In the latest Utne Reader, there are a couple of articles that perplex me somewhat, albeit for different reasons.
In the first, Stephanie Fairyington provided a recent article on ‘choosing’ sexual identity and went on to rehash the whole dreary endless ‘essentialist’/’social constructionist’ debate within LGBT academia over the last twenty years or so. In my […]

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Under moderate centre-right governments, religiously-based ‘faith schools’ may be more able to get started, remain operational and attract students- so what about LGBT pupils?
Unfortunately, the faiths in question do not tend to be reasonably inclusive ones like Buddhism or Wicca, and while I would have no problems with Anglicanism or Reform Judaism in this context […]

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Colin Hughes (ed) What Went Wrong, Gordon Brown? London: Guardian Books: 2010.
And did it…?
The British and New Zealand Labour administrations of the last decades were siblings. However, apart from Tony Blair’s LGBT-inclusive social liberalism and paradoxical corresponding foreign policy conservatism when it came to the Iraqi War, we know little about one major influence in […]

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The Catholic clergy pedophilia crisis is killing that church. I feel deep sorrow for the Catholic Left over this, but as for the Catholic Right…
After Vatican II in the sixties, Catholicism has tended to be riven by two divergent tendencies. One is a noble orientation toward social justice for the poor and oppressed that involves […]

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