Bertrand Russell first delivered this lecture on March 6, 1927 to the National Secular Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall.
What Is a Christian? 0:16 The Existence of God 4:16 The First-cause Argument 5:27 The Natural-law Argument 7:42 The Argument from Design 12:08 The Moral Arguments for Deity 15:18 The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice 18:06 The Character of Christ 20:28 Defects in Christ's Teaching 23:22 The Moral Problem 25:43 The Emotional Factor 30:45 How the Churches Have Retarded Progress 33:48 Fear, the Foundation of Religion 35:41 What We Must Do 37:10
This is a video I created for my friends and family detailing how and why I went from a deeply religious Christian to an atheist.
It's not meant to persuade or "deconvert" anyone but is a detailed description of the step-by-step process which led me to where I am today. I hope you enjoy it!
"Radical atheism is the only hope for the world" ~Roger Waters
Masturbation is a controversial topic in Islam, as the Qur'an makes no mention of it, leaving Muslim scholars and clerics to make their own interpretations.
A limited number of rulings condemn the act as haram (forbidden), while many simply put it in the category of makruh, or "disliked." Some interpretations also allow masturbation under certain circumstances [ http://www.nairaland.com/2086341/whats-islamic-rule-istimna-masturbation ], with a 14th century scholar ruling: "If a man is turned between continued desire or releasing it, and if this man does not have a wife and he fears he will suffer because of this (someone like a prisoner, or a pauper), then it is permissible for him to masturbate."
Feel free to follow Mücahid Cihad Han's interpretation, but we think it's a risk worth taking.
The letter, signed by rabbis from the Belz Hasidic sect in Stamford Hill and sent last week to parents in the community, says that female drivers are a violation of “the traditional rules of modesty in our camp.” It also states that, beginning in August, children driven by their mothers will be barred from attending school, according to The Jewish Chronicle [id.].
A statement issued on behalf of the local Belz's women's organization, Neshei Belz, said the women of the group feel “extremely privileged and valued to be part of a community where the highest standards of refinement, morality and dignity are respected," The Jewish Chronicle reports.
We believe that driving a vehicle is a high pressured activity where our values may be compromised by exposure to selfishness, road-rage, bad language and other inappropriate behavior.
We do, however, understand that there are many who conduct lifestyles that are different to ours, and we do not, in any way, disrespect them or the decisions they make.
The question of whether women should be allowed to drive is an ongoing debate in various Hasidic communities. The movement often holds women to strict standards of modesty and expects young women in particular to prioritize childbearing over everything else [ http://forward.com/articles/172568/cracks-in-a-holy-vessel/ ]. Frimet Goldberger, an American woman who grew up in New York's Kiryas Joel Hasidic sect, wrote earlier this year about her experiences: She was forbidden from driving [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/30/kiryas-joel-women-driving-goldberger_n_6580568.html ] and risked being shunned and having her children taken out of school if she did.
Later, while defending her story in a Facebook post [ https://www.facebook.com/frimet.goldberger/posts/10203238704870053 ], Goldberger wrote: "Of course, the overwhelming majority of women in Kiryas Joel are content with their lifestyles... But there are many women who do wish for greater freedom to come and go as they please. This story is about them, and for them."
Lindsey Graham Reintroduces 20-Week Abortion Ban: 'I Am Dying For That Debate' Waterloo, Iowa -- Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) speaks at a campaign stop at Veteran of Foreign Wars Post 1623 on June 5, 2015 in Waterloo, Iowa. 06/11/2015 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/11/lindsey-graham-abortion_n_7561410.html [with comments]
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Fischer: Legal Abortion Will Result In 'The Destruction Of This Land Through The Shedding Of Blood In Our Streets'
Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Thursday, 6/4/2015 10:42 am
"The thing that brings kingdoms down, even great nations like the United States," Fischer said, "is moral rot, it is moral decay, that is what signals the end of a once mighty nation, a once great nation. And I believe we are on the precipice, as many others have argued, we are on the precipice of going over the edge and if we go over the edge, there's no stopping until we hit the bottom."
"We have filled this entire country with innocent blood and the Lord will not pardon that," he declared [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtJp8QTpR_c (below, as embedded; with comments)], saying that the nation must collectively repent and beg God's forgiveness or face the alternative, "which is the destruction of this land through the shedding of blood in our streets. That will come."
He responded that it is possible that the coworker’s three-year-old child died as a result of human error at the hospital: “Are you going to blame that on God? That’s not God, that’s people who are making mistakes.”
Robertson, who once said at a faith healing that God could bring a dead baby back to life [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pat-robertson-conducts-faith-healing ], continued that perhaps the child would have turned out to be the next Adolf Hitler, and therefore it is better that the woman’s child is in Heaven rather than becoming a murderer.
“As far as God’s concerned, he knows the end from the beginning and He sees a little baby and that little baby could grow up to be Adolf Hitler, he could grow up to be Joseph Stalin, he could grow up to be some serial killer, or he could grow up to die of a hideous disease,” Robertson said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmeH0s3H68I (below, as embedded; with comments)]. “God sees all of that, and for that life to be terminated while he’s a baby, he’s going to be with God forever in Heaven so it isn’t a bad thing. So how could God do that? How could a good God let that happen? Well, the good God is going to take that baby to Heaven right now, and that isn't a bad thing.”
Court hears chilling confession letters from missionary about holding down and raping children while he was volunteering in a Kenyan orphanage Matthew Lane Durham is accused of sexually abusing several children between April and June 2014 at a Kenyan orphanage where he volunteered. Durham, 20, pleaded not guilty to the 17 charges he faces, including aggravated sexual abuse and engaging in illicit sexual conduct in foreign places. 'I took her to the bathroom and forced her to have sex with me. This has happened on more than one occasion.' This is one of the horrific confessions that Durham allegedly wrote out. Excerpts of Durham's confession were read in court by Assistant U.S. Attorney Don Gifford, including a section pertaining to the alleged assault of a 12-year-old girl. Durham's parents, Melissa Durham, left, and Kyle Durham, right, and other family members reportedly discussed a plan to 'pack the courtroom' with supporters. • Matthew Lane Durham, 20, is accused of sexually abusing up to ten children, ages four to ten, while volunteering in Kenya • Durham, of Edmond, Oklahoma, has pleaded not guilty to the 17 charges he faces including engaging in illicit sexual conduct in foreign places • Assistant U.S. Attorney Don Gifford spent part of his opening arguments reading excerpts of Durham's confession • Durham's lawyer says isn't true and was coerced into confessing 10 June 2015 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3117771/Trial-gets-underway-man-accused-abusing-Kenyan-kids.html [with comments]
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Sandy Rios: Duggar And Hastert Are Victims Of 'Systematic Targeting' Of Conservatives
Submitted by Brian Tashman on Friday, 6/5/2015 11:34 am
“What he did was wrong but I think maybe even the verbiage in describing it doesn’t describe the actual thing that happened,” she said of Josh Duggar. “It does seem very much to me that they are again the subject of targeting in order to completely destroy the family, it’s just an amazing thing.”
She added: “Something should go off in someone’s head about the way in which conservatives, social conservatives, are being systematically targeted. It’s going to happen and it’s been happening for a very long time.”
“This is the kind of thing that is going to be happening to conservatives, just think of the Denny Hastert situation,” she said, citing the Duggar and Hastert abuse scandals as reasons that conservatives, whom she suggested are the targets of government surveillance, should oppose measures like the PATRIOT Act and the USA Freedom Act.
Evil liberal media continues to persecute righteous white Christians by nitpicking about the sexual abuse of children
by Fred Clark June 12, 2015
John Perry is an impressively prolific writer. I can’t say that any of his books seem like anything I’d want to read, but I do have to admire the sheer volume of his literary output.
Well, “literary” may not be quite the right word to describe Perry’s body of work. He’s more of a hired gun — the ghostwriter or, more euphemistically, “co-author” of soft-focus political and “inspirational” memoirs, pop-histories, and slender, hagiographic biographies.
Many of Perry’s prominent clients — the non-writers he writes “with,” or for, or as — come from the Southern Gothic Fundie fringes of the religious right. He’s written for/with/as Alabama theocrat Roy Moore, Southern Baptist race-hustler and plagiarist Richard Land, and Randian/Calvinist crackpot Marvin Olasky of World magazine. All of whom were, unsurprisingly, very happy to work with a writer whose fan-boy biography of Gen. Robert E. Lee was subtitled both “A Life of Virtue” and “Goodness in Action.”
For white fundamentalists like Moore, Land and Olasky, “virtue” and “goodness” are synonymous with treason in defense of slavery, rape, torture, and trafficking in children. “Christian heritage” and all that.
John Perry has also written two books for former Fox News host and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, one titled Character Makes a Difference [ http://www.amazon.com/Character-Makes-Difference-Where-Believe/dp/080544677X ] and the other Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That’s Bringing Common Sense Back to America [ http://www.amazon.com/Do-Right-Thing-Movement-Bringing/dp/1595230572 ]. Both are campaign books, written with an eye to establishing and reinforcing Huckabee’s political brand as an avuncular moral scold who’s condescending and sanctimonious … but in a charming, folksy way.
Huckabee is currently stumbling in his second attempt to win the Republican nomination for president. In a very crowded field of candidates with mostly indistinguishable policy ideas, Huckabee so far stands out mainly for being the only candidate to defend the Duggars and their attempts to cover-up and excuse the sexual abuse eventually confessed by their oldest son [ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/05/28/the-duggar-family-scandal-a-reader/ ]. Huckabee has long supported the reality-TV-famous family, and vice versa, as John Seavey puts it [ http://mightygodking.com/2015/05/26/exeunt-huckabee/ ]: Huckabee “has hitched his wagon pretty hard to the creepy cult/family, holding them up as a shining example of American family values to contrast with the neglectful, even abusive decision on the part of the Obamas to let their kids listen to Beyonce.”
Seavey was sure that this link — compounded by Huckabee’s doubling-down on his defense of the family and their defiant non-response to Josh Duggar’s creepy criminality — would doom Huckabee’s presidential aspirations. “As political strategies go,” Seavey writes, “standing in solidarity with the child molester and the people who helped cover up his crimes” should mean that “Huckabee is never going to be taken seriously as a politician in this country ever again. He might not even be able to get his Fox News job back.”
That seems reasonable. It seems like it ought to be true. But I don’t think it is. Mike Huckabee’s viability as a conservative politician and Fox News host (I repeat myself) is based on his appeal to a considerable niche of the Southern white Christian voting bloc. As long as that niche continues to support him, he will continue “to be taken seriously as a politician.” And the Southern white Christians of that niche are, apparently, pleased that Huckabee is “standing in solidarity with the child molester and the people who helped cover up his crimes.”
If anything, the Duggar scandal has reinforced their support for Huckabee in that it reinforces his/their self-aggrandizing narrative of “persecution” from the nasty liberal media conspiracy.
Spinning Josh Duggar’s confessed crimes into evidence of this “persecution” — and thereby further evidence of his and their own Christian virtue — was quite a trick. Now we’ll have to see if Mike Huckabee can perform that same trick a second time.
John Perry, a prolific author who co-wrote two books with former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and co-wrote one with Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, was accused of child molestation in two separate lawsuits, BuzzFeed News has found.
A 2012 police investigation of Perry’s alleged offenses found that “the allegations of sexual battery were sustained” but that the statute of limitations had expired.
... In a sworn affidavit submitted during divorce proceedings, Perry’s ex-wife attests that she “filed for divorce as a result of Mr. Perry’s inappropriate marital conduct, to which he admitted to in his Response to Interrogatories numbers 1 and 2.” Throughout the court documents, “inappropriate marital conduct” appears to be a euphemism for the alleged molestation.
... Another filing, submitted by Perry’s ex-wife’s attorney earlier in the same proceedings, refers to Perry’s “admitted sexual abuse” of a minor child. Perry’s response to that filing — also submitted prior to his ex-wife’s affidavit — does not deny the abuse, or that Perry admitted it.
... a police investigation launched in 2012 found the allegations against Perry “were sustained,” according to a police department spokesperson, but that statute of limitations had passed.
“The alleged sexual battery was reported to have occurred when the victim was between the ages of 11 and 14,” said Nashville police department spokesperson Don Aaron in a statement to BuzzFeed News.
“As a result of the investigation, the allegations of sexual battery were sustained, but it was determined that the statute of limitations had tolled, barring prosecution. The victim was age 18 when she first disclosed the allegations to non-law enforcement and said at that time she did not want the matter reported to the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services or the police.”
The same “alleged sexual battery” of a young victim apparently also forced Perry to resign as a deacon at his PCA (conservative uber-Calvinist Presbyterian) church, from which he was later excommunicated because he “confessed to committing heinous and repetitive sin […] and has not shown evidence of repentance.”
You won’t find any “evidence of repentance” in the statement John Perry offered in response to Buzzfeed News’ report, either. His non-denial denial states only that “the person behind it has been pursuing a vendetta against his former church for years and this story is one of the means he has used.”
Perry, apparently, is hoping to pull off the same trick the Duggars have used — characterizing reports of his own criminal deeds as an attack on the church and a form of anti-Christian persecution.
How will that go over with the right-wing white Christians who support Mike Huckabee, Roy Moore, Richard Land, Marvin Olasky and Robert E. Lee? It just might work. Perry’s offering them a double-shot of the intoxicating narrative of self-righteous indignation over imaginary persecution. And as we’ve already seen countless times, when they’re drunk on that stuff, these folks will swallow anything.
"Judging and Condemning Belong to Jesus Christ": Duggars' Hometown Takes Ostrich Approach to Molestation Scandal Jill Duggar was married in 2014 at Springdale’s Cross Church, one of the largest Southern Baptist congregations in the state of Arkansas. Pastor Floyd has been an outspoken advocate of forgiving Josh while also speaking critically about Jenner’s transition. The Duggar family’s 20-acre gated compound just outside Springdale is anchored by a 7,000-square-foot house that contains an industrial kitchen. Jim Bob and Michelle spoke about faith at the Values Voter Summit, an annual conference for social conservative causes, held in September 2010 in Washington, D.C. A THR reporter heads 1,541 miles from Hollywood to the Arkansas setting of TLC's '19 and Counting,' where sexual abuse admissions, a visit to church and Caitlyn Jenner all collide: "If you are created a man, you are intentionally created to be a man, so don't try to be anything else." 6/12/2015 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/judging-condemning-belong-jesus-christ-801194 [with comments]
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6 things to know about Jeb Bush Former Florida governor Jeb Bush George W. Bush at age 7 and Jeb Bush at age 10 months in Midland, Texas, on Dec. 23, 1956. (Courtesy of the Petroleum Museum) June 15, 2015 [...] His name His full name is John Ellis Bush, and his nickname derives from his initials, J.E.B. He is seven years younger than his brother, former president George W. Bush. The family business When he was growing up, Bush’s family thought he would be the most likely presidential candidate, not his brother. Through his mother, Barbara Pierce Bush, he is distantly related to yet another president: Franklin Pierce, the nation’s 14th president (1853-1857) and often rated one of the worst. His wife & kids He met his wife, Columba, when he was in Mexico as part of a high school program abroad. Jeb is fluent in Spanish. The two married when he was 21 and she was 19. They have three children: Jeb Jr., Noelle, and George P., who was elected Texas land commissioner in November. [...] His religion He is Catholic. Raised Episcopalian, Bush converted to his wife’s faith in 1995, saying at the time that part of the church’s appeal is “the fact that the Catholic Church believes in and acts on absolute truth as its foundational principles and doesn’t move with modern times as my former religion did.” [...] http://onpolitics.usatoday.com/2015/06/15/jeb-bush-facts/
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Catholic Archbishop and Aide Resign in Minnesota Over Sexual Abuse Scandal
Archbishop John C. Nienstedt in his office in St. Paul in 2014. Credit Craig Lassig/Associated Press
By MARK S. GETZFRED and MITCH SMITH JUNE 15, 2015
The Roman Catholic archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis and a deputy bishop resigned on Monday after prosecutors recently charged the archdiocese with having failed to protect youths from abuse by pedophile priests.
“My leadership has unfortunately drawn attention away from the good works of His Church and those who perform them,” Archbishop Nienstedt said. “Thus my decision to step down.”
“This has been a painful process,” The Rev. Andrew Cozzens, an auxiliary bishop for the archdiocese who will remain in his post, said during a news conference. “A change in leadership offers us an opportunity for greater healing and the ability to move forward.”
Under Pope Francis, the Vatican [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/roman_catholic_church/index.html ] has begun to step up efforts to hold bishops accountable for covering up or failing to take action against priests accused of abuse. Abuse survivors had long said that this was the great unfinished piece of business in the three decades since the abuse scandal first became public with a notorious case in Louisiana. Victims over the years have accused the Vatican of allowing prelates to go unpunished, and so turned to civil and criminal courts to pursue charges.
In accepting the resignations, the pope appointed the Rev. Bernard A. Hebda, a coadjutor archbishop of Newark, as apostolic administrator to oversee the archdiocese. The Vatican also announced on Monday that it would open a trial in July of its former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Jozef Wesolowski [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/world/europe/vatican-sets-trial-for-ex-ambassador-accused-of-sexual-abuse.html ], on charges of sexually abusing boys while he served in the Caribbean and of possessing child pornography after he was sent back to Rome in 2013.
In Rome, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, said he did not know whether the two bishops, by resigning, had avoided a trial by the new tribunal.
They are hardly the first bishops to resign under scrutiny or accusations that they failed abuse victims. Since the papacy of John Paul II — now St. John Paul — 16 other bishops have resigned [ http://www.bishop-accountability.org/bishops/removed/index.html ] or been forced from office under a cloud of accusations that they mishandled abuse cases, according to research by BishopAccountability.org [ http://bishopaccountability.org/ ], an advocacy group based in Boston. Archbishop Nienstedt is the 17th, by that group’s count.
