Oregon’s attorney general told a federal court Tuesday why she believes the state’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriages violates the federal constitutional rights of homosexual couples. Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum added that Oregon is prepared to implement gay marriages if a federal judge strikes down the ban. Rosenblum announced last month that she would not defend the state’s same-sex marriage ban in court…. Allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry is not a redefinition of marriage, the attorney general wrote. Instead, she said the plaintiffs in this case “seek the same right to marry that the state offers opposite-sex couples and not a right to any newly invented form of marriage.”Oral arguments in the case are due in mid-April, so we could have a ruling by May
The sad trend of American anti-LGBT activists traveling across the globe in order to "warn" them from making the pro-LGBT "mistakes" of America continues. The latest example comes from Peru, where vehemently anti-LGBT activist Michael Brown recently spoke to local members of congress, as well as passed out copies of his propaganda book, A Queer Thing Happened to America. This new trend is chilling, frankly. From Jamaica to France to Russia, and many map stops in between, a who's who of American anti-LGBT activists, feeling defeated and increasingly marginalized here at home, are seizing the chance to stir the pot in any nation that might be willing to see them as soothsayers. It is, to the letter, the strategy we saw in Uganda a handful of years ago, when Scott Lively and other Americans started dropping into the nation and telling locals how downright awful we LGBT Americans are. We all know how that one played out.
I’ve learned that my father, Fred Phelps, Sr., pastor of the “God Hates Fags” Westboro Baptist Church, was ex-communicated from the “church” back in August of 2013. He is now on the edge of death at Midland Hospice house in Topeka, Kansas. I’m not sure how I feel about this. Terribly ironic that his devotion to his god ends this way. Destroyed by the monster he made. I feel sad for all the hurt he’s caused so many. I feel sad for those who will lose the grandfather and father they loved. And I’m bitterly angry that my family is blocking the family members who left from seeing him, and saying their good-byes.Hemant Mehta has more at the Friendly Atheist:
I just got off the phone with Nate and he confirmed what he had written. The rumors had been flying for several weeks, he said, but after a conversation with some of his fellow “excommunicated” family members, he found out that the rumors were true. He elaborated on that final line, too, saying that the Phelps family is now blocking anyone who is no longer with the church from seeing him, including Fred’s sons, daughters, nieces, and nephews. Why was he kicked out of his own church? Did he have a change of heart near the end of his life? There’s no definitive answer to that and Nate has heard different things (so any explanation is pure speculation right now).Over on Twitter, some are calling for a picket of Phelps' funeral, but Mehta and others suggest that the better response might be to ignore it completely. Rod Dreher writes at American Conservative:
Can you imagine having come to the end of your life, very nearly to the moment in which you will meet your God and be reckoned with, and all you have to show for it is … that? I’ve always thought the Westboro Baptist Church people were despicable, but there is something about the thought of that old man lying on his death bed, forsaken, the victim of his own sins, that makes me pity him. One tear of repentance from the vicious old preacher will open the floodgates of the divine mercy he spent his life trying to deny to others. I pray for that tear. And I hope no one pickets his funeral, giving to his family the mercy they do not deserve.
