Last month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed what was dubbed the essentially anti-LGBTQ "Save Chick-fil-A" bill into law. If it weren’t enough that Abbott signed the bill over a month ago, late last week he thumbed his nose at LGBTQ people even more and participated in a TV ceremony celebrating the bill’s signing while he and his team were surrounded by Chick-fil-A food and beverages. He then tweeted the moment out to his supporters.

“No business should be discriminated against simply because its owners donate to a church, the Salvation Army, or other religious organization,” Abbott said.

“No business should lose a government contract because of their religious beliefs. The save Chick-fil-A legislation that I’m about to sign is a victory for religious freedom in Texas.”

Three upstate New York siblings abused their elderly father ?— both mentally and physically ?— for years because they claimed God told them he was unfaithful to their mother.

When Brittney Ready and her wife Stacey enrolled their youngest daughter Callie in the daycare program of Parkview Christian Academy of Waco, Texas, they hoped their child would continue being raised in the Christian faith, just like they’d done at home. Instead, Callie was rejected because her parents are lesbians.

In a public Facebook post, Brittney wrote that the school called she and her partner in when they had an opening for their daughter.

Brittney said, “With excitement we went in this afternoon ready to see the place and get her started. The director was super sweet and welcoming to us and Callie! We go to leave with paperwork in hand only for the administrator to call us into his office to let us know that he heard that Stacey and I are “mates” (first off we aren’t animals) and because of that they cannot welcome her (Callie).”

When Brittney asked why her child was no longer welcome, the administrator reportedly said, “bylaws are bylaws” and that the school’s Christian faith disallowed the school from accepting Callie.

A Catholic priest who linked autism to homosexuality has canceled his upcoming Australian tour. Church authorities canceled his tours in Ireland and Canada also canceled his tours.

Father Dominic Valanmanal from India was scheduled to appear at a five-day retreat in the southern city of Melbourne.

Syro Malabar Eparchy of St Thomas the Apostle in Melbourne had planned to host the retreat. It announced the cancellation but did not give a reason for it.

The weather report in Buenaventura, Colombia, calls for thunderstorms this Sunday. That is a bit unfortunate, since it may prove tricky to differentiate between precipitation and holy water falling from the sky.

That afternoon, on the Lord's day of rest, Monsignor Rubén Dario Jaramillo Montoya, a Catholic bishop in the city, plans to hop in a helicopter and soak what he has described as crime-ridden streets with the blessed liquid. The ritual was set to be part of a religious feast celebrating Buenaventura's patron saint. But Montoya's real hope, he told a local radio station, was to "exorcise all those demons that are destroying our port."

An Indiana Catholic high school has fired a married gay teacher to remain within the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.

The decision means Cathedral High School in northeast Indianapolis will avoid the punishment the neighboring Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School received just last week for following its conscience and refusing to fire its own gay and married employee.

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Cathedral High School’s board of directors said in a letter on Sunday that if the school kept the gay teacher on staff, it would lose its nonprofit status, its diocesan priests and its ability to offer the Eucharist, a central Christian rite, among other consequences.

Leaders said they hoped the gay teacher’s termination won’t “dishearten” students.

The Trump Administration’s leaked gender memo, the recent transgender military ban, and the expansion of the global gag rule aren’t coincidences. They are part of a well-coordinated, funded global movement designed to control our communities by restricting the rights and bodily autonomy of women, LGBTQI communities, and people of color — eerily reminiscent of Reagan era oppressive tactics.

For LGBTQI communities, this kind of backlash is not new. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, the Reagan administration demonized our communities, as did right-wing forces around the world, spreading the false notion of the "gay plague" and blaming men who have sex with men for the transmission of the HIV virus. LGBT people were denied equal access to healthcare, faced intense violence, were stigmatized, stripped of basic rights, and often forced into the shadows. But we fought back.

Today, we know the far-right are sewing those same seeds of paranoia, creating gender panic with the use of an intentionally ambiguous organizing framework termed "gender ideology"by some and "anti-gender ideology" by others. Originating in the 1990s, gender ideology is a construct that depicts efforts to expand rights for women, LGBTQI people, and people of color, as radical, dangerous, and elitist, arguing that we are a threat to traditional family values.

At first, you might not realize the flyer was put there by a white supremacy group.

The poster, in shades of black, white and teal, features Andrew Jackson on horseback. The accompanying text reads: "European roots, American greatness."

Flyers like this, posted across the country by American neo-Nazi and white supremacist group Identity Evropa are popping up far more than they used to. Others feature George Washington. According to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League, white supremacy propaganda increased by 182 percent in 2018 compared with the year before.

The increase in flyers and other propaganda reflects a relatively new strategy for hate groups, the ADL says. Under intense scrutiny, white supremacists are reluctant to show their face in public, so they're relying more on leaflets and posters to spread hate without putting themselves at personal risk, it adds.

A tax-filing business in Indiana refused to serve a lesbian couple, citing the business owner’s religious beliefs.

Bailey Brazzel says she has gone to Carver Tax Service in Russiaville, Indiana, to have her taxes done for years.