Archbishop Nienstedt had become one of the most embattled figures in the American Catholic hierarchy, under fire in the courts, in the pews and on newspaper editorial pages. He had refused to resign about a year ago after coming under sharp criticism [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/31/us/archbishop-under-fire-over-abuse-apologizes-but-says-he-wont-resign.html ] from his own former chancellor for canonical affairs, Jennifer Haselberger, who charged that the church used a chaotic system of record keeping that helped conceal the backgrounds of guilty priests who remained on assignment.
He did, however, apologize at the time for his conduct, saying that while he had never knowingly covered up sexual abuse by clergy, he had become “too trusting of our internal process and not as hands-on as I could have been in matters of priest misconduct.”
On Monday, he said he would “leave with a clear conscience knowing that my team and I have put in place solid protocols to ensure the protection of minors and vulnerable adults.”
In one case, a boy told the police that the archbishop touched his buttocks while posing for a photo after his confirmation ceremony. The archbishop denied wrongdoing, and temporarily stepped aside while the authorities investigated. Prosecutors later declined to file charges, and Archbishop Nienstedt returned to work.
In another case, the archdiocese announced that it had received “claims regarding alleged misbehavior” against Archbishop Nienstedt that did not involve minors. The allegations were said to be about a series of sexual relationships with men, including seminarians and priests. The church announced an investigation into that matter last year. An archdiocese spokesman, Tom Halden, did not immediately answer questions on Monday morning about the status of that inquiry.
The criminal charges against the Minnesota archdiocese and accompanying civil petition, filed June 5 by the Ramsey County attorney, John J. Choi, stem from accusations by three male victims who say that from 2008 to 2010, when they were minors, a local priest, Curtis Wehmeyer, gave them alcohol and drugs before sexually assaulting them.
Mr. Wehmeyer, 50, who was dismissed as a priest in March, was sentenced to five years in a Minnesota prison in 2013 for criminal sexual conduct and possession of child pornography. He also has been charged with sex crimes in Wisconsin.
The 44-page criminal complaint states that concerns about Mr. Wehmeyer date to the 1990s, when he was in seminary and supervisors suggested that his past sexual promiscuity and alcohol abuse made him a poor candidate for the priesthood.
The five-point plan announced last week by the Vatican says the tribunal will be housed in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that polices adherence to church doctrine and that already handles the cases of priests accused of abuse.
Francis will choose a secretary, and additional permanent staff members will be hired for the tribunal, said Father Lombardi. The procedures will be re-evaluated in five years, he said.
Father Lombardi said that the tribunal’s responsibility for judging bishops would include questions of omission: “What one should have done and didn’t do,” he said. “This is another kind of responsibility and shortcoming, and has to be judged in an appropriate way with appropriate rules.”
Critics of the archdiocese said the resignations, while not surprising, were only another step in addressing the deep-seated concerns with the archdiocese and its leaders.
“The resignation is welcomed because it is a measure of reckoning and accountability,” said Jeff Anderson, a lawyer in Minnesota who has represented victims of sexual abuse by clergy. “But it’s far from enough.”
Frank Meuers, 76, of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said, “I’m sad it had to come to filing charges for a man of that status to get the message.”
Mr. Anderson said more top officials needed to be held accountable for their actions, and that criminal charges would be appropriate for some of them.
He attributed the resignation to the recent criminal charges against the archdiocese and unflattering disclosures made in recent civil cases. Many of those lawsuits were made possible by legislation that allowed victims to sue the church over abuse that happened years ago, and for which the statute of limitations had expired.
“This is about a culture and system that has been intractable,” Mr. Anderson said. “It needs to continue on a headlong course toward full accountability and full disclosure.”
Mr. Meuers added a word of caution.
“I don’t think just because he resigns the office it should be everything’s fine,” he said, referring to Archbishop Nienstedt. “I don’t think he’s free.”
Laurie Goodstein contributed reporting from New York and Gaia Pianigiani from Rome.
Archbishop John Nienstedt, Deputy Resign After Archdiocese Of St. Paul and Minneapolis Charged With Sex Abuse Coverup
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By NICOLE WINFIELD Posted: 06/15/2015 6:42 am EDT Updated: 06/15/2015 [c.] 3:30 pm EDT
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The embattled archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis and his deputy resigned Monday after years of pressure, an indication Pope Francis is making good on his promise that no one is above the law when it comes to covering up for clergy who sexually abuse children.
Archbishop John Nienstedt and Auxiliary Bishop Lee Anthony Piche stepped down after Minnesota prosecutors charged their archdiocese with having failed to protect children from unspeakable harm by a pedophile priest who was later convicted of molesting two boys.
Separately, the Vatican indicted Jozef Wesolowski, its own former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, on charges of sexually abusing minors in the Caribbean country and possessing child pornography. He will be the highest-ranking Vatican official ever to stand trial for a sex crime.
The developments came days after Francis approved the creation of a new tribunal inside the Vatican to hear cases of bishops accused of failing to protect minors, answering years of criticism that top-ranked churchmen have long been immune to punishment for ignoring or covering up for priests who rape and molest children.
It's not clear if the tribunal — once it becomes functioning — would handle the cases of Nienstedt and Piche, since they are no longer in office.
They quit under the code of canon law that allows bishops to resign before they retire because of illness or some other "grave" reason that makes them unfit for office.
Earlier this month, prosecutors charged the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis as a corporation with having "turned a blind eye" to repeated reports of inappropriate behavior by the priest. The complaint did not name any individuals.
The charges came two years after diocesan canon lawyer-turned-whistleblower Jennifer Haselberger alleged widespread cover-up of clergy sex misconduct in the archdiocese, saying archbishops and their top staff lied to the public and ignored the U.S. bishops' pledge to have no tolerance of priests who abuse.
Haselberger, who was Nienstedt's archivist, accused the church of using a chaotic system of record-keeping that helped conceal the backgrounds of guilty priests who remained on assignment.
She said she repeatedly warned Nienstedt and his aides about the risk of keeping accused priests in ministry, but they took action only in one case. As a result of raising alarms, she said she was eventually shut out of meetings about priest misconduct, and later resigned.
Nienstedt refused to resign after Haselberger's accusations, and later after announcing that allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior had been made against him. He denied misconduct and the archdiocese hired a firm to investigate. No results were ever announced and recently Nienstedt hired his own attorney to look at the matter again.
In a statement Monday, Nienstedt said he was stepping down to give the archdiocese a new beginning. But he insisted he was leaving "with a clear conscience knowing that my team and I have put in place solid protocols to ensure the protection of minors and vulnerable adults."
In a statement, Piche said: "The people of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis need healing and hope. I was getting in the way of that, and so I had to resign."
Monday's resignations bring to 18 the number of bishops who have stepped down after being publicly criticized for covering up for abusers, according to Anne Barrett Doyle of the online resource BishopAccountability.org.
In April, Francis accepted the resignation of U.S. bishop Robert Finn, who had been convicted in a U.S. court of failing to report a suspected child abuser.
Francis has pledged that not even high-ranking churchmen — "daddy's boys" he called them — will get away with abuse or cover-up.
The criminal charges against the archdiocese in Minnesota stem from its handling of Curtis Wehmeyer, a former priest at Church of the Blessed Sacrament in St. Paul, who is serving a five-year prison sentence for molesting two boys and faces prosecution involving a third in Wisconsin.
Prosecutors say church leaders failed to respond to "numerous and repeated reports of troubling conduct" by Wehmeyer from the time he entered seminary until he was removed from the priesthood in 2015. The criminal complaint says many people — including parishioners, fellow priests and parish staff — reported issues with Wehmeyer, and many of those claims were discounted.
Jeff Anderson, an attorney who has filed lawsuits against the Catholic Church over alleged abuse, said Monday's resignations are part of an "important reckoning" for the failure of top officials to respond appropriately when priests were accused of abusing children.
But David Clohessy, executive director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, says the Vatican should do much more to clean up the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
He said the acceptance of the two resignations "doesn't feel like reform" and that Francis should move to defrock top church leaders in the archdiocese.
The resignations came on the same day the Vatican announced it was putting Wesolowski, the former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, on trial in a Vatican court. Wesolowski, who has already been defrocked after being convicted in a canon law court, now faces possible jail time if convicted by the criminal tribunal of the Vatican City State.
The case has been highly sensitive, given that the Polish-born Wesolowski was an ambassador of the Holy See — a direct representative of the pope and not just one of the world's 440,000 priests — and had been ordained both a priest and a bishop by St. John Paul II.
With Little Fanfare, Mexican Supreme Court Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage
Hiram Gonzalez, center, married Severiano Chavez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, where gay marriage is technically illegal. Credit Cheros A.C.
Victor Manuel Aguirre, left, and Victor Fernando Urias, center, with the mayor of Mexicali, the town where the two men wed. Credit Alex Cossio/Associated Press
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and PAULINA VILLEGAS JUNE 14, 2015
MEXICO CITY — His church turned him away, his family discouraged him from a public fight and the government of the state where he lives vowed it would never happen.
But it did. Hiram Gonzalez married his boyfriend, Severiano Chavez, last year in the northern state of Chihuahua, which, like most Mexican states, technically allows marriage only between a man and a woman.
In ruling after ruling, the court has said that state laws restricting marriage to heterosexuals are discriminatory. Though the decisions have been made to little public fanfare, they have had the effect of legalizing gay marriage in Mexico without enshrining it in law.
“When I heard the judge pronounce us legally married, I burst into tears,” said Mr. Gonzalez, 41. Like nearly all same-sex couples marrying in Mexico, he and his partner needed a court order in order to exchange vows.
As the United States awaits a landmark decision on gay marriage [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/us/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage.html ] by the Supreme Court, the Mexican court’s rulings have added the country to a slowly growing list of Latin American nations permitting same-sex unions.
“It’s a huge change from where things were 10 years ago,” said Jason Pierceson, a professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield who studies gay marriage trends in Latin America.
The shift in Mexico, the second-largest country in Latin America after Brazil, is the product of a legal strategy that advocates used to bypass state legislatures, which have shown little inclination, and often hostility, to legalizing gay marriage.
In 2009, Mexico City, a federal district and large liberal island in this socially conservative country, legalized gay marriage — a first in Latin America. There have been 5,297 same-sex weddings here since then, some of them couples coming to the city from other states.
Of the nation’s 31 states, only one, Coahuila, near the Texas border, has legalized gay marriage. A second state, Quintana Roo, where Cancun is, has allowed gay unions since 2012, when advocates pointed out that its civil code on marriage did not stipulate that couples be one man and one woman.
In most of the rest of the country, marriage is legally defined as a union between a man and a woman — laws that may remain on the books despite the court’s decisions.
The Supreme Court upheld Mexico City’s law in 2010, adding that other states had to recognize marriages performed there.
Advocates of gay marriage saw that as an opportunity to use the court’s rulings to assert that marriage laws in other states were discriminatory.
The court — taking into account international decisions and anti-discrimination treaties that Mexico has signed — has steadily agreed, granting injunctions in individual cases permitting gay couples to marry in states where the laws forbid it.
A major turning point occurred this month when the court expanded on its rulings to issue a decree that any state law restricting marriage to heterosexuals is discriminatory.
“As the purpose of matrimony is not procreation, there is no justified reason that the matrimonial union be heterosexual, nor that it be stated as between only a man and only a woman,” the ruling said. “Such a statement turns out to be discriminatory in its mere expression.”
The ruling does not automatically strike down the state marriage laws. But it allows gay couples who are denied marriage rights in their states to seek injunctions from district judges, who are now obligated to grant them.
“Without a doubt, gay marriage is legal everywhere,” said Estefanía Vela Barba, an associate law professor at CIDE, a university in Mexico City. “If a same-sex couple comes along and the code says marriage is between a man and a woman and for the purposes of reproduction, the court says, ‘Ignore it, marriage is for two people.’”
The Roman Catholic Church, often an influential force socially and politically in a country that is 83 percent Catholic, objected to the ruling, saying the court had flouted two millenniums of convention.
“We reiterate our conviction, based on scientific, anthropological, philosophical, social and religious reasons, that the family, cell of society, is founded on the marriage of a man and a woman,” Msgr. Eugenio Lira Rugarcía, secretary general of the Mexican bishops’ conference, said in an email on Sunday in response to the decision.
He added that the church’s position is “stated in the millennia of Western legal tradition, collected and deepened throughout our history by legislators and judges from very different schools of thought and ideologies.”
In Mr. Gonzalez’s case, the Supreme Court had already ruled that the law in Chihuahua State was unconstitutional, enabling the couple to get an injunction so that their marriage could go forward.
State officials in Chihuahua vowed to never legalize same-sex marriage, and Mr. Gonzalez said he was expelled from his local church for being gay.
He and his husband refused to go to Mexico City to get married because they believed they should have that right in the state where they pay taxes.
The principle, he said, was important.
“It is not just the legal battle, but what it involves, the emotional and physical strain of the process,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “At the end, it’s a fight for your dignity.”
Alex Ali Mendez, a lawyer and gay rights activist with Mexico Marriage Equality, took on a case involving three couples from Oaxaca State in 2012, using the Supreme Court’s arguments to challenge the law in that state.
The court ruled in the couples’ favor. It was the first such decision in a state case.
“We opened the door in Oaxaca, and we are now opening it in different states,” Mr. Mendez said.
Bureaucratic hurdles, and sometimes hostility, remain.
Civil registry authorities abiding by state laws can still block couples hoping to marry.
It is up to the couples to appeal to the courts, a process that can cost $1,000 or more and take months. Although gay rights advocates are spreading the word, many couples remain unaware that they have a strong legal case to get married.
José Luis Caballero, a constitutional scholar who directs the law school at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City, said that even though judges must now rule in favor of gay couples, full equality has yet to be reached.
“What has to happen is that the state laws have to be reformed so that couples have the same rights and they don’t have to spend time and money,” he said. “A couple with resources can get married. A couple without resources can’t.”
Victor Manuel Aguirre, 43, and Victor Fernando Urias, 38, in January faced down protesters and bureaucratic roadblocks in Baja California before, with the power of a court injunction, they became the first gay couple to marry there.
At one point, they could not get into the civil registry building because of demonstrators.
“We were both dressed in white and went back home completely defeated and humiliated and just cried our eyes out,” Mr. Aguirre said.
After news media coverage of the fracas, the mayor of Mexicali called them and said that there had been a misunderstanding and that they could marry.
“With many setbacks, love triumphed after all,” Mr. Aguirre said.
Mr. Mendez, the lawyer pressing these cases, said the next step in the legal process was compiling enough injunctions in each state to reach a threshold under which the court could formally order state legislatures to rewrite their laws.
But experts said that Mexico had already reached a watershed. “It certainly looks like there will be more marriage equality in Mexico in the near future,” Professor Pierceson said. “We don’t know if there will be any backlash or counterprotest to stop it.”
Jeb Bush In 1995: Unwed Mothers Should Be Publicly Shamed
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush wrote in 1995 that society needs to relearn the art of public shaming. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
By Laura Bassett Posted: 06/09/2015 10:31 am EDT Updated: 06/12/2015 3:59 pm EDT
Public shaming would be an effective way to regulate the “irresponsible behavior” of unwed mothers, misbehaving teenagers and welfare recipients, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) argued in his 1995 book Profiles in Character [ http://www.amazon.com/Profiles-Character-Jeb-Bush/dp/0965091201 ].
In a chapter called "The Restoration of Shame,” the likely 2016 presidential candidate made the case that restoring the art of public humiliation could help prevent pregnancies “out of wedlock.”
One of the reasons more young women are giving birth out of wedlock and more young men are walking away from their paternal obligations is that there is no longer a stigma attached to this behavior, no reason to feel shame. Many of these young women and young men look around and see their friends engaged in the same irresponsible conduct. Their parents and neighbors have become ineffective at attaching some sense of ridicule to this behavior. There was a time when neighbors and communities would frown on out of wedlock births and when public condemnation was enough of a stimulus for one to be careful.
As governor of Florida in 2001, Bush had the opportunity to test his theory on public shaming. He declined to veto a very controversial bill that required single mothers who did not know the identity of the father to publish their sexual histories in a newspaper before they could legally put their babies up for adoption. He later signed a repeal of the so-called "Scarlet Letter" law [ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/31/us/florida-scarlet-letter-law-is-repealed-by-gov-bush.html ] in 2003 after it was successfully challenged in court.
Bush's ideas about public shaming extended beyond unwed parents. He said American schools and the welfare system could use a healthy dose of shame as well. “For many, it is more shameful to work than to take public assistance -- that is how backward shame has become!” he wrote, adding that the juvenile criminal justice system also "seems to be lacking in humiliation."
In the context of present-day society we need to make kids feel shame before their friends rather than their family. The Miami Herald columnist Robert Steinback has a good idea. He suggests dressing these juveniles in frilly pink jumpsuits and making them sweep the streets of their own neighborhoods! Would these kids be so cavalier then?
YouTube and social media, of course, did not exist when Bush wrote his book in 1995. But the former governor makes clear that "society needs to relearn the art of public and private disapproval and how to make those to engage in some undesirable behavior feel some sense of shame."
Bush did not respond to a request for comment.
UPDATE: 6/10 [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/10/robert-steinback_n_7554326.html ] -- Steinback, the former Miami Herald columnist, told HuffPost that "until today, I was unaware that Governor Bush had cited my column on public shaming of juvenile criminal offenders in his 1995 book."
"My column made reference only to young offenders who often harbor a mistaken romance about jail and prison, and might consider incarceration a perverse badge of honor," he said. "I suggested that sentencing them to wear frilly pink jumpsuits and performing a public duty such as street sweeping in their own neighborhood might serve as more of a deterrent than jail time. I made no mention of using such a tactic with unwed pregnant teens. In fact, I would consider such a policy utterly horrific. Pregnancy is not and should never be treated as a crime. Unwed girls in such circumstances are most likely experiencing considerable personal and psychological stress and anxiety that would only be exacerbated by shaming them publicly."
