A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
As same-sex marriage springs up all around him, Delaware Gov. Jack Markell says that it will come soon to his state too.
In an interview with Reuters Insider TV, Markell, a Democrat, said he expects that Delaware will take up same-sex marriage legislation "probably within the next few years." Delaware began allowing civil unions -- an institution set up to give the same rights as civil marriage, while reserving marriage for heterosexual couples -- last year. Markell noted that until three years ago it was legal in Delaware "to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation," and said the state was moving towards greater acceptance of homosexuality. "I think it's inevitable," he said of gay marriage.
"I believe that freedom of speech and freedom of religion go hand-in-hand in America. I should be able to express moral views on social issues – especially those that have been the underpinning of Western civilization for 2,000 years – without being slandered, accused of hate speech and told from those who preach ‘tolerance’ that I need to either bend my beliefs to their moral standards or be silent when I’m in the public square. In any society that is governed by the rule of law, some form of morality is always imposed. It’s inescapable." - Kirk Cameron, quoted by World Net Daily. Cameron adds that he's gotten support from "my gay friends" since the CNN interview aired.
NOTE: To my knowledge, not one person or organization has asked the government to silence Kirk Cameron. His freedom of speech and his freedom to be a batshit crazy fuckweasel has never been threatened.
Education and knowledge by themselves do not bring inner peace to individuals, families or the society in which they live. But education combined with warmheartedness, a sense of concern for the well-being of others, has much more positive results. If you have a great deal of knowledge, but you're governed by negative emotions, then you tend to use your knowledge in negative ways. Therefore, while you are learning, don't forget the importance of warmheartedness. - The Dalai Lama
May your spirit soar throughout the vast cathedral of your being.
May your mind whirl joyful cartwheels of creativity.
May your heart sing sweet lullabies of timelessness.
A campaign to add support for marriage equality to the Democratic Party platform has gained the support of 22 members of the U.S. Senate, according to the Washington Blade. “Two people who want to enter into a loving committed relationship should be afforded the same legally recognized rights and benefits I enjoy with my wife,” Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., said in a statement. While the campaign has gained other high-profile supporters, it’s unclear whether the issue will make it into the party platform, which has traditionally opposed anti-LGBT initiatives while stopping short of offering outright support for LGBT causes such as marriage equality. Washington Blade (3/2), The Charlotte Observer (N.C.)
Sometimes when I’m asked to describe the Buddhist teachings, I say this: Everything is connected; nothing lasts; you are not alone. This is really just a restatement of the traditional Three Marks of Existence: non-self, impermanence, and suffering. The fact that we all suffer means we are all in the same boat, and that’s what allows us to feel compassion.
A rapidly growing number of Americans now live in states that grant the basic rights and responsibilities of marriage to same-sex couples. But DOMA prevents the federal government from recognizing any of these relationships!
If we are intelligent enough to understand the instructions and if we have the perseverance, then we can remind ourselves about how to really practice at any given moment during the day. The skilled practitioner is someone who goes to work and then while working also develops spiritual qualities.
Note from Joe: Robin McGehee is a great friend of AMERICAblog's. We're big fans. She's the amazing activist who helped organized the National Equality March on Washington back in 2009, then founded GetEQUAL. Last night, she was in the audience for AFER's production of "8, The Play." Robin's activism started with Prop. 8, so she sent us her take on last night's event (along with some photos.)
If you missed the live broadcast, watch it here. It's worth it -- and remember, the haters don't want people to know what happened at the trial. The play begins at 29:51.
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From Robin:
If you would have asked me a week ago if I was going to the American Federal for Equal Right's showing of "8" in Los Angeles - I would have replied, "I wish!" I am a full-time mom and professor at the College of the Sequoias in a small town called, Visalia, California. Although I am deeply devoted and in love with what AFER has done for the marriage equality fight in California, and globally for that matter, there is no way I could afford to get in.
Rick Santorum says that if elected he was ensure that all existing same-sex marriages will be nullified. That's not too surprising actually, but that's a step further than we've heard from the other GOP tools.
