Salt Lake OKs Gay Rights Laws With Mormon Backing

OK, It's Not Perfect, But If Salt Lake City, Utah, Can Pass An Ordinance Protecting GLBT Rights, Oil City And Other Venango County Municipalities Can Surely Do at Least As Much For Starters!

from The Blade:

The Mormon church for the first time has announced its support of gay rights legislation, an endorsement that helped gain unanimous approval for Salt Lake city laws banning discrimination against gays in housing and employment.


The Utah-based church's support ahead of Tuesday night's vote came despite its steadfast opposition to gay marriage, reflected in the high-profile role it played last year in California's Proposition 8 ballot measure that barred such unions.

"The church supports these ordinances because they are fair and reasonable and do not do violence to the institution of marriage," Michael Otterson, the director of public affairs for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said.

Passage made Salt Lake City the first Utah community to prohibit bias based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Under the two new ordinances, it is illegal to fire someone from their job or evict someone from their residence because they are lesbian, bisexual, gay or transgender.

Utah lawmakers tend to quickly fall in line when the influential church makes a rare foray into legislative politics. So Tuesday's action could have broad effects in this highly conservative state where more than 80 percent of lawmakers and the governor are church members.

"What happened here tonight I do believe is a historic event," said Brandie Balken, director of the gay rights advocacy group Equality Utah. "I think it establishes that we can stand together on common ground that we don't have to agree on everything, but there are lot of things that we can work on and be allies."

But the church has pointed out an inherent dispute it has with gay relationships. Mormonism considers traditional marriages central to God's plan. Gays are welcome in church, but must remain celibate to retain church callings and full membership.

Its strong support for Proposition 8 in California last year drew a sharp reaction from gay rights supporters nationwide, with many protesting outside temples that singled out Mormons as the key culprits in restricting the rights of gay couples.

Since then, however, Utah's gay community has sought to engage church leaders in quiet conversations to help foster better understanding, said Valerie Larabee, executive director of the Utah Pride Center.

"I thought this conversation would never come to be while I was here in Salt Lake City," said Larabee, adding that the discussions have "shifted her perspective of what's possible" and could foreshadow a different relationship between the two sides.

But addressing the council on Tuesday, Otterson said the endorsement is not a shift in the church's position on gay rights and stressed it "remains unequivocally committed to defending the bedrock foundation of marriage between a man and a woman."

Church support for the ordinances is due in part to the way the legislation was drafted to protect those rights. Exceptions in the legislation allow churches to maintain, without penalty, religious principles and religion-based codes of conduct or rules.

"In drafting these ordinances, the city has granted commonsense rights that should be available to everyone, while safeguarding the crucial rights of religious organizations," Otterson said Tuesday.

Previous Utah legislation that sought statewide protections for the gay community did not contain those exceptions.


And although this was the church's first public endorsement of specific legislation, it is not the first time the church has voiced support for some gay rights. In August 2008 the church issued a statement saying it supports gay rights related to hospitalization, medical care, employment, housing or probate as long as they "do not infringe on the integrity of the traditional family or the constitutional rights of churches."

Last year, church leaders were silent on a package of gay rights bills known as the Common Ground Initiative, dooming them from the start, despite the bill having the support of the most popular governor in state history, Jon Huntsman. Huntsman resigned this summer to become U.S. ambassador to China.

His successor, Gov. Gary Herbert, has repeatedly said it shouldn't be illegal to discriminate against someone for being gay.

Voting On Human Rights Is An Affront To Human Dignity

by Wayne Besen at Truth Wins Out:

In last week's column, I pointed out that the GLBT movement might be the first where a majority gets to vote on the rights of a minority. If the basic freedoms of women, immigrants and African Americans were subject to the whims of voters, there is no doubt that this nation would be decades behind. Yet, we continue to blindly accept that these degrading and un-American referendums are tolerable, when they are not.


Ironically, ballot initiatives were once helpful in gaining visibility. The 1977 anti-gay vote in Miami, led by beauty queen Anita Bryant, put our issues on the national radar. Even though we lost, we were given a rare forum to introduce ourselves to the American people.

In 1978, California voters defeated the Briggs Initiative, which would have banned gay schoolteachers, showing that victory was attainable. But whether it is a loss in Miami and a win in California in 1977-78, or a defeat in Maine and the victory on domestic partnerships in Washington State last week, success or failure is beside the point. All Americans are losers by virtue of participating in a disgraceful process that is an affront to human dignity.

Unfortunately, we have never had the luxury to stop, take a deep breath and consider if these grotesque referendums are the best use of our time and limited resources. With a record of 0-31 in marriage initiatives, now may be a good opportunity to review our complicity in a process that doles out or strips away basic rights by majority vote.

We must first recognize that a virtual campaign-industrial-complex has been built and financed around these fights. There is an army of field staff, media consultants, signature gatherers, advertising experts and fundraisers who work (and in some cases thrive) on these ballot initiatives.

In California, both sides spent as much as $73 million. Even in the small media market of Maine, both sides spent a combined $9 million dollars for campaign staff and advertisements. The financial burden for these wars repeatedly falls on the same besieged philanthropists and everyday people who care enough to open their wallets. The four key questions we must ask ourselves before we continue down this road:

1) Are referendums the best use of our human resources?
2) Are they the best use of our finite capital?
3) Are these votes legitimizing the un-American concept of mob rule?
4) Are these quixotic and narrowly focused battles the best way to educate and create lasting progress?

Perhaps, these campaigns are unavoidable and we must soldier on and slog through the muddy terrain of lies and fear-based thirty-second ads. I won't pretend to know the answer, but there is no doubt that our traditional tactics must be looked at with fresh eyes and vigorously debated.

There has been much disagreement as to whether our ads in these campaigns are too "soft". I think this misses the larger point that campaigns are not conducive to education. "Vote No on Prop 8" may be a good campaign slogan, but it is hardly a compelling message for changing hearts and minds.

Campaigns by their very nature go for the short term fix, when we may be in need of more enduring strategies. Repeatedly investing in such hand-to-hand combat has potentially precluded deeper discussion with the American people, so they fully understand how our families are harmed, the damage caused by discrimination and the inequality we face, from taxation to immigration law.

It is also clear that our opponents are trying to bleed us to death financially. We can never outspend the combined forces of the Mormon, Catholic and Evangelical churches, which can afford referendums in every burg in the nation. To put the monetary imbalance in perspective, the annual budget for the largest GLBT organization is only $30 million. Meanwhile, in 2007 the Archdiocese of Los Angeles paid a $660 million settlement to 508 victims of sexual abuse by clergy. (A mere $250 million after pedophile insurance reduced costs)

Instead of investing millions on referendums, what if we used the money to send our field experts into communities to educate, without asking people to take sides on a divisive measure? What if we built powerful outreach programs geared towards minority communities? How about training talk radio hosts and buying airtime in small, conservative media markets like Lewiston, Maine or Bakersfield, California?


