As if intending to justify the need for the International Day Against Homophobia, a vicious mob of more than 20,000 homophobes attacked 50 gay rights advocates who were commemorating this event in Tbilisi, Georgia. According to The New York Times, the attack was "led by priests in black...

Wine may represent the blood of Jesus in church, but whine is the religious right's drink of choice these days. Having lost the culture war, their latest tactic is to falsely cast themselves as martyrs who are defending the faith and the right to free speech against an increasingly totalitarian...

Groups opposed to abortion are similar to anti-gay activists because they rely on junk science, scare tactics, and religious fervor to limit the freedom of others. Both issues are central to the culture wars, and the Religious Right will be on the losing end of each battle.

Last week,...

As the College of Cardinals slinks into Rome to elect a new pope, the usual chorus of eternal optimists and media lapdogs follow close behind. The secular press is ecstatic because they can pose as pious while lifting sagging newspaper sales and static cable ratings. Beaten down progressive Catholics will...

I wouldn't be surprised if schoolchildren across America thought the word "gay" is a synonym for "old," because every time a professional athlete comes out of the closet, he promptly retires.

The latest competitor to come out and then promptly get out is Robbie Rogers, a 25-year-old who...

In 1984, I was placed on the varsity basketball team as a high school sophomore -- a team that held a daily Evangelical Christian prayer after practice. Even though it was a public school, we were forced to gather in a circle near center court and offer pleas to God...

Responding to the Boy Scouts of America's plan to ditch their ban on gay Scouts, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said, "A departure from their long-held policies would be devastating to an organization that has prided itself on the development of character in boys."

The problem...

Had Mitt Romney won the election, the gay community would have hit a stone wall. Instead, President Barack Obama's historic inauguration speech mentioned Stonewall, the New York City gay bar where patrons fought back against a police raid in 1969. That Obama did so while invoking Seneca Falls and Selma...

For 50 years, Bob Jones University, in Greenville, S.C., prohibited interracial dating, and Bob Jones Jr. once claimed that Catholicism was a "satanic counterfeit" of fundamentalist Christianity. Despite the ugly rhetoric and vile policies, Republican candidates regularly flocked to the school and groveled for its endorsement. The GOP luminaries who...

It was unthinkable in my high school years that I, a gay person, could be a successful politician. It was drilled into our heads that we had to be "extras" in the political arena but never star in the leading role. The jobs we could take, if we remained at...

Instead of using his annual Christmas address to call for unity and peace on Earth, Pope Benedict XVI squandered his big moment to declare war on the gay community. In a mean-spirited and hyperbolic speech, the pontiff tried to whip up fear about the unfounded threat caused by marriage equality....

Emotionally, my job is vaguely similar to that of a police detective. I closely monitor, and occasionally confront, bad guys. The process requires witnessing the chaos and carnage that results from crimes of prejudice and passion.

Most of the time, what I encounter are shattered people and broken families...

In an odd court decision released Monday, federal judge William Shubb temporarily blocked California from enforcing S.B. 1172, a groundbreaking law that prohibits anti-gay therapists from trying to turn gay minors straight. However, the order was quite narrow, applying only to the three plaintiffs who sued to overturn...

In 1998 fifteen religious-right organizations launched a huge advertising campaign to promote "pray away the gay" programs. Anti-gay activist Robert Knight called the "Truth in Love" campaign the "the Normandy landing in the larger cultural wars." But things didn't quite work out as Knight had hoped. In 2000...

Today I feel a little bit like Dr. Sam Loomis, the psychiatrist in the classic horror movie Halloween who ran through the streets of Haddonfield telling anyone who would listen that Michael Myers had just escaped from the insane asylum. As he frantically warned the residents, they looked at him...

The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, is in a huff because she was kept in the dark about CIA Director David Petraeus' affair with Paula Broadwell, a former military officer and his biographer.

"... A decision was made somewhere not to...

The gay rights battle in America has been a tough slog measured in inches, not yards -- at least until last night, when progress could be calculated in miles. In a blink, the future became the present, and our horizons were without limitation. In a sweeping election victory, barriers were...

A new poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reveals that a record number of Americans (19.3 percent) have abandoned faith and now consider themselves unaffiliated with any particular religion. According to USA Today:

This group, called "Nones," is now the nation's second-largest category only...

If there is one thing that we learned from the Pacific Justice Institute's lawsuit against California Gov. Jerry Brown and anyone in his orbit remotely connected with a new law banning "ex-gay" therapy for minors, it is that these lawyers' legal case is as logic-challenged and convoluted as the industry...

The Chick-fil-A controversy is more than a battle over chicken sandwiches, as some have flippantly suggested. The fast-food chain has become an international symbol of anti-gay intolerance since its CEO, Dan Cathy, expressed his views on marriage equality on The Ken Coleman Show in July:

I think we...