for bankruptcy protection on Thursday amid a wave of lawsuits over alleged sexual abuse of children. The bankruptcy was announced by Bishop Salvatore Matano, above. See video here. SNAP said on its website: We believe this move by church officials is not about protecting church assets, but rather about protecting their secrets. It pointed… Read more
September 14, 2019
In Russia, holy water was used to combat ‘drinking’ and ‘fornication’
September 14, 2019 By Barry Duke
9 Comments
IT’S still early days, so we have no idea yet whether an aerial assault on naughty behaviour in the Russian city of Tver has had any effect, other than to make people point and laugh at the sheer stupidity of dropping holy water on the city from a biplane which looked barely airworthy. The stunt, according to this report, took place on Russia’s Sobriety Day, a non-official holiday on September 11 when 70 litres of holy water, and a large… Read more
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