By turning away from such votes, we strengthen our position by increasing our moral authority. At the very least, it forces our foes out of campaign mode and into an ongoing, intelligent discussion, where it is more difficult to twist the truth and manipulate emotions.

Winning in California and Maine would have been exhilarating. But, would you have felt less dirty and exploited by the referendum process in victory?

I didn't think so.

Acting Out Loud -- Diversity As A Blessed Part Of Life

ACTING OUT LOUD is a new resource for faith communities that want to move beyond welcome toward a wider embrace of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and their families.

ACTING OUT LOUD provides clergy and other religious leaders with background on LGBT people, points you to the best-available online resources, and offers ideas and approaches recommended by leading clergy, theologians and advocates across the country. Click on HERE to get started!

Dutch Views On Same-Sex Marriage

Followers of Venango County extremist Diane Gramley of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania often push ugly lies about what has happened in The Netherlands as a result of the legalization of same-sex marriage.

This article presents a more informed analysis.

By Lisa Belkin for Motherlode: Adventures in Parenting

When I wrote about same sex parenting in the Times Magazine this weekend, one of the people I interviewed was M. V. Lee Badgett, who is both the director of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law & Public Policy at the UCLA School of Law and a professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She is also the author of “When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage,” which focuses mostly on data from the Netherlands, where same-sex marriage has been legal for nearly a decade.

My magazine article focused primarily on the effects of same-sex marriage on children. But Badgett has more to say — about the effects of same-sex couples on marriage, and also about the effects of marriage on same-sex couples.


She shared her thoughts in a follow-up email interview:

Q. Why study how gay marriage works in the Netherlands?

A. The Netherlands let same-sex couples marry in 2001, so they have the longest experience for us to see what effects it might have. And like some states here, the Netherlands also had a civil union-like status (“registered partnerships”) before same-sex marriage rights, starting in 1998. So the Dutch have had a long time for things to change — the cultural meaning of marriage, choices about marriage by different-sex couples, and the impact on gay and lesbian people, in particular. Also, Dutch couples have lots of choices for organizing their relationships, so we can see which legal institutions appeal most to couples, whether gay or heterosexual couples.

Q. Did legalizing same-sex marriage face the same objections there as here?

A. The Dutch gay activists worked on the issue for about 15 years, so things clearly moved faster there. (We’re already past 15 years of serious effort here in the U.S.) A majority of their public supported equal rights for same-sex partners and marriage rights fairly early in that process. The most powerful opponents were in the Christian Democratic Party and other religious parties. (Even now some civic officials who have religious objections to gay marriage refuse to marry same-sex couples.) The two biggest issues would be very familiar to people in the U.S.: whether there should be a separate status for same-sex couples and how to deal with children — whether adoption rights would be included and what the status of children born into same-sex couples would be. That’s why the Netherlands ended up with two legal statuses for both same-sex and different-sex couples. And married same-sex couples still don’t have the same parental rights as different-sex married couples. Same-sex married couples can’t adopt children internationally, and a non-biological lesbian parent only gets “parental authority” for a child born to her female spouse, not automatic parental rights. To get full parental rights, the non-biological parent must still formally adopt the child.

Q. Did marriage change the individuals who entered into it? If so, how?

A. On a personal level, many people said that getting married made them feel more committed to or responsible for their partners, or that they felt some larger emotional or spiritual effects, even though most of these couples had already been together for many years before they could marry. Many same-sex couples were surprised to find that marriage changes how other people see them. Marriage triggers expectations of friends and family members, who support married couples and remind them that they’re part of a larger social institution.

Q. How did people who did not marry feel about having the right to marry?

A. The right to marry even changed people who chose not to marry. Everyone I interviewed noted that they were glad the law had changed — they felt “invited to the party” in the words of one person — and they said that they felt more a part of society as a result. The long-standing anger and resignation that many lesbians and gay men felt as the result of being excluded from such an important institution as marriage is not healthy, psychologically or physically. I believe that the sense of increased social inclusion that I saw in the Netherlands has the potential to profoundly change all lesbian, gay, and bisexual people in positive ways in the U.S., too.

Q. Did the legalization of same-sex marriage somehow change marriage in the Netherlands?

A. I looked hard for evidence of changes in the cultural idea of marriage and for evidence that heterosexuals and gay and lesbian couples have different ideas and behavior related to marriage — but I couldn’t find any. The trends in marriage and divorce didn’t change. The ideas about marriage expressed by lesbian and gay couples lined up with the ideas of their heterosexual peers: marriage is about the love and commitment of two people who work together as equals to weather life’s ups and downs, become members of each other’s extended families, and often (but not always) raise children together. Couples who formalize their relationships — gay or straight — are more likely to choose marriage than a civil union.

Q. What is the “take away” for those who are debating these questions in the U.S.?

A. The big point is that all of the evidence suggests that same-sex couples will fit right into our current understanding of marriage in the U.S. Marriage itself will not be affected. Dutch heterosexuals appear to have adapted to the legal change by changing how they see same-sex couples, not how they see marriage. Now they see gay couples as people who should get married, and they are happy to remind their gay and lesbian family members of that fact!


We also see why the word “marriage” matters. The Dutch same-sex couples I interviewed saw their civil union-like status as “a bit of nothing,” as one person called it, or as a political compromise that an accountant might invent. Only marriage has the social understanding to back up the legal status, and the social meaning is as important as the legal rights. Civil unions just don’t have that social meaning. One woman I interviewed put it this way: “Two-year-olds understand marriage. It’s a context, and everyone knows what it means.”

Finally, as in Europe, in the U.S. we see the most liberal states — the most tolerant of homosexuality, the least religious, and the ones with more family diversity — taking the earliest action through courts and legislatures to legally recognize same-sex couples. That’s not surprising, of course, but it suggests that we’re going at about the right pace for social change.

Right Wing Extremists Will Test Matthew Shepard Act By "Inciting Hate Crimes"

from The Progressive Puppy:

Religious conservatives still outraged over the passing of hate crimes legislation have decided to test the limits of the new law with a publicity stunt involving incendiary hate speech directed at gays and lesbians. In order to "prove" that their God-given right to harass LGBT folk is being threatened, a group of pastors plan to travel to the nation's capital and ratchet up the rhetoric in hopes of getting themselves arrested. (Can you believe this shit? And these zealots have the audacity to refer to hate crimes legislation as the "Hate Christians Law.")