Shaming Unwed Moms Was the Law in Jeb Bush’s Florida
iStockphoto
The so-called Scarlet Letter law passed in Florida under Jeb’s watch. But the way he tried to fix it made it less offensive (kinda) but still pretty weird.
Betsy Woodruff 06.10.15 5:15 AM ET
Remember that time when Governor Jeb Bush allowed a bill to become law that required unwed, pregnant women to publish their sexual history in the newspaper in order to give their babies up for adoption?
No? Well, it happened.
But this was just the beginning of the weird parental follies of Florida in the early 2000s.
And by taking a pass, he allowed a particularly offensive provision to become law.
This provision required any woman who wanted to put her child up for adoption, but who didn’t know who the father was, to take out an ad in a local newspaper listing her name and description, as well as the name and description of each possible father and the locations where the baby could have been conceived.
In other words, women had to broadcast their sexual histories to, well, pretty much everybody before attempting to find stable homes for their children.
The law’s sponsor, state Senator Walter Campbell, said the provision was designed to keep “potential biological fathers from coming back and taking children out of adoptive parents’ hands.” And the law didn’t include an exception for women who became pregnant because of rape.
“You cannot just allow someone to say they were raped and use that as an excuse not to provide a name,” said Deborah Marks [ http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=123843 ], who helped draft the law, at the time.
Alvin Coen, a veteran adoption lawyer, told the New Pittsburgh Courier at the time that concerns about birth fathers interfering with adoptions were baseless.
The bill passed overwhelmingly in the state House and by a 30-8 vote in the state Senate. Bush said he decided not to veto it because Campbell told him the newspaper-reporting language would get fixed. That didn’t happen. What did happen? More abortions. The Orlando Sentinel reported there were almost 2,000 more abortions in the first six months of 2002—after the legislation went into effect—than in the first six months of 2001.
After state courts declared the law unconstitutional, Bush signed legislation repealing it. The bill that took its place put the fathers-rights onus on potential fathers. The law still exists today.
“In place of the publication requirement, the new law establishes a ‘’father registry’ through which men who believe they may be fathers must provide the name, address, and physical description of the mother and the date and place where conception took place to protect their parental rights,” The New York Times reported [ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/31/us/florida-scarlet-letter-law-is-repealed-by-gov-bush.html ].
Basically, Florida men have some major issues when it comes to dealing with vulnerable children. And in the early 2000s, it appears Jeb Bush was no exception.
Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, pauses as he speaks during the Wirtschaftsrat conference in Berlin, Germany, on June 9, 2015. Photo by Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg/Getty
By Steve Benen 06/12/15 08:00 AM—Updated 06/12/15 12:48 PM
It was a little jarring to learn this week that Jeb Bush, before he became Florida’s governor, took some surprisingly far-right positions on social issued in a 1995 book. In Profiles in Character, for example, the Republican touted the benefits of public “shame” and a “sense of ridicule” for unwed mothers and those who rely on public assistance.
Jeb Bush even cited Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as support – the novel served as a reminder, he wrote “that public condemnation of irresponsible sexual behavior has strong historical roots.”
In fairness, the book was published 20 years ago. The Florida Republican can’t simply walk away from his record, but it’s not unreasonable to think candidates of every stripe are going to change and adapt to changing circumstances over the course of two decades. If Bush wanted to say he’s learned a lot since 1995, it’s an understandable response.
Asked by msnbc whether his views regarding the application of shame had changed, Bush suggested his book’s warning had proved prophetic and stressed the importance of encouraging young people to get married before having children.
“My views have evolved over time, but my views about the importance of dads being involved in the lives of children hasn’t changed at all,” he said. “In fact, since 1995 … this book was a book about cultural indicators [and] the country has moved in the wrong direction. We have a 40-plus percent out-of-wedlock birth rate.”
available of Bush, who made the comments in Poland during a European campaign swing, making the comments while talking to reporters.
It’s possible the GOP White House hopeful doesn’t fully appreciate the nature of the controversy.
If Jeb Bush wants to make the case the children benefit from larger support networks, fine. If he wants to talk about the enormous challenges facing young, unwed mothers, no problem. If he wants to argue that two parents are better than one, we can at least have a conversation about the available social science.
But in his book, Bush went much further, touting the societal benefits of shame, even for those in poverty. He literally wrote about the value in a “sense of ridicule.”
This isn’t just rhetoric about old-fashioned affinity for a traditional nuclear family; Bush’s vision went much further.
And given a chance to clarify his book 20 years later, Bush declined.
It’s worth noting that during Bush’s tenure in Florida, the state had a law [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/09/jeb-bush-1995-book_n_7542964.html (above)] “that required single mothers who did not know the identity of the father to publish their sexual histories in a newspaper before they could legally put their babies up for adoption.” Bush eventually repealed the law following a successful court challenge.
Wendy Davis joins Chris to talk about Jeb Bush's comments about shaming parents of out-of-wedlock children, Lindsey Graham's push for a 20-week abortion ban, and the abortion ban in Texas. Duration: 6:47
After Beck brought up his concerns about society's tendency to mix images of sex with images of death, Lapin explained that this was exactly why God prohibited anyone from touching a woman for seven days during her monthly period in Leviticus 15 [ https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2015 ], since sex represents life while a menstrual period represents death.
As Lapin put it, "the good Lord created men with an infinite capacity to produce seed at almost any age whereas he chose to create women with an absolute finite limited number of eggs. And so the loss of an egg every month, for any sensitive woman, is sad because it's one less opportunity for life. And so foolish and insensitive people say, 'Oh, it's just a hormonal imbalance,' it isn't; it's a genuine, authentic sadness which suffuses any sensitive woman at the loss of an egg."
Beck, of course, was blown away by this revelation.
"Wow, I've never thought of it that way," he said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXuGa1hO2pA (next below, as embedded; with comments)]. "It is actually a God-given sadness."
ISIS bans pigeon breeding - punishable by public flogging - because seeing birds' genitals overhead offends Islam Document: Senior ISIS issued this diktat banning pigeon breeding as they claim the sight of the birds' genitals as they fly overhead is offensive to Islam. The war on pigeons: The latest announcement isn't the first time ISIS has targeted the apparently blasphemous practice of pigeon breeding - a popular pastime in the Middle East. • Islamic extremists in Syria and Iraq have banned citizens breeding pigeons • Claim the sight of uncovered pigeons flying overhead is offensive to God • Also say that raising the birds wastes time that should be spent praying • Those who break the rules will face flogging, fines and even imprisonment • Earlier this year ISIS executed three boys they found breeding pigeons 2 June 2015 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3107027/ISIS-bans-pigeon-breeding-punishable-public-flogging-seeing-birds-genitals-overhead-offends-Islam.html [with comments]
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State Rep Suggests Abortion Is To Blame For California Drought
Assemblywoman Shannon Grove, R-Bakersfield, June 27, 2013, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
While speaking at the California ProLife Legislative Banquet last week, California Assemblywoman Shannon Grove (R) suggested a theory that the state's worst drought in 1,200 years may be divine retribution for California providing women with access to abortions, RH Reality Check reported.
"I believe --and most Americans believe --that God’s hand is in the affairs of man, and certainly was in the formation of this country," she wrote. "Is this drought caused by God? Nobody knows. But biblical history shows a consequence to man’s actions."
Pro-life activists in Kern County, the district Grove represents, didn't stand behind Grove's idea.
'If God Is Judging Texas, It's Because Of The Witchcraft And Sodomy'
Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Thursday, 5/28/2015 5:11 pm
On his radio program today [ https://vimeo.com/129143675 ], Bryan Fischer took a call from "Rebecca in College Station, Texas" who shared her theory that the massive flooding taking place in Texas is God's punishment for "witchcraft and sodomy."
As Rebecca explained, the only parts of Texas that are underwater are the parts "that are overrun with witchcraft and sodomy" like Austin and Houston, which has a "sodomite mayor."
On the other hand, the area where Rebecca lives is not underwater, even though she lives in a valley, and that is because "we kicked out abortion" and the people who live there hold conservative views.
"If God is judging Texas, it's because of the witchcraft and sodomy that we've allowed to run rampant," Rebecca said, and Fischer responded by agreeing that that was a very plausible explanation.
"If you're going to attribute the flooding in Texas to some kind of supernatural cause, you can make a geographical connection between the flooding and the practice of the occult and witchcraft and the embrace of homosexuality," he said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMP_Kp1s-7s (below, as embedded; with comments)]. "That's where the disaster is being felt the worst."
Fischer then explained that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was also a very localized natural disaster that "just wiped out those two cities where homosexuality had been embraced [so] if you're going to make a case that there is some supernatural origin to this natural disaster, that would probably be the place to look".
Pop Star Comes Out, Causes Outrage By Having Sex With Priest In NSFW Video
By Cavan Sieczkowski Posted: 06/09/2015 Edited: 06/09/2015 08:08 PM EDT
A Norwegian pop star came out as gay in a new NSFW music video featuring simulated gay sex with a priest, and the Church of Norway [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Norway ] is fuming.
Tooji, a Iranian-Norwegian singer living in Norway and a participant in the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest, came out when announcing the release of his new music video titled "The Father Project."
Human Rights Above Religion Photography: Knut Joner Director: Tooji Project manager: Helene Eggen Coordinator: Henriette Vold Management/Assistance: Nena Krizan Lyrics: Tooji & Julia Karlsson Music Production: Anton Rundberg Special Thanks to: Head of Makeup: Anette Klophus Makeup assistance: Andrine Grimstad, Siri Sundve, Guro Frey Hair: Hege B (Syndicatet) Blomst af Hansen Gaysir LLH Pride 12:39 AM - 8 Jun 2015 [ https://twitter.com/Tooji_/status/607783865768243200 ]
The video shows Tooji enter a church and proceed to have simulated sex with the priest in front of a congregation. But the Church of Norway is not pleased with Tooji's artistic choices. In a statement published Sunday, the bishop of Oslo condemned the video [ http://bd.kirken.no/oslo/index.cfm?id=425529 ] as a desecration.
"No matter what the video's message might be or who the artist might be, footage of intimate scenes in front of the altar is unacceptable, and it is an abuse of the church," he said in a Norwegian statement translated by The Huffington Post. "I was informed about the matter after they decided to rent out Frogner Church and had done the shoot. No matter what the content of the video might be, it is not acceptable to perform these types of scenes in front of the altar. It is a misuse of the holy room of the church."
The bishop added that this would hold true if a straight couple was featured in the same manner in the video.
"A scene shot between a man and a woman would also be unacceptable," he added. "What has happened breaks several rules of the church. Besides this, I would not comment any further on the matter."
he spoke out against religious theology that claims God does not accept gay people.
"I want to stand out as an example and let my voice be heard for all those voices mute, for all those who feel ashamed with their beliefs, that are told that God doesn't accept them," he said. "Let me tell you: You are a part of God and what you have is the purest gift. Any love between two grown-up, consenting adults -- no matter gender, no matter race -- is pure ... I am gay and I stand up for my rights and that is why I made the video 'Father.'"
Meet The Couple Who Will Get Divorced If Marriage Equality Becomes Legal “Once you change the meaning of marriage it becomes meaningless.” A Canberra couple say they are fully committed to getting divorced if marriage equality becomes legal in Australia. Jun. 10, 2015 http://www.buzzfeed.com/robstott/this-couple-is-vowing-to-get-divorced-if-marriage [with comments]
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Gandalf The White And Professor Albus Dumbledore 'Wed' At The Equality House
By JamesMichael Nichols Posted: 06/08/2015 5:00 pm EDT Updated: 06/09/2015 10:59 am EDT
Two of the most recognizable names in the wizarding world came together on Sunday for an unexpected cause -- to join one another in holy, gay matrimony.
We first brought you the news [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/02/gandalf-dumbledore-equality-house_n_7495270.html ] last week that Gandalf The White of the Lord of The Rings series and Professor Albus Dumbledore of Harry Potter fame would be tying the knot at the Equality House, which sits essentially on the front lawn of the notoriously anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church.
As promised, the two fictional characters, played by hired actors, wed one another on Sunday, June 7 at the Equality House, which is painted the colors of the rainbow flag and regularly holds fundraisers [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/equality-house/ ] to support the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.
J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling @WBCsigns Alas, the sheer awesomeness of such a union in such a place would blow your tiny bigoted minds out of your thick sloping skulls. 4:09 PM - 26 May 2015 [ https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/603307065054990336 ]
This back-and-forth between the author and Westboro inspired Plating Peace founder Aaron Jackson to bring the wedding to life in order to raise money to counter the hateful messages [ https://www.crowdrise.com/WizardsWed ] of the Westboro Baptist Church. Planting Peace is the organization that founded and sponsors the Equality House.
Graham urged people to “love” their gay and lesbian neighbors “enough to warn them” that they will “spend eternity in Hell” since “God has no hope but to judge them” if they are “practicing the gay and lesbian lifestyle.” This led him to rail against churches that accept LGBT Christians, a decision which he warns will ultimately destroy the church.
“If a person says, ‘but I’m gay,’ okay fine, you don’t practice it, you have to stay away,” Graham said. “What’s happening is we are seeing in churches, where churches are accepting gay and lesbian couples who are living in sin, living the gay lifestyle, not repenting and the church is letting them in. This is so dangerous and it is going to destroy our church in this country if this continues.”
“I believe we are in the midnight hour as far as God’s clock is concerned or we may be in the last minutes, but of those last minutes it may be another hundred years, I don’t know, but when you see how quickly our country is deteriorating, how quickly the world is deteriorating morally, especially under this administration, we have seen that it has just taken a nosedive off of the moral diving board into the cesspool of humanity,” he said.
Franklin Graham's anti-gay banking protest backfires
The Rachel Maddow Show 6/10/15
Rachel Maddow reports that televangelist Franklin Graham found a Wells Fargo ad featuring a lesbian couple adopting a deaf girl so out of line with his Christian faith that he moved his money to a new bank ...that also actively supports gay the community. Duration: 3:23
Larry Hall, Democratic leader of North Carolina House, talks with Rachel Maddow about the passage of a new law allowing state magistrates to reject couples for wedding licenses based on the subjective religious tests of the magistrates. Duration: 19:10
'Oranges, Baby Powder, Handcuffs And Duct Tape': Inside The Trial That May End The Gay 'Cure' 06/12/2015 JERSEY CITY, New Jersey -- For years, Benjamin Unger had lived uneasily with the knowledge that he liked other guys, but in 2007, at 19 years old, the expectations of adulthood were looming. For religious Orthodox Jews in Unger’s community, this meant two things: marriage to a woman, and having children. So Unger called JONAH. JONAH, or Jews Offering New Alternatives For Healing, is a counseling center that offers a controversial service. Through a variety of “scientific” techniques referred to by the vaguely Orwellian name of “Psycho-Educational Model for Healing Homosexuality,” JONAH claims to help gay men become straight. For the next several weeks, a jury in New Jersey, where JONAH is based, will hear -- at times in excruciating detail -- about the practices that constitute this ostensible treatment. “Many of these processes involve nudity,” David Dinielli, a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center who is representing the plaintiffs, said at the outset of the trial. “Some involve cuddling between older counselors and young men, and some involve various props such as oranges, baby powder, handcuffs and duct tape.” No, this is not a gay spin-off of Fifty Shades of Grey. Welcome to the bizarro world of conversion therapy -- and to a case that is shaping up to be its death knell. [...] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/12/conversion-therapy-trial_n_7564280.html [with comments]
Lawyer In 'Gay Cure' Trial Says Satan Is Behind Gay Rights Movement
By Lila Shapiro Posted: 06/08/2015 3:59 pm EDT Updated: 06/09/2015 12:59 am EDT
JERSEY CITY -- In a first-of-its-kind legal challenge to gay conversion therapy, the lawyer defending this controversial practice has taken pains to assert that his clients do not judge people for being gay, but simply offer their services to those gay people who wish to change their sexual orientation.
“If you chose to live your life as gay, fine. We wish you well. We’re not judging you,” Charles LiMandri said in describing his clients' views during opening statements in the New Jersey state court trial last week. His clients run Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing, or JONAH, a conversion therapy center in Jersey City.
Whether or not his clients make no judgments, however, LiMandri himself seems to have a different take on the matter.
He also equated the work of gay rights activists with that of Satan.
When asked by "Catholic Answers," a radio show “dedicated to serving Christ by bringing the fullness of Catholic truth to the world,” whether he anticipated a backlash against gay activists for their work, LiMandri said, “I predicted that, and the more the side overplays its hand -- it is spiritual warfare, and as we know, Satan does frequently overplay his hand.”
The interviewer later asks him to “finesse” his comment on Satan. “I know what you mean. But what did you not mean? You’re not saying gays are satanic?”
LiMandri agreed that he was not saying any individual is evil. “We’re not judging anyone; that’s God’s business,” he said, before doubling down on the idea that the push for gay rights is, in fact, evil. “But you know I’m not alone. The last three popes I have mentioned have said this is an evil that is being inflicted on society.”
For the next several weeks, a New Jersey jury will hear the case of Ferguson v. JONAH, the lawsuit brought by four young men and two of their parents accusing the conversion therapy center of fraudulently claiming that its services could "cure" a person's sexual orientation.
One Million Moms Promise Devil of a Time for ‘Lucifer’ TV Show
John P. Fleenor/FOX
Right-wing Christian group declares war on Fox Devil TV show because of course.
Asawin Suebsaeng 06.07.15 12:01 AM ET
Next year, Fox will premiere Lucifer (loosely based on the character introduced in the Neil Gaiman comic, The Sandman), in which a British-accented Devil roams Los Angeles and helps the LAPD fight crime—and one extreme Christian advocacy group is already pissed about it.
