Hasta La Gadget!

Last week, the governor of Texas signed into law a bill that allows faith-based adoption groups to deny services “under circumstances that conflict with the provider’s sincerely held religious beliefs.” Critics, including the ACLU of Texas, say the new law could likely be used to discriminate against LGBTQ families in adoptions.

A number of Christian groups and outlets applauded the bill. But according to a new report by the Public Religion Research Institute, support for religiously based service refusals is quickly declining.

PRRI’s report, based on a survey of roughly 40,000 interviews, found that more than six in ten Americans oppose allowing small business owners in their state to refuse to provide goods and services to gay or lesbian people on religious grounds.

That’s roughly the same percentage that opposed such refusals in a similar study PRRI conducted last year. But a breakdown of the results reveals that across religious groups, support for religiously based service refusals is declining.

White evangelical Protestants continue to be the faith group most in favor of religiously motivated discrimination, though even among that group support has dropped. In 2015, 56 percent of white evangelicals were in favor of allowing business owners to deny services to gay and lesbian people. In 2016, the number had dropped to 50 percent.

No group witnessed a more dramatic shift in opinion than Mormons, 58 percent of whom favored religiously based refusals in 2015. By the following year, just 42 percent were in favor and 52 percent were opposed.

“For the first time in a PRRI poll of this size, no major religious group reports majority support for religiously based service refusals of gay and lesbian Americans,” said PRRI CEO Robert P. Jones in a statement.

This change appears to be part of a larger shift in the way religious Americans view a number of LGBTQ issues. “Most religious groups today support same-sex marriage,” Jones added. “The religious groups in which majorities oppose same-sex marriage make up less than 20 percent of the public.” 

Geographically, too, Americans demonstrate increasing support for LGBTQ rights. A majority of Americans in every state except Alaska oppose allowing small business owners to refuse goods and services to gay and lesbian people, according to PRRI. The report also found that a majority of residents in 37 states are in favor of allowing same-sex marriage.

Such refusals tend to be more popular among Republicans than Democrats, even though support there is also faltering, PRRI found. The Texas adoption bill was sponsored by a group of 55 senators and representatives ― all of them Republicans.

Rumors swirled earlier this year that President Donald Trump was poised to sign an executive order that could allow virtually any federally funded entity with a religious affiliation to refuse service to someone based on religious objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion or transgender identity after a draft order leaked to news outlets. Such a move could have effectively given the government license to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

In May, Trump signed an executive order on religious freedom that left out religiously based service refusals and instead focused on granting churches greater involvement in politics. 

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You know Ashton Kutcher the actor and husband of Mila Kunis, but are you as familiar with Ashton Kutcher the tech entrepreneur and buddy to former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick?

If you haven’t already, get ready to meet the latter. In an interview on “The Howard Stern Show” Wednesday, Kutcher addressed Kalanick’s removal from the company he founded in 2009, in which the actor invested “probably a couple million dollars.” (It was at an “early” point in the company’s history, some time after hearing about the idea on “a party bus” with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.)

Despite that investment, and what he described as a friendship with Kalanick, Kutcher seemed unaware of the finer points of the former CEO’s fall from grace. When asked how he felt about the news, Kutcher responded, “I’m conflicted.”

“I’m 100 percent certain there were mistakes made and he would cop to the fact that he made mistakes and did things that he maybe shouldn’t have done,” the actor began.

“But at a certain point, I feel like we’re in a society today that is so fast to judge people, and that we have to realize people make mistakes, and you have to let people learn from their mistakes. But I don’t know the extent of the internal damage, so I can’t really comment, because I don’t really know.”

To refresh, Kalanick resigned his post this week after Uber shareholders demanded a change in leadership in the wake of a series of scandals that included a hashtag, #DeleteUber. The company’s problems have involved charges of rampant sexual harassment across all levels of its workforce, an intellectual property challenge, Kalanick’s hotheaded retort to an Uber driver’s concerns and a history of less-than-satisfying responses to charges that it has profited off calamity and political strife. 

Kutcher, who founded a venture capital company called A-Grade in 2011, seemed unfamiliar with many of those issues. He defended his friend Kalanick, who recently suffered a devastating loss to his family, saying that “without a guy like him, the company wouldn’t be where it is.”

And if it were up to him, Kutcher probably wouldn’t have booted Kalanick from his top spot.

“I know there were cultural shortfalls within the company that happened along the way. I don’t know that removing him is the best answer, but I think, you know, optically, things have to happen like that sometimes,” the actor said.

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Police say they have arrested a 24-year-old man for setting a fire in a Washington, D.C., fountain on Wednesday morning ― but emphasized that the incident was not a hate crime, as it had no connection to a memorial at the same fountain for a murdered Muslim teen. 

The Washington D.C. fire department responded to a call about a brush fire inside Dupont Circle around 8:30 a.m., a spokesman said. When firefighters arrived, they quickly extinguished a small fire inside a fountain there.

At around 10:00 a.m., according to a police report from the Metropolitan Police Department, officers arrested Jonathan Soloman, of South Carolina, on charges of “attending or kindling bonfires.”

Hundreds gathered at the Dupont Circle fountain on Tuesday evening to mourn the death of Nabra Hassanen, the 17-year-old kidnapped and brutally murdered near her Virginia mosque earlier this week.

A memorial materialized, with mourners laying posters and flowers by the fountain. 

Although a video posted by Fox5 DC on Wednesday shows some charred flowers ― and what appears to be a burned painting ― inside the fountain, a spokeswoman for U.S. Park Police told HuffPost that “the memorial does not appear to have been specifically targeted.”

“Not a hate crime,” Sergeant Anna Rose said, explaining that there was “no indication [Soloman] was there to desecrate that memorial.”

Soloman was released from custody on Wednesday with a court date, Rose added. 

William Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington D.C., says Soloman will likely have his first court appearance on Thursday, when charging documents further explaining the crime will become public. 

The vigil for Nabra Hassanen in Dupont Circle on Tuesday evening. 

Clarity over Soloman’s intentions would surely be welcome, as Hassanen’s murder has already sown fear and confusion among Muslims across the United States. 

“We are saddened to hear reports that a memorial site for Nabra may have been set on fire,” the civil rights group Muslim Advocates said in a statement on Wednesday. 

“The idea that this could happen while her family and friends are mourning her loss, and memorials are held across the country is appalling,” the statement continued. “This is a sordid reminder that hate is thriving in our nation.” 

Hassanen, who was wearing a hijab and an abaya, was attacked and beaten to death with a baseball bat while she and her friends headed to the All Dulles Area Muslim Society Center for morning prayers around 4 a.m. on Monday. 

She and the other teens had just left a restaurant where they’d had suhoor, the predawn meal Muslims eat during the holy month of Ramadan. According to police, Hassanen and the other teens got into some kind of altercation with 22-year-old Darwin Martinez Torres, who had been driving by in his car. 

Torres was later arrested and has been charged with murder. He does not, however, face hate crime charges. 

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