You can't miss the irony here. Christianity is supposed to be all about "Love Thy Neighbor" and "Do Unto Others," right? So in order to challenge the new law, a posse of homobigots led by Pastor Gary Cass (president of the so-called Christian Anti-Defamation Commission) is heading to Washington DC on November 16th where they will assemble outdoors and shout hatred and even foment violence against gays - y'know, to see how far they can go before being arrested under the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

From the creepy World Net Daily: The "Rally for Religious Freedom" in front of the Department of Justice in Washington is intended to force Attorney General Eric Holder either to address the issues or be put in a position of ignoring those who say they are violating the provisions of the federal law, Cass said. "We're basically going to defy the law, and challenge it," Cass told WND. "We're going to declare the whole counsel of God, including those parts that some may consider 'inciting a hate crime' to see if the attorney general is going to come down and arrest a group of peaceful clergy exercising their First Amendment rights."

They want to get arrested so that they can assume the role of martyrs. They'll whine piteously: "See? See? We told you this would happen! Just look how the government tramples our right to agitate against gays and lesbians! See how brave and noble we are when we engage in hate speech! Please, bring us our crosses!"


Don't expect subtlety from this assembly of extremists. They're yearning to be handcuffed. I imagine they'll take a page from Pastor Steve Anderson's playbook and start demanding the execution of homosexuals. (He got away with it and became a sort of insta-celebrtiy, like balloon boy.) They'll do their damndest to out-Phelps the Phelps Clan, they'll try to out-Savage Michael Savage. The spittle will fly.

Still, I don't think D.C. tourists will appreciate hearing anti-gay slogans shouted as they make their way toward the Lincoln Memorial. The police will be standing by, bored expressions on their faces. The local news might make an appearance. I doubt anyone will be arrested during Cass & Company's little hate fest, which will only serve to make the participants look like what they are: a bunch of delusional preachers with way too much time on their hands.

(Pictured: Pastor Gary Cass)

Stop Religion-Based Bigotry and Political Intervention

from Phil Attey:

I'm hoping a good chunk of you will be able to take from this what I did. Yes, the majority of money going into the Stand for Marriage Campaign was coming from the Archdiocese of Portland ... but if you look at who was making contributions to them, (see link) you can connect the dots that the National Conference of Catholic Bishops was "laundering" money from collection plates from parishes across the country into the anti-gay initiative in Maine.


This means, if your parents give money to their small church in Florida or Ohio, that money didn't go to shelter the homeless of feed the hungry in the poor sections of their town, but to fuel the Catholic Church's attacks on Jesus' gay and lesbian brothers and sisters -- THEIR SONS AND DAUGHTERS!

Please print this out and bring it home with you when you celebrate Christmas with your family and implore them to stop giving money to the Church.

Contributions for Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland

A Quiet Voice For Gay Marriage

Legalization could avert doomed relationships, straight ex-spouses say

By Theresa Vargas for the Washington Post:

If anyone could have talked himself out of being gay, Kimberly Brooks said, it was her husband.

He wanted to be straight; she wanted him to be straight. She once followed his gaze across the beach to another man but quickly dismissed the thought. No, he couldn't be. Then he started spending more time with one particular friend, and an unease pushed Brooks to ask the question that ultimately confirmed her fears: Was that friend gay?


"He said, 'I don't know.' And in that moment, I knew," said Brooks, who is a therapist in Falls Church. "That day, the marriage was over."

As the debate over legalizing same-sex marriage in the District grows louder and more polarized, there are people whose support for the proposal is personal but not often talked about. They are federal workers and professionals, men and women who share little except that their former spouses tried to live as heterosexuals but at some point realized they could not.

Many of these former spouses -- from those who still feel raw resentment toward their exes to those who have reached a mutual understanding -- see the legalization of same-sex marriage as a step toward protecting not only homosexuals but also heterosexuals. If homosexuality was more accepted, they say, they might have been spared doomed marriages followed by years of self-doubt.

"It's like you hit a brick wall when they come out," Brooks said. "You think everything is fine and then, boom!"

Carolyn Sega Lowengart calls it "retroactive humiliation." It's that embarrassment that washes over her when she looks back at photographs or is struck by a memory and wonders what, if anything, from that time was real. Did he ever love her?

"I'm 61 years old," said Lowengart, who lives in Chevy Chase. "Will I ever know what it's like to be loved passionately? Probably not."
Discovering the truth

She gave her husband 31 years, just a little less than she gave the State Department. Because of her job, she bought a home computer, and on that computer she got the first hints that her husband was gay. Once, she said, she glimpsed gay pornography on the screen; another time, she found a printout of an e-mail about a rendezvous.

In 2002, she said, she asked her husband for the truth. He told her. They separated that year.

"I said, 'When did you know?' " Lowengart recalled. "He said, 'When I was a teenager.' I said, 'Why did you marry me?' He said, 'Because I didn't want to be.' "

For her, devastation blended with relief. The devastation: Raised Catholic, she believed marriage was forever. The relief: For three decades, while she struggled with her weight, she thought it was her fault that they weren't intimate.

Lowengart's ex-husband could not be reached to comment, but Carolyn Lowengart has spoken publicly about their marriage through the Straight Spouse Network, which organizes support groups across the country.

"We want people to have the right to be who they are," she said. "If that were the case, people like me wouldn't exist."

People like her wouldn't question every memory. "In a regular divorce, you don't question whether you were loved or desired at the beginning," Lowengart said.
The author

He was her first love and promised to be her last, Joy Parker said. They had met in high school but had lost touch for decades, until she received a message from him through Classmates.com. It came a day after she'd been looking nostalgically at prom photos of the two of them.

"It was like we were meant to be together," Parker said. In 2004, at 43, she traveled across the country, from California to Virginia, to move in with him. By the end of that year, they were married. "He seemed like the perfect husband, buying flowers, gifts."

Then, as she tells it, came the night she decided to check her husband's voice mail. "There were two messages from a guy calling him 'Baby' and telling him how good he looked," Parker said. She says she woke him up to confront him. "His eyes got huge, and he said, 'You're going to try to destroy me.' I said: "Destroy you? What about me?' "

Parker, who lives in Manassas, said she became severely depressed by the breakup of her marriage. She and another woman have written a book, "The Straight-Up Truth About the Down-Low," about being married to gay men.

Reached by phone, Parker's ex-husband, who did not want to be identified, denied that a man left him that message and said he is not gay. He said Parker wrote the book because she is hurt.

Parker, an IRS agent for 16 years and an investigator after that, said she wrote the book to help other women. "I used to sit on the bed and count the pills, too," she said. "I didn't want to live. I was just in a dark place I couldn't get out of."

