vietnam war

More than 100 million people have viewed a video produced by the Chinese branch of PFLAG urging parents to welcome their LGBT children home for Lunar New Year celebrations. The website Erasing 76…

In our precap of global LGBT stories we expect to follow in 2015, we discussed the global culture war and specifically religious conservatives’ use of “religious liberty” claims and demonization of…

Transgender Day of Remembrance was observed around the world on Thursday to memorialize victims of violence against transgender people. Organizers report that at least 226 trans people were murdered…

This week’s global LGBT justice roundup, with a focus on Africa.

My heart skipped a beat when I spotted Vincent Harding’s obituary in the New York Times. I only met Harding a couple of times (although I felt that I’d “met” him long before through his powerful…

The cliché that 9/11 “changed everything” is nowhere less true than in the post-9/11 impulse to declare war immediately. War was a choice as well as an echo: a choice Americans made, and an echo of how Americans have made decisions in times of previous conflict.

I think I can safely assume that for most Americans, Camping and his miscalculated (and then re-calculated) doomsday predictions are of more curiosity than true salvific concern. Camping has been buried by subsequent news cycles and is the latest member of a cadre of religious leaders whom the Apocalypse passed by. But while May’s Apocalypse seems to have skipped over most of the world, it did land squarely on a hilltop in north-western Vietnam. It would behoove us to take notice of the complex and unexpected ways in which this spring’s apocalypticism rippled across the world…

On November 2, 2009, five Catholic activists — one nun, two priests, and two laypeople, all age sixty or above — cut through a series of chain link and barbed wire fences surrounding Naval Base Kitsap in Bangor, Washington. The five unfurled a banner reading “Trident: Illegal + Immoral,” poured their own blood over the site, and beat on the ground and the fences with household hammers before being apprehended and arrested. The five, who call themselves the Disarm Now Plowshares, were found guilty in December on four felony counts: trespass, damage to federal property, injury to federal property, and conspiracy to damage federal property. A week and a half ago in Tacoma’s federal court they received prison sentences of six to fifteen months.

While Obama used his Nobel Peace Prize speech to legitimize Afghanistan using just war principles, soldiers are currently unable to invoke these principles in refusing to serve. When we punish soldiers who heed their moral compasses, we deny them religious freedom, and our democracy is threatened. It’s time to allow those who oppose the war on ethical grounds the option of ‘Selective Conscientious Objection.’

The fact is that we are already committed to war in Afghanistan; we are already in. And while many of us may want to get out, the question is how?