Via Tricycle Daily Dharma

Tricycle Daily Dharma May 8, 2012

Saving Yourself from Anger

 

When you give in to aversion and anger, it’s as though, having decided to kill someone by throwing him into a river, you wrap your arms around his neck, jump into the water with him, and you both drown. In destroying your enemy, you destroy yourself as well.

- Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, "Putting Down the Arrow"
Read the entire article in the Tricycle Wisdom Collection

Via JMG: Olympics Hopeful Comes Out

Olympics hopeful Josh Dixon wants to be the first out American gymnast in the history of the games. Outsports reports:

The Stanford grad took a big step toward that goal at the U.S. Men’s Qualifier on Saturday in Colorado Springs, finishing second overall out of the 72 competitors. He also tied for wins in two events: floor exercise and high bar. It was a game-changing come-back performance for Dixon, who tore his Achilles tendon last spring. Now Dixon is talking about his personal life and sexual orientation publicly for the first time. Like charging at the vault, he’s coming at it at full speed.

Read the full article.

Labels: coming out, gay athletes, Outsports, sports

Reposted from Joe

JMG Quote Of The Day - Rep. Barney Frank:

"Any gay or lesbian person with any self-respect should not be voting for any of the Republicans, including Mitt Romney, who made the degrading comment in one of the recent debates about how he kept Massachusetts from being the Las Vegas of gay marriage, kind of cheapening this very profound thing for us. This is a faker who in 1994, when he was trying to beat Ted Kennedy in a different era, said 'Oh, I’ll be better than him on gay rights,' and of course he’s been outrageous.

"In fact in 2004, when the Massachusetts Supreme Court had ruled in favor of gay rights, there was an effort in the state Legislature to overturn it. Mitt Romney led a fight against a whole lot of legislators who had courageously voted with us to uphold gay marriage, and he tried very hard to defeat them. I think he gave the business I’m in a bad name. He is the most unprincipled, dishonest, intellectually flexible guy I’ve seen. There does not appear to be any public policy to which he’s committed." - Rep. Barney Frank, in an interview with Palms Springs' Desert Outlook.

Labels: 2012 elections, Barney Frank, GOP, Mitt Romney

Reposted from Joe

Via JMG: Marriage Map

You should check out the timeline of when the bans went into place. In 2004 Ken Mehlman was the chair of the Bush re-election campaign. From 2005-2007, he was the head of RNC. During those two short time spans 23 of the bans were enacted. For the past couple of years, Mehlman has been working to undo that damage or at least prevent it from spreading further.

Labels: LGBT rights, maps, marriage equality

Reposted from Joe

Via Wipe Out Homophobia / Facebook:

Via Tricycle Daily Dharma

Tricycle Daily Dharma May 7, 2012

 

The Wise Investigator

You always need to check the quality of mind; only if the quality is good are you practicing in the right way. This is how the quality of practice should be measured; not by posture or by the number of hours of sitting, walking, or standing meditation you do.

- Sayadaw U Tejaniya, "The Wise Investigator"
Read the entire article in the Tricycle Wisdom Collection

STEVE HAYES: Tired Old Queen at the Movies - ALL ABOUT EVE - 100th Episode!

Via JMG: UNSHOCKING: Prosperity Gospel Televangelists Are Ripoff Artists

Here's just a little of what the New York Times says about televangelists Paul and Jan Crouch.

Mr. and Mrs. Crouch have his-and-her mansions one street apart in a gated community here, provided by the network using viewer donations and tax-free earnings. But Mrs. Crouch, 74, rarely sleeps in the $5.6 million house with tennis court and pool. She mostly lives in a large company house near Orlando, Fla., where she runs a side business, the Holy Land Experience theme park. Mr. Crouch, 78, has an adjacent home there too, but rarely visits. Its occupant is often a security guard who doubles as Mrs. Crouch’s chauffeur. The lavish perquisites, corroborated by two other former TBN employees, include additional, often-vacant homes in Texas and on the former Conway Twitty estate in Tennessee, corporate jets valued at $8 million and $49 million each and thousand-dollar dinners with fine wines, paid with tax-exempt money.

Here's the part you may find the most infuriating.

Ms. Koper and the two other former TBN employees also said that dozens of staff members, including Ms. Koper, chauffeurs, sound engineers and others had been ordained as ministers by TBN. This allowed the network to avoid paying Social Security taxes on their salaries and made it easier to justify providing family members with rent-free houses, sometimes called “parsonages,” she said.

In case you're wondering why Mr. and Mrs. Crouch maintain separate side-by-side luxury mansions in multiple cities, I remind you of this.

In September 2004 the Los Angeles Times reported that in 1998 Crouch paid Enoch Lonnie Ford, a former employee, a $425,000 formal settlement to end a wrongful termination lawsuit. At that time it was reported that Crouch had had a homosexual encounter with Ford. TBN officials acknowledge the settlement, but contested the credibility of Ford who is a convicted felon.

Labels: con men, crime, liars, religion, ripoffs, scam artists, scams, television

Reposted from Joe

Sh*t Homophobic People Say

Via Tricycle Daily Dharma

Tricycle Daily Dharma May 6, 2012

 

Joyful Energy

We can get greater energy out of love and joy than out of hatred. Hatred is so off balance. You blow your adrenals in one minute, then you're shaky and weak. But if you're joyful, you'll get an endless source of energy.