Parker, who was raised in a church where she was taught that homosexuality was wrong, said she goes back and forth on the issue of same-sex marriage. Even if it is allowed, she said, there will always be men and women who deny they are gay and who marry heterosexuals. It'll take much more than changing the law to alter perceptions about homosexuality.

"Socially, we'll just have to see it as normal," she said. "That's the only way."
The therapist

Kimberly Brooks calls people whose marriages ended like hers "collateral damage."

"I think straight spouses are the nameless, anonymous victims," she said. "We're not ignored -- because that sounds intentional -- but unseen."

Brooks, who lives in Arlington County, was 28 when she met Robert Webb on a blind date. He was perfect: tall, handsome and a lawyer. As a husband, she said, he treated her "wonderfully," celebrating with champagne the day she got her master's degree. They talked about having children.

Webb said he never meant to hurt her.

"I married her because I loved her," said Webb, a lawyer in Orlando whose firm has an office in the District. "I married her because I wanted us to spend the rest of our lives together. We had lived together, and things were fine. I thought I had conquered that thing I didn't want to be."

But then he met the man he's been with since. "And there was this incredible overriding basic attraction that drove everything else out of my life," he said. "It was no longer a matter of mind over matter."

Webb, who views his 23-year union with his partner as a marriage even if it's not recognized in Florida, said that even if same-sex marriage had been legal at the time, he still would have married Brooks. "I didn't want to be gay," he said. He estimates that he lost two-thirds of his friends when he came out, including one who sent him a Bible.


"You want the things you're taught to want," Webb said. "You want the life you're taught to want."

Brooks, who is starting a therapy group for straight spouses, said that for a long time, she neither favored nor opposed same-sex marriage. But as the D.C. Council prepares to vote on the matter next month, she thinks about her former husband.

"It would be heartbreaking if in Rob's final days his partner was not allowed to be in the hospital with him, was not allowed to make decisions for him," she said. "And he's the one person Rob would want there."

We Are The Ones We've Been Waiting For

by Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish:

A reader writes:

My straight son worked for the marriage equality campaign in Maine. I just got off the phone with him. He is sad and started crying. Not for himself but for those whose rights have been taken away and those who have been fighting for those rights for years. I have seldom been so proud as a Mother. I told my son that we should be satisfied. People like us who work hard for our ideals and follow our hearts have nothing to be ashamed of.

I also don't believe that the campaign has anything to be ashamed of. I was worried about the early ads, but they improved. The campaign organization, by all accounts, was superb. The money was there. The enthusiasm was there. The turnout was spectacular in an off-year.

The hard truth is: people are still afraid of this, and our opponents knew how to target their fears very precisely. They have honed it to an art - their prime argument now is that although adults can handle gay equality, children cannot. And so they play straight to heterosexuals whose personal comfort with gay people is fine but who sure don't want their kids to turn out that way. One way to prevent kids turning out that way, the equality opponents argue, is to ensure that they never hear of gay people, except in a marginalized, scary, alien fashion. And this referendum was clearly a vote in which the desire to keep gay people invisible trumped the urge to treat them equally.

The truth about civil marriage - why it is the essential criterion for gay equality - is that it alone explodes this core marginalization and invisibility of gay people. It alone can reach those gay kids who need to know they have a future as a dignified human being with a family. It alone tells society that gay people are equal in their loves and in their hearts and in their families - not just useful in a society with a need for talented or able individuals whose private lives remain perforce sequestered from view.


This is why it remains the prize. And why our eyes must remain fixed upon it. In my view, the desperate nature of the current tactics against us, the blatant use of fear around children (which both worries parents and also stigmatizes gay people in one, deft swoop) are signs that what we are demanding truly, truly matters.

You can always tell what matters because it is the one thing our opponents are desperate to prevent. That is why, even in Washington State, even when they dilute marriage into "domestic partnership", the Christianist right is already promising to mount another referendum to repeal it again. They know that once civil marriage is accepted, the bigotry toward gay people has been dealt a terminal blow.

But guess what? Civil marriage is already here. It exists in several states already, it exists in the consciousness of an entire generation. It exists abroad in America's closest neighbor and in America's closest allies. The speed of the movement towards it is unprecedented in modern civil rights movements, even as it may seem crushingly slow to those who live under discrimination's weight. These defeats - even narrow defeats as in California and Maine - should not discourage us. The desperation and fanaticism of our opponents proves they know that this is the crucial battleground. And they're right.

But civil rights victories, the final and enduring ones, are always built on the foundations of defeats. Sometimes, the defeat of a minority's sincere aspiration to equality helps reveal the injustice of the discrimination and the cruelty of the marginalization. Sometimes, it helps show just how poorly treated we are, and galvanizes a community to fight back more fiercely as we saw in that amazing march on DC last month. That has certainly been true of previous civil rights movements. It is just as true of ours.

So congrats, Maine Equality. You did a fine job. Congrats, HRC. You helped. No congrats to Obama who is treating this civil rights movement the way Kennedy first treated his. But we don't need Obama.

We are the ones we've been waiting for. And we will win in due course, with a good spirit and keen arguments, and with passion and conviction in our hearts. We will win.

The Alternative Universe Of The Far Right

There Is A Message Here That Also Applies To Venango County And Northwest Pennsylvania

The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York
By Frank Rich for the NY Times:

BARACK OBAMA’S most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.

The governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia were once billed as the marquee events of Election Day 2009 — a referendum on the Obama presidency and a possible Republican “comeback.” But preposterous as it sounds, the real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada. That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or not.


The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.

The New York fracas was ignited by the routine decision of 11 local Republican county chairmen to anoint an assemblywoman, Dede Scozzafava, as their party’s nominee for the vacant seat. The 23rd is in safe Republican territory that hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress in decades. And Scozzafava is a mainstream conservative by New York standards; one statistical measure found her voting record slightly to the right of her fellow Republicans in the Assembly. But she has occasionally strayed from orthodoxy on social issues (abortion, same-sex marriage) and endorsed the Obama stimulus package. To the right’s Jacobins, that’s cause to send her to the guillotine.

Sure enough, bloggers trashed her as a radical leftist and ditched her for a third-party candidate they deem a “true” conservative, an accountant and businessman named Doug Hoffman. When Gingrich dared endorse Scozzafava anyway — as did other party potentates like John Boehner and Michael Steele — he too was slimed. Mocking Newt’s presumed 2012 presidential ambitions, Michelle Malkin imagined him appointing Al Sharpton as secretary of education and Al Gore as “global warming czar.” She’s quite the wit.

