Gallup reports: Fifty percent of Americans believe same-sex marriages should be recognized by law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages -- down slightly from 53% last year, but marking only the second time in Gallup's history of tracking this question that at least half of Americans have supported legal same-sex marriage. Forty-eight percent say such marriages should not be legal.
Clinton, who is married to former US President Bill Clinton, will be honoured at a star-studded black-tie fundraiser preceding WorldPride 2012 on 5 July. The gala evening is in aid of Pride London’s new Solidarity Fund, which supports organisation within the Commonwealth that work with and for LGBT people to tackle homophobia and transphobia. Also to be honoured, with the “International Community Award”, is ILGA – the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association. Founded in 1978, ILGA brings together more than 750 LGBTI groups from around the world.RELATED: WorldPride has previously been held Rome (2000) and Jerusalem (2006). After WorldPride Toronto in 2014, the event will take place on a five-year cycle. (Tipped by JMG reader Huntington)
Maurice Sendak, the gay author of iconic children's books like Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, has died at 83.
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.
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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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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.Here's the part you may find the most infuriating.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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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As
soon as we think we know something, then we become rigid and
unresponsive. You know the famous phrase: 'For the beginner there are
many possibilities, but for the expert there are few.' Maintaining a
mind of 'not knowing' allows us to respond to situations with openness,
freshness, and joy.
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"Even
as Republicans try to wrestle women into chastity belts, the Vatican is
trying to muzzle American nuns. Who thinks it’s cool to bully nuns?
While continuing to heal and educate, the community of sisters is aging
and dying out because few younger women are willing to make such
sacrifices for a church determined to bring women to heel. Yet the nuns
must be yanked into line by the crepuscular, medieval men who run the
Catholic Church. How can the church hierarchy be more offended by the
nuns’ impassioned advocacy for the poor than by priests’ sordid
pedophilia? How do you take spiritual direction from a church that seems
to be losing its soul?" - Maureen Dowd, on the Vatican's order to punish nuns that don't publicly oppose gay marriage.
When
you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the
fundamental point; for the place, the way, is neither large nor small,
neither yours nor others’. The place, the way, has not carried over from
the past, and it is not merely arising now.
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