“FOX has plans to air a new series which will glorify Satan as a caring, likable person in human flesh,” the petition reads. “Previews of the pilot show depict graphic acts of violence, a nightclub featuring scantily-clad women and a demon.”
The petition on the main AFA website has upwards of 120,000 signatures, while the One Million Moms one has over 15,000 “Concerned Moms” signed on.
“Ah,” he wrote. “It seems like only yesterday (but it was 1991) that the ‘Concerned Mothers of America’ announced that they were boycotting SANDMAN because it contained Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Trans characters. It was Wanda that upset them most: the idea of a Trans Woman in a comic book… They told us they were organising a boycott of SANDMAN, which they would only stop if we wrote to the American Family Association and promised to reform.”
He concludes: “I wonder if they noticed it didn’t work last time, either…”
New Michigan law lets adoption agencies decline referrals
FILE - This June 20, 2014 file photo shows Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder during a ceremony in Detroit. Snyder on Thursday, June 11, 2015 signed a law letting private adoption agencies with state contracts decline to participate in referrals against their religious beliefs, despite criticism that it amounts to government-sanctioned discrimination against gay couples. (Carlos Osorio, file/Associated Press)
By David Eggert June 11, 2015
LANSING, Mich. — Gov. Rick Snyder on Thursday signed a law letting private adoption agencies with state contracts decline to participate in referrals against their religious beliefs, despite criticism that it amounts to government-sanctioned discrimination against gay couples.
The Republican told The Associated Press that the legislation codifies an existing practice within the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, which relies on private agencies to help find temporary or permanent homes for 13,000 children in foster care at any given time.
“Our goal is to get the maximum number of kids adopted by loving families regardless of the loving family’s background, whether they’re straight or gay,” Snyder said in a phone interview.
Only two other states, Virginia and North Dakota, have laws that are explicit in allowing private adoption agencies to turn away prospective parents for religious reasons.
Snyder acted a day after the bills cleared the GOP-controlled Legislature almost entirely along party lines. Opponents compared the legislation — which is expected to be challenged in court before it takes effect in 90 days — to a religious objections law in Indiana that had to be softened after a backlash.
The ACLU of Michigan said agencies covered by the law are “receiving state money to perform a public function” and are legally obligated to act in children’s best interests.
“There is nothing about this shameful legislation that helps vulnerable kids find homes,” said deputy director Rana Elmir, who warned that same-sex couples, religious minorities, single parents and others will be affected. The Human Rights Campaign, the largest U.S. gay rights group, said Snyder has “utter disdain” for the welfare of children and the new law will set the state back.
Snyder denied that the law discriminates against gays or others, saying “this isn’t about that” and reiterating his past threat to veto a broader religious freedom bill unless the state’s civil rights law is expanded to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The Michigan Catholic Conference and others have lobbied for the adoption legislation for years, but it gained traction ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court’s expected ruling on gay marriage in coming weeks.
Snyder said he received letters from Catholic Charities and Bethany Christian Services, which on average do 25 to 30 percent of the Michigan’s foster care adoptions and had expressed concern that if the state’s policy changed in the future, they would be forced to close their doors. In 2011, Illinois ended long-standing contracts with Catholic Charities to provide foster care and adoptions because of the group’s practice of referring unmarried couples to other agencies.
“This is about making sure we get the largest number of kids in forever families,” Snyder said. “The more opportunities and organizations we have that are doing a good job of placing people in loving families, isn’t that better for all of us?”
Rep. Andrea LaFontaine, a Columbus Township Republican and sponsor of the main bill, said when agencies are forced to close rather than violate their religious beliefs, “it results in a lack of services, longer wait times and fewer child placements.”
Under Michigan’s law, an agency with religious objections to a prospective adoption will have to refer an applicant to another “willing and able” agency or to a state website listing other providers.
The measure specifies that child-placing agencies do not have to provide services in conflict with their “sincerely held” religious beliefs, meaning they can decline a referral for foster care management or adoption services without fear of an “adverse action” by the state or local governments.
Private agencies — which received $19.9 million from the state for adoption services in the last fiscal year — will be able to cite the law as a defense in judicial or administrative proceedings. If they decline to provide services, they must give applicants a written list of other adoption or foster care providers.
Michigan has 105 licensed adoption and foster care agencies, approximately 25 percent of which are faith-based, according to lawmakers.
One of the gay marriage lawsuits before the Supreme Court began as a Michigan adoption case, because the state does not allow unmarried couples to jointly adopt.
On Wednesday, Republican majorities in both chambers approved a bill that would allow faith-based adoption agencies — including those who take taxpayer dollars to place children who are in the state's custody — to discriminate in the practice of their work. They can deny services to families that violate the agency's religious beliefs, including unmarried couples, same-sex couples and those who hold different religious beliefs.
The legislation is a craven attempt to cloak discrimination in faith, and it leaves the best interests of the 13,000 children in the state's care — entirely out of the equation.
Even worse, it sends Michigan in the exact wrong direction just weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court could invalidate all legislative or constitutional provisions that permit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Should that happen, this statute, along with bigoted laws in states around the country, would fall like their predecessors — Jim Crow-era laws and regulations — after landmark rulings in the 1960s.
That's lousy moral company for Michigan to keep. It's lousy business company for Michigan to keep. And it's especially shameful for a governor whose own preachings about tolerance and acceptance obviously mean less than appeasing his party's religious conservatives.
The bills Gov. Rick Snyder signed Thursday spell nothing but trouble for the children in this state who are waiting, desperately, for the chance to join willing families.
For starters, there's simply no credible evidence that same-sex couples make worse parents. Legions of experts backed by well-vetted research testified as much in a legal challenge to Michigan's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. So the bills the governor signed Thursday, like the same-sex marriage ban that preceeded them, fail the rational-basis test that legitimate legislation must be able to withstand.
Republican state Sen. Rick Jones, R-Grand Ledge, told the Free Press that because faith-based agencies handle most of the children Michigan places with foster families or adoptive parents each year — pocketing more than half the $19.9 million that the state spent last year to support adoption and foster care services — lawmakers have little choice.
"If they close their doors," he said, "I don't know what we'll do with all the children. This is a real threat."
Jones is not absolutely wrong.
The truth is that Michigan's approach to dealing with the 13,000 children in its care is at real risk of collapsing if the Supreme Court invalidates all state-sponsored discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Right now, about 50% of the state's adoption work is performed by religious agencies who, in the likely coming legal reality, won't be able to or won't want to receive taxpayer money because they discriminate.
Faced with the loss of that kind of capacity, lawmakers and the governor should be panicked — and seeking some alternative way to ensure the state's 13,000 in-custody children continue to see adoption opportunities.
Should Michigan develop a more robust in-house government approach to adoption services, in preparation for the possible loss of services from religious agencies? Are there other, nonreligious private options that ought to be explored? Pursuing any of those routes wouldn't just be wise — it's crucial, at this point.
But legislation that inculcates the very discrimination that the high court is likely to squash, and does it in the name of religious freedom, is as wrong-headed as the desperate attempts in the 1960s to carve out religious exceptions to racial bias. It won't work. It embarrasses us all. And it sacrifices the interests of children to make a small-minded point about the nobility of bigotry.
This is the low point to which the state has sunk today, thanks to elected officials who either lack the moral decency or the moral courage to stand for equality alongside religious freedom.
It may not stand more than a few weeks, depending on what the Supreme Court does.
But the stain on our state's character? That's indelible.
And the work of figuring out what to do when Michigan's reliance on religious agencies to do much of the state's adoption work turns sour? It still awaits more reasoned, tolerant debate among our elected officials.
North Carolina’s Magistrates Now Can Legally Ignore Marriage Laws
Chip Somodevilla/Getty
North Carolina’s civil magistrates now have the right to refuse to marry anyone whose union they might religiously object to—be it gay, interracial, or mixed Muslim couples.
The vote happened first thing in the morning. “They gaveled us right to order, and they didn’t allow any time for debate,” says assembly member Mary Price “Pricey” Harrison, Democrat of Greensboro. In North Carolina, an override is achieved with three-fifths of present and voting members. SB2 had originally passed the assembly by 67-43, which is 61 percent. Thursday’s vote was 69-41, or 62.7 percent. Harrison told me that some Republicans who might have voted against the bill weren’t present, and that a few members were off at their children’s high-school graduations.
Here’s the background. The state started out with a broad religious-freedom restoration bill of the sort becoming law in more conservative states [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/02/arkansas-governor-signs-amended-religious-freedom-law.html ]. There was an outcry; after some wrangling, legislators settled on this bill, limited to magistrates. So this is a “compromise” bill. Remember that North Carolina’s legislature and its governor, Pat McCrory, are about as right-wing as any in the country—all those “Moral Monday” protests have come in response to radical actions the governor and legislature have taken on education, voting rights, the environment, and other matters.
So when legislators walked away from the broader religious-freedom act, they settled on SB2. Some compromise. “The legislation is in some ways even worse than Indiana’s,” Christopher Sgro, the executive director of Equality North Carolina, told me. “These are taxpayer-funded government employees.”
The law is really aimed at same-sexers, but of course legislators knew that they couldn’t single gay people out by name or category, because that would have been too obviously discriminatory. The only way to get around this was to write it more broadly, so the law says [ http://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2015/Bills/Senate/PDF/S2v3.pdf ]: “Every magistrate has the right to recuse from performing all lawful marriages under this Chapter based on sincerely held religious objection.”
Read that again. Recuse from “lawful marriages.” In other words, disobey the law. So, magistrates who still think the races shouldn’t mix can now take that brave stand with the weight of the law behind them. What about a Southern Baptist marrying a Jew? OK, it’s probably a stretch to think anyone would object to that. But what about a Southern Baptist marrying a Muslim? A Muslim marrying an atheist? A citizen marrying a non-citizen in what appears to the magistrate to be mostly a matter of helping the noncitizen gain permanent resident status? As a practical matter, experts think recusals will likely be limited to same-sex marriages, not that that makes this any better, but we’re about to find out what’s theoretical and what’s not.
This is shocking stuff. It’s pretty much at the level of George Wallace defying integration, albeit without the pulse-quickening, schoolhouse-door histrionics. Except this is arguably more extreme because here, North Carolina isn’t defying Washington, but itself. The state passed a ban on same-sex marriage back in 1996 and amended the state constitution in 2011 to emphasize the point. But then, a mostly religious coalition of North Carolinians brought suit, and last year a federal judge seated in North Carolina ruled the state’s ban unconstitutional [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2014/07/28/virginia-marriage-law-unconstitutional.html ]. The governor, extremist though he is, knew enough law not to fight it, and indeed knew enough law to veto the magistrates’ bill when it came before him.
But now the legislature has spoken, or re-spoken, and overridden him. “It’s unconstitutional, and we all know it’s unconstitutional, and a court is going to throw it out,” Pricey Harrison told me. “It’s a heck of a way to run a legislature.”
The point needs making: Laws like this magistrates’ law and those Pence-style religious-freedom laws have turned the original intention of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 completely on its head. That law was meant to protect the religious rights of minorities. It emanated from a lawsuit brought by two Native American men who took peyote, they claimed, as a religious rite. The Supreme Court backed them, and then President Clinton signed the RFRA. Protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority has a long history in this country, back to the famous Federalist No. 10, and in fact the concept goes back to ancient Greece. But now, the majority (or near-majority, depending on which poll you believe) in North Carolina that opposes same-sex marriage can bully the minority.
Now, imagine if these religious-conscience laws had existed in 1967. How long would it have taken for interracial marriage to become the accepted norm in the South? As it happens, we have a partial answer to this question in the form of a story that emanates, again, from North Carolina. In 1976, Carol Ann and Thomas Person, she white and he black, walked into their local courthouse to get their marriage license. As she recently told the story in a column in the Raleigh News & Observer [ http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article22949817.html ], the magistrate said no. A second magistrate on duty said the same thing, and one of them “took out a Bible and began to lecture us about their religious views and why Thomas and I should not be together.” This was nearly a full decade after Loving.
A court ruled against those two magistrates, and the Persons were soon married. Presumably, a court will toss this magistrates’ law, too. But who’ll be denied a license in the meantime? And what constitutes religious freedom, and what is simply bigotry?
Pat Robertson: Gay Marriage Will Stifle Free Speech, Just Like In Bob Jones University Case
Submitted by Brian Tashman on Thursday, 6/4/2015 11:55 am
Pat Robertson warned today that a Supreme Court decision striking down bans on same-sex marriage would have devastating consequences, telling viewers of “The 700 Club” that marriage equality will jeopardize the free speech of religious broadcasters like himself who oppose gay marriage.
Curiously enough, Robertson broadcasts from Virginia, a state with marriage equality [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/topics/marriage-equality ], and is freely able to denounce gay marriage on a regular basis without facing any legal consequences.
“Isn’t it chilling to think that a practice that was abhorrent and stigmatized for so many years has now become the dominant weapon of the left to hurt those who share traditional values?” he asked [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U0ORSFCZ-w (next below, as embedded; with comments)].
Robertson also addressed the Supreme Court’s 1983 in Bob Jones University v. US, in which the court found that the IRS did not violate the Constitution by stripping the evangelical university of its tax exempt status because of its rules barring interracial relationships. According to Robertson, such a rule never existed: “Bob Jones never prohibited men and women of different races from getting married, they never had any laws, as I understand, they merely said in their statement of faith, they didn’t believe that the Bible supported interracial marriage and interracial activity. That was their belief.”
He quickly added that while he disagreed with the university’s stance, he feared that the ruling would open the door to religious persecution by the government.
“There is to be no interracial dating,” declared the university’s rule book [ https://web.archive.org/web/20140720082733/http:/www.stufffundieslike.com/2011/07/reader-submitted-photo-student-handbooks-bju-edition/ ] in the 1990s. “Students who become partners in an interracial marriage will be expelled. Students who are members of or affiliated with any group or organization which holds interracial marriage as one of its goals or advocates interracial marriage will be expelled. Students who date outside of their own race will be expelled.”
God has separated people for His own purposes. He has erected barriers between the nations, not only land and sea barriers, but also ethnic, cultural and language barriers. God has made people different one from another and intends for those differences to remain. Bob Jones University is opposed to intermarriage of the races because it breaks down the barriers God has established. It mixes that which God separated and intends to keep separate. Every effort in world history to bring the world together has demonstrated man’s self-reliance and his unwillingness to remain as God ordains.
“We need a Promised Land. We need an Exodus strategy,” Farah wrote. “Are there any governors or legislatures out there among the 50 states willing to secede to offer a refuge for the God-fearing?”
If not, Farah says that foreign nations that prohibit same-sex marriage should prepare for “a pilgrimage by millions of Americans” fleeing marriage equality.
Will a U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring “same-sex marriage” a “right” warrant secession by some state willing and eager to reclaim America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and foundation?
You know it’s inevitable, right?
The fix is in. Two members of the Supreme Court have personally officiated at same-sex “marriages.” I count three solid votes against it. The chances of reaching five are somewhere between slim and none.
I’ve heard some chatter about civil disobedience. That’s all well and good. But I don’t see much in the way of serious organization taking place.
What I do see is a lot of grass-roots concern. I know there are millions of Christians, Jews and others who would pull up stakes and move to another country that honored the institution of marriage as it was designed by God – a union between one man and one woman.
As Jesus said it: “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh.”
Is there one state in 50 that would not only defy the coming abomination, but secede in response? The rewards could be great. I would certainly consider relocating. How about you?
The founders of this country found a place of refuge in America and shaped it into the greatest self-governing nation in the history of world. Just think what one state could do if it simply stuck to the principles that made this country great? Americans wouldn’t have to cross an ocean to rediscover what brought most of our ancestors here. We could simply drive.
Are any states so inclined?
I haven’t heard this question raised by anyone else. So I’m raising it now. We don’t have much time before the nine high priests in black robes decide to follow Baal instead of the One True God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
We need a Promised Land. We need an Exodus strategy.
If not a state, are there any nations in the world interested in a pilgrimage by millions of Americans?
...
And here’s the second question: Are there any governors or legislatures out there among the 50 states willing to secede to offer a refuge for the God-fearing?
Garlow's conference is coming at the perfect time, Beck said, because society is about to collapse and America needs passionate pastors who are willing to give up their lives if necessary in the fight against the coming persecution of Christians. Fortunately, the Black Robe Regiment [ http://nationalblackroberegiment.com/ ] that he and David Barton [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/david-barton ] established a few years back has managed to cobble together at least 10,000 pastors who are willing to do just that.
"The number in the Black Robe Regiment is about 70,000 now," Beck said. "The number that I think will walk through a wall of fire, you know, and possible death, is anywhere between 17,000 and 10,000. That is an extraordinary number of people that are willing to lay it all down on the table and willing to go to jail or go to death because they serve God and not man."
Garlow was in complete agreement, saying that the necessity of being willing to die is "honestly where we are."
"We've come to that moment," he said. "People like you and me and, thank God, many others are digging in very deeply and laying the benchmark of where we're going to stand on these issues."
"You're going to see these 10,000 to 20,000 pastors begin to stand up," Beck promised [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1N3zOqzNM8 (below, as embedded; with comments)], "and say 'it doesn't matter if I lose my church, it doesn't matter if I lose my building, it doesn't matter if I lose my life, I will not sit down!'"
GOP Calls for 'All Hell Breaking Loose' Over Gay Marriage, Because 'God'
AP Photo/Pat Sullivan
By Richard Zombeck Posted: 06/08/2015 2:11 pm EDT Updated: 06/08/2015 3:59 pm EDT
As the Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage bans looms, the right wing has begun their assault on reason and intellect with the standard dire warnings, threats, and fear mongering in the form of corporate boycotts and revolt. As usual, their claims include flagrant misinterpretations of their favorite documents, the Constitution and the Bible, as well as an assumption that no one will either read up on or bother to revisit history.