The wrecking crew of Kristol, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Michele Bachmann, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the government-bashing Club for Growth all joined the Hoffman putsch. Then came the big enchilada: a Hoffman endorsement from Palin on her Facebook page. Such is Palin’s clout that Steve Forbes, Rick Santorum and Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor (and presidential aspirant), promptly fell over one another in their Pavlovian rush to second her motion. They were joined by far-flung Republican congressmen from Kansas, Georgia, Oklahoma and California, not to mention a gaggle of state legislators from Colorado. On Fox News, Beck took up the charge, insinuating that Hoffman’s Republican opponent might be a fan of Karl Marx. Some $3 million has now been dumped into this race by outside groups.

Who exactly is the third-party maverick arousing such ardor? Hoffman doesn’t even live in the district. When he appeared before the editorial board of The Watertown Daily Times 10 days ago, he “showed no grasp” of local issues, as the subsequent editorial put it. Hoffman complained that he should have received the questions in advance — blissfully unaware that they had been asked by the paper in an editorial on the morning of his visit.

Last week it turned out that Hoffman’s prime attribute to the radical right — as a take-no-prisoners fiscal conservative — was bogus. In fact he’s on the finance committee of a hospital that happily helped itself to a $479,000 federal earmark. Then again, without the federal government largess that the tea party crowd so deplores, New York’s 23rd would be a Siberia of joblessness. The biggest local employer is the pork-dependent military base, Fort Drum.

The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That’s bad news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose primary opponent in the Texas governor’s race, the incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode. They drove out Arlen Specter, and now want to “melt Snowe” (as the blog Red State put it). The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing to let an anti-abortion dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now routinely banish any dissenters in their own camp.

These conservatives’ whiny cries of victimization also parrot a tic they once condemned in liberals. After Rush Limbaugh was booted from an ownership group bidding on the St. Louis Rams, he moaned about being done in by the “race card.” What actually did him in, of course, was the free-market American capitalism he claims to champion. Limbaugh didn’t understand that in an increasingly diverse nation, profit-seeking N.F.L. franchises actually want to court black ticket buyers, not drive them away.

This same note of self-martyrdom was sounded in a much-noticed recent column by the former Nixon hand Pat Buchanan. Ol’ Pat sounded like the dispossessed antebellum grandees in “Gone With the Wind” when lamenting the plight of white working-class voters. “America was once their country,” he wrote. “They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”

They are right. That America was lost years ago, and no national political party can thrive if it lives in denial of that truth. The right still may want to believe, as Palin said during the campaign, that Alaska, with its small black and Hispanic populations, is a “microcosm of America.” (New York’s 23rd also has few blacks or Hispanics.) But most Americans like their country’s 21st-century profile.

That changing complexion is part of why the McCain-Palin ticket lost every demographic group by large margins in 2008 except white senior citizens and the dwindling fifth of America that’s still rural. It’s also why the G.O.P. has been in a nosedive since the inauguration, whatever Obama’s ups and downs. In the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only 17 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans (as opposed to 30 percent for the Democrats, and 44 for independents).

No wonder even the very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues, disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama’s Nobel Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting “Hope.” Chris Christie, McDonnell’s counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign video celebrating “Change” in which Obama’s face and most stirring campaign sound bites so dominate you’d think the president had endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine.

Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah and Palin the great white hope. It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive because it drives up the network’s numbers. But if curious moderate and independent voters are now tempted to surf there and encounter Beck’s histrionics for the first time, the president’s numbers will benefit as well. To the uninitiated, the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in “Star Wars.”

There is only one political opponent whom Obama really has to worry about at this moment: Hamid Karzai. It’s Afghanistan and joblessness, not the Stalinists of the right, that have the power to bring this president down.

New Documentary: TWO SPIRITS

Fred Martinez was nádleehí—someone who possesses a balance of masculine and feminine traits—a special gift according to his traditional Navajo culture. But his determination to express his truest identity tragically cost him his life. At age sixteen, he was one of the youngest hate-crime victims in modern history when he was murdered in Cortez, Colorado.



Learn more about TWO SPIRITS HERE.

NEW: Butler County PFLAG Chapter Forming!

The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Communities and their Straight Allies of Butler County formed a chapter of PFLAG in October of 2009.


After three months of formation meetings held in three separate parts of the county
it was determined that Butler County, Pennsylvania has both the need and resources
to support the efforts of the PFLAG Organization.

Two monthly meetings will be held in two areas of the county. We have three meeting sites which will rotate in hosting the meetings. Those are in Butler, Slippery Rock and Evans City.

The hope in having two meetings in different locations is to provide accessibility for all parts of the county. It also recognizes the differing needs of the county and the people who will attend the meetings.

Learn more about Butler County PFLAG HERE.

Also, check out the Butler County PFLAG Blog HERE.

NW Penna. COLAGE Chapter Forming

Northwestern Pennsylvania now has a local chapter of Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere (COLAGE). COLAGE is the only national youth-driven network of people with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer parents.

Living in a world that treats our families differently can be isolating or challenging. By connecting us with peers who share our experience, COLAGE helps us become strong advocates for ourselves and our families.

COLAGE Northwest PA is one of the organization's newest local chapters and will build community in the northwestern PA region for people with LGBTQ parents. Contact: Christine. Phone: (814) 398-0148. Email: nwpa@colage.org. Browse to www.colage.org

Our lanes are reserved from 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM. The cost is $7 per person and includes shoes/balls and all-you-can-bowl. If anyone is interested in joining our chapter and/or would like to volunteer at activities, please plan to meet us there. We would like to meet once a month and hope that as word gets out, we will have many participants!


Parents are welcome to volunteer and attend activities and meetings.

New copies of Just For Us will be available at the event. For info and/or to RSVP, please email Christine at nwpa@colage.org.

To get things kicked off we are having our first event at Rolling Meadow Lanes in Erie. Mark your calendars for Saturday, December 12th at 2 PM to meet and sign-in. PLEASE NOTE THE DATE CHANGE! This was initially announced for December 5th. It has been moved to December 12th.

Our lanes are reserved from 2:30 P

Pennsylvania Progressive Summit 2010

Coming Together To Build A Progressive Future
January 29 & 30, 2010 -- Harrisburg

The Pennsylvania Progressive Summit is the largest gathering of progressive activists and leaders in Pennsylvania. We’re coming together to build the progressive movement and to prepare for the legislative and electoral battles of 2010.


We believe that together we can build a permanent progressive majority in Pennsylvania. The Summit is bringing together hundreds of Pennsylvanians to discuss environment, energy, health care, home foreclosures, civil rights, state finances and budget, labor organizing and other progressive issues. It will include panels led by state and national experts; identity, issue and regional caucuses; prominent political, issue and policy-oriented speakers; and the most concentrated gathering of progressive bloggers and field organizers in Pennsylvania to date.