But she won’t be going back anymore.

She and her new wife Samantha – they were married this past July – went to Carver Tax Service and were told by Nancy Fivecoate, who runs the business, that she would not prepare their taxes.

At first, officials at the U.S. Indian Health Service overlooked the peculiarities of their unmarried new doctor, including the children’s toys he hoarded in his basement on the reservation. They desperately needed a pediatrician at their hospital in Browning, Mont.

By 1995, after three years, they became convinced Stanley Patrick Weber was a pedophile and pushed for his removal from the government-run hospital.

“You’re going to have to leave,” Randy Rottenbiller, its clinical director at the time, recalled telling the doctor after learning a child patient had stayed the night in his house.

But the Indian Health Service didn’t fire Mr. Weber. Instead, it transferred him to another hospital in Pine Ridge, S.D. He continued treating Native American children there for another 21 years, leaving behind a trail of sexual-assault allegations.

America is, quite famously, a nation founded on the principle of freedom of religion. As a result it is easy to understand why many people would be uncomfortable with certain kinds of religious practices (mostly notably prayer) and education in public schools. A little over a week ago President Trump tweeted his support for the introduction of Biblical literacy classes in schools, drawing attention to efforts by a variety of Christian groups to put the Bible back on the high school agenda.

Following Trump’s statement there was a flurry of media coverage of the issue. Fox News reported that “at least six states, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Virginia and West Virginia have introduced legislation this year pushing for public schools to offer Bible literacy classes,” noting that these classes would be electives. (The Indiana bill is not actually a Bible course bill at all. It demands that the previously existing world religions electives class has to include a conversation about the Bible).

There is a strategy here: Project Blitz, an initiative sponsored by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, the National Legal Foundation and the WallBuilders ProFamily Legislative Network, has been orchestrating the push to create these bills.

As prominent SMU religious studies professor Mark Chancey has written, it’s actually already legal to teach the Bible in schools, so in some sense these bills are unnecessary. Courses like the one Trump is tweeting have been around for a century. Chancey told The Daily Beast that “it is important to recognize that Bible course bills and their sponsors may have different motivations…sometimes a bill is clearly about more than just biblical literacy, and that's definitely the case with Project Blitz bills.” Other measures that Project Blitz has called for includes the promotion of the motto “In God We Trust,” the introduction of a “year of the Bible” and the limiting of the rights of same-sex couples and transgender people. Chancey told me, “Project Blitz is weaponizing Biblical Literacy for the cultural wars.”

Ellen Page on Thursday criticized Chris Pratt for attending a “infamously anti-LGBTQ” church after he appeared on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and discussed his religious side.

The “Guardians of the Galaxy” star sat down with Colbert to promote “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part,” and Pratt said he just finished a 21-day Daniel Fast that he took part in through his church and that his pastor encouraged. He also said the pastor shared with him words of wisdom about balancing fame and his inner self.

“If the spotlight that is shining on you is brighter than the light that’s within you, it will kill you,” Pratt recounted to Colbert.

Page tweeted about the appearance and the pastor shortly after, writing, “Oh. K. Um. But his church is infamously anti lgbtq so maybe address that too?”

Tom Bianchi is a longtime male erotic photographer and HIV activist whose photographs have helped document gay men’s sexual history on Fire Island and elsewhere. But as of this morning, you won’t be seeing his images on Instagram anymore because the photo-sharing platform recently banned him.

The shot that got Bianchi banned was called “Untitled, 457,” a picture from his collection entitled Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-1983. The shot simply showed a naked man sitting on a bedside with his back to the camera. It showed the top of the man’s buttocks but was otherwise non-obscene. At the point of its deletion, it allegedly had over 5,000 likes.

Bianchi’s banning isn’t necessarily surprising. The Facebook-owned photo-sharing platform has a habit of deleting supposedly risqué homoerotic content, including tasteful pictures of nude athletes, an image of Queer Eye food guy Antoni Porowski in his underwear and even a lovely image of a lesbian couple cuddling in bed with their child.

Squirming in his seat, Michael Jackson is asked directly on camera whether he's a pedophile in newly unearthed video footage obtained by DailyMailTV.

The King (Perv) of Pop is quizzed by lawyers about allegations of child sexual abuse in what's understood to be the only time he was ever filmed being questioned on the subject during his life.

The iconic singer, who at the time was 37, appears nervous and laughs, giggles and jokes his way through questions about molesting children in the astonishing footage dated March 1, 1996.

A longtime Roman Catholic priest in Iowa has been removed from the ministry indefinitely after a girl complained a year ago that he improperly touched her, a diocese has confirmed.

The fourth-grader alleged that the Rev. Brian Danner of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Humboldt rubbed the top of her leg while taking her confession, the Diocese of Sioux City told The Associated Press. The girl's parents were "extremely upset" and complained to church officials, recalled diocese lawyer Michael Ellwanger.

The diocese reported the incident to the county attorney last December and has revoked Danner's ability to function as a priest indefinitely. Its review found that Danner's actions were inappropriate but didn't constitute sexual abuse, Ellwanger said.