Earlier this week, Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, in an unfortunate choice of words, suggested that homosexuality is being "crammed down [the] throats [ https://www.facebook.com/FranklinGraham/posts/935913996464782 ]" of Christians, noting that Tiffany's & Co is "advertising wedding rings for gay couples." Graham is calling for a boycott of the jeweler and Wells Fargo, both of which apparently use same-sex couples in their ads. Ironically, he posted his outrage on Facebook, whose CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, marched alongside his employees [ http://mashable.com/2013/06/30/zuckerberg-pride-parade/ ] in 2013 in San Francisco Pride.
Yes, he's the same Tom DeLay who danced on Dancing With the Stars [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aGZ9-l2GNM ] to the tune of "Wild Thing," in a solid rookie performance, scoring 16 out of 30.
He's back, on camera, stoking homophobic fears and warning of a massive revolt if the Supreme Court rules to strike down gay marriage bans. "If this Supreme Court rules against marriage, all hell is going to break loose," DeLay said Thursday on The Steve Malzberg Show [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SzktS4ps04 (below, as embedded; with comments)].
DeLay went on to say that he had pledges signed by politicians, including -- who else? -- Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, who have vowed to defy a ruling by SCOTUS. Of course, neither of them holds any political office, but why should that matter? They're the dynamic anti-gay duo.
"We're going to stand for marriage even if it takes civil disobedience," DeLay said.
It would appear that Scott Walker and Ted Cruz are treading the same homophobic path, both recently announcing the prospect of a constitutional amendment either defining marriage in the GOP's terms, as one man and one woman, or leaving it up to individual states to define marriage or allow it.
We love people who have chosen to be homosexuals. The problem is, we abhor the sin. So yes, when I have a business and some gay person walks in -- unidentified by the way, there's no way you can tell it unless he tells you -- then I'm going to serve him. But if he comes in and asks me to undermine my values, what I believe in, undermine my religious liberty, then I have the right to stand up for what I believe in and not serve him. It's not discrimination.
To clarify: If a dude who "chooses" to be gay walks into a business looking all normal and stuff, then it's OK to serve him. But if that same dude swishes in and asks you for sex or a wedding cake, then it undermines your apparently fragile religious liberties. Got it.
During the interview on The Steve Malzberg Show, while DeLay was ranting about "all hell breaking loose" if gays marry, he pulls out an idea we'll be hearing a lot about, attempting to explain that anyone who "understands the Constitution" knows that the legislative and executive branches do not need to enforce a Supreme Court ruling, "and not only that, if the states would just invoke the 10th Amendment and assert their sovereignty, they could defy a ruling by the Supreme Court." And that's relevant to anyone who doesn't care to look deeper than "Gays can't marry, because it's gross" or "Being gay is a choice."
DeLay is suggesting that what the Supreme Court rules and what essentially would be the law of the land is subject to refusal (civil disobedience) on a state-by-state basis, under the umbrella of the 10th Amendment. To a degree that's true, as the 10th Amendment provides that our government is limited, and there's nothing in the Constitution that gives the federal government power over marriage. In fact marriage has always been the preserve of the state and left, in some cases, to popular vote.
However, the Constitution enumerates certain rights and liberties as so important that they are above politics and the whims of politicians. Freedom of speech and religion, for example, are never put to a popular vote, nor should they be. DeLay may very well believe that being gay is something someone chooses to be one morning while brushing their teeth, but the Constitution stands for the proposition that some rights cannot be left to the whims of politics and politicians. Equality before the law is one of those rights, and that can't be decided state by state and changed based on who controls the political climate.
There's a historic precedent as well. In the 1967 Loving v. Virginia [ https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/388/1#388_US_1n5ref ] decision, SCOTUS applied the Constitution's guarantees of equality and liberty to strike down Virginia's discriminatory interracial marriage law as unconstitutional, a ruling that took down 15 similar state laws along with it. Until then, 16 states had laws on the books that banned interracial couples from marrying under those state laws.
The other glaring ideological barrier in this argument is that, according to DeLay [ http://www.rawstory.com/2014/02/tom-delay-people-keep-forgetting-that-god-wrote-the-constitution/ ], "God created this nation, that he wrote the Constitution, that it's based on biblical principles." So show me in the Bible where it talks about gay marriage. There's a lot of stuff in that book, and it covers a lot of other things that we don't seem to be discussing. Here's a great scene from The West Wing that illustrates that point [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD52OlkKfNs (next below, as embedded; with comments)]:
This morning, Beck made that announcement but, in typical Beck fashion, he first spent nearly an hour and a half delivering [ http://www.glennbeck.com/2015/06/08/never-again-is-now-glenn-announces-relief-campaign-for-middle-east-restoring-honor-anniversary-event-in-birmingham-and-much-more/ ] a long-winded and self-aggrandizing monologue full of references to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King and passages of Scripture as he railed about how America has gone completely off the rails, fuming that this nation only cares about things like Caitlyn Jenner, abortion rights, and transableism at a time when Christians are being slaughtered by ISIS in the Middle East.
"We are no longer a country that I recognize," he said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIrpqS3vnMg (below, as embedded; with comments)]. "We are no longer a people that I recognize. We are no longer a nation in which I care to call myself a member of. We've become a place where our citizenship is more of an indictment than an honor ... We are a country that has not only lost its way, but history will show that we have lost our ever-loving minds."
Eventually, Beck finally got around to announcing a new "Never Again Is Now [ http://now.mercuryone.org/ ]" campaign to raise awareness of the crisis in the Middle East and a relief effort organized by his Mercury One charity to provide supplies and aid to those displaced and threatened by ISIS.
But there is more to the effort than simply providing relief to the victims of ISIS, as Beck is personally launching a speaking tour of churches in order to wake up Americans to the threat posed by things like gay marriage and to train them to carry out boycotts, civil disobedience, and nonviolent resistance ... and just like Martin Luther King, Beck will be kicking this effort off in Birmingham, Alabama.
"If you think there is trouble now, what happens when the Supreme Court decides to say that homosexual marriage is the law of the land?" Beck asked. "Will this administration then force our churches to comply? Will you be forced to violate your own faith? We must together wake the most powerful force on earth: the people of God."
"I'm going to begin," he continued [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7_0My3Vagw (below, as embedded; with comments)], "where Martin Luther King began. On 8/28, I'm going to be in Birmingham, Alabama in a church just down the street from where Martin Luther King began his historic stand against Bull Connor ... We are going to begin to gather like-minded people and we are going to begin to train ourselves for non-violent resistance and civil disobedience. We're going to begin to train ourselves for boycotts and sit-ins. We're going to do all of the things that we thought were too radical or too hippy-like to do because we have to understand that we are now David and Goliath has all of the power. But we all know how that story ends."
The group, which filled stadiums and attracted criticism for its patriarchal message in its 1990s heyday, has a smaller profile today. This year it is holding several gatherings, starting with one in Stockton, California, back in May, with other events following in Dallas in August; Pittsburgh in September (rescheduled from June); Rochester, Minnesota, in October; and Redmond, Washington, in November.
Today’s culture nurtures a popular misconception that tolerance is the only reasonable worldview. Unfortunately, this spirit of compromise on key moral and biblical issues has permeated both our culture and the church. Divorce and co-habitation rates continue to rise. Same-sex marriage is now accepted and abortion is still legal in our nation. Scripture is quite clear how we are to respond whenever the foundations of the Christian faith are under attack: our duty is to contend for the faith, without compromise.
In 1 John 1:5 John wrote, “This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.” This is a very definitive statement. God is light. There are no shades of grey with God. He is Light and in Him, there is no darkness. What is light? It’s truth, and there is no compromising God’s Truth. There is no middle ground.
Considering the current times, as Promise Keepers, we must boldly and courageously stand for truth. We must defend biblical marriage, champion the life of the unborn and protect religious liberty. We cannot stand back and allow moral relativism, cultural decadence, spiritual apathy and ecclesiastical indifference to hinder us any longer. We must draw our battle lines without compromise.
The website declares, “Everything that Promise Keepers does centers on this central truth – obedience to the Word of God.” The website also encourages people to join the “One Message [ http://www.theonemessage.org/ ]” movement, a project of Promise Keepers that is working to bring about the “greatest revival the world has ever known” – in fact, they say, it’s already under way:
The greatest revival the world has ever known – a revival prophesied by the Apostle Paul and affirmed by men like Jonathan Edwards and C. H. Spurgeon – has begun. And each of us has the amazing privilege of being a part of it.
This revival began 65 years ago, when the State of Israel – a nation that ceased to exist 2,000 years earlier – was reborn in a day. Since then, the Jewish people have been turning by thousands to recognize Yeshua (Jesus’ Hebrew name) as their long-awaited Messiah.
President Santorum Won't Enforce Gay Marriage Ruling Since It's A 'Violation Of The First Amendment'
Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Wednesday, 6/10/2015 4:28 pm
Rick Santorum [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/rick-santorum ] called into Glenn Beck's radio program this morning, where he warned that if the Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage, it will be an unconstitutional establishment of religion that, when he becomes president, he will not enforce.
"This is tantamount to government establishing religion," Santorum said. "When the United States government comes in and says this is what you are going to believe, this is how you're going to practice your faith, this is a new religion. This violates, in my opinion, the Establishment Clause in the Constitution that says that Congress shall make no law with respect to an establishment of religion. If the government goes around and tells churches what they have to believe in and what their doctrine is, that is something that is a violation of the First Amendment."
Santorum said that he holds out hope that the Supreme Court will rule against marriage equality advocates "because there is no way that the left will stop at mere tolerance, they will demand conformity, they will demand it from the church, they will demand it from every institution, they will demand it from businesses and there will be no tolerance to a different point of view on this issue."
But if the Supreme Court does legalize gay marriage, Santorum said that, as president, he will fight it.
"If they get it wrong and the consequences are what I suspect they will be toward people of faith," he said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRvH-qAZjgo (below, as embedded; with comments)], "then this president will fight back."
“So this is the world we’re living in,” Savage sighed. “This is what Obama has done to America, this is what he has done to the military. A man, a general now, introduces his husband at an event like this. Do you have any idea why ISIS is insane as they are? Do you have any idea that you are looking at two sides of a coin here? You see a ninth-century view of the world from a point of view of ISIS, and you see a view of the world that is so warped and so accepted in America as the norm, that most people’s heads are spinning around the world not understanding how a super power became a ‘stupid power’ in one generation.”
Indeed, the “wife” or “husband” of a top U.S. general was on display during the Pentagon gay pride ceremony on Tuesday, as reported by Rowan Scarborough of The Washington Times. He noted that Brigadier General Randy S. Taylor introduced his husband, Lucas, at a Pentagon event on Tuesday. Another top Pentagon official, Air Force General Counsel Gordon O. Tanner, also has a husband.
In Obama’s Orwellian Armed Forces, two men make a marriage, even if one takes the title of “wife” and the other “husband.” Or, perhaps, both are husbands. Who knows? I may have to consult the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association for the latest instructions on the correct terminology.
...
It appears that over the past several years, Obama has been acting as a seamstress, weaving things into the fabric of America that didn’t exist until he took office.
Left behind in the wake of this exercise in building a new nation are the remnants of the old America—traditional values, a strong military, and a constitutional system based on free enterprise and limited government.
Back during the congressional debate over DADT, the military's service chiefs were promised that the Equal Opportunity guidelines would not change -- which, like many other assurances, has turned out to be a bold-faced lie that greased the wheels of repeal. As we've witnessed in the four years since, once the camel's nose was under the tent, the dominos started to fall. Under an affirmative action-type system, what troops do in the bedroom will transcend what they do in battle when it comes to key personnel decisions. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that the military will start catering to gays, lesbians, and transgenders at the expense of good soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. As they have with every incremental change, activists will leverage this new standing as a way to demand access and force affirmation.
...
Faith and military service have been an inseparable piece of the American fabric for centuries. And to watch that fabric unravel at the hands of a radical few is painful -- but not irreparable. Courage, the same kind that led the great men and women of this country to put on their uniform, is needed more now than ever. Pray for our troops -- not only that they would have the fortitude to fight the enemies abroad, but the agenda within. (emphasis added)
He told WND: “What you’re seeing here is the Left’s and Obama’s fundamental transformation of the military. This is the cultural revolution and long march through America’s most cherished institutions that the radical left, particularly the cultural Marxists, have long sought. This is a takedown.
“They were very shrewd. They understood that once you captured culture via education, media, and Hollywood, the rest would fall in due course. And as Americans become increasingly secular and individualistic and relativistic, they’ve been fairly easy prey. The left took the public schools, the universities, media and social media, Hollywood, and now the Boy Scouts and even the military.”
As evidence of this deliberate campaign, Kengor cited the media’s celebration of Bruce Jenner’s transformation to “Caitlyn” and the recent spate of television shows targeted at children and young people celebrating transgenders.
Kengor observes: “I must say that I’m tempted to congratulate them. They’ve worked long and hard and patiently at this. Unfortunately, it’s just such a shame because they’re ruining what was once a great country. The left laughed at Ronald Reagan’s description of America as a Shining City Upon a Hill. Well, they can take comfort in the fact that it ain’t no Shining City no more.”
Kengor believes military culture is simply following the same cultural trends as the rest of society. He notes homosexuality and other sexually deviant behavior was once seen as a reason to deny a security clearance. However, as public morality has shifted, Kengor argues it is impossible to expect the military to remain permanently aloof from society.
“As for military men openly acknowledging gay ‘husbands’ – hey, why not? Once upon a time in America, such a spousal arrangement would have been a huge security risk inviting instant possibility of blackmail,” he said.
“But that’s no longer the case in a culture and country where behavior like this is celebrated as a joyous expression of liberation and self-expression. In the new fundamentally transformed America, these two soldiers are no longer security risks; they’re cultural icons. They’re the new heroes. They are the new G.I. Joes.”
Kengor warns Americans the new sexually progressive military is unlikely to produce the kinds of legendary military heroes prior generations of Americans once idolized. Indeed, Kengor says many heroic Americans would find no place in the armed services of today.
“I guess I’ll be the one to ask the politically incorrect but obvious question: What would George Patton think of this? Of course, we all know that he was a mere hate-filled homophobe whose abiding anti-marriage-equality bigotry should have forever disqualified him from disserving our military.”
More importantly, said Kengor, the transformation of the military into a pro-homosexual and pro-transgender force is only a step toward what he sees as the left’s final goal of driving religion entirely out of public life.
“Marriage is within their grasp. What’s next? The greatest foe of all: God and religion. A victory there would be the secular left’s ideological apotheosis.” (emphasis added)
Why Do Republican Officials Keep Partnering With Christian-Nation Extremist David Lane?
In pursuit of conservative evangelical voters, GOP candidates embrace far-right political operative who is raising an ‘army’ to fulfill his ‘Christian nation’ vision
Submitted by Peter Montgomery on Friday, 6/12/2015 5:02 pm
When one-third of the Republican National Committee took a nine-day junket to Israel in January with the American Family Association [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/american-family-association ] picking up the tab, things got a little ugly. Israeli media started asking questions about the extreme positions taken by AFA spokesman Bryan Fischer [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/bryan-fischer ], including his claims that the First Amendment’s religious liberty protections apply only to Christians and that gays were responsible for the rise of the Nazi Party. In damage control mode, the AFA disavowed some of Fischer’s most inflammatory statements and took away his title – but not the radio show that continues to give him a bigotry-spewing platform. Meanwhile, the actual organizer of the trip, Christian nationalist David Lane, slipped out of the spotlight and got right back to building political alliances between high-level Republican politicians and conservative evangelical pastors, especially those in key primary states.
David Lane promotes a vision of America as a nation founded by and for Christians; denounces court rulings upholding church-state separation; calls for Christianity to be established as America’s official religion with the Bible as the primary textbook in public schools; vehemently opposes legal equality for LGBT people; and demands the impeachment of judges who rule in favor of allowing same-sex couples to be legally married. Lane matters because these are not just the opinions of a far-right fringe figure. They are the explicit agenda of a political operative who is working closely with the highest leaders of the Republican Party. The explicit goal of Lane’s political organizing is to advance his particularly narrow and divisive vision of America. Republican politicians who embrace Lane in the hope of winning votes are playing with fire, giving credibility to his divisive worldview and troubling political agenda.
David Lane’s Worldview
In Lane’s worldview, there are essentially no gray areas: America will either be a Christian nation or a pagan nation and there will be no peace until we decide which. Judges who uphold the right of same-sex couples to marry must be impeached. The Supreme Court’s rulings upholding the separation of church and state have imposed a destructive secularism on America and must be reversed. Secularism and homosexuality are twin evils from which America must be rescued. This quote gives a pretty good summary of Lane’s worldview:
Who will wage war for the Soul of America and trust the living God to deliver the pagan gods into our hands and restore America to her Judeo-Christian heritage and re-establish a Christian culture?...
As to the future of America – and the collapse of this once-Christian nation – Christians must not only be allowed to have opinions, but politically, Christians must be retrained to war for the Soul of America and quit believing the fabricated whopper of the ‘Separation of Church and State,” the lie repeated ad nauseum by the left and liberals to keep Christian America – the moral majority – from imposing moral government on pagan public schools, pagan higher learning, and pagan media...
Christian America is in ruins…
You ask, “What is our goal?” To wage war to restore America to our Judeo-Christian heritage with all of our might and strength that God will give us. You ask, “what is our aim?” One word only: victory, in spite of all intimidation and terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory, America will ultimately collapse.
Lane has no patience for those who don’t see the world as he does. His message to lawmakers: “Vote to restore the Bible and prayer in public schools or be sent home,” he has written. “Hanging political scalps on the wall is the only love language politicians can hear.”