Some of the features of the Summit will be:

* Networking of netroots and grassroots activists, including stakeholders, decision makers, policy makers, activists and providers
* A gubernatorial debate and a U.S. Senate debate
* Inspirational keynote speakers
* Informative and educational workshops
* Creation of issue, identity and regional caucuses
* Beginning the development of progressive policy recommendations for state and local government issues
* Beginning the development of strategies for policy implementation

In the short term, we hope to create policy solutions and action plans to attract support for their implementation. In the long-term, however, the partnerships formed through the Summit have the potential to dramatically alter the political landscape in PA. By connecting the communications, research and organizing capacity of the participating organizations, Pennsylvania progressives may finally be able to produce, campaign around, and implement progressive policy solutions in a way that they were never capable of before.

Learn more:

PA CARES Bullying Prevention

Announcement of new GRANT FUNDING to prevent bullying in Pennsylvania Schools

The Center for Safe Schools and the Pennsylvania Department of Education, through a unique partnership with Highmark Healthy High 5, an initiative of the Highmark Foundation, is pleased to announce the availability of grants of up to $7500 for Pennsylvania schools to address the serious issue of bullying. The deadline for submission is November 6, 2009. For more information and to apply online, please click here.

What About Gay Marriage?

What Would America Be Like If Marriage Equality Was A Reality?

Voices Of Witness Africa

No Matter Where We Are, From Oil City To Ouagadougou, The Struggle Is The Same!

The film Voices Of Witness Africa born out of desire to keep a promise.

The Worldwide Anglican Communion has failed to keep its promise to its LGBT children to listen to their experiences. Even though lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender faithful Anglicans are in danger of life imprisonment in many countries – indeed can be put to death in some countries simply for being gay – few provinces of the Communion have been willing to engage in the listening process urged on the Communion by its own bishops at every Lambeth Conference since 1978.

The idea for this film began as an effort to bring LGBT African Anglicans to the 2008 Lambeth Conference to tell their stories to this every-ten-years-gathering of Anglican bishops. When that proved almost impossible, the decision was made to bring them to Lambeth via film. That effort was successful. A short preview of this film was shown twice at the Lambeth Conference, on one of those occasions to a standing-room-only crowd.

The producers then returned to Africa for more interviews in more countries. The result is this 30 minute film of stories of courage and love, and most of all, of a deep abiding faith in God.

Voices of Witness Africa from Claiming the Blessing on Vimeo.

The Cruelty of Inequality

The only bright side in this heartbreaking story about inequality in U.S. immigration law is the opportunity to see examples of what true family values really look like.

The nice local connection here is that the subject of this story, Steve Orner, has visited Venango County many times to lend his support to folks working for fairness & equality at the community level.

His and his father's courage are an inspiration to all those working for justice in the struggle for human rights for all.


by Kerry Eleveld for The Advocate:

A congressional briefing held Friday to discuss immigration reform included five witnesses, one of whom was a gay man testifying about the struggles faced by binational LGBT couples.

Steve Orner of Washington, D.C., said goodbye on Wednesday to his partner of nearly 10 years, “Joe Smith” -- who asked that we not use his real name -- when Smith left to return to his native Indonesia.

“I'm scared to go back,” Smith said by phone on the day of his departure. “This is my home; I have been living here for half of my life.”

Smith came to the United States 18 years ago to pursue his education. Federal scholarships funded his studies entirely as he earned bachelor's and master’s degrees from the University of Kentucky and a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, where he met Orner. “I met Steve and I fell in love. I didn’t choose to fall in love,” he said. “I didn’t plan to stay in this country at the time.”

But now Smith is returning to the closet -- to a country where being gay is criminal in some provinces, and to a family who doesn’t know he is gay or that he was forced to leave behind his love in America. “I will survive there, but it's hard because I have a family here -- my partner, the person that is most important in my life, is here,” he said.


Smith was well on his way to receiving his green card, having been approved for one after he was sponsored by a D.C. firm that hired him as a structural engineer.

“Once he got approved, even our immigration attorneys said, ‘Congratulations, it's only a matter of time,’” recalled Orner. But Smith was laid off in April, before his work visa came through. “It was just a huge blow,” said Orner, noting that they had already bought a house together.

The sting has been particularly acute because Smith is well qualified to help rebuild the crumbling infrastructure that major federal stimulus funds are now targeted toward repairing -- but the stimulus package stipulates that almost all the jobs it creates must be filled by U.S. citizens.

“He’s educated with American money, he's a scientist, a Ph.D., and there’s a brain drain in this country -- it's a stupid policy,” said Orner.

For now, the two have determined that living separately is their only option since they would have to be closeted in Indonesia and Orner would not be employable there.

Smith plans to search for jobs in other countries that might take both of them and they have also applied to immigrate to Canada. While they believe the Canada option holds promise, “The hardest part is not knowing for sure,” said Orner. Altogether, the two estimate that they have spent more than $12,000 on immigration attorneys.

“I'm an American and I feel like a 3rd class citizen,” said Orner. “I don’t have the same rights as LGBT couples that were both born here, and I don’t have the same rights as heterosexual binational couples. It’s heartbreaking and it’s cruel.”

That’s the message Orner took to Capitol Hill Friday in a closed-door meeting with Congressional staffers.

Four immigration bills have already been introduced this Congressional session, and LGBT families have been included in three of them. But another set of bills to be introduced later this year by New York Senator Chuck Schumer and California Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren may prove to be more decisive since they will lay out the framework for comprehensive immigration reform -- a debate that will extend into next year.


Friday’s briefing dealt with Rep. Mike Honda’s LGBT-inclusive Reuniting American Families act. A spokesperson for the pro-LGBT lobby group Immigration Equality said Orner’s invitation to speak provides hope that LGBT families could make it into immigration legislation yet to come.

“This is the very first briefing that Congress has convened since turning its attention to immigration reform,” said Steve Ralls. “The fact that from the very beginning we are being included in that process is a very good sign.”

Ralls explained that Immigration Equality is pushing for LGBT binational couples to be part of the comprehensive package.

“Inclusion in a multi-issue, high priority bill for this Administration means that we would have a new level of visibility and support to pursue other legislative avenues,” Ralls said, even if LGBT families don’t make the final version of the bill.

If LGBT families are eventually left out of comprehensive immigration reform, Immigration Equality will move forward with the LGBT stand-alone bill, the Uniting American Families Act.

Congressional leaders have stated their intent to tackle comprehensive immigration reform before considering any stand-alone immigration bills.

“We will try every available avenue to win on this issue,” said Ralls.

Learn more about Immigration Equality.