There are 18,000 married gay and lesbian couples in California and at least 131,000 nationwide according to the 2010 census, conducted before New York state legalized same-sex marriage in July. Rick Santorum says he'll try to unmarry all of them if he's elected president. Once the U.S. Constitution is amended to prohibit same-gender marriages, "their marriage would be invalid," the former Pennsylvania senator said Dec. 30 in an NBC News interview. "We can't have 50 different marriage laws in this country," he said. "You have to have one marriage law."
Romney also wants a federal constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, but has said he would allow existing marriages to remain legal. The Family Research Council yesterday voiced their support for Santorum's plan to rip apart gay families.
Featuring an all-star cast including George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Martin Sheen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jane Lynch, Kevin Bacon and others, "8" is a play written by Academy Award winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and directed by acclaimed actor and director Rob Reiner. It is a powerful account of the case filed by the American Federation for Equal Rights (AFER ) in the U.S. District Court in 2010 to overturn Proposition 8 [LINK], a constitutional amendment that eliminated the rights of same-sex couples to marry in the state of California. Framed around the trial's historic closing arguments in June 2010, 8 provides an intimate look what unfolded when the issue of same-sex marriage was on trial.
Kirk Cameron joins former TV stars Victoria Jackson and Chuck Norris in desperately trying to remain in the public eye by using anti-LGBT rhetoric. Last year, Jackson described a kiss between ‘Glee’ characters Kurt and Blaine as ‘sickening’ and Norris wrote on anti-LGBT site WorldNet Daily that the public education system has devolved into "progressive indoctrination camps” that train students to “forcefully defend issues like abortion and homosexuality, as well as become cultural advocates for political correctness, relativism, globalization, green agendas and tolerance for all.” Let’s remember that while these once relevant celebrities try to regain notoriety through advancing ignorance, Hollywood’s elite including George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jane Lynch, and Martin Sheen are using their voices and popularity to move America closer to equality for everyone.
Letting go of fixation is effectively a process of learning to be free, because every time we let go of something, we become free of it. Whatever we fixate upon limits us because fixation makes us dependent upon something other than ourselves. Each time we let go of something, we experience another level of freedom.
I’ve been forced to explain homosexuality to my kids (aged 3 and 4) because their uncle is gay. This incredibly difficult and traumatic experience went as follows:
Child: Why does Uncle Bob go everywhere with Pete?
Me: Because they’re in love, just like Mummy and Daddy are.
Child: Oh. Can I have a biscuit?
When people praise us and we glow with delight, it is because we think that being praised is beneficial. But that is like thinking that there is some substance to a rainbow or a dream. However much benefit appears to accrue from praise and acclaim, actually there's none at all. However convincing it seems, it is as unreal as a magician's illusion.
In a stunning turnaround, Maine's Catholic diocese says it will not campaign publicly against this November's vote on the same-sex marriage.
Bishop Richard Malone on Friday unveiled a "pastoral letter" he wrote explaining the church's position on marriage. The document will be discussed at Catholic churches and schools, through the diocese's magazine and on radio stations devoted to Catholic issues. Malone said the letter will be the heart of the church's response to gay-marriage supporters. The church in 2009 took up special collections and asked for contributions from other dioceses to fund a campaign against an effort to legalize gay marriage. The Legislature that year legalized same-sex marriage, but voters later overturned the law.
For the first time for any state, Maine's gay marriage item was placed on the ballot by gay activists themselves. (Tipped by JMG reader Matt)
The “HR 535 – Year of the Bible Resolution” declared by the PA House of Representatives asked us to “study and apply the teachings of the holy scriptures”. After considering the bill, we felt it necessary to highlight one of those teachings and share it with the public in the form of this billboard. It will be posted starting around March 5th for 28 days, and stay up throughout the month of March.
What came to my mind as I watched this was the time of witch burnings - it's the same thing, I thought, just as ignorant, just as hysterical, just as evil - and once again, it comes from "religious" feelings - better to be without religion altogether, if this is what it comes to. When will Baha'is understand that if you denounce homosexuality as an undesirable aberration, displeasing to God and needing correction, you are contributing to this kind of ignorant fear of gays? All the Baha'i platitudes about it being wrong to show prejudice or disdain toward gays are meaningless as long as they hold on to the denouncement of homosexuality as being abhorrent to God, while insisting they are not homophobic - you can't have it both ways, folks.
