The conversion therapists met last November at the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. Behind the closed doors and drawn blinds of a Hampton Inn conference room, a middle-aged woman wearing white stockings and a Virgin Mary blue dress issued a call to arms to the 20-some people in attendance. “In our current culture, in which children are being indoctrinated with transgender belief from the moment they’re out of the womb, if we are confronted with a gender-confused child, you must help,” declared

Growing up, Myles Markham always felt like an outsider. Markham was multiracial in small, mostly white Florida towns. And they were queer. “I was swimming in water that told me that who I was, what I was, needed to change if I wanted to be safe,” they say. “I really believed, ‘I am a problem. I need to be fixed.’”

As a teen, a friend got them interested in evangelical Christianity, which seemed to offer the promise of ­transformation. They joined a church youth group and began studying the Bibl

On August 2, 2019, Colorado became the 17th state in the US to ban conversion therapy. Four months later, Alana Chen, a 24-year-old Catholic woman, died by suicide in Boulder after sharing her struggles with sexuality with church elders and seeking counsel.

Chen’s family believes that the advice she received contributed to her death. And they say that, even if it had been in effect when Chen sought guidance, the conversion therapy ban would not have helped Chen at all. That’s because laws like

“Mr. President, you care about Jewish people. As a rabbi, I need you to call for a cease-fire right now,” called Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg last week, interrupting Biden at a campaign reception in Minneapolis.

Biden responded with “I think we need a pause.” It was the first time Biden had wavered from his unconditional support for Israel, though he clarified that “a pause means give time to get the prisoners out. Give time.”

Rosenberg, a Reconstructionist rabbi, author, and organizer, is a member

On Thursday, Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) became the first Jewish congressperson to join the congressional call for a ceasefire in the war in Gaza. A first-term representative, Balint made history last year as the first woman and LGBTQ person to represent Vermont in Congress.

Her call for a ceasefire comes one week after activists from the Vermont chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace protested outside one of Balint’s campaign events and days after a meeting between Balint and rabbis from Rabbis for Ce

As many young adults do, Nicole Garcia had a crisis of faith in college. While studying at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Latina student took several Chicana Studies classes and was confronted with the violent history of the Catholic faith she was raised in.“Through the Doctrine of Discovery, the church was able to murder millions of Native people in this country, and steal [their land] and enslave them,” she says. Combined with the rigid hierarchical structure and patriarchy intrinsic