Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Via JMG: Heather Knows Punctuation
reposted from Joe
Via JMG: Queerty Relaunches "Without Snark"
Several weeks after announcing its own demise, Queerty has relaunched this morning with the below promise. While we are committed to maintaining the best of Queerty, we also recognize that you have demanded change. In recent months the Queerty patented wit devolved into predictable snark, eviscerating everyone and everything in its path. Some of the comments simply piled on. We will maintain the independent voice at all cost, going after with a vengeance the powerful, the hypocritical and the just plain foolish. But now we’ll also strive for a better sense of journalistic balance and fairness. In other words we’re going to keep afflicting the comfortable; only now we’ll take care to comfort the afflicted as well.More on the relaunch from departing owner David Hauslaib.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
2ª Marcha Nacional contra a Homofobia - 2º Grito Nacional pela Cidadania LGBT e Contra a Homofobia
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© ABGLT - Associação Brasileira de Gays, Lésbicas e Transgêneros - 2006 ©
Via JMG: "Untraditional" Households On Rise
These demographic nuggets appear in a Miami Herald story about just-released census data:
Preliminary census numbers show that unmarried partners made up 6.5 million, or nearly 6 percent of U.S. households. Those figures include roughly 581,300, or a half-percent of households, composed of same-sex unmarried couples. Measured by shares, the District of Columbia ranked highest for same-sex unmarried households at 2 percent. [snip] The decreases in traditional families were seen in 42 states plus the District of Columbia, while the remaining eight - Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, North Carolina and Georgia - saw increases. Those eight states generally have a higher number of either immigrants or Mormon residents. In contrast, non-family households made up of single people such as seniors living alone, or opposite-sex or same-sex partners without children, jumped 13 percent to roughly 38 million. Married couples with no kids, which include younger couples and older empty-nesters, rose 9 percent to more than 32 million.Married opposite-sex couples with children now make up fewer than 20% of households, an all-time low. Cue the cries of "the end of American culture."
Via JMG: 61 Years And They Still Can't Marry
Via press release from Freedom To Marry:
reposted from Joe
“Richard and John are the quintessential New York couple. They met at Juilliard and have spent most of their lives together here,” said Evan Wolfson, Founder and President of Freedom to Marry. “They are still obviously so deeply in love after 61 years and yet after all those years of commitment, being there for one another through the ups and downs of life, they are still being denied the one thing they want most – the freedom to marry in New York. It is time to change that. After 61 years together, haven't they waited long enough?”
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reposted from Joe
Via AmericaBlogGay: Known "hate group" contacting Burger King, Boost Mobile, Subway and Taco Bell - interesting to see if those companies do the bidding of a hate group
A project of a known "hate group," the American Family Association, is asking Burger King, Boost Mobile, Subway and Taco Bell to stop advertising on GLEE because the show is just too positive about its portrayal of gay kids. No need to link to the AFA's alert - these companies know the hate group is targeting them.
At some point, you have to tell hostage takers - especially ones who are avowed bigots (and anti-semites too) on the wrong side of history - especially ones that are running officially-designated hate groups - to take a hike. Ford did that to this same hate group a number of years ago (when Joe and I led a successful campaign beating the AFA at their own game). Ford simply told AFA to take a hike. Burger King, Boost Mobile, Subway and Taco Bell should do the same.
PS Those companies need to read the background on AFA before deciding. They're not just dealing with "Christian conservatives." They're dealing with extremists whose homophobic and anti-Semitic words would shock Americans of every stripe. These are not the kind of people you want your brand associated with.
Via AmericaBlog.gay: Never Again: Yom HaShoah and the Rosa Winkle
Never Again: Yom HaShoah and the Rosa Winkle
The internationally recognized date comes from the Hebrew calendar and corresponds to the 27th day of Nisan on that calendar. It marks the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In Hebrew, Holocaust Remembrance Day is called Yom Hashoah. When the actual date of Yom Hashoah falls on a Friday, the state of Israel observes Yom Hashoah on the preceding Thursday. When it falls on a Sunday, Yom Hashoah is observed on the following Monday.Of course, along with Jews, homosexuals were also considered the enemy of fascist Nazi Germany and were made to wear the "Rosa Winkle" or "Pink Triangle" in German.
The pink triangle (German: Rosa Winkel) was one of the Nazi concentration camp badges, used to identify male prisoners who were sent there because of their homosexuality.[1] Every prisoner had to wear a downward-pointing triangle on his or her jacket, the colour of which was to categorise him or her by "kind". Other colors identified Jews (two triangles superimposed as a yellow star), political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, "anti-social" prisoners, and others the Nazis deemed undesirable. Pink and yellow triangles could be combined if a prisoner was deemed to be gay and Jewish (see German concentration camp chart of prisoner markings image).May we never cease to honor our victims and vow NEVER AGAIN and to NEVER FORGET.
Originally intended as a badge of shame, the pink triangle (often inverted from its Nazi usage) has been reclaimed as an international symbol of gay pride and the gay rights movement, and is second in popularity only to the rainbow flag.[2]
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Via 365Gay: Corvino: What the Bible doesn’t say
04.22.2011 9:00am EDT
I confronted this problem recently after a talk I gave in rural Pennsylvania, when fielding comments from two audience members from opposite sides of the debate.
The first cited Romans 1, where St. Paul claims that because people had “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles,” God gave them over to “degrading passions,” so that the women exchanged “natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error” (Romans 1:26-27).
I personally don’t accept the authority of scripture, as I explained in my talk. This is the same Paul who several times tells slaves that they must obey their masters, even harsh masters (see Ephesians 6:5, Colossians 3:22, 1 Timothy 6:1, Titus 2:9-10, and 1 Peter 2:18). He gets some stuff clearly wrong.