Even on a small scale in daily life situations, such as when we feel bored or ill at ease, instead of trying to avoid these feelings by staying busy or buying another fancy gadget, we learn to look more clearly at our impulses, attitudes, and defenses. In this way dukkha guides and deepens our motivation to the point where we’ll say, 'Enough running, enough walls, I’ll grow through handling my blocks and lost places.'
At this writing 21 Senate Democrats have signed on to a call for a marriage equality plank in this year's Democratic Convention. Chris Johnson reports:
The Washington Blade received statements from the offices of 21 Democratic senators — including Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) — expressing support for including a marriage equality plank in the Democratic Party platform. The Blade solicited statements from all 53 Democratic senators and will update this article as more senators respond. The senators follow the lead of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who on Tuesday became the first U.S. senator this year to get behind the idea of including same-sex marriage in the Democratic Party platform. Shaheen, who’s also a co-chair of President Obama’s national campaign committee, said she backs a plank in support of marriage equality proposed by the LGBT organization Freedom to Marry.
Here's the language of Freedom To Marry's proposed plank.
The Democratic Party supports the full inclusion of all families in the life of our nation, with equal respect, responsibility, and protection under the law, including the freedom to marry. Government has no business putting barriers in the path of people seeking to care for their family members, particularly in challenging economic times. We support the Respect for Marriage Act and the overturning of the federal so-called Defense of Marriage Act, and oppose discriminatory constitutional amendments and other attempts to deny the freedom to marry to loving and committed same-sex couples.”
The new Field survey shows support has leapt markedly in the three and a half years since California voters approved Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage, 52.3 percent to 47.7 percent. The poll showed increases in support virtually across the board – among voters under 64, non-white voters, Catholics, Republicans and nonpartisans. Poll Director Mark DiCamillo said the move to a 25-point gap goes beyond the gradual increase in support that has been expected as young voters age and "replace" older voters in the electorate. "This is now showing that opinions are changing irrespective of generational replacement," DiCamillo said. "This is real change."
I wonder if Equality California is kicking themselves right now.
"I think it’s funny, but the last thing you’ll ever see me do is jump up and down, saying, 'These are lies!' That would be unfair and unkind to my good friends in the gay community. I’m not going to let anyone make it seem like being gay is a bad thing. My private life is private, and I’m very happy in it. Who does it hurt if someone thinks I’m gay? I’ll be long dead and there will still be people who say I was gay. I don’t give a shit." - George Clooney, speaking to the Advocate.
"I used to be a very, very fanatical Christian, not that there’s anything wrong with being a Christian, but my beliefs, my core beliefs, definitely have changed as I’ve grown up because of the way I live, the way I am. I joined the Marine Corps because I felt I wanted to be the voice of God in the Marine Corps. I’m pretty sure people very close to me like my mother, my father, and my sister always knew that there was something different about me. I was always at the church, and had those values, had that idea that homosexuality was wrong according to the Christian faith. Eventually, nature comes out." - Sgt. Brandon Morgan, speaking to the Daily Beast.
RELATED: On the day that the story broke on JMG, those of us on this side of things traded a couple of slightly worrying items Morgan had apparently posted online some years ago. The wording was certainly mild compared to what we see here every day, but still there was some momentary concern that the entire "gay Marine in love" story might be some strange hoax. But as we see in the quote above, Morgan was just working through the youthful denial that so many of us faced.
The Buddha is saying, 'You are this.' He doesn’t say, 'I have something extra that I am going to give you.' Trust in yourself, trust in who you are. Sit down, breathe, be listening right now, hearing right now. Be intimate. But you have to do it for yourself.
The Supreme Court has ruled that religiously affiliated organizations like this school have the legal right to discriminate against anyone they choose, so I'm not arguing with the school's actual //legal// rights to fire the music teacher. I believe, however, that the firing was highly //immoral//. And why was it ok for him to keep his job when he was living with another man, but not ok after he talked about getting married. And I wonder if the school has fired any teachers who have been divorced, or who use contraception. I suspect with near 100% certainty the answer is no.
