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.

Yes, it’s time again for an episode of “Might Makes Right” and “Majority Rules.” The trouble began when the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) sent Superintendent Phil Howard a letter pointing out that a portrait of Jesus (on display in the public school since 1947, donated by a Christian student group) was an “egregious violation of the the First Amendment.”

The right wing is not going down without a long painful fight, thanks to the movement’s professional bigots, womb-controllers, religious zealots.

After my post earlier today, I discovered that one more thing needed to be said. Instead of updating the earlier post, or putting it into the comments there, it deserves a new post all its own. Those uninterested in theology can skip this post and go on to something else.

That one more thing? Theologically speaking, Mike Huckabee is off his rocker. Click through for the details.

The stakes are high, and can be encapsulated in this predicament: Will Egypt complete the transition from Mubarak’s authoritarian regime to a consolidated democracy or will it eventually — soon — produce another authoritarian regime, this one dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, its allies and the military?

Some women manage to save their own lives. They hide and escape. A friend of mind from Kabul did just that. With a secret mobile phone she messaged her boyfriend from the bathroom of the family house where her father was keeping her a prisoner – and they plotted their escape.

Despite a documented plan to drive a wedge between the religious black community and the LGBT community to pass discriminatory measures at the ballot box, it looks like its last big win was in my state of NC, and they had to spend a lot of money to secure it.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops held their annual November meeting this past week, and coming a week after the elections, it had to have been rough. The bishops lost four out of four state votes on marriage equality, and the prospects for rolling back the Affordable Care Act and advancing their other policy prescriptions dimmed greatly with Obama’s reelection and the failure of the GOP to take control of the Senate. It was not a good week for the bishops, and like all people in politics who came out on the short end of things, a little stock taking was in order. What went wrong, and how can we do better next time?

Their answer: bad messaging. “If only we were better at explaining things . . .” Right. And Todd Akin lost not because he was a man firmly on a mission to return us to the 18th century, but because he was inarticulate.

News flash for the USCCB: It’s not that the voters don’t understand you; it’s that they don’t agree with you.

On October 10, 2012, an appellate court in Moscow announced the conditional release of Pussy Riot’s Yekaterina Samutsevich, the punk rock dissident imprisoned alongside band members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina for charges of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” The “religious hatred” involved a musical protest, a “punk prayer” staged inside Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral in February, less than a month before Russia’s elections. Appealing to the Virgin Mary to banish Vladimir Putin, the performance artists called attention to Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill’s explicit endorsement of Putin as “a miracle from God,” highlighting the entangled powers of church and state.

One of these is not like the other, a reminder that American Catholics don’t hold the views of much of the hierarchy. First, news from Maryland about Rev. Richard T. Lawrence bucking the Vatican by reading his archbishop’s statement during mass that urged the flock to vote against the upcoming marriage bill referendum. The memorandum stated that the Church would only recognize “the total, exclusive and permanent union of gay and lesbian couples as part of the sacrament of matrimony.”