“This struggle for the Soul of America is merely the ongoing battle since the beginning of time, “man says” or “God says.” God has said multiple times over thousands of years that homosexuality is wickedness – just like stealing or committing adultery, it is sin – but to double-down on the U.S. Supreme Court, in its omniscience, sanctioned and legitimized homosexual marriage in 2014 as a diverse and acceptable lifestyle, well inside the cultural norm.”
and:
“God says” or “man says” is the choice facing America. “We the people” must hold the Judicial, Legislative and Executive Branches of government accountable or be ready to answer to God; this is our point of no return. The secularist ideology is more than a mere political philosophy, dueling for ideological supremacy, it is a Weltanschauung (a world view), a religion. Secularism – the false idol instituted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963 – has finally bloomed, blossomed, and produced fruit, it’s stench is nauseating.
“More to the point, there can be no reconciliation of opposites, particularly the spiritual and the secular. Therefore, we need to establish if America is a pagan or Christian nation and get on with it- the sooner the better….We have to make the peace: either secularism of Christian values are going to reign supreme….The grandiosity and recklessness of the radicalized, secular United States Supreme Court in the last century is mind-blowing. The Court has birthed a full-scale catastrophe, corrupting 500 years of natural law and threatening America’s long-term, sustainable freedom. Congress has failed to fulfill its historic role to check and balance the judicial and executive branches of government. It’s up to us “we the people” to hold them accountable.”
“Government is not going to save America. Wall Street is not going to save America. The Republican party is not going to save America. If America is going to be saved it will be done by Christian men and women restoring a Judeo-Christian culture to the country...
He argued that America was established as a Judeo-Christian nation and that separation of church and state was never meant to keep religion out of politics.
“There’s no truth to that, the Constitution says the state is to keep out of the church, it doesn’t say the church is to keep out of the state,” Mr. Lane said, adding that secularism is another religion that’s being imposed on Americans.
“It’s just a matter of somebody’s values are going to reign supreme,” Mr. Lane said, “It’s just a little minority imposing their values. It’s part of a spiritual battle. If we are going to survive as a nation, we have to have a spiritual resurrection.”
Christian Nation Covenant versus Secularism/Paganism
“Secularism is paganism clothed in tolerance,” Lane wrote in a January 21 email, “its ubiquitous chant, ‘We are a pluralistic society,’ is not the same nation bequeathed to us by our Founders.”
Lane’s belief that America is “a nation founded by Christians…for the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith” is not based on the people traditionally seen as the nation’s Founding Fathers – the authors of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Lane looks back to the pilgrims and the Mayflower compact, and even further to the covenant [ http://www.charismanews.com/opinion/47843-congress-needs-to-grow-a-spine-and-restore-checks-and-balances ] declared by Robert Hunt, founder of the Jamestown, Virginia, colony in 1607:
“We do hereby Dedicate this Land, and ourselves, to reach the People within these shores with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to raise up Godly generations after us, and with these generations take the Kingdom of God to all the earth. May this Covenant of Dedication remain to all generations, as long as this ear remains, and may this Land, along with England, be Evangelist to the World.”
“America was a Christian nation,” he says. But now, “America has boarded the wrong, secular train. Now we’ve lost our Judeo-Christian heritage and its byproduct – a Christian culture.”
“Ah, but what has godless secularism produced? Red ink as far as the eye can see: racism, injustice, the murder of fifty-five million babies, the advancement of the homosexual agenda, fatherless homes, an epidemic of drugs and crime and the widespread acceptance and usage of pornography, especially among America’s youth.”
Punishing and Purging Judges
Who is to blame for secularism and its attendant evils? According to Lane, it’s the Supreme Court, secularists in the schools, politicians who promote the secularist agenda – and pastors who don’t stand against all these evils. He complains [ http://www.christianresponsealerts.com/2012/09/the-godless-democrats/ ] that the “the Church didn’t even shudder when the Bible, prayer, Jesus, and the Ten Commandments were removed from the public schools in 1963.” And he says [id.] there was “not a peep from the Christian Church” in response to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, when the church “should have initiated riots, revolution, and repentance.”
By ending Bible reading in public schools, he says, the Supreme Court removed the foundation for real knowledge and the transmission for wisdom and virtue. He wrote [ http://barbwire.com/2014/08/08/will-21st-century-church/ ] in August 2014:
Virtue is required for sustainable freedom. Secularists have successfully removed the transmission agent (The Word of God) for the accumulation of wisdom and knowledge, which created freedom in America. The nation is now basically biblically illiterate. Let’s be clear, the secularists and their priests — i.e., public education, higher learning, Hollywood and Media elite — have a coordinated, deliberate, sustained effort, a blitzkrieg, imposing an intolerant and aggressive false religion on America — Secularism.
This false god of Secularism — embedded in public education by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963 — has glamorized, exalted and now normalized sin in America, creating a spiritually decadent, godless society.
Lane has said [ http://www.citywatchla.com/8br-hidden/7708-conservatives-already-planning-new-ways-to-take-down-gay-marriage ] he is looking for a member of the House of Representatives to introduce an impeachment bill. “The way we address this is we start removing unelected and unaccountable judges,” he said. “And then we remove the members of Congress who don’t vote to impeach them.” Lane was deeply involved in the 2010 purge of three Iowa Supreme Court justices who voted for marriage equality.
This approach to the courts is one reason Lane seems so fond of Mike Huckabee [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/mike-huckabee ], whose win in the 2008 Iowa caucus is often attributed to Lane’s efforts. (Evangelical strategist Doug Wead described Lane as “the mysterious, behind-the-scenes, evangelical kingmaker” who stormed into Iowa in 2008 and tilted the whole thing from Romney to Huckabee.) Huckabee has signaled for some time that he would make attacks on “judicial supremacy” central to his campaign. His call for a rejuvenated nullification movement among the states has been taken up by Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore and the state Supreme Court [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/opinion/alabamas-dangerous-defiance.html ].
Republican Party Loves Lane
While Lane often expresses his contempt for “establishment” Republicans who don’t embrace his radical vision for a Christian America in which the Bible is the primary textbook in public schools, GOP officials like party head Reince Priebus [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/reince-priebus ] attend and promote his events. Priebus was scheduled to participate in Lane’s trip to Israel in January before controversy flared; he ended up not making the trip, saying he needed to attend a funeral.
Indeed, Republican Party officials seem unconcerned with Lane’s extremism and are eager to make use of his network of conservative pastors. The invitation letter for the Israel junket came from Priebus himself; although he said it was not an RNC trip, committee members interested in participating were told to RSVP to the RNC’s Member Services department. Priebus praised [ http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/10/07/3576926/top-gop-leader-letting-gay-people-marry-will-undermine-american-society/ ] David Lane by name in October during a television interview in which he reiterated the Party’s support for a federal constitutional ban on same-sex couples marrying, which would overturn marriage equality in every state that now recognizes it.
TIME reported [ http://time.com/3616292/republican-israel-trip-american-renewal/ ] that the RNC members’ trip to Israel was organized by the American Family Association and Lane’s American Renewal Project, “in concert with RNC faith director Chad Connelly [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/chad-connelly ].” When Right Wing Watch reported in August 2014 that Cruz and Huckabee were planning to appear at a Lane-sponsored event in Michigan, the RNC’s Connelly posted on his Facebook page, “My buddy David Lane is drawing the attention of the God-haters and left wingers, but I repeat myself, out there! We had a great Michigan event and I’m convinced that the faith component is what will bring our nation together!” Connelly’s post was shared by the American Renewal Project, as was one of Connelly’s photos from the event, with Connelly’s caption: “honored to speak and give my testimony to a terrific crowd of enthusiastic pastors at the Michigan Renewal Project last night!” A few days later, Connelly bragged, “The RNC was well represented tonight at the California renewal project conference... .”
Lane returns the love by helping Republicans win elections. Last year, his American Renewal Project teamed up with four potential 2016 candidates – Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, and Mike Huckabee – to record radio ads urging “God’s people” to vote in the 2014 mid-terms. The ads were reportedly meant to run [ http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/christian-vote-cruz-perry/2014/09/30/id/597636/ ] on almost 300 radio stations in more than 35 states. Those ads capped off the American Renewal Project’s 12-state strategy to turn out conservative evangelical voters in the 2014 cycle, a strategy that reportedly included a $2 million registration, education, and turnout ground game [ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/22/evangelical-pastors-descend-on-las-vegas-to-learn-/ ] in North Carolina, Colorado, Iowa and Arkansas, states with key Senate races
Lane’s love for the GOP, however, is far from unconditional. In April 2013 he complained [ http://www.westernjournalism.com/normalizing-sin-and-the-decadent-society/ ] that the Republican Party establishment was not taking a strong enough stand against homosexuality and said there was a war for ideological supremacy – “the moral against the immoral” – within the Republican Party between “establishment moderates and the biblically conservative grassroot, precinct-level ground forces.” He has praised [id.] GOP officials who speak out against marriage equality, as he did when Iowa State GOP Chair AJ Spiker wrote:
“While inclusion is important, elected Republicans (we all know the most recent example) and National/State Party leaders who embrace so-called same sex marriage are doing grave harm to our Party and the whole of society.
Lets not forget, so-called same sex marriage is an irreconcilable difference with the Republican Party’s largest constituency…Committed Christians.
Matchmaker, Matchmaker
All of Lane’s events are designed to promote conservative GOP candidates by introducing them to networks of politically engaged conservative pastors who are willing to turn their churches into GOTV operations on behalf of the right kind of right-wing candidate. Lane claims those events have engaged some 15,000 pastors since he began conducting them in the 1990s.
“A lot of them asked the obvious question – sort of the 800-pound gorilla in the room: Why are pastors from Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada the lion’s share of participants on this trip?” Huckabee said. “And I think some of them probably honestly, and perhaps somewhat cynically, probably said, ‘Is it because you’re trying to secure their support, if, in fact, you decide to run?’ My honest answer was, ‘Fair enough. If I should run, would I like to have your support? Sure.’”
Also on the trip were people like Rich Bott, president of a Christian radio conglomerate, whose support could be very useful.
During the flap over RNC members’ trip to Israel, Lane told Ha’aretz that he made his first trip to the country in 2008 or 2009 and has since taken seven or eight trips, including the one with Rand Paul in 2013, about which Lane says, “A lot of people believe that after Rand Paul went in January 2013, his views evolved and he saw how wonderful the Jewish people are.” Researcher Rachel Tabachnik reports [ http://www.politicalresearch.org/2015/01/30/while-fischer-takes-the-blame-rnc-israel-trip-will-be-led-by-an-even-more-influential-christian-nationalist/ ] that Perry has also taken one of Lane’s trips to Israel.
“When we talk about freedom or liberty people say that can get carried away you can’t have too much of that. I tell people thought that the fabric of our country though wasn’t just liberty and freedom. It was liberty and freedom and tradition.”
Lane himself is not a pastor; he describes himself as a political operative. He believes America is in the sad state it’s in because pastors have not preached more aggressively, and conservative Christians have not been active enough in the public arena. He told the New York Times’ Jason Horowitz in March that his goal is to raise up “an army [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/us/evangelicals-aim-to-mobilize-an-army-for-republicans-in-2016.html ].”
In 2016, Lane’s political strategy has two major prongs: one is using “Pastors and Pews” events, trips to Israel, and public prayer rallies to promote politicians he likes and mobilize political engagement by conservative evangelicals. During controversy over Israel trip, Lane told Ha’aretz [ http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/.premium-1.639330 ], “The Lord gave me this model of mobilizing pastors to try and engage the culture. Somebody’s values are going to reign supreme. America was founded by Christians for the glory of God and the Christian faith.”
Lane clearly hopes these efforts to vet presidential candidates will help conservative evangelicals coalesce around a single champion. He says [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/11/25/christian_conservatives_plot_2016_revival__124747.html ] he will not endorse in the primary, but he has complained bitterly about Jeb Bush’s hiring of pro-marriage-equality campaign staff. Lane bemoans the fact that divided evangelical voters allowed McCain and Romney to take the GOP nominations in 2008 and 2012. He told the Houston Chronicle in 2013, “We’re going to try to eliminate the stuff that they [GOP leaders] do to us every four years, which is picking somebody who has no chance of being viable and they kill us off and we have the McCains and Romneys left.”
“Only a merciful God can cause America to change, and God works through His people,” Lane said.
That’s why prayer is so important; people need God’s guidance about whom to elect, Lane explained.
In a March 3 email, Lane summed up the quest this way: “The challenge is this – can we find a man or a woman whose faith is so great that they will voluntarily abandon those things which men cherish, including their very life, to defend against the seemingly invincible omnipotence of secularism?”
The other prong of Lane’s 2016 strategy is an effort to recruit 1,000 conservative evangelical pastors to run for office themselves. Lane says he was inspired by his own pastor, Rob McCoy [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/california-pastor-warns-america-turning-nazi-germany-unless-pastors-get-involved-politics ] of Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks, California, who decided to run for the state assembly last year. McCoy won the Republican primary but was defeated in the general election. In both races he was outspent but managed to mobilize hundreds of volunteers. Lane figures [ http://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2014/11/20/huckabee-auschwitz/ ] that if he could replicate that experience on a grand scale, it “would revolutionize the political process” and dramatically change the political climate in America.”
“Our goal in 2016 is to have 1,000 pastors running for city council, county commissioner, school board, mayor, Congress — who attract an average of 300 Christian volunteers per campaign,” Mr. Lane explained.
“That would amount to a total 300,000 grassroots, evangelical, precinct-level conservatives — from the bottom up — in 2016,” he added. “It would change America for good, a step toward restoring the nation to our Judeo Christian heritage and reestablishing a Christian culture.”
In January, Lane put on a recruitment and training session for pastors thinking about running for office. Jindal signed an invitation letter, which said, “There is a great need for the kind of leaders we read about in the Old Testament, ‘The Men of Issachar’ (1 Chronicles 12:32). We need such men and women of wisdom today who will accept the challenge to restore our Judeo-Christian heritage in America.” Jindal and Sen. Steve Lankford [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/james-lankford ] of Oklahoma were among the speakers at the event, which was held the day before “The Response,” the Lane-organized, Jindal-hosted prayer rally.
“A thousand pastors running in 2016-and three to four hundred pastors winning their political races – would ignite a spiritual movement in the public arena of America not seen since America’s Founding. Again, the flock of God hungers for leadership in the battle for restoring America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and reestablishing a Christian culture.”
Lane’s American Renewal Project operates under the umbrella of the American Family Association, a nonprofit organization that is not required to disclose its donors. Lane has always refused [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/us/evangelicals-aim-to-mobilize-an-army-for-republicans-in-2016.html ] to name the big donors who pick up the tab for flying pastors and politicians around the world, or picking up the meals and lodging for preachers to attend one of his state “Pastors and Pews” events with elected officials. But we know where at least some of Lane’s money is coming from.
In 2013, the Christian Broadcasting Networks [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/christian-broadcasting-network-0 ]’ David Brody [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/david-brody ] reported on one of Lane’s Iowa events. Brody’s story included short clips of comments by brothers Farris [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/farris-wilks ] and Dan [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/dan-wilks ] Wilks, who were identified only as members of Lane’s Pastors and Pews group. Brody introduced the brothers by saying, “The Wilks brothers worry that America’s declining morals will especially hurt the younger generation, so they’re using the riches that the Lord has blessed them with to back specific goals.” Dan Wilks told Brody, “I just think we have to make people aware, you know, and bring the Bible back into the school, and start teaching our kids at a younger age, and, uh, you know, and focus on the younger generation.” Brother Farris said, “They’re being taught the other ideas, the gay agenda, every day out in the world so we have to stand up and explain to them that that’s not real, that’s not proper, it’s not right.”
Each of the brothers has, with their wives, set up charitable foundations: Farris and Joann created The Thirteen Foundation and Dan and Staci the Heavenly Father’s Foundation. The Thirteen Foundation in particular became a source of millions for right-wing political groups. According to the 2013 990 forms filed by the foundations with the IRS, The Thirteen Foundation gave $922,000 that year to the American Family Association. It is not clear how much of that was for Lane’s projects, but the filing from Heavenly Father’s Foundation is more explicit, reporting $750,000 to the AFA for three Pastors and Pews conferences.
Lane is, not surprisingly perhaps, a fan of today’s big-money approach to politics. Speaking about a post-Citizens United World, Lane told NBC News’s Perry Bacon in 2014 [ http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/no-announcements-yet-plenty-gop-2016-hopefuls-are-already-running-n246386 ]: “The problem used to be, you had to raise $2,500 per person, so you had to come up with the bundlers. With Citizens United, I don’t think it’s as big of a hurdle. Now you can have somebody who gives $15 or $20 million into a super PAC and that changes the game.”
CBN’s David Brody as David Lane’s Personal Press Agent
One good example [ http://blogs.cbn.com/thebrodyfile/archive/2015/03/03/ted-cruz-bobby-jindal-ready-to-meet-the-pastors.aspx ] of Brody serving as Lane’s public relations man came in a March blog post, in which Brody enthused about the upcoming event featuring Jindal and Cruz: “The influential David Lane has done it yet again, pulling together a big event in Iowa where the two soon-to-be presidential candidates will speak in front of a couple hundred pastors next week.”
Brody added a message directly to reporters:
“Hey mainstream media: you better pay attention to these events. These spiritual events are authentic as can be and here's some straight talk for the media as well: don't think that Cruz, Jindal, and others do these events for political purposes. They are both authentic Christians who believe every word of what they say when they talk to these pastors. They are NOT ashamed of the Gospel.
Will there be some political benefit? Well, of course but their heart is in the right place. And after all, God looks at the heart.”
Is it remotely possible that David Brody really believes that Cruz and Jindal do not go to Lane’s explicitly political events “for political purposes”?
