Yesterday, the Supreme Court officially declined to review any of the Marriage Equality cases that had been appealed to them thus far. Declining to review means that the ruling by each appeals court is, essentially, upheld. The immediate effect was the stays against those rulings were lifted, and in five more states Marriage Equality now is the law of the land. The secondary effect is that any other states covered by one of the five Circuit Courts whose rulings were upheld will almost certainly become marriage equality states as soon as an appeal gets to the circuit. That means very soon the number of states that have marriage equality will be 30. In fact, officials in Colorado, knowing that the circuit court they are currently appealing to has already ruled against a nearly identical ban in a neighboring state, have decided to drop the appeal, and have told county clerks to start issuing marriage licenses.
Now, there are several other cases that have yet to be ruled on by any circuit court, so those last 20 states may take a while.
Governors of at least two of the states who lost Monday are not taking it gracefully. Most hilarious of these is Mary Fallin, governor of Oklahoma. Fallin’s righteous indignation is so funny because Fallin is a divorced adulterer.Continue reading Traditional marriage?→
So often what I wind up putting in Friday Links is bad news, outraging news, and so forth. The Tonight Show rounds up real news anchors to read things we’d all like to hear about on the news for a change. I’ve Got Good News and Good News:
Meanwhile, the ASAPScience guys finally settle the question, which is better for health reasons, drying your hands with paper towels or an air blower. Paper Towel vs Hand Dryers:
And those scientists who built the small underwater robot that mimics swimming motions to maneuver and not scare off sea life have made some improvements: Octobot uses webbed arms to swim faster. There’s a short video in the story!
A pair of bigots.In case you didn’t already know that neither Pastor Manning nor Pastor Driscoll are even slightly acquainted with logic, the last couple week’s revelations will make it crystal clear.
I’m not even sure where to begin. Pastor Manning’s most recently posted youtube video explains how NASA’s Voyager spacecraft proves that homos are perverts, with a long digressive rant about rectums. Pastor Driscoll’s supporters have been trying to distance themselves from recently unearthed postings on the church’s forums in which Driscoll explained that god created each woman as a special home for a particular penis.
I’ve written many times before about my own ambivalent relationship with football. And, as we enter the second week of the regular season, my enthusiasm for my Seahawks is high after our great opening game, but my deep misgivings about the league and the institution have me at a low, and not just because of the case that everyone has been talking about this week.
It happens all the time. Authorities take some action which is clearly out of proportion to whatever has allegedly happened. Other people report on the incident, generating a lot of negative publicity. In response to the calls from the public, the authorities explain that there is more to the story. Those authorities then tell us that there is more “information” they neglected to mention before, and they spout of a story that sounds like a six-year-old’s excuse for why they didn’t break that lamp whose broken pieces they are standing over. Other people then repeat the excuses from the authorities as if said excuses were independently verified facts. Those of us who raised concerns about the original action are told to let it go, because “there’s more to the story.
(Source: musingsfromunderthebus.wordpress.com)Mars Hill Church, a cult-like evangelical megachurch/ denomination headquartered right here in the Emerald City has had a really, really bad summer. Scandals about lead Pastor Mark Driscoll plagiarising most of the content of several of his books, the church spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy one of Driscoll’s books onto the New York Times best seller list, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for specific disasters overseas, then sending only a few hundred, raising millions of dollars for a Jesus Festival that was supposed to happen last weekend, but was simply never scheduled or organized, ordered members to shun other members who raised questions and taking further action to defame said former members, threatening legal action against former members based on spiritual covenants signed by the former members, suing former associate pastors who try to find work in other churches under non-compete clauses in employment agreements, and so on, and so on.
As I said before, all of these transgressions are serious problems. But all of these these things are merely symptoms of a deeper issue. Mars Hill claims to follow the teachings of Jesus, and Jesus had something to say on this issue: “Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.” (Matt 7:16-17)
When an organization is producing this much unethical and immoral behavior, it isn’t a matter of just one bad person. Even though I firmly believe that Driscoll is a narcissitic bigot and con man, he isn’t the only problem. He’s the leader of this church, but that doesn’t explain the financial shenanigans, lies, and violations of law at the National Organization for Marriage. Or the lies told by Save America. Nor the crimes against humanity and related actions by evangelical leaders such as Scott Lively. Or scamming tax-payers for millions in tax breaks for a creationist museum.
The evangelical fundamentalist theology is inherently hateful, fearful, and toxic. One of the evangelical movement’s central tenets is that in god’s eyes everyone isn’t merely imperfect, but infinitely wicked. And rather than seeing god’s love as infinitely merciful and compassionate, they see god as being so consumed by wrath at sin that only by killing his own son could he even consider being merciful.
They have scripture they quote to rationalize this belief, but other Christians read those same scriptures and come to a different conclusion. Evangelicals hold their fellow humans (and often themselves) in utter contempt, ignoring Jesus’ teachings about compassion. When you combine that with the anti-intellectual, anti-modernist mindset of most fundamentalists, it is no surprise that so many of their leaders and institutions are corrupt, because the followers are infinitely susceptible to being hoodwinked.
Ahmed Said (upper) and Dwone Anderson-Young (lower) were murdered, execution style, together.On the night of May 31st, two young men, Dwone Anderson-Young and Ahmed Said, spent an evening dancing at a gay bar, then were seen together later at a nearby pizza place. Dwone was the great-grandson of jazz legend Ernestine Anderson. Ahmed’s family immigrated more recently from Somalia. Dwone was less than two weeks from graduating from the University of Washington and already had a job lined up at Microsoft. Unfortunately, not many hours after they left the pizza place together, in the wee small hours of June 1st, they were both murdered on the street, not far from Dwone’s home.
