I love the new homophobia. In the vein of Chik-Fil-a, bigoted establishments welcome gay dollars, but want to condemn at the same time. In New Bern, NC on December 4, Ariel and Shawnee McPhail walked into The Stingray Café, sat down and had their meal, and had this handed to them by the restaurant’s owner, Ed McGovern — after they had paid and were leaving.

Admitted Drug Money Launders HSBC are going back to court. This time the firm will not be apologizing for helping Mexican Drug Cartels or 9/11 Hijackers evade the law but for predatory lending targeted at minorities.

In the short documentary From Silence to Recognition, father and son filmmakers David Hughes Duke and John Duke explore a painful part of the history of Emory University and its Jewish students: the consistent abuse of Jewish students in the University’s School of Dentistry which lead to a 65% flunk-out/withdrawal rate over the thirteen years that John E. Buhler was the Dean of that department.

The Boy Scouts can count on zero donations from UPS. The corporation’s foundation has publicly underscored that it will not give to the anti-gay youth organization because the shipping giant’s criteria for giving says “No” to homophobia, aligning that criteria with the UPS non-discrimination policy.

I attended the annual International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics conference in Italy. During the five days I was there, nearly 500,000 women had abortions. Many of these women faced stigma, a mechanism of social control used to dehumanize and devalue women who need, or decide, to terminate pregnancies.

The ACLU plans to sue Morgan Stanley on behalf of five named plaintiffs (they will seek class action status), for the investment bank’s role in fueling what they view as a discriminatory subprime bubble. In doing so, the ACLU will try to pioneer a new legal strategy, by going after the securitizer of the loans instead of the now-defunct originator.

The purveyor of waffle fries with a side of bible-based bigotry has been for ages engaging in perfectly legal and ethically questionable ways of ensuring its franchisees adhere to their “Christian” point of view business model. And this was long before Chief Operating Officer Dan Cathy decided to open his piehole about marriage equality.

When you work on human rights issues, you notice a certain pattern in government denial of abuse. First line of defense: it didn’t happen. Or if it happened, they did it to themselves. Or if they didn’t, we certainly had nothing to do with it. Or if we did, we didn’t mean to. It doesn’t matter if the issue is torture, forced evictions, or garden-variety employment discrimination. The response from those in charge is often, if not always, the same.

In the 1850s and 60s, there were slaveholders who justified their ways by appealing to their religious beliefs. In the 1950s and 60s, there were segregationists who screamed “religious liberty” when their practices were questioned. Today, it’s the US Conference of Catholic Bishops doing the same with regard to laws and regulations that attempt to protect the rights of women to equal treatment, and anti-gay crusaders who want a religious exemption to continue their anti-gay ways.

In 1983, though, the US Supreme Court ruled in Bob Jones University v US that shouting “religious liberty!” is not a magic incantation that automatically frees the speaker from the laws of society. As Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. — no hater of the church — wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Even, or especially, when that injustice is perpetrated in the name of religious liberty.

In what may be a landmark decision, the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, charged with enforcing statutes banning sex (and other) discrimination in employment has ruled that the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also applies to sexual orientation. The case involved a transgender woman.