Pagan Community Notes

Pagan Community Notes: Patheos, PantheaCon, the awen and more.

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TWH – The tensions between bloggers and the Patheos company continued this week as former Patheos writer John Halstead announced that he and others would be demanding that their material be taken off the site. Their joint letter begins: “We the undersigned former and current Patheos Pagan contributors hereby request that you remove our names, likenesses, and our intellectual property, including our writing, art, and images, from your site. We previously gave Patheos license to publish our writing, but Patheos is no longer the company that we contracted with.” The letter continues on to list the writers’ grievances and detail why the group feels that Patheos is no longer the company that it once was. In its conclusion, the letter says, “We should not be forced to affiliate with or be seen to support, through our work, organizations which are inimical to our values and which, in many cases, are hostile to our existence…” 

Currently eighteen bloggers have signed the document.

News

Hurricane Matthew: Pagans in the southeast respond

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UNITED STATES – “We boarded up the house and we left town because our house isn’t (concrete) block construction, it’s wood. We live in an area where there are lots of trees and we weren’t confident that a cat 3, 4, or whatever hit land that we would be safe,” said Kathy Lezon, a priestess from Vero Beach, located on Florida’s Treasure Coast. Hurricane Matthew was a slow-moving behemoth of a storm that flared up on Sept. 28 and quickly shot up to hurricane status, at one point topping off the scale as a category 5 storm with sustained winds of 160 mph before weakening slightly to a category 4 before making landfall in Haiti, Cuba, the Bahamas and bouncing along the Florida coast before skirting north along the Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina coastline. It also affected areas well beyond those that were directly impacted.

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North Carolina Pagans react to passage of “Bathroom Bill”

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RALEIGH, NC — On Mar 23 North Carolina’s governor signed into law the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act. The bill is primarily known for its measures, which block local governments from allowing transgender persons to use bathrooms that do not match the biological sex as recorded on their birth certificates. The Wild Hunt takes a close look at the bill and gets reactions from Pagans living in North Carolina. Overview of Bill

The Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act was created in response to the expansion of the city of Charlotte’s nondiscrimination ordinance, which includes protections for marital and familial status, sexual orientation, gender expression and gender identity. State Republican lawmakers said that Charlotte’s new ordinance would give men access to women’s bathrooms and locker rooms. Supporters of Charlotte’s nondiscrimination ordinance said it provided much needed civil protects for vulnerable minorities. The new ordinance was set to take effect on April 1.

Pagan Community Notes

Pagan Community Notes: Marc Pourner, Rev. Tony Brown, The Pomegranate, Pagan Dawn and more!

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MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Tex.– On Feb 9, a grand jury indicted David Brown Jr., the man arrested for the murder of Wiccan Marc Pourner. As we reported in November, Pourner went missing for three days, after which police found his strangled body deep in the woods inside his burned-out truck. He was known as Axel within Pagan circles, and helped run the now-defunct Wiccan World Social Network. Pourner was also instrumental in creating and moderating the popular Facebook group, “The Cauldron – A Mixing Place for Witches, Druids, and Pagans.” When news broke of his death, that group lit up with stories and memorials coming from users who live all over the world. As  was recently reported in the local news and by the Montgomery County Police reporter, court records have now revealed more about what actually happened to Pourner.

News

Interfaith Group Wrestles With Public Prayer, Hate

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SHELBY, N.C — When the Foothills Interfaith Assembly (FIA) was created earlier this year, it was inspired by concerns over public prayer policy in its local region. However, this was never supposed to be an issue that the group focused on. Nevertheless, the assembly has played a public part in shaping a recent prayer policy debate, which has made clear that religious political tensions are alive and well in the foothills region of North Carolina. A strong sentiment against Islam is evident, and Pagan members of the assembly are equally concerned about discriminatory policies and behavior. The latest salvo came when the Cleveland County School Board replaced a moment of silence with public prayer at its meetings. North Carolina Piedmont Church of Wicca’s Tony Brown told The Wild Hunt that the school board was reacting to “a lot of pressure from Christian groups in the community to do so.