The motive for the crime was unknown at first, though robbery was immediately ruled out. Neither young man was linked to any gang and neither had a criminal record. They were both openly gay and well-known in the neighborhood. While there are gay gang-bangers, they tend to be deeply, deeply closeted.
Witnesses placed another young man, one with a rather long and violent criminal record, near the scene…
The argument they are pushing is: “allowing same sex couples to marry is exactly the same as prohibiting interracial couples to marry.” If you don’t read that closely, it sounds like they’re finally agreeing with one of our arguments, but look again (and go look at the confusing graphic that accompanies the meme they’re trying to get their people to post everywhere).
Because interracial marriage bans prevented people from marrying who they wanted to merely because the color of one half of the couple’s skin didn’t match the other was bad. Most everyone agrees the interracial marriage ban was bad. And the Ruth Institute agrees. But, they say, allowing same-sex couples to marry is just as bad because it prevents straight women from marrying gay men if they want to. And so forth.
That’s literally their argument.
Which is wrong on so, so many levels. Allowing my husband and I to legally marry does not prevent any gay person (closeted or not) from entering into a marriage with a straight person if they want. It doesn’t. If they want to do that, they can. I don’t know why they would want to, but they can.
Allowing someone to do something doesn’t prevent other people for doing it.
The closest you can get to any “logic” in this argument is that if marriage equality is not available anywhere, it increases the odds that people will be closeted, and it makes it slightly more likely that unsuspecting straight people will get married to closeted gay people, and probably suffer a lot of heartache later on.
I think Jeremy is right: desperation is making them lose their minds.
Their new sign says that individuals and churches that support “homos” will be cursed with cancer, HIV (the virus that causes AIDS), syphilis, stroke, madness, and itch, then references I Corinthians 6:9: “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind…” Interestingly they don’t reference the next verse, which is a continuation of the sentence, “nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”
That’s important because Pastor Manning spent time in prison in both New York and Florida for burglary, robbery, larceny, criminal possession of a weapon, and other things. So verse 10 would seem to say that Pastor Manning may not be so welcome in the kingdom of God.
But less snarkily, look at another word there: “revilers.” A reviler is someone who insults or verbally abuses someone else, someone who criticizes abusively. Such as someone who calls people devils, or calls for whole classes of people to be stoned to death. That sort of thing.
I know that Pastor Manning is using one of the more hateful translations of the Bible. Since 1946 certain people have decided that the scriptures weren’t anti-gay enough, and they went through changing verses where it isn’t entirely clear what they are referring to to explicitly says “homosexual.” But the two words that used to be translated into english as “effeminate” and “abuses of themselves with mankind” are not so clearcut.
Scholars argue a lot about what the Apostle Paul meant there. Paul wrote in greek, which had a word for men who have sex with other men already, but Paul didn’t use that word. Greek also had a word for male temple prostitutes, and Paul didn’t use that word. Instead, he made up a word, arsenokoitai. That words has never appeared in any other Greek text at all. It appears to be a compound of the words “man” and “beds.” If Paul was condemning homosexual behavior, why would he make up a new word when words already existed for it? And also, it is important to note that he uses specifically male-gendered nouns, so if Paul was condemning homosexual behavior, it was only gay male homosexual behavior: so apparently lesbians are fine, as far as Paul is concerned.
My own guess, based on how much of a misogynist Paul appeared to be, and how much he despised sex of all kinds (the fundamentalists all ignore Paul’s other admonishments where he condemns marriage and having children as an anti-Christian waste of time that would better be spent preparing for Jesus’ return; yes, Paul was against people marrying and raising families), is that Paul was making a general condemnation of all kinds of sexual and romantic behavior, here. And he aimed it at men because Paul didn’t really believe that women mattered, or at the very least he didn’t believe that women made choices of their own, but rather simply did what men told them to do.
And there is nothing in 1 Corinthians at all about cancer, or the virus that causes AIDS, or itching.
But Manning sees lots of things that aren’t actually in the text. It’s very convenient for a man with as big an ego as his, and as long a history of abusing and using others as him.
So Time allowed a college student to write an op-ed piece they published this week called, “Dear White Gays: Stop Stealing Black Female Culture.” A lot of other people have written some great responses to it (I most particularly recommend Vice Magazine columnist Dave Schilling’s answer in his This Week in Racism column), but I want to focus on something that most of them have overlooked. Among the offences Ms. Mannie lays at the feet of white gay men as proof that we are stealing the culture of black women: having sex with black men.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court officially declined to review any of the Marriage Equality cases that had been appealed to them thus far. Declining to review means that the ruling by each appeals court is, essentially, upheld. The immediate effect was the stays against those rulings were lifted, and in five more states Marriage Equality now is the law of the land. The secondary effect is that any other states covered by one of the five Circuit Courts whose rulings were upheld will almost certainly become marriage equality states as soon as an appeal gets to the circuit. That means very soon the number of states that have marriage equality will be 30. In fact, officials in Colorado, knowing that the circuit court they are currently appealing to has already ruled against a nearly identical ban in a neighboring state, have decided to drop the appeal, and have told county clerks to start issuing marriage licenses.
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