- Robert Thurman, "Rising to the Challenge: Cool Heroism"
Read the entire article in the Tricycle Wisdom Collection

Via AmericaBlog Gay:

Finding acceptance of homosexuality in the Bible

Leonard Pitts, Jr.:

Vines is a Christian, a 22-year-old Harvard undergrad raised in a conservative evangelical church in Kansas. He is also gay and says he grew up being taught that the Bible condemns his sexual orientation. He took two years off from school to research and study whether or not that assertion is true. 

The result is "The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality." It's a video -- you can find it online with a simple Google search [see video below] -- of a speech he gave in March at a church in Wichita that has become a minor sensation. Small wonder. Vines' speech is a masterwork of scriptural exegesis and a marvel of patient logic, slicing and dicing with surgical precision the claim that homophobia is God ordained. 

So effective is the video that after viewing it, Sandra Delemares, a Christian blogger from the United Kingdom who had, for years, spoken in staunch opposition to same-sex marriage, wrote that it "revolutionized" her thinking.

Via Syrinx: We will always love her no matter what

In the universe next to ours, a woman emails her sister:

Hey, sis, good to hear from you.

Have you seen Elyse lately? I wondered if she talked to you. Did you know what's been happening at our place? You will have to tell me you are surprised. Elyse came out as straight. So our household has been in a bit of an uproar.

Well, of course we are supportive. Debs and I are very conventional parents but we have always supported our daughter's choices and we will always love her no matter what. We may express concern, that's what mums do, but we will always support her. And she is a good kid, we just never saw this coming.

Click here to make the jump here to read the full article at Syrinx

Via Tricycle Daily Dharma:

Tricycle Daily Dharma May 5, 2012

How Do You Practice?

I used to think that to become free you had to practice like a samurai warrior, but now I understand that you have to practice like a devoted mother of a newborn child. It takes the same energy but has a completely different quality. It's compassion and presence rather than having to defeat the enemy in battle.

- Jack Kornfield, "The Question"
Read the entire article in the Tricycle Wisdom Collection

Via JMG: "Ex-Gays" Cancel Conference

The "ex-gay" industry has been rocked to its core this year. First the head of its most infamous group announced that not one person had ever actually been "cured." Then the researcher who authored the most widely cited "ex-gay" study recanted his findings and apologized to the gay community. So maybe it's not surprising that nobody wants to attend an "ex-gay" convention.

In what seems like the logical extension of the recent trend, Exodus International has decided there were not enough people interested in attending their Love Won Out conference scheduled for later this month to justify the expense. Conference attendance has been trending downward, with their last conference bringing in barely 400 people. This is down from nearly 1000 in Exodus’ headier days. In November, XGW reported on a secret meeting held by Exodus president Alan Chambers to come up with ways to rebrand the organization in the wake of social and financial collapse. Since then events have occurred which seem to validate that scenario. The cancellation of this conference, the first time we know of since either Exodus or Focus on the Family held the event, appears to provide more evidence of their decline.

As everybody here doubtlessly knows, "ex-gay" therapy is a con job, a scam, a cash-cow designed to separate self-hating homosexuals from their money. It's sort of brilliant, really. You're never "cured" so you just have to keep paying and paying and paying. It's like Jenny Craig, but without the delicious cardboard aftertaste.

Labels: "ex-gay", con men, Exodus International, frauds, liars, scams, still totally gay

reposted from Joe

Via JMG: The Avengers Plus One

Labels: Barack Obama, GOP, Osama Bin Laden

reposted from Joe

Via JMG: Google Nods To Keith Haring

Today would have been Keith Haring's 54th birthday.

Labels: AIDS, art, gay artists, Google, Keith Haring

Reposted from Joe

Via JMG: Slate Nails The Savage Flap

Slate writer Amanda Marcotte gets to the root of it:

The American right is undertaking a huge project of trying to put right-wing politics beyond criticism by shouting "religious bigotry" any time someone gets in the way of their political agenda. If they can create a consensus that it's somehow off-limits to criticize teaching that gay people are subhuman as long as you wrap it up in religion, that gives them a huge political advantage. Taken far enough, merely stating out loud in public that you don't believe gay people are evil could be cause for the fainting couches to be pulled out and accusations that Christians are being oppressed. Sounds ludicrous? Well, consider that we're currently debating whether or not it's oppressing Christians to accurately state what's in the Bible. Anyone who is actually supportive of gay rights shouldn't be playing along with this feigned umbrage. It won't stop until opposing anti-gay actions is considered completely off-bounds on the grounds that it's an attack on religion.

Bingo.

Labels: Dan Savage, fakery, LGBT rights, religion

Reposted from Joe

Via AmericaBlogGay

NC anti-gay amendment meant to "protect caucasian race" from multiplying dark people

The wife of a North Carolina state senator, who's supporting the anti-gay Amendment One in the state (a constitutional amendment that will ban gay marriage, civil unions, and domestic partners) reportedly told a poll worker that the amendment is intended to help protect the caucasian race from all those dark people who keep multiplying.  The woman allegedly disagrees with the report, says her remarks were taken out of context, but admits to using the word "caucasian."  She probably said: "I would never use the word 'caucasion' as that might sound racist."  Uh huh.

Via Tricycle Daily Dharma

Tricycle Daily Dharma May 4, 2012

Don't Get Mad, Don't Get Even

If we want to succeed in life and bring about a more peaceful world, we must learn to control our emotions and not to be affected by a moment of anger.

- Master Hsing Yun, "Don't Get Mad, Don't Get Even"
Read the entire article in the Tricycle Wisdom Collection