All of the reports point back to the same announcement on Facebook from one of Phelps’ sons, Nate (who fled the cult at 18 years old back in 1976, has since come out as atheist, and has spent many of the last decades working in favor of LGBT rights). A few people have called Nate and other excommunicated family members to confirm a few facts: the senior Phelps was excommunicated from his own cult last August, and he’s currently a patient at the Midland Hospice Center in Topeka. Continue reading As ye sow…→
Irish heritage should include all of the community…The fight continues over the banning of openly gay groups to march in both the New York City and Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Back in the 1990s the non-profit groups that put on each parade re-organized in order to proclaim the parade a religious (Irish Catholic) processional in order to keep the legal right to exclude people despite anti-discrimination laws. And that’s fine.
The troublesome question has been ever since then, why do non-irish and non-catholic elected officials march in a religious processional? And more importantly, why are police and firefighters allowed to march in uniform?
The last point is particularly important. It has long been the consensus opinion (and has even been accepted as a statement of fact at the federal appeals court level), that allowing the police to participate in uniform in a discriminatory rally or parade gives ordinary citizens the impression that the police department (and the entire justice system) endorses the bigoted message of said event. When police participated in Anti-segregationist Marches in the past, it had a chilling effect on the minority communities. People in those communities became even more reluctant to call the police to report crimes, afraid to cooperate with police in the investigation of crimes, et cetera. All one has to do is to watch the video of nearly an entire contingent of cops in uniform marching in the St. Patrick’s day parade a few years ago all flipping off a small group of gay protestors standing along the parade route to understand what kind of message that conveys.
The new mayor of NYC decided not to march in this year’s parade (as did the mayor of Boston). The NYC mayor instead participated in the St Pat’s For All parade earlier in the month. Note, that article mentions a deal that was being worked out for one gay group to march in the Boston parade, but that deal has since been rescinded.
The mayor has declined to try to forbid NYPD officers from marching in uniform in the bigots’ parade, claiming it is a free speech issue. Except, the courts ruled long ago that because marching in uniform creates the impression that the city endorses a discriminatory message, that the city’s responsibility to serve all citizens equally trumps the rights of the cops. They can’t forbid the cops to march, they can’t forbid the cops to march with banners and signs that say they are cops, but they can forbid them to march in uniform.
The sad thing is that, since gay rights groups have been lobbying these city governments to ban the uniforms from the parade, parade organizers and their apologists have squawked loudly, claiming that doing so would be discrimination!
This coming from the people who created new religious non-profit corporations to sponsor the parade for the explicitly stated purpose to discriminate. It’s all well and good to discriminate against gay citizens, but Saints Preserve us if you suggest that maybe the police department shouldn’t endorse such a thing…
Can you feel the godly love oozing from the sign?Just when we thought it was safe for us gay guys to go out in public, Pastor Manning from New York is now reminding his co-religionists that gay people should be stoned to death, because “stoning is still the law.” In the same sermon (which he has posted on youtube), he refers to the notion that god is love as a teaching from Satan. I kid you not! Continue reading Fears of a white homo devil→
A church sign, posted his sermon on youtube, repeated it in his podcast. Gee, I wonder how people heard about it?I wrote earlier about the preacher who claimed that the reason there are more gay couples living openly in Harlem is because President Obama had unleashed “white homo demons” to steal black men away from good black women. His crazy church sign and the sermon that accompanied it went viral and was reported all over the place. And then, as the news-of-the-weird cycle does, everyone moved on. He now claims that the reason the story was only a brief blip was because Obama has ordered the media to ignore the pastor.
“It’s the end of the world as we know it… and I feel fine!I finally watched Iron Sky, which is a very silly movie about a secret colony of Nazis hidden on the dark side of the moon, that has been plotting the “liberation” of earth for 70-some years. It’s got some nice, diesel-punk (that’s like steampunk, except moved forward about 40 years) sets and devices. It has some nice homages to a couple of movies (Dr. Strangelove, Downfall, just to name two) without beating you over the head with it. It was fun.
I especially liked the song that played over the end credits, “Under the Iron Sky”—not just because its chorus line, “We will meet again, under the Iron Sky,” was a nice nod to Kubrick’s choice to play “We’ll Meet Again,” over the end credits of Dr. Strangelove. While I was checking to see if the song was available to buy online (it is, along with an entire album of music inspired by the movie released by the Finnish band, Kaiti Kink Ensemble), I got thinking about other end-of-the-world movies and why I like them.
I wound up polling my twitter followers for more suggestions of end-of-the-world movies. That spawned a side conversation about the difference between a post-apocalyptic story versus a story about an apocalypse. For me, not all post-apocalyptic stories are end-of-the-world stories. And though I’ve been thinking about it for a whole week, I still haven’t been able to clearly articulate why I think of Mad Max as an end-of-the-world story, but Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome are post-apocalyptic but not end-of-the-world in my head.
