Under Brunei's laws, sodomy — whether between two men or an unmarried heterosexual couple — can be punished by being stoned to death or whipped with 100 strokes.

Adultery attracts the same forms of punishment, but as with sodomy it applies only if the accused admits their involvement or at least four eyewitnesses testify.

If a person is convicted by other evidence, they still face being flogged up to 30 times and imprisoned for up to seven years.

Penalties for women who have sex with other women are less severe, but they can still be whipped up to 40 times and jailed for 10 years.

Non-Muslims are not exempt — they face exactly the same punishments for adultery or sodomy if their partner is Muslim. It is not clear if two non-Muslims would be punished.

Also in Brunei's Sharia penal code is the punishment of armed robbery with the amputation of the offender's right hand or left foot, and the whipping of Muslims caught drinking alcohol.

Women also face jail terms for giving birth outside of wedlock or having an abortion.

Brunei is set to introduce new laws next week that could see LGBT people whipped or stoned to death for same-sex relations, according to human rights groups that have urged the country to abandon the plan.

Homosexuality is already illegal and punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment in the tiny sultanate, but the changes would see Brunei become the first Asian country to make homosexuality punishable by death.

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Socially conservative attitudes prevail across much of Asia with Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei banning sexual relationships between men while Indonesia has seen an increase in raids targeting LGBT people in recent years.

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"It is horrible. Brunei is imitating the most conservative Arab states," he said.

Homosexuality is punishable by death in several Muslim-majority countries, including death by stoning in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Mauritania.

If you stand by the Catholic Church, if you donate time and money to this organization, you are complicit. There is no way around it. This will not be the last report. It will not be the worst report. It’s just the latest in a long line. And we all know this to be true. If you still support the Catholic Church, you are complicit in the rape of children and its coverup. If you think that is too harsh, start thinking about the victims instead.

The cross is an ancient torture and execution device — an odd choice as *the* symbol for a religion. Catholic priests in the Pittsburgh Diocese found a modern and insidious use for the cross, one that harkened back to the bygone era of torture. They would gift the most pliable, reticent victims with a gold cross, marking the children for torment by their fellow pedeophile priests. According to the report, the crosses “were a visible designation that these children were victims of sexual abuse. They were a signal to other predators that the children had been desensitized to sexual abuse and were optimal targets for further victimization.”

The Church knew. It kept “secret archives [that] contained incriminating information regarding numerous priests who had molested children.” Access to these secret archives was highly regulated, protected from legal discovery during litigation, and “seldom turned over” to the secular authorities, even when the church was supposed to be coming clean. The secret archives date back to at least 1948.

The statute of limitations has run out on almost all of these cases, and, “as a consequence of the coverup, almost every instance of abuse [the grand jury] found is too old to be prosecuted,” according to the report. In other words, the coverup worked.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/freethoughtnow/pa-abuse-report/

“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes,” Sessions said during a speech to law enforcement officers in Fort Wayne, Ind. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves. Consistent and fair application of the law is in itself a good and moral thing, and that protects the weak and protects the lawful.”

Sessions has said “we’ve got to get this message out” that asylum seekers or anyone else immigrating through unofficial means is not given immunity. He appealed to “church friends” later in Thursday’s speech in Fort Wayne, emphasizing that non-citizens who enter the United States illegally are breaking the law.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said during a briefing Thursday that she hadn’t seen Sessions’s comments, but she backed his line of thinking. “I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law. That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible,” she said. “It’s a moral policy to follow and enforce the law.”

“There are two dominant places in American history when Romans 13 is invoked,” said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. “One is during the American Revolution [when] it was invoked by loyalists, those who opposed the American Revolution. The second spike you see is in the 1840s and 1850s, when Romans 13 is invoked by defenders of the South or defenders of slavery to ward off abolitionists who believed that slavery is wrong,” Fea said. “I mean, this is the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.”

"Thou shall not attempt discussion with the faithful"

“For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile, and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them,” said Meg Kilgannon, a parent and director of Concerned Parents and Educators of Fairfax County, during a panel discussion called “Transgender Ideology in Public Schools: Parents Fight Back.”

...

Attendees were also told to wrap their transphobic rhetoric in the language of feminism, claiming gender identity is a concept offensive to women.

Other tips included: No personal attacks on the LGBTQ community, since it’s ineffective (except on politicians who vote for transgender rights); Use secular, not religious, arguments; Run for school board.

...

“In essence,” said Hertzler, “what we’re experiencing is a full scale attempt to short-circuit the democratic process, right, of passing laws through the power of persuasion that reflects society’s values, substituting civil order and the rule of law with the will of a few judges and bureaucrats.”

Introducing the ‘alt-left’: The GOP’s response to its alt-right problem

"The term isn't brand new, but it has just now gradually worked its way into the mainstream. It started with alt-right websites like World Net Daily and has graduated to the airwaves of Fox News and Sean Hannity, who has been using it for a couple of weeks now. And Trump, who has distanced himself from the alt-right term, may have played a major role in pushing it into the conservative lexicon.

“Nobody even knows what [alt-right] is,” Trump told CNN's Anderson Cooper in August when asked about Bannon's comments tying Breitbart to the alt-right. “This is a term that was just given that — frankly, there's no alt-right or alt-left. All I'm embracing is common sense.”

Previously, the term had appeared intermittently on sites like WND and CNS News and even in a syndicated column in Canadian newspapers hitting the media's coverage of Trump. But Trump's mention seemed to bring it to the attention of more mainstream conservatives.

The same night Trump used it, Lou Dobbs dropped a reference on his Fox Business Network show. A couple days later, the Washington Times' Kerry Riddell appeared on Fox News's “Media Buzz” and took issue with the media trying to label Trump's supporters as bigoted and racist: “If they're going to do that, do it with her or do it with her alt-left supporters.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/meet-the-alt-left-the-gops-response-to-its-alt-right-problem/?utm_term=.5261efeba6b7