David Lane, the GOP, Gideon and Rahab the Harlot
Lane ends just about every email and column with the question, “Will a Gideon or Rahab the Harlot please make a stand?” As RWW has noted, in the Old Testament, Gideon is called by God to defeat the armies of enemies of the Israelites and end the worship of false gods. Rahab the Harlot enabled the Israelites’ conquest of Jericho by helping two spies sent into the city by Joshua. She and her family were the only ones spared when the city was destroyed and every other man, woman and child was killed. Politicians who stand with Lane might consider asking him just what he means by his frequently repeated calls for a Gideon or Rahab to stand up among American evangelicals.
• Feared that God might destroy the U.S. [id.] just as he punished Nazi Germany: “If we get judgment like Nazi Germany, I’m assuming we go to rebel, and God says ‘I’m done.’”
• Favorably quoted a Christian author who said [id.] that “same-sex marriage practiced universally is suicide. To survive gays and lesbians are parasites, depending for their cultural survival on couples that birth the next generation.”
• Predicted that homosexuality will lead to the destruction of America [id.]: “Homosexual desire and marriage is unnatural and — more so — is a symptom of advanced cultural decay and precursor to the collapse of the Republican Party and the nation... . The mark of a decadent society is the exaltation and normalization of sin — which leads to the death.”
• Lamented that the “‘religion of secularism [ http://www.westernjournalism.com/a-call-to-all-pastors/ ]’ has produced red ink as far as the eye can see, homosexuals praying at the Inauguration, tax-funded abortion, homosexual marriage in several States, Evangelicals held in contempt, and God expelled from the classrooms of America — and the public square.”
Rafael Cruz, Ted Cruz's dad, went on right wing talk radio show Eagle Forum Live to talk with host Phyllis Schlafly about same sex marriage. Their words incited some of their listeners to call in with a very disturbing question...
Filling in for Sam Seder: Majority Report contributors Matt Binder and Michael Brooks.
This clip from the Majority Report, live M-F at 12 noon EST and via daily podcast at http://majority.fm/
I downloaded this video from the now defunct Google Video and uploaded here so it's archived and isn't lost after Google Video deletes all its content. Original description below:
This is a presentation [from November 5, 2006] on science, religion, and how poorly-designed humans, the Earth, and the universe really are. The presenter, Neil deGrasse Tyson, is the new host of the PBS-TV program "NOVA scienceNOW", and director of the Hayden Planetarium in the Rose Center For Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History. He is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal.
This week on Moyers & Company, Bill talks with the astrophysicist about his redux of the famous Carl Sagan series and why science and science literacy matter in a democracy
Neil deGrasse Tyson on Why Science Literacy Matters
Published on Jan 24, 2014 by Moyers & Company
This week on Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers concludes his conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson about why science literacy is critical to the future of our democracy, economy and standing in the world. They also discuss the dangers created by those who would deny scientific fact and block important research.
As NCSE previously reported [ http://ncse.com/news/2015/05/antiscience-legislation-alabama-0016345 ], the bill identified "biological evolution, the chemical orgins of life, and human cloning" as topics likely to "cause debate and disputation," and in effect would have allowed teachers to present whatever they pleased about such topics — while preventing educational authorities from intervening.
But judging from a statement of the bill's lead sponsor, Mack Butler (R-District 30), evolution was the primary target of HB 592. Raw Story (May 7, 2015) noted [ http://www.rawstory.com/2015/05/alabama-lawmaker-my-bill-protects-kids-from-learning-they-came-from-a-monkey/ ] that Butler explained on his Facebook page that his bill would "encourage debate if a student has a problem learning he came from a monkey rather than an intelligent design!"
A columnist for the Montgomery Advertiser (May 8, 2015) argued [ http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/opinion/columnists/josh-moon/2015/05/08/biology-classes-stick-evolution/26989223/ ], "The goal of Butler's bill ... was to make it OK for some two-bit religious zealot posing as a biology teacher to fill kids' heads with debunked and ridiculous ideas. ... [T]his bill, should it pass, will open the door to giving religious ideas the same standing in a classroom as scientific theory."
¬Half of a jawbone discovered in Ethiopia that dates to between 3.3 and 3.5 million years ago. Credit Yohannes Haile-Selassie Cleveland Museum of Natural History
While some experts agree, skeptics argue that the jaw belongs to a familiar hominid species, known as Australopithecus afarensis, that existed about 3.9 to 3 million years ago.
Studies like this one are adding fresh fuel to the debate over the pace of human evolution. Some researchers now believe the human family tree bore exuberant branches early on.
“I’m so excited about these discoveries I’m driving my friends crazy,” said Carol V. Ward [ http://pathology-anatomy.missouri.edu/people/ward.html ], a paleoanthropologist at the University of Missouri. “It makes us stop and rethink everything.”
In the 1990s, the broad outlines of human evolution seemed fairly clear. Early human ancestors, known as hominids, evolved from an ancestor shared with chimpanzees about six or seven million years ago. These hominids were short, bipedal apes with small brains and arms and legs still adapted for climbing trees.
Until about three million years ago, experts thought, there weren’t a lot of hominid species. In fact, some researchers argued that most hominid fossils represented just a single species.
In 1974, the paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and his colleagues found a fairly complete, 3.4-million-year-old skeleton [ http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9A05E7D71431E034BC4A52DFB266838E669EDE ] in Ethiopia, which they nicknamed Lucy. The species was named Australopithecus afarensis, and many more examples have come to light, dating from about 3.9 to 3 million years ago.
Scientists had thought that hominid evolution became more complex just 2.4 million years ago. New species split apart from Australopithecus afarensis, at least a few of them coexisting in Africa.
One lineage, called Paranthropus, evolved powerful jaws it probably used to grind tough plant matter. Other hominids developed nimble hands, which they used to make stone tools for butchering meat. Eventually they evolved into tall, long-distance walkers.
These hominids belonged to the genus Homo, which produced our own species about 200,000 years ago.
But with new discoveries like Australopithecus deyiremeda, this eons-long story may need to change. Hominids may have become much more diverse much earlier than previously thought. Australopithecus afarensis may have had a lot of company.
Geologists initially estimated that the rock layer atop the bones was 2.2 million years old. But that research did not tell them exactly how much older the fossils might be.
The long, grasping toes appear to have been better suited for tree climbing than those of Australopithecus afarensis, suggesting it belonged to a species of its own. Until scientists can describe more bones from its skeleton, it remains without a species name.
These early hominids may have been more mentally sophisticated than previously thought, scientists also have found. Until now, the oldest stone tools ever found dated back 2.6 million years — about 400,000 years after Australopithecus afarensis became extinct.
But last week, Sonia Harmand of Stony Brook University and her colleagues reported discovering tools in Kenya that they estimate to have been made 3.3 million years ago [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/science/stone-tools-from-kenya-are-oldest-yet-discovered.html ]. The researchers suggested that the tools were made by Kenyanthropus, because its fossils come from rocks about the same age and in the same region of Kenya where the tools were found.
Dr. Ward, of the University of Missouri, said the evidence gathered so far pointed to a much earlier explosion of hominid diversity. “It changes our view of human evolution in a fundamental way,” she said.
Four or more species may have coexisted with Australopithecus afarensis. Some may have specialized in different ways of getting food, perhaps with newly developed stone tools, for example. Or they may have competed with one another.
The tools also hint that at least some of these early hominids were capable of more complex thinking than previously believed. “The stone tools represent a sophistication in how they use and manipulate objects,” Dr. Ward said.
Scientists have also shed new light on the transition from Australopithecus to Homo. In March, Kaye E. Reed [ http://www.public.asu.edu/~kreed/ ] of Arizona State University and her colleagues reported finding the oldest Homo fossil [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/world/jawbones-discovery-fills-barren-evolutionary-period.html ], dating back 2.8 million years. It has some anatomical features found only in Homo, such as narrow molars. But it has other traits, like a rounded chin, that make it look more like Australopithecus afarensis.
Dr. Ward said scientists now must trace Homo’s origins to one of the several hominid species that may have lived between three million and four million years ago — and figure out why the other species became extinct.
But some hominid experts remain unconvinced that the road to Homo took so many turns. Tim D. White [ http://ib.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/whitet ], a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that most of the new studies have been rushed into publication without careful peer review.
The 3.3-million-year date for the ancient stone tools, for example, “seemed quite sketchy to me,” Dr. White said. The tools could have been made hundreds of thousands of years later, he said.
Dr. White is also skeptical that the new fossils represent a wealth of new species. He suspects that most of them, including Australopithecus deyiremeda, are just Australopithecus afarensis.
“Lucy’s species just got a few more new fossils,” he said of Wednesday’s announcement.
The peculiar anatomical quirks described by other scientists are no more unusual than the variations found within living ape species, he said. When scientists discover a fossil, Dr. White warned, it can be easy to blow minor variations out of proportion.
“A piece of a mandible doesn’t tell you much,” he said. “Whenever you have small samples, you run a very real risk of mischaracterization.”
Dr. White said it would be wiser to assume that new fossils belonged to documented species, like Australopithecus afarensis, instead of hypothesizing a new species with every new fossil. As he sees it, human evolution isn’t the bushy tree that Dr. Ward describes.
Even Dr. Ward expects that scientists will eventually decide some of the new “species” really aren’t species. Even so, she predicted that early hominids would remain more diverse than traditionally thought.
“There were at a bare minimum two hominids around at that time, and perhaps three or more, which is exciting and important however it falls out,” she said.
Humans migrated north, rather than south, in the main successful migration from Cradle of Humankind
Satellite imagery of Africa. Credit: Public Domain
225 human genome sequences from Ethiopians and Egyptians point to a Northern exit out of Africa as the most likely route by the ancestors of all Eurasians. Credit: Luca Pagani
May 28, 2015
New research suggests that European and Asian (Eurasian) peoples originated when early Africans moved north - through the region that is now Egypt - to expand into the rest of the world. The findings, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, answer a long-standing question as to whether early humans emerged from Africa by a route via Egypt, or via Ethiopia.
The extensive public catalogue of the genetic diversity in Ethiopian and Egyptian populations developed for the project also now provides a valuable, freely available, reference panel for future medical and anthropological studies in these areas.
Two geographically plausible routes have been proposed for humans to emerge from Africa: through the current Egypt and Sinai (Northern Route), or through Ethiopia, the Bab el Mandeb strait and the Arabian Peninsula (Southern Route). Some lines of evidence have previously favoured one, some the other.
"The most exciting consequence of our results is that we draw back the veil that has been hiding an episode in the history of all Eurasians, improving the understanding of billions of people of their evolutionary history," says Dr Luca Pagani, first author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and University of Cambridge. "It is exciting that, in our genomic era, the DNA of living people allows us to explore and understand events as ancient as 60,000 years ago."
The team produced whole-genome sequences from 225 people from modern Egypt and Ethiopia. In previous studies, they and others have shown that these modern populations have been subject to gene flow from West Asian populations, so they excluded the Eurasian contribution to the genomes of the modern African people.
The remaining masked genomic regions from Egyptian samples were more similar to non-African samples and present in higher frequencies outside Africa than the masked Ethiopian genomic regions, pointing to Egypt as the more likely gateway in the exodus to the rest of the world.
The team also used high-quality genomes to estimate the time that the populations split from one another: people outside Africa split from the Egyptian genomes more recently than from the Ethiopians (55,000 as opposed to 65, 000 years ago), supporting the idea that Egypt was last stop on the route out of Africa.
"While our results do not address controversies about the timing and possible complexities of the expansion out of Africa, they paint a clear picture in which the main migration out of Africa followed a Northern, rather than a Southern route," says Dr Toomas Kivisild, a senior author from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
The Northern Route as the preferential direction taken out of Africa is in better agreement with the known genetic mixture of all non-Africans with Neanderthals, who were present in the Levant at the time, and with the recent discovery of early modern human fossils in Israel (close to the Northern Route) dating to around 55,000 years ago.
"This important study still leaves questions to answer," says Dr Chris Tyler-Smith, a senior author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "For example, did other migrations also leave Africa around this time, but leave no trace in present-day genomes? To answer this, we need ancient genomes from populations along the possible routes. Similarly, by adding present-day genomes from Oceania, we can discover whether or not there was a separate, perhaps Southern, migration to these regions.
"Our approach shows how it is possible to use the latest genomic data and tools to answer these intriguing questions of our human origins and migrations."
The Yamnaya people are thought to have carried their burial practices and other traditions into Europe. Natalia Shishlina
A reconstruction of the Yamnaya skull. A typical Yamnaya individual from the Caspian steppe in Russia ca. 5,000-4,800 BP. Yamnaya people were tall and were buried in deep pits covered by a small barrow. Ten thousands were built during this period in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, but also in temperate Europe thousands were built as a result of the migrations. Credit: Alexey Nechvaloda [ http://phys.org/news/2015-06-modern-eurasia-born.html ]
This image shows a typical group of Danish Bronze Age barrows from ca. 3,500-3,100 BP. Normally they were 3-5 meters high, constructed with cut out grass turfs (sods). One barrow would demand 3 hectares of grazing land. In Denmark 50,000 such barrows were constructed during the period 3,500- 3,100 BP for the leading chiefly lineages. Credit: Kristian Kristiansen [ http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-06/fos--wme060815.php ]
Population-scale studies suggest that migrants spread steppe language and technology.
Ewen Callaway 10 June 2015
Only half a decade after a 4,000-year-old tuft of hair yielded the first ancient-human genome (ref 1), researchers are starting to sequence ancient genomes by the dozen, much as they do with modern genomes.
Such population-scale sequencing is answering long-standing questions about the Eurasian Bronze Age. This tumultuous period between about 3000 BC and 1000 BC saw new technologies and cultural traditions — from the use of finely crafted weaponry and horse-drawn chariots to changes in burial practices — spread across Europe and Asia, starting in the steppe between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
As DNA data flood in, researchers say, the mass-genome approach will paint an increasingly accurate picture of the past and show how ancient events shaped modern humanity — from what we eat to the diseases that ail us. “Christ, what does this mean?” says Greger Larson, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Oxford, UK. “In another five years, we’ll be talking about tens of thousands of ancient genomes.”
The dawn of ancient population genomics is the result of cheap DNA sequencing and the rise of boutique lab techniques that can separate highly degraded ancient DNA from contemporary contaminants.
A team led by palaeogenomicists Morten Allentoft and Eske Willerslev at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen has used these advances to sequence the genomes of 101 people who lived across Eurasia between about 3000 BC and AD 700 (ref. 2). “We could have stopped at 80,” says Allentoft. But “we thought, ‘Why the hell not? Let’s go above 100.’”
The sequences allowed the team to tackle questions that have vexed archaeologists for decades, says Allentoft. For example, researchers have disagreed over whether the cultural changes of the Bronze Age were the result of migration or simply the spread of ideas. Allentoft and his colleagues found evidence for migration, in the form of a massive shift in the genetic make-up of northern and central Europeans at the start of the Bronze Age. Before 3000 BC, their genomes resembled those of early farmers from the Middle East and even earlier European hunter-gatherers. By 2000 BC, their genomes looked more like those of people from the Yamnaya culture, which arose on the steppe around 2900 BC.
The findings echo those of a team that sequenced 69 ancient Europeans (ref 3). Both groups speculate that the Yamnaya migration was at least partly responsible for the spread of the Indo-European languages into Western Europe.
Allentoft’s team found genetic traces of the Yamnaya in people who lived near the Altai Mountains in central Russia from 2900 bc to 2500 bc, potentially explaining why Indo-European languages are spoken so far into Asia. “It’s pretty clear that these eastern cultures in the Bronze Age are linked to the Yamnaya,” says Pontus Skoglund, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. But he is not yet convinced that the culture’s wanderings explain the origins of all Indo-European languages.
Ancient population genomics also offer insights on physical and physiological traits. Allentoft’s team found that the ability to digest milk into adulthood — nearly universal in northern Europeans today — was rare in Bronze Age Europeans, contradicting earlier claims that the trait helped early European farmers to gain calories from milk. Of the 101 sequenced individuals, the Yamnaya were most likely to have the DNA variation responsible for lactose tolerance, hinting that the steppe migrants might have eventually introduced the trait to Europe.
Another team has analysed (ref 4) DNA from 83 ancient Europeans and discovered that a mutation linked to thick hair and numerous sweat glands, once thought to have emerged in East Asians, was common in Scandinavians as early as 7,700 years ago — potentially revealing a connection between these groups. That analysis, posted on the preprint server bioRxiv in March, also found evidence of evolutionary pressure on height: Iberians seem to have become shorter after farming arrived in what is now Spain and Portugal 8,000 years ago, whereas the Yamnaya who migrated out of the steppe appear to have been taller than their neighbours.
In future, researchers are likely to probe genomes to see how past events shaped modern susceptibility to disease, says Larson. For instance, survivors of the fourteenth century Black Death, which killed around half of Europeans, may have carried gene variants that protect against certain infections.
“It’s an interesting time, because the technology is moving faster than our ability to ask questions of it,” says Larson, whose lab has also amassed around 4,000 samples from ancient dogs and wolves to chart the origins of domestic dogs. “Let’s just sequence everything and ask questions later.”
Inhabitants of forests in Bossou, south-eastern Guinea, enjoy rich, alcoholic brew fermented from sugary sap
Ian Sample, science editor Tuesday 9 June 2015 19.05 EDT
The boozing starts from 7am. Though large amounts are often drunk, the sessions are orderly, even sociable. A skinful later, and always before nightfall, enough is enough and they rest.
They are the chimpanzees of Bossou, south-eastern Guinea [ http://www.theguardian.com/world/guinea ], and their secret is finally out. With 17 years of evidence in hand, scientists have declared the troop the first wild chimpanzees to indulge in regular, habitual drinking.
The west African chimps were observed in their natural forest habitat from 1995 to 2012. The action, captured on video, centred around raffia palms. Local communities harvest sugary sap from the trees, which ferments into a rich, alcoholic brew in hours.
To extract the sweet, white sap, tappers cut a wedge in the tree and suspend a container beneath. They leave it there to fill and lay leaves over the top to keep the bugs out. In a few weeks, a single tree can yield 50 litres of sap.
