Category: LGBTQ

Number 3421 on the List of Things that I’d Never Say

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God Bless Jerry Brown.

He’s always rubbed me the wrong way, but his decision to accurately label the Califoria hate initiative is a very good thing:

Those voters were much more likely to oppose the measure when read Brown’s wording (58 percent against it and 30 percent for it) than those in the same category who were read the old version of Prop. 8 (42 percent against and 37 percent for it), according to the Field Poll.

The Brown language reads, in part: “Eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry.” The original version read, in part: “Limit on marriage.”

No big surprise here…If you tell the truth people vote now on this abomination.

When Does a Writer Become too Personally Repulsive to Read?

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Orson Scott Card does not raise the question for me, I read Ender’s Game, and was not particularly impressed, but he does for a lot of avid readers of SF.

His recent essay equating gay marriage with allowing blind people to drive, and suggesting a fascist state will mercilessly expose children to “te gay” will further conflict those folks who think that he doesn’t write crap, particularly when he seems to call for a revolution to promulgate anti-gay discrimination in our society.

Luckily, I find his plotting pedestrian, his characterizations flat, and his writing not particularly engaging, which is which I read Ender’s Game 20+ years ago, and haven’t read anything else of his since.

DADT on the Block

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It looks like the worm is finally turning on the antedeluvian Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy of the US Military,with Congress looking at changing the law.

Of course, Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a right wing group, claims that it will drive away too many allegedly straight soldiers, but honestly this is not likely to be the case, and as the people most likely to leave are those who are attempting to make the US military an explicitly Evangelical Christian institution, it’s a net win for everyone.

We get needed skilled soldiers, and the religious whack-jobs who are creating a religiously hostile institution in contravention of good military order.

Massachusetts Senate Passes Repeal of 1918 Backdoor Anti-Miscegenation Law

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In 1913, Massachusetts passed a law making it illegal for people to marry their if it was not legal in their home state. It was intended to prevent blacks and whites from other states from conducting an interracial marriage there.

No one paid too much attention to it, until Mitt Romney dusted it off to hinder gay marriage in Massachusetts to further his efforts to appeal to bigots in the ‘Phant base in his race for president.

Well, the Mass. Senate just voted to repeal it, and passage looks likely in the Mass House, and governor Patrick says that he will sign it.

Woot!

God is Beyond Our Comprehension, So Many Use Him to Justify Hate

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So at best, we only see bits and pieces of the totality that is called in Kabbalistic thought the Ein Sof, and what see reflects far more on us than it does on the nature of the divine.

For conservative Anglicans, it appears that when they look for God, all they find is hate, because that is all that they look for:

Conservative evangelicals representing half of the world’s Anglicans launched a new global church yesterday, challenging the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury and vowing to rescue people from the forces of “militant secularism and pluralism” created by a “spiritual decline” in developing economies.

The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, Foca, will sever ties with the main churches in the US and Canada, whose leaders they accuse of betraying biblical teaching. Foca architects will tomorrow go to the conservative evangelical church of All Souls, in central London, to discuss global Anglicanism and English orthodoxy.

Hundreds of disgruntled clergy, representing many Church of England parishes, will be in the audience and the speakers will include the Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, and the Archbishop of Uganda, Henry Luke Orombi.

So much training in theology, and all they can think to do is to search scriptures for reasons to hate.

Retired Anglican Bishop John Shelby Spong asks more generally, “Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?”

The answer is, “yes”, and for these people, this is all that religion is for them.

California Gay Marriage Amendment May Also Bans Straight Marriage

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Looks like the Talibaptists may have screwed up, bit time:

Should voters approve the measure, Cruz said, offering another potential outcome, it could inadvertently affect traditional marriages. That’s because the amendment would undo only part of the court’s decision — allowing gay couples to marry — but not the rest, which says that same-sex couples cannot be recognized differently than opposite-sex couples, he said.

“If you’ve got those two rules — that you can’t let them marry, but you can’t give different options to gay and straight couples — then one possible outcome, if the amendment were to pass, is that no one could get married in California,” Cruz said.

Oopsie.

New York to Recognize Same-Sex Unions From Out of State

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Kudos to Governor Patterson for directing state agencies to, “all state agencies to begin to revise their policies and regulations to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions, like Massachusetts, California and Canada.”

That sound you hear is wingnut heads exploding, as they just got outmanouevered.

This will doubtless be statute in 2009, when the NY State Senate goes Democratic.