The Prodigal God: Finding Your Place at the Table

Followers of extremist, hate groups like the American "Family" Association of Pennsylvania may not be interested in rational dialogue with family, friends and neighbors about the important issues of our time, but for the rest of us, Pastor Mark Micklos and his wife Diana, featured in the new documentary Out In The Silence, continue to share opportunities to build bridges rather than walls in our communities.


Most recently, the Mickloses are encouraging all of us to examine The Prodigal God by renowned minister and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller. In this book and curriculum guide, Keller illuminates the central Christian message with one of the most powerful yet most misunderstood parables of the Bible.


See video trailer HERE.

Thank You Mark & Diana For Your Openness and Leadership, And For Showing What Christianity Is Supposed To Be All About!

Is LGBT Harassment A Problem In Venango County Schools?

Though bullying is a problem for many kids in school, students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT), or perceived as such, can face a particularly hard road. They are frequently the targets of teasing, ostracism, and even violence, and the consequences go well beyond hurt feelings.


A survey by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network found that harassed LGBT students are more likely to cut class and have lower GPAs than LGBT students who feel safe at school. Some schools have successfully created gay-straight alliances to promote tolerance, but others are reluctant to tackle the issue, or have been stymied by legislation meant to discourage such programs.

Are LGBT students harassed about their sexual orientation at your school?

Edutopia wants to know! Fill out the survey HERE.

"They Want You Dead"

American Evangelicals Play Role In Uganda's Effort To 'Wipe Out' Gays

Do They Have Similar Goals For Taking Care of GLBT People In The U.S.?

by Wayne Besen:

In March, American anti-gay activists traveled to Uganda for a conference that pledged to "wipe out" homosexuality. Seven months later, a draconian bill has been introduced that pledges to make good on this threat. The "Anti-Homosexuality Bill" is so severe that it is designed to shred the spirit and suffocate the soul of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Ugandans. If it passes, Uganda will become a predator state that actively hunts down GLBT people to destroy them.

Uganda already punished gay intimacy with life in prison. But, apparently that was not harsh enough, with this bill penalizing anyone who "attempts to commit the offence" with up to seven years in jail. Additionally, a person charged will be forced to undergo an invasive medical examination to determine their HIV status. If the detainees are found to be HIV+, they may be executed.

This barbaric legislation stifles free speech by threatening anyone who is accused of "promoting" homosexuality with five to seven year prison sentences. Snitching on gay friends and family members is strongly encouraged because "failure to disclose the 'offence' within 24 hours of knowledge makes somebody liable to a fine or imprisonment of up to three years."


Sadly, this witch-hunt has the blood stained fingerprints of leading American evangelicals. The Fellowship, (aka The Family) one of America's most powerful and secretive fundamentalist organization's, converted Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni to its anti-gay brand of Christianity, which is the "intellectual" impetus behind the anti-gay crackdown. The clandestine organization's leader, Doug Coe, calls Museveni The Fellowship's "key man" in Africa. Jeff Sharlet, author of "The Family", writes of the African strongman's conversion:

"So," Doug Coe told us, "my friend said to the president, 'why don't you come and pray with me in America? I have a good group of friends-senators, congressmen-who I like to pray with, and they'd like to pray with you.' And that president came to the Cedars (a religious retreat), and he met Jesus. And his name is Yoweri Museveni...And he is a good friend of the Family."

The Family, of course, recently made headlines because one of its key members, Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) had sex with his best friend's wife, while they were working together. Another member, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), used one of the Family's Washington properties to try to broker a deal to buy off the furious husband, who has since gone public with the Ensign scandal.

It is important for people to understand that The Fellowship and other anti-gay groups have longed viewed Uganda as a laboratory to experiment with Christian theocracy. For example, fundamentalist organizations recently undermined successful HIV programs in Uganda by demanding abstinence only education, over condom use, which had been working to reduce infection rates.

This year's notorious Kampala conference was the opening salvo in a campaign to crush GLBT lives. The seminar featured Scott Lively, author of The Pink Swastika, who blames the holocaust on gay people.

The hate forum also featured Don Schmierer, a board member of the "ex-gay" organization Exodus International, and Caleb Lee Brundidge, who works with discredited ex-gay "reorientation coach" Richard Cohen. These American "ex-gay" activists clearly left their stamp on this evil legislation, giving Ugandan officials a way to justify the abuse because they can claim that "sinful" gays can choose to change.

"This legislation further recognizes the fact that same sex attraction is not an innate and immutable characteristic and that people who experience this mental disorder can and have changed to a heterosexual orientation," the bill said. "It also recognizes that because homosexuals are not born that way, but develop this disorder based on experiences and environmental conditions, it is preventable, especially among young people who are most vulnerable to recruitment into the homosexual lifestyle."

Following the infamous conference, a Kampala newspaper named local gay people, placing their lives in immediate danger. Now, the government may soon declare it open season on GLBT individuals.

In 1994, I brought Rev. Mel White down to speak at an event in Fort Lauderdale. In his address, the former Christian right ghostwriter proclaimed of his previous employers, "They want you dead."

The comment was at once riveting and alarmist to some in the crowd. Yet, the painful silence of anti-gay activists at home is making White appear downright prophetic.


These Christian Colonialists invaded Uganda's politics and culture, and the result is that they have ruined the lives of its GLBT citizens. The Fellowship, Exodus and other American fundamentalist organizations, appear quite unbothered by the poisonous fruits of their labor.

Uganda is a proxy in their culture war and we are witnessing exactly what these fanatics might do if they did not have the United States Constitution blocking their pious path to power. Let the record show that their "key man" controlled Uganda when a religious terror campaign was waged against an innocent minority - and these good Christians stood by and did not lift a finger to stop the horror.

A Manifesto For Justice! The Time Has Come!

by John Shelby Spong, former Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark:

I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is "an abomination to God," about how homosexuality is a "chosen lifestyle," or about how through prayer and "spiritual counseling" homosexual persons can be "cured." Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy. I will no longer dignify by listening to the thoughts of those who advocate "reparative therapy," as if homosexual persons are somehow broken and need to be repaired.


I will no longer talk to those who believe that the unity of the church can or should be achieved by rejecting the presence of, or at least at the expense of, gay and lesbian people. I will no longer take the time to refute the unlearned and undocumentable claims of certain world religious leaders who call homosexuality "deviant." I will no longer listen to that pious sentimentality that certain Christian leaders continue to employ, which suggests some version of that strange and overtly dishonest phrase that "we love the sinner but hate the sin." That statement is, I have concluded, nothing more than a self-serving lie designed to cover the fact that these people hate homosexual persons and fear homosexuality itself, but somehow know that hatred is incompatible with the Christ they claim to profess, so they adopt this face-saving and absolutely false statement.

