The picketers outside the family planning clinic were loud and jeering. They shouted epithets as women walked toward the front door. They called them whores.

Jennifer Villavicencio was one of those women. She remembers thinking, “I’m on your side. I believe what you believe. I’m anti-abortion.”

Back then, in 2006, Villavicencio wasn’t seeking an abortion — only emergency contraceptive pills, sometimes called morning-after pills or Plan B.

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 At their annual meeting last month in Anaheim, California, Southern Baptists passed a series of reforms to address sexual abuse in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

Local church delegates, known as messengers, also passed a resolution, calling on states to make...

A panel of Tennessee judges has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a couple who alleged that a state-sponsored Christian adoption agency refused to help them because they are Jewish.

The lawsuit against the state challenged a 2020 law that installed legal protections for private adoption agencies to reject state-funded placement of children to parents based on religious beliefs.

Much of the criticism of the law had focused on how it allowed adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ people...

Several South Florida high school educators are alarmed that a new state civics initiative designed to prepare students to be “virtuous citizens” is infused with a Christian and conservative ideology after a three-day training session in Broward County last week.

Teachers who spoke to the Times/Herald said they don’t object to the state’s new standards for civics, but they do take issue with how the state wants them to be taught.

“It was very skewed,” said Barbara Segal, a 12th-grade government teacher at Fort Lauderdale High School. “There was a very strong...

A Grand Rapids, Michigan, Christian Reformed congregation that was ordered to rescind the ordination of a deacon in a same-sex marriage has voted to appeal the decision. The unprecedented step sends the matter to the small Dutch Calvinist denomination, which has no established procedure to expel a congregation. 

Neland Avenue Christian Reformed Church ordained the deacon, a woman who has asked to remain unnamed out of fears for her safety, in 2020. Earlier this month, the denomination’s annual synod, which had not met in the interim due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ordered...

At 31 years old, Grace Semler Baldridge is still a preacher's kid. 

The musician, who spent her childhood growing up in a rectory, didn't ever think she would write an entire album about her religious upbringing. But when the pandemic left her with nothing but time to focus on her music, the end result was an album Baldridge couldn't have predicted. 

"Preacher's Kid" is a musical exploration about growing up in the Christian faith and how that life impacted how she embraced her queer identity. Recorded with her laptop and small microphone, she never...

Lizzy Duke-Moe, a Boise High School graduate who is attending Brown University in the fall, was spurred into action last week to counter a local Baptist pastor who called for the death of all gay people.

Duke-Moe said in an email that her mom, Keely Duke, and stepmom, Sarah Seidl are married — “they got married in Idaho,” Duke-Moe said, and her mother had shown her an article about the pastor’s sermons. “And...

Sabrina Hodak grew up in a Modern Jewish Orthodox family but only truly embraced Judaism at age 16, around the same time she understood she was bisexual.

It was an upsetting and confusing time, because the same religious mentors who helped her strengthen her beliefs kept saying her sexuality would conflict with her faith.

“That was very frustrating, because I also knew that a lot of other religious people believed that,” said Hodak, now a 19-year-old psychology major at Florida International University. In her journal, she kept asking, “Can I please just find...

DignityUSA, an advocacy organization for LGBTQ+ Catholics, is gearing up for its first in-person national conference since 2019.

The group, which has been active since 1969, will host its 25th national conference — "Proclaiming Our Vision: Church Transfigured" — in San Diego July 8-10. The conference will feature several leading Catholic voices including keynote speaker Victor Carmona, a theologian at the University of San Diego. He will speak on the shared experiences of LGBTQ+ and immigrant Catholics. Other...

Catholic leaders expressed disappointment with a June 6 ruling by a federal judge in Oklahoma calling the state’s three-drug lethal injection method constitutional.

The ruling enables the state to move ahead with executions for more than two dozen death-row inmates who were plaintiffs in a case arguing against the lethal injection drugs and requesting another form of execution.

Judge Stephen Friot, of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, announced his decision just over three months after a weeklong trial when attorneys for 28 death-row...

A Supreme Court decision allowing taxpayer dollars to help pay for tuition at schools that offer religious instruction has sparked concerns about the potential implications of the ruling on LGBTQ rights. 

In a 6-3 vote, the court ruled Tuesday that Maine could not prohibit parents from using a state-funded tuition assistance program to pay for their...

The Rev. James Martin never pictured himself managing a website aimed at helping resource LGBTQ Catholics.

He never saw himself starring in a documentary about the Roman Catholic Church’s relationship with its LGBTQ members.

He never set out to write or speak on issues related to LGBTQ people and the Catholic Church at all, he said.

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The hardline stances of many conservative Catholic bishops in the U.S. are not shared by a majority of lay Catholics. Most of them say abortion should be legal, favor greater inclusion of LGBT people, and oppose the denial of Communion for politicians who support abortion rights, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The poll, conducted in mid-May, shows a clear gap between the prevalent views of American Catholics, and some recent high-profile actions taken by the church’s leaders.

For example, leaders of the U.S...

The stark, dual-colored letters of the Black Lives Matter flag and the bright rainbow stripes of the Pride flag had flown above the Massachusetts Catholic school for more than a year before the local bishop registered his opposition.

The Black Lives Matter flag, Bishop Robert McManus said in April, has been “co-opted by some factions which also instill broad-brush distrust of police.” And the LGBTQ...

For 10 years after 9/11, James Strickland fought for the United States Army, slogging, rifle on shoulder, from battlefield to battlefield.

He took and returned fire, he says, for not just a country, but an idea – that America had God’s special blessing. “I used a gun for a living to enforce that idea,” he says.

As the U.S. endures a wave of gun violence, it sometimes seems to him as if the war has come home. In 2021, active shooter incidents increased 52% over 2020, according to the FBI. This weekend, mass shootings in Pennsylvania and South Carolina added to...