But the chimps have cottoned on. In a study published on Wednesday, scientists report 51 incidents of the chimps raiding the palm sap containers. The apes found a big leaf – often one covering the container – and chewed it to form an absorbent sponge or a folded scoop. They then plunged this into the sap, pulled it out and drank.
And drank some more. In their analysis, reported in Royal Society Open Science [ http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/6/150150 ], the researchers observed the chimps necking on average a litre of fermented sap each time. One male, named Foaf, was a regular, appearing in 14 of the 51 sessions. He was an outlier though. Of the 26 apes observed, 13 were apparently teetotal.
Separate tests on raffia palm sap found that the alcohol content of the drink varied through the day, as the sugars increasingly fermented to alcohol. On average, the liquid contained 3.1% alcohol by volume (ABV), the same as a pint of Bass mild. The most potent sap came in at 6.9% ABV, the same as Brooklyn East India Pale Ale.
Male and female chimps were equally keen on the drink, but apes varied individually in how much the imbibed. At one event, the scientists estimate that the amount of alcohol ingested reached 85 millilitres, the equivalent of about three pints of Stella Artois.
Kimberley Hockings, an author of the study at Oxford Brookes University, said they could not be sure if the chimps got drunk, but said the amounts they consumed were enough to “elicit behavioural changes in humans.” On one occasion, an adult male seemed restless after a session and while his companions made for their nests, spent the next hour swinging from tree to tree “in an agitated manner.”
The all-too-human behaviour adds weight to the “drunken monkey hypothesis”, which states that natural selection favoured primates with a taste for alcohol, because it stimulated the appetite, helped them hunt for fruit and so boosted calorific intake. About 10 million years ago, our ancestors – and those of apes – gained a genetic mutation that improved 40-fold our ability to break down ethanol. Without it, consuming large amounts would be even more dangerous.
Chimpanzees Would Cook if Given the Chance, Research Says
Could Chimps Cook? Almost. Scientists found that chimpanzees have the patience and foresight to hold off on eating raw food and put it in a device that seems to cook it. By David Frank and James Gorman on June 2, 2015.
By James Gorman JUNE 2, 2015
Chimpanzees have the cognitive ability to cook, according to new research, if only someone would give them ovens.
It’s not that the animals are ready to go head-to-head with Gordon Ramsay, but scientists from Harvard and Yale found that chimps have the patience and foresight to resist eating raw food and to place it in a device meant to appear, at least to the chimps, to cook it.
That is no small achievement. In a line that could easily apply to human beings, the researchers write, “Many primate species, including chimpanzees, have difficulty giving up food already in their possession and show limitations in their self-control when faced with food.”
But they found that chimps would give up a raw slice of sweet potato in the hand for the prospect of a cooked slice of sweet potato a bit later. That kind of foresight and self-control is something any cook who has eaten too much raw cookie dough can admire.
He argued that cooking may have begun something like two million years ago, even though hard evidence only dates back about one million years. For that to be true, some early ancestors, perhaps not much more advanced than chimps, had to grasp the whole concept of transforming the raw into the cooked.
Felix Warneken at Harvard and Alexandra G. Rosati, who is about to move from Yale to Harvard, both of whom study cognition, wanted to see if chimpanzees, which often serve as stand-ins for human ancestors, had the cognitive foundation that would prepare them to cook.
One obvious difficulty in creating an experiment was that chimps have not yet figured out how to use fire, and the scientists were wary of giving them access to real cooking devices. So the scientists hit on a method that, as they write in Proceedings of the Royal Society B [ http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1809/20150229 ], presents the chimps with “problems that emulate cooking.”
“We invented this magic cooking device,” Dr. Warneken explained in an interview: two plastic bowls that fit closely together with pre-cooked food hidden in the bottom tub.
When a chimpanzee placed a raw sweet potato slice into the device, a researcher shook it, then lifted the top tub out to offer the chimp an identical cooked slice of sweet potato.
It was known that chimps prefer cooked food, but it was an open question whether chimps had the patience to wait through the pretend “shake and bake” process. And, the researchers wanted to know if the animals could understand “that when something raw goes in there it comes out cooked,” said Dr. Warneken.
He and Dr. Rosati, who contributed equally to the research, spent parts of two years at the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center [ http://www.janegoodall.org/programs/tchimpounga-chimpanzee-rehabilitation-center ], a sanctuary in the Republic of Congo and ran nine different experiments, judging different cognitive capacities. The two researchers are married to each other.
The chimps showed a number of indications that, given a real cooking opportunity, they had the ability to take advantage of it. They resisted eating raw food and put it in the device, waiting for cooked food. They would bring raw food from one side of a cage to the other in order to put it in the device. And they put different kinds of food in the device.
Dr. Rosati said the experiments showed not only that chimps had the patience for cooking, but that they had the “minimal causal understanding they would need” to make the leap to cooking.
Other scientists praised the research, but the world of research on chimpanzee cognition is a small one, and many of the scientists know each other and have worked together. Brian Hare at Duke University was not involved in the research, but has worked with Dr. Warneken and was Dr. Rosati’s Ph.D. adviser. Dr. Wrangham was his Ph.D. adviser.
He said in an email, “In 1999, when Wrangham proposed the cooking hypothesis, it seemed silly to some to think that the use of fire was the major impetus to convert upright chimpanzee-like creatures into the first species of humans, but this paper makes that scenario the leading hypothesis in my mind.”
Dr. Laurie Santos at Yale was not involved in this project, but was Dr. Rosati’s postdoctoral adviser. She said it was hard to know what chimps understood about the transition from raw to cooked food, but said similar questions could be asked about “most teenagers who are microwaving their pot pies,” she said.
Whether or not chimpanzees could operate a real oven on their own — Dr. Rosati thinks they probably could — the research leaves no doubt that they have the cognitive ability to take advantage of a restaurant (bring your own potato, of course).
Chimps and humans smile the same proving ancestral links
By Jayalakshmi K June 11, 2015 03:28 BST
Not only can chimps cook, it turns out now that the apes communicate much like humans, further proving the close evolutionary ties between the two species.
The research also found that chimpanzees are able to produce silent smiles without the accompanying laughing sound, much like humans.
Lead researcher, Dr Marina Davila-Ross, from the University's Centre for Comparative and Evolutionary Psychology and colleagues studied the facial expressions of primates by filming 46 chimpanzees at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage.
They then used ChimpFACS - a facial action coding system designed for chimpanzees - to measure their facial movements.
Dr Davila-Ross said: "Humans have the flexibility to show their smile with and without talking or laughing. This ability to flexibly use our facial expressions allows us to communicate in more explicit and versatile ways, but until now we didn't know chimps could also flexibly produce facial expressions free from their vocalizations."
The findings suggest that these smile types must have evolved from positive expressions of ancestral apes.
Co-author on the paper, Professor Kim Bard, who designed ChimpFACS, said: "The coding system allows us to examine very subtle facial movements and compare human and chimpanzee facial expressions, based on their shared musculature."
The study further suggests that flexibility in facial expressions was already present in ancestral apes and emerged long before humans evolved.
Key differences include crow's feet displayed in humans during Duchenne laughter but rarely seen in chimps.
Estimates of genetic similarity between humans and chimpanzees based on comparison of both genomes have revealed a 96% match with a difference of 4%.
While this is lower than the earlier 99.4% suggested when the whole ape genome hadn't been sequenced, the fact remains that humans, chimpanzees and bonobos are more closely related on the genetic front to each other than either is to the gorilla or other primates.
DNA also shows that humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor between 8 and 6 million years ago, where the common ancestor of apes and other primates goes back to 25 million years.
Jane Goodall hails 'awakening' as US labels all chimpanzees endangered Chimpanzee laugh. Dr Jane Goodall: ‘I think of chimpanzees as chimpanzeebeings because they’re so like us.’ Research has found evidence that chimpanzees exhibit complex memory, emotions, self-awareness and even an awareness of death. The primates had previously had a ‘split status’ with those in US classified as ‘threatened’ but new rules will restrict scientific research on captive animals 12 June 2015 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/12/jane-goodall-us-chimpanzees-endangered [with comments]
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Gentle Orangutan Shares Incredible Moment With Human Mom And Baby
A short but comprehensive look into my life as a Christian (which spanned 15 years) to prove to Christians that I was a genuine born-again, Holy Spirit baptised, and deeply committed Christian who had a strong relationship with Jesus Christ.
The concept of God, while having the appearance of being a single, coherent belief is often actually supported by multiple pillars of intertwined sub-beliefs. I give an overview of some of the most important sub-beliefs for my personal conception of God here. I will detail how at least most of these sub-beliefs fell for me, under the weight of logic and evidence, in later videos.
All excerpts used in this video are either copyright-free or covered under "fair use" in Title 17 § 107 of the USC.
I explain why, for theological reasons, I stopped believing in the validity of intercessory prayer as a Christian.
I also comment on the famous 2006 study on intercessory prayer[1] and present GIIVideo's argument against the validity of the "Yes", "No", and "Wait" heuristic that many theists use to justify the practice of intercessory prayer.
All excerpts used in this video are either copyright-free or covered under "fair use" in Title 17 § 107 of the USC.
Music: "Ave Maria" by The Sixteen "Jaracanda" from the iLife Sound Effects library
I explain how, through the study of Ethics, I came to believe that morality was something separate from God that He wanted us to discover using reason, evidence, and experience.
All excerpts used in this video are either copyright-free or covered under "fair use" in Title 17 § 107 of the USC.
A special thanks to snap2objects for providing the Creative Commons 3.0 licensed vectors used for the figures representing myself and my teacher in this video.
Another thank you to http://graphicssoft.about.com/ for providing the Christian dove brush used to represent the guidance of the Holy Spirit in my videos.
I explain how I came to see science and the Bible as compatible and started sharing this argument with atheists and non-believers through the Internet.
Books Mentioned: The Science of God by Gerald Schroeder A History of God by Karen Armstrong Who Wrote the New Testament? by Burton Mack
All excerpts used in this video are either copyright-free or covered under "fair use" in Title 17 § 107 of the USC.
A special thanks to snap2objects for providing the Creative Commons 3.0 licensed vectors used for the figures representing myself and the professor in this video.
I explain how I came to meet a true Christian who had deconverted and how I came to believe that I was at a different rational stage of development than some believers.
Books Mentioned: Some Mistakes of Moses by Robert Ingersoll (written in 1880)
All excerpts used in this video are either copyright-free or covered under "fair use" in Title 17 § 107 of the USC.
A special thanks to snap2objects for providing the Creative Commons 3.0 licensed vectors used for the figures representing myself and the professor in this video.
I explain how I was raised to see God in everything, how I came to believe I had a personal relationship with him, and how I began to enter a personal crisis in college when that relationship started failing and feeling distant and confused.
All excerpts used in this video are either copyright-free or covered under "fair use" in Title 17 § 107 of the USC.
I explain the end of my confident faith in God and the beginning of what became irreparable doubts about God's existence, given the current lack of motivating evidence for believing in Him.
All excerpts used in this video are either copyright-free or covered under "fair use" in Title 17 § 107 of the USC.
Music (in order of appearance): "Welcome to the Real World" by Don Davis "Song For Bob" by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis "One-Winged Angel (Orchestra Version)" by Nobuo Uematsu "Returns a King" by Tyler Bates "Canis Lupus" by Alexandre Desplat
I relate the inspiring experiences of reading Ingersoll for the first time, observing the successful application of reductio ad absurdum to religion, perceiving the growth and maturing of my own mind, and encountering the concept of different Jesus movements from Mack.
Note: In case it is not obvious, the voice in the pseudo-Ingersoll recordings is my own.
All excerpts used in this video are either copyright-free or covered under "fair use" in Title 17 § 107 of the USC.
Thank you to Pioneer Press and Spencer Research Library for pictures of their copy of "Mistakes of Moses".
A note to the curators of Spencer Research Library: the book I took photos of in 2010 (published 1941) appears to be a different version than the one I read in 2004 (published ~1898).
I relate the insights of reading Spong for the first time, solidifying the displacement of theism by the insights of science, seeing how we had created the theistic God in our own image, learning about the first images of Jesus from the letters of Paul, and trying to extract concepts from my Christian experience that were still meaningful in a non-theistic universe.
I explain how I learned from A History of God by Karen Armstrong that the evidence indicates that the Jewish concept of monotheism evolved from the syncretism of various polytheistic sources like Canaanite and Babylonian polytheism.
I explain why I stopped using the word "God" to describe anything correlated with a reality outside of our own minds, pending evidence that would persuade me to do so.
2:13 Hillel died in 10 CE. His ideas helped shape the Pharasaic Theology that allowed Judaism to survive after the second destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.
All excerpts used in this video are either copyright-free or covered under "fair use" in Title 17 § 107 of the USC, including:
I lay the philosophical groundwork for my epistemological position of Evidentialist Foundationalism by contrasting it with the First Principles journey of the Rationalist Descartes.
I respond to objections to Evidentialism regarding the use of provisional hypotheses, the alleged self-refuting properties of Evidentialism, the evidential bases of mathematics and logic, and the relation of Evidentialism to Logical Positivism.
Evidentialism References: Conee, E., & Feldman, R., 2004, Evidentialism: Essays in Epistemology. Clarendon Press. Poston, T., 2007, Foundational Evidentialism and the Problem of Scatter. Abstracta, 3 (2), 89-106. Wampler-Doty, M., 2010, Evidentialist Logic. MSc Thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands. Retrieved from ILLC Publications (Accession Order No. MoL-2010-15).
All excerpts used in this video are either copyright-free or covered under "fair use" in Title 17 § 107 of the USC, including:
Any christian to watch any of these videos and ignore the evidence, or that it appeals to reason and logic; is in denial...and is experiencing "Cognitive Dissonance" which is the core fundamental belief in something which can be predicated on any idea or experience, and refuses to give up the belief despite good reason to do so but do not, to protect them from any aversive feelings that would make them feel uncomfortable. It serves to only decouple them from what is reality or within the perceptual range of what we can verify to be true. They ignore evidence, ignore their senses, and use "Incomprehensible" or "beyond our limitations" to justify it. Because not one person nor them can explain it (It is not possible without the use of our functions or abilities) so they come to the conclusion that god is Incomprehensible, but rather their thinking is illogical and incomprehensible. Anyone who uses their senses (Sight, Scent, Sound, Touch, Taste) and abilities to relate and understand correctly, cannot understand the thinking of the person who does not use the same senses or logic as they do. To do this would require a detachment from logic and effectively unlearning how to use logic, and use the frame of mind or mentality that uses the illogical thinking, thus decoupling one self to also ignore reality or their senses in an effort to also not understand something, and accept that they don't understand an impossibility.
This is mass delusion, a perplexing perpetuating circle of unknowing that comes to no conclusion and offers no direction or purpose other than severe mental discomfort when injecting any rational thinking. This creates an abyss of confusion, when they think they're thinking coherently...which is an impossibility, you cannot rely on something you cannot sense, or something you cannot prove or perceive your self to be reality, and then hope to prove it to others as a reason to believe in it. After all we rely on these senses to operate like a car requires a fuel source to move or a computer that works with logic and numbers or "binary". A program cannot work or give meaning to anything if a set of rules do not execute correctly or have none to execute, we cannot prove something that is beyond our perceptual understanding. We can prove something is there, but we cannot prove that something is not there...the latter is irrelevant until the former can prove that it was there all along, but has to coincide with our understanding otherwise it has no value, or meaning, and unless it does it has no use and can never be understood. Using "supernatural" is a cop out because it boasts the impossibility that because you cannot explain it, you cannot know for sure. Thus any argument that is based on logic cannot battle against a belief predicated and consisting no logic at all. Fiction and none-fiction cannot coexist, so logic can never oppose it. This is why The belief of god is merely a mythological fairy tale.
Music "Whispering - Alpha Frequency" by Brainwave-Sync
I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian, but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.
As President, I'll end Obama's war on religion. And I'll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage.
Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.
America, if you openly elect people like this, then you probably deserve everything that's coming to you. I can't believe there's still people like this shameless bigot...proud, even:
In America, where you can't be elected president without being an open Christian, why, I'm not ashamed to tell you that I just so happen to be a Christian.
During these tough economic times, when you may have lost your job or your house, I, Rick Perry, know what truly matters to you: the icky icky gay people. At this very moment, some red-blooded, vagina-lovin' American soldier might be overseas with a sand nig... uh, terrorist in the sights of his assault rifle, only to have Poop Chute Pete sneak up the flank and take the shot. That shoulda been Vagina Vince's kill - not Poop Shoot Pete's. Because when it comes to killin' towel-hea...terrorists, where you stick your giggle stick matters....It matters. Elect me president and I will fight for the Vagina Bill. Every adult male who can provide notarized evidence that he has come into contact with a vagina, will receive a free license to carry a firearm.
As president, I promise to end the war, the quagmire that America has been stuck in for years. That's right, I'm talkin' about the war on Christmas. Last year at my nephew's school, there were 54 children participatin' in the Christmas play. This year, there's only fifty two. Fifty two. Don't think we don't see what you're doin', Obama. I mean, were not even allowed to force kids to pray anymore. As president, I will put an end to Obama's sausage-fest jihad on God.
Bigotry and bullying made our country strong, and it can make her strong again.
I am Rick Perry, and I am a dinosaur.
A big dinosaur, like a t-rex...not one of them little gay velociraptors.
That pesky First Amendment is always gettin' in the gosh darn way! For many folks, being free to practice their religion just isn't enough. Nope. They want to be able to force other people to observe and practice their religion as well. Now that's freedom! ...or maybe not.
Traditional marriage or gay apocalypse. Pick one. Do you dare delve deep into the mind of Rick Perry? Be warned! When you emerge, you will never be the same.
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