NORMANDY • A popular music teacher at St. Ann Catholic School in north St. Louis County recently was fired after church officials learned that he planned to marry his male partner of 20 years in New York, one of a handful of states where same-sex marriage is legal.
Great job from the Marine spokesman. Not to mention, this was their first kiss. Their four year friendship had turned into a romance by mail (or email) while the Marine was stationed in Afghanistan.
Sgt. Brandon Morgan returned Wednesday from a six-month deployment to Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan.
There to meet him was his friend of four years, Windward Oahu artist Dalan Wells -- a friendship that had turned to a long-distance love during the deployment. This was their first kiss.
"We couldn't talk, I can barely talk now, his hands went numb, my legs were shaking, our first kiss after just knowing how we felt about each other,” Morgan said.
“All my superiors, my staff sergeants, my gunnery sergeants, my lieutenants, my officers, my captains, they're all very ecstatic and very happy that I had somebody to come home to,” Morgan said. “Again, gay or straight, does not matter.”
A spokesperson for Marine Corps Base Hawaii said in a statement: "It's your typical homecoming photo."
The ego must be dethroned, its arrogance must be dismantled, and we must begin, before it is too late, to listen to the ensuing silence. All of this is about becoming who we are in the deepest sense and about surrendering to what creation is asking of us and needing from us just now.
The Washington Post has published a fascinating history of the origins of HIV, based on the fairly widely-accepted theory that the virus sprang from chimp to human during the tumultuous colonial days of western Africa, possibly beginning in the 1880s.
Most of this colonial world didn’t have enough potential victims for such a fragile virus to start a major epidemic. HIV is harder to transmit than many other infections. People can have sex hundreds of times without passing the virus on. To spread widely, HIV requires a population large enough to sustain an outbreak and a sexual culture in which people often have more than one partner, creating networks of interaction that propel the virus onward. To fulfill its grim destiny, HIV needed a kind of place never before seen in Central Africa but one that now was rising in the heart of the region: a big, thriving, hectic place jammed with people and energy, where old rules were cast aside amid the tumult of new commerce. It needed Kinshasa. It was here, hundreds of miles downriver from Cameroon, that HIV began to grow beyond a mere outbreak. It was here that AIDS grew into an epidemic.
Houston Mayor Annise Parker said this week she believes President Barack Obama “needs to evolve a little bit faster” on the issue of marriage for same-sex couples, and that she supports an effort to include marriage equality in the Democratic platform. Meanwhile, Parker rejected a local pastor's call for her to resign over her increasingly public stance on marriage. "I do my duty to uphold the state Constitution and the U.S. Constitution. I swore an oath to that. I take that oath very seriously, but I have my First Amendment rights to free speech. We all have the right to do that and I’m sorry [he doesn't] understand the Constitution," Parker said. The Huffington Post/Gay Voices (2/27), ThinkProgress.org (2/28)
The life that flows through each of us and through everything around us is actually all connected. To say that, of course, means that who I really am cannot be separated from all the things that surround me. Or, to put it another way, all sentient beings have their existence and live within my life.
Members of New York City's Congressional Delegation -- Reps. Jerrold Nadler, Ed Towns, Eliot Engel, Carolyn Maloney, Joe Crowley and Jose Serrano -- released a video to combat the scourge of suicide among LGBT American youths. They join thousands of others across the country working to help those who are at risk. The It Gets Better Project was created in 2010 to address the alarming increase of reported suicide among LGBT youths.
We may be powerless to change the past, but we do have the power to shape the present and the future by what we do, moment to moment, right now. And in maintaining our intention to be as skillful as possible in thought, word, and deed, we’ll find the only true refuge there is.
Bob Green, a onetime radio DJ who married pop singer and Miss Oklahoma Anita Bryant, was found dead Jan. 26 at his home in Miami Beach. He was 80. Mr. Green managed his wife’s rise to stardom as an entertainer and Florida citrus spokeswoman, then followed her into anti-gay activism, which ultimately destroyed their careers — and marriage in 1980. For more than 30 years, Mr. Green lived quietly, alone and resentful.
Never read an obit quite like that. Read the full thing.
As same-sex marriage springs up all around him, Delaware Gov. Jack Markell says that it will come soon to his state too. 