I will no longer temper my understanding of truth in order to pretend that I have even a tiny smidgen of respect for the appalling negativity that continues to emanate from religious circles where the church has for centuries conveniently perfumed its ongoing prejudices against blacks, Jews, women and homosexual persons with what it assumes is "high-sounding, pious rhetoric." The day for that mentality has quite simply come to an end for me. I will personally neither tolerate it nor listen to it any longer. The world has moved on, leaving these elements of the Christian Church that cannot adjust to new knowledge or a new consciousness lost in a sea of their own irrelevance. They no longer talk to anyone but themselves. I will no longer seek to slow down the witness to inclusiveness by pretending that there is some middle ground between prejudice and oppression. There isn't. Justice postponed is justice denied. That can be a resting place no longer for anyone. An old civil rights song proclaimed that the only choice awaiting those who cannot adjust to a new understanding was to "Roll on over or we'll roll on over you!" Time waits for no one. I will particularly ignore those members of my own Episcopal Church who seek to break away from this body to form a "new church," claiming that this new and bigoted instrument alone now represents the Anglican Communion. Such a new ecclesiastical body is designed to allow these pathetic human beings, who are so deeply locked into a world that no longer exists, to form a community in which they can continue to hate gay people, distort gay people with their hopeless rhetoric and to be part of a religious fellowship in which they can continue to feel justified in their homophobic prejudices for the rest of their tortured lives. Church unity can never be a virtue that is preserved by allowing injustice, oppression and psychological tyranny to go unchallenged.

In my personal life, I will no longer listen to televised debates conducted by "fair-minded" channels that seek to give "both sides" of this issue "equal time." I am aware that these stations no longer give equal time to the advocates of treating women as if they are the property of men or to the advocates of reinstating either segregation or slavery, despite the fact that when these evil institutions were coming to an end the Bible was still being quoted frequently on each of these subjects. It is time for the media to announce that there are no longer two sides to the issue of full humanity for gay and lesbian people. There is no way that justice for homosexual people can be compromised any longer.


I will no longer act as if the Papal office is to be respected if the present occupant of that office is either not willing or not able to inform and educate himself on public issues on which he dares to speak with embarrassing ineptitude. I will no longer be respectful of the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems to believe that rude behavior, intolerance and even killing prejudice is somehow acceptable, so long as it comes from third-world religious leaders, who more than anything else reveal in themselves the price that colonial oppression has required of the minds and hearts of so many of our world's population. I see no way that ignorance and truth can be placed side by side, nor do I believe that evil is somehow less evil if the Bible is quoted to justify it. I will dismiss as unworthy of any more of my attention the wild, false and uninformed opinions of such would-be religious leaders as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, Albert Mohler, and Robert Duncan. My country and my church have both already spent too much time, energy and money trying to accommodate these backward points of view when they are no longer even tolerable.

I make these statements because it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church. "Don't ask, don't tell" will be dismantled as the policy of our armed forces. We will and we must learn that equality of citizenship is not something that should ever be submitted to a referendum. Equality under and before the law is a solemn promise conveyed to all our citizens in the Constitution itself. Can any of us imagine having a public referendum on whether slavery should continue, whether segregation should be dismantled, whether voting privileges should be offered to women? The time has come for politicians to stop hiding behind unjust laws that they themselves helped to enact, and to abandon that convenient shield of demanding a vote on the rights of full citizenship because they do not understand the difference between a constitutional democracy, which this nation has, and a "mobocracy," which this nation rejected when it adopted its constitution. We do not put the civil rights of a minority to the vote of a plebiscite.

I will also no longer act as if I need a majority vote of some ecclesiastical body in order to bless, ordain, recognize and celebrate the lives and gifts of gay and lesbian people in the life of the church. No one should ever again be forced to submit the privilege of citizenship in this nation or membership in the Christian Church to the will of a majority vote.

The battle in both our culture and our church to rid our souls of this dying prejudice is finished. A new consciousness has arisen. A decision has quite clearly been made. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. I do not tolerate racism or sexism any longer. From this moment on, I will no longer tolerate our culture's various forms of homophobia. I do not care who it is who articulates these attitudes or who tries to make them sound holy with religious jargon.

I have been part of this debate for years, but things do get settled and this issue is now settled for me. I do not debate any longer with members of the "Flat Earth Society" either. I do not debate with people who think we should treat epilepsy by casting demons out of the epileptic person; I do not waste time engaging those medical opinions that suggest that bleeding the patient might release the infection. I do not converse with people who think that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as punishment for the sin of being the birthplace of Ellen DeGeneres or that the terrorists hit the United Sates on 9/11 because we tolerated homosexual people, abortions, feminism or the American Civil Liberties Union. I am tired of being embarrassed by so much of my church's participation in causes that are quite unworthy of the Christ I serve or the God whose mystery and wonder I appreciate more each day. Indeed I feel the Christian Church should not only apologize, but do public penance for the way we have treated people of color, women, adherents of other religions and those we designated heretics, as well as gay and lesbian people.
Life moves on. As the poet, James Russell Lowell once put it more than a century ago: "New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth." I am ready now to claim the victory. I will from now on assume it and live into it. I am unwilling to argue about it or to discuss it as if there are two equally valid, competing positions any longer. The day for that mentality has simply gone forever.

This is my manifesto and my creed. I proclaim it today. I invite others to join me in this public declaration. I believe that such a public outpouring will help cleanse both the church and this nation of its own distorting past. It will restore integrity and honor to both church and state. It will signal that a new day has dawned and we are ready not just to embrace it, but also to rejoice in it and to celebrate it.

The Golden Girls on Marriage Equality

Imagine Fairness & Equality In Venango County

-- It Is Possible, But It Will Take Work

Cool Web Site: ACT ON PRINCIPLES

Turning Principles into Equality

Act On Principles provides free tools for individuals and organizations interested in implementing The Dallas Principles: Full LGBT civil rights now. No delay. No excuses.

These tools are:

1. Hub for Actions. Registered members representing themselves or their organizations can submit actions that, after editorial review, are posted on our website, facebook page, twitter account, and sent on a daily email to subscribers. Visitors to the site can comment on the actions.
2. Open Blog. Registered members representing themselves or their organizations can submit new ideas, articles, videos, strategies and information for achieving full LGBT civil rights now. After editorial review, it gets posted on our website, facebook page, twitter account, and sent on a daily email to subscribers. Visitors to the site can comment on the blog posts.
3. Public Whip Count. Registered members who contact their Members of Congress can post an update on the Member’s position on a specific bill. Champions follow up on these leads to confirm the whip count.

People fully committed to The Dallas Principles who can write well can become Champions—gaining access to the tools above without editorial review. They are listed as champions with their bio in our site.

Register now to be able to use these tools. Better yet, become a Champion of Equality!