But I also pointed out that the audience member was reading quite a bit into the text.
Paul is addressing a specific group of people—first-century Romans—about a specific group of people: Gentiles who engaged in idolatry. He states that the latter’s same-sex passion is a sign and consequence of their rejecting God in favor of images of “man or birds or animals or reptiles.” To read his discussion more broadly as a general claim about all homosexual acts is to supply information that isn’t there.
It’s also to attribute a blatantly false claim to Paul, since most homosexuality doesn’t stem from idol worship, and most idol worship doesn’t lead to homosexuality.
After I finished making these points, a second audience member chimed in:
“And besides, Jesus never said a single word about homosexuality,” he said. “That silence speaks volumes.”
No, it doesn’t.
Gently I responded, “We need to be careful about reading things into silence. Jesus doesn’t say anything about Ponzi schemes either. But Bernie Madoff is still an asshole.”
“Sure,” he replied, “but that’s not something that existed at the time. Same-sex relationships did exist, and the fact that Jesus chose not to mention them is significant.”
I really don’t think so.
Perhaps Jesus chose not to mention them because he thought their wrongness was obvious. Perhaps he had bigger fish to fry (so to speak).
Or perhaps he did mention homosexuality, but his comments got lost among the scores of competing gospels that never made it into the Biblical canon. We just don’t know.
What we do know—or should—is that reading messages into the Bible is a tendentious and potentially dangerous game.
Sure, the first audience member was doing that for anti-gay purposes, and the second one was doing it for pro-gay purposes. But they were both doing it: reading their own biases into the text, and then using the text as validation for those biases.
And by the way, slavery certainly existed in Jesus’ time, yet Jesus failed to condemn slavery (in the texts that we have). Does his relative silence there speak volumes, too?
I don’t like picking on my allies. I’m sure some readers will think, “If such beliefs make liberal Christians feel better, why not let them slide?”
Because the gay-rights battle isn’t freestanding, that’s why. It’s tied into other debates about freedom, religion, rationality, the role of government, the justification of moral norms, and so on. It’s not only our conclusions that matter, but also how we arrive at them.
The very same license that allows one person to assert that Jesus’ silence on homosexuality “speaks volumes” allows another to assert that Paul’s commentary on certain pagans demonstrates the wrongness of all homosexual acts. It lets people read something into the text that isn’t there, and then to attribute that supplied message to God Himself.
The danger in this process is that it lets people think that they have infallible backing for their fallible prejudices.
We know what this mistake looks like when our opponents do it. We shouldn’t validate the mistake by committing it ourselves.
John Corvino, Ph.D. is a writer, speaker, and philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. Read more or watch clips from his talks at www.johncorvino.com.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Via JMG: MINNESOTA: Marriage Ban Advances
The Minnesota Senate Judiciary Committee today advanced a bill to place a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage on the November ballot. But not before Democrat Barb Goodwin (left) tried a slick move to sink the bill. Goodwin suggested tweaking the text of the proposed amendment so the Minnesota Constitution would not only limit marriage to couplings of one man and one woman, but also to one marriage per person per lifetime—a ban on divorce, though not separation. The proposed ballot question: "Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to provide that only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota?" Goodwin first proposed adding the words "for life" after the word "union," then to replace "a marriage" with "one marriage."The amendments failed. Goodwin reacted (to roars of approval from the gallery): “I will never in this Legislature, will never vote — even if it means I’m voted out — to put language of discrimination in the constitution. I could not live with myself, and those of you who claim to be good Christians, you need to think about what you are doing here."
Via JMG: Gays Caused The Mortgage Crisis (wtf?)
"Just as a child is far less likely to suffer abuse in the home of his/her married, heterosexual parents, so the opposite is true. Where the structure is sin-based, other sins are more likely to scurry in through the cracks. Substance abuse and self-destruction accompany sexual deviance. And some of this means poor decisions about finances."The mortgage crisis was the sin of temptation being offered by those who relaxed legitimate standards, offered to those without the personal standards to resist. This easy-pay physical structure was too good to be true, and appealed to an increasingly covetous segment of our culture. Sexual and material covetousness are usually sin siblings. It would be interesting to study the families who have defaulted on mortgages for the correlations between structural and/or functional weaknesses like infidelity, divorce, gambling or porn addictions, job instability, credit card default, domestic abuse, sexual deviance, and criminality. There is also a high likelihood that poor or no church attendance would show up as a factor as well." - Linda Harvey, head of the SPLC-certified hate group, Mission America.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Via JMG: Sullivan Vs. Sisters, Round Two
"Rail against the supposed grief we cause believers and wrap yourself in self-righteous anger if it makes you feel good- it’s your shtick and in these tough times I know you need a paycheck. But for the love of every young LGBTQI kid out there trying to find a way through this cruel world, please stop carping on about how events like Hunky Jesus 'empower every religious right prejudice about gays.' Bigotry like that is irrational and self- generating. They hate us because we’re GAY, Andrew, period."It’s actually the GAYS and all those stung by that hatred the Sisters try to help by creating space for a good belly laugh at all the holier-than-thou attitudes that keep us down. If we’re all going to Hell, there’s no reason we can’t have fun and look fabulous on the way! I’m sorry that a bunch of drag nun volunteers with a cheap sound system don’t rise to your definition of high art, but blasphemy is a democratic art form that delivers its most profound punch at street level where ordinary people struggle every day." - Sister Merry Peter, responding to Andrew Sullivan's criticism of the Hunky Jesus contest.
Read Sister Merry's full response.
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