Tennessee has been a hotbed of anti-Muslim activism for years, especially after plans were laid to build an Islamic center in Murfreesboro. There have been bomb threats and numerous conferences centered on the unfounded but widely hyped fear that Shariah law will somehow be imposed on Americans. The chapter of ACT! for America, an anti-Muslim extremist group, based in Nashville is the most active in the country.

So perhaps it was to be expected that a community forum intended to foster dialogue and a greater understanding of Muslims in America degenerated into a hate-filled free-for-all on Tuesday night. ( continue to full post… )

After watching a surveillance video of two white male police officers slam a black woman’s head into a countertop and yank her to the floor by her hair in the town lockup, the Jasper, Texas, City Council voted unanimously on Monday to fire the men, less than a month after the brief but violent encounter on a Sunday morning in May.

The incident has awakened the East Texas town’s ghosts. ( continue to full post… )

On May 13, Jason McCann’s nephew celebrated his first communion at the Saint Benedict Center (SBC) in Richmond, N.H.

McCann was not in attendance.

He wanted to be there. But Brother André Marie, Prior of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a religious order based at SBC, was firm in his refusal to allow McCann to worship at SBC’s chapel. In a May 9 letter explaining his decision to McCann, he wrote that McCann’s “sin ranks, along with willful murder, oppressing of the poor, and defrauding working men of their wages, as one of the ‘sins that cry to Heaven for vengeance.’”

McCann’s so-called “sin”? The 25-year-old Boston man is openly gay and has declared himself in love with his partner, Earlon Smith. ( continue to full post… )