However, since I polled my twitter followers, I’m going to poll you! Note that you can choose Other and type in the name of your favorite if it isn’t listed.
Also, please feel free to add a comment with your own thoughts on the subject. I want to post a follow-up on the subject. Maybe by then I’ll have a better idea of how to explain my definition of end-of-the-world movie!
Together forever.We’ve never made a super big deal out of Valentines Day. I think we’ve both had more fun, the last couple of years, meeting up with friends to celebrate Jared’s birthday, instead of doing the Valentine’s thing. Nor have we ever been really over the top on any of our anniversaries. In fact, both of us frequently forget them altogether. It could be argued that it’s because we have too many. One reason we have so many is because for the longest time, we couldn’t agree on what constituted our anniversary, since we weren’t able to legally marry until very recently. I favored February 7, as the anniversary of our first date. Michael leaned toward Easter, because we first met (nearly three years before that first date) at the NorthWest Science Fiction Convention on an Easter weekend. There was also a strong argument to be made for the date we signed and notarized the domestic partnership papers and had a party with friends, of course.
Now that we are finally legally hitched (and given what a struggle it has been to get it legal here), shouldn’t our wedding anniversary be the one we observe?
Or course, it’s impossible to forget about Valentine’s Day. I know this because I have been told many, many, many times by various people how the way our society deals with Valentine’s Day amounts to oppression or even abuse of people who are not in a relationship…Continue reading What’s the big deal about Valentine’s Day?→
A kitty and his teddy bear.I’ve written before about some of the disasters in my early attempts at dating. In some ways those disasters seemed worse than usual because most of them happened in my late twenties and early thirties. I didn’t date much in high school, and what dating I did do was with the gender I wasn’t actually attracted to, and while some things about navigating relationships are universal, there is a big difference between the awkwardness of trying to learn how to make things click with someone you’re attracted to, rather than the awkwardness of trying to make yourself feel desire for someone when there wasn’t any underlying physical attraction at all.
For a while I thought things were going so badly simply because I was playing catch-up. Other people had made these kinds of mistakes as teenagers, whereas I hadn’t. Other times I wondered if maybe the cliches about most gay men not wanting commitment had a grain or more of truth (this despite the fact that I was also hanging out with gay couples who had been together for many years). I wondered if I’d just had bad luck and kept meeting guys who only wanted a fling.
And then, eventually, I had to admit the truth: that the only thing all the failed relationships had in common was me, and I needed to figure out what I was doing wrong…Continue reading Love is in the bear→
There are many differences between my story and Dan’s (besides his being famous, and me not). Michael and I have not adopted, for instance. I have never, ever wanted to live in New York City (visits have been fine, but live there? Never!). And so on.
When people talked about how beautiful the mountains are, it was more of a “meh” for me than a “WTF.” I grew up in the central Rocky Mountain states. Mountains are supposed to always be there, being beautiful. It’s flat places (and how anyone can stand to live there) that always baffle me…Continue reading How I learned to love the city→
What’s a hater to do?The song, “America, the Beautiful” got an entire day’s lesson in the Colorado State History class I had to pass in ninth grade. Katherine Lee Bates, an English professor from Wellesley College, came to Colorado Springs in 1893 to teach a summer class at Colorado College. As her train rolled across the plains of eastern Colorado, drawing closer to the dramatic front line of the Rocky Mountains spread across the horizon, she wrote in her journal about the landscape she was passing. Colorado Springs is near the base of Pike’s Peak, one of the taller mountains in the Rockies, and one day Bates took an excursion by train and then mule to the peak of the mountain, where she later said she felt as if all the beauty of America was laid before her, and inspired a poem to form in her mind. She eventually submitted the poem, entitled “Pike’s Peak” to a publication called The Congregationalist. When it was published in the July 4th edition in 1895, appeared under the title, “America the Beautiful.”
We learned that and other facts about the subsequent versions of the poem Bates re-published, and how it was eventually set to music by Samuel A. Ward, in class. What the textbook failed to mention is that Katherine Lee Bates was almost certainly lesbian…Continue reading …with brotherhood?→
Not quite toothless…Frank Rich has a very well-written piece at New York Magazine, “Stop Beating a Dead Fox,” that is currently making the rounds. Rich does an excellent job laying out the declining ratings for Fox News, including a look at the demographics of its dwindling audience. There’s also some interesting explanation of why Fox has been both very slow and ludicrously clueless about how to integrate the net in general and social media in particular into its service and coverage. The reporting half of the article is really very good, and you ought to give it a read.
However, the most passionate part of his argument is the claim that when those of us who don’t share Fox’s ideology react to the latest outrageous commentary or false story, we’re simply giving them the attention they want. And we should stop doing that. That sounds eerily like the advice I used to get from some adults regarding some of my most frequent childhood bullies. And it is just one of the deep flaws I see in Mr. Rich’s arguments…Continue reading “Just ignore them!”→
Font Folly 