It’s time for music now. This week I want to introduce you to an artist you probably haven’t heard of, named Angie Aparo. He’s a Georgia singer/songwriter who has been working to create authentic, wonderful music for well over a decade, and you may not know it, but you probably know one of his greatest songs. One of Faith Hill’s greatest hits is a song called “Cry,” and sorry, no love lost for Faith, but she didn’t do it justice. It was on Angie’s record The American years back, along with the other songs I’m posting, “Gravity” and “Hush.” The latter song ranks as one of my favorites to crank up in the car and sing along to. It’s an exceptionally difficult song to sing, as Angie’s voice is truly something special, but on those good days when I, as a singer, can nail it, it feels really good. If you don’t listen to all of the songs, at least listen to “Cry,” and hear what it sounds like when the composer of the song does it. All of these songs are particularly meaningful to me.

Now we hit shuffle on the iTunes and see where we are ten songs later, listen to music, etc. More videos after the jump!

1. Echospace – “Empyrean”
2. The Rolling Stones – “Midnight Rambler”
3. Gov’t Mule – “New World Blues”
4. Princeton – “Oklahoma”
5. The Roots ft. Dice Raw – “Diedre vs. Dice”
6. The Byrds – “Eight Miles High”
7. Digable Planets – “Dog It”
8. Gary Jules – “Wichita”
9. Tori Amos – “Girl”
10. Tori Amos – “Cool On Your Island”

“Cool On Your Island” is highly appropriate, considering the songs I started with. Though the version that came up in the shuffle is a live recording, I’m using the Y Kant Tori Read version below, and if you know what that means, I like you.

(Read More)

Weird quote from “ex-gay” PFOX leader Greg Quinlan:

“I want to talk first of all about something I heard from the very beginning by people of this Legislature that we are bigots as people of faith, because we do not hold that homosexual marriage should be codified. That somehow we are bigots and we are ideologues because we are people of faith. I want to address that hate. Everyone in this room who is a person of faith deserves an apology from one of the sponsors of this bill for calling us bigots.

“To date there is zero evidence that anyone is born a homosexual, zero. In fact it’s homosexual researchers and scientists that are proving that homosexuality is not innate and had no biological ideology. Homosexuality is not immutable. There are many ex-gays; Anne Heche, to name one, Sinead O’Connor and myself. I left the homosexual lifestyle almost 20 years ago. Lived as a homosexual activist for 10 years of my life.”

Wait, I’m confused. Did Anne Heche and Sinead O’Connor go through brutal, discredited “ex-gay” ministries, the patients of which often end up driven to deeper levels of depression and sometimes suicide, in order to pray themselves straight. Or did their lives just change? I don’t know about Anne, but I highly doubt Sinead O’Connor would appreciate her name being used in that way by such an ignorant, hateful bigot.

Anyway, the rest of it is just the usual whining. “Tolerate our unhinged hatred!” Whatever.

[h/t Joe]

She writes for Glamour:

Imagine finding someone you love more than anything in the world, who you would risk your life for but couldn’t marry. And you couldn’t have that special day the way your friends do—you know, wear the ring on your finger and have it mean the same thing as everybody else. Just put yourself in that person’s shoes. It makes me feel sick to my stomach.

When I shared a picture of my tattoo on my Twitter page and said, “All LOVE is equal,” a lot of people mocked me—they said, “What happened to you? You used to be a Christian girl!” And I said, “Well, if you were a true Christian, you would have your facts straight. Christianity is about love.” The debate resulted in a lot of threats and hate mail to people who agreed and disagreed with me. At one point I had to say, “Dude, everyone lay off.” Can’t people have friendly debates about sensitive topics without it turning into unnecessary threats?

I believe every American should be allowed the same rights and civil liberties. Without legalized same-sex marriage, most of the time you cannot share the same health benefits, you are not considered next of kin and you are not granted the same securities as a heterosexual couple. How is this different than having someone sit in the back of the bus because of their skin color?

. . .

We all should be tolerant of one another and embrace our differences. My dad [country singer Billy Ray Cyrus], who is a real man’s man, lives on the farm and is as Southern and straight as they come. He loves my gay friends and even supports same-sex marriage. If my father can do it, anyone can.

This is America, the nation of dreams. We’re so proud of that. And yet certain people are excluded. It’s just not right.

Good going, Miley.

Remember Eddie Long? You know, Bishop Biceps, the homophobic, muscle shirt-wearing megachurch pastor who settled out of court with four teenage boys who accused him of coercing them into sexual relationships?

Well guess what? He’s now a king. Just ask him.

According to a CNN article, Long held a “crowning ceremony” at a recent Sunday service at his New Birth Missionary Church outside of Atlanta. In it, a man purporting to be a rabbi (but whose ordination is dubious, according to Rabbi Hillel Norry, an established Georgia rabbi) wrapped Long in a Torah scroll that he claimed had been recovered from the Auschwitz concentration camp.

After that astonishing display of disrespect, four congregants lifted the seated Long and paraded him in front of the assembled worshippers as the questionable rabbi, Ralph Messer, proclaimed Long to be a king.

Norry pointed out to CNN that the alleged “Holocaust Torah” most probably did not pass through Auschwitz because its large size meant it would have likely been detected in the concentration camp. Still, the mere fact that Bishop Biceps felt comfortable participating in such a profane ceremony at all, much less one that mistreated a scroll with that kind of story attached to it (regardless of its authenticity), is incredibly disturbing.

Looks like the gays aren’t the only group that Eddie Long has no problem flagrantly disrespecting.

VIDEO: Eddie Long Crowned “King”

Here at Truth Wins Out, the epidemic of LGBT teen suicides in Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin school district has been on our radar for a long time.

Nonetheless, you need to head over to Rolling Stone and read this article about what LGBT kids go through in Michele Bachmann’s district every day, largely because local evangelicals have waged an all-out war on the area’s LGBT population. This blatant bigotry only serves to intensify the bullying that’s par for the course for LGBT teenagers at schools across the country. In Anoka, homosexuality is forbidden from even being discussed. Teachers and administrators do not intervene when LGBT students are harassed by their peers because they fear being fired for violating a district policy requiring them to stay “neutral” on, and banning positive references to, LGBT people and issues. And the culture of shame and fear that “Christian” fundamentalists (many of them from the same conservative church that Bachmann attended until just last year) have created around lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identities  is so pervasive that LGBT teens feel scared and unsafe within the walls of their schools.

And they’re killing themselves because of it. So many, in fact, that the state of Minnesota declared the Anoka-Hennepin school district a “suicide contagion area.” After one of the suicides — that of Sam Johnson in 2009 — students in the district’s GSAs participated in the Day of Silence. In this GLSEN-sponsored event, participants spent the day in silence to illustrate the silencing effect of the anti-LGBT bullying that led to the loss of several of their peers.  The response? Local evangelical churches organized a so-called “Day of Truth” event; their kids showed up at school wearing shirts telling their peers they could pray away the gay and engaged in anti-gay proselytizing in the hallways. (At that time the “Day of Truth” events were sponsored by Exodus International; it’s now been shifted to Focus on the Family and re-branded as a so-called “Day of Dialogue” in a transparent attempt to soft-pedal anti-gay bigotry.)

The way local evangelical “Christians” have doubled down on– not merely shown coldhearted indifference to, but doubled down on — the persecution of LGBT people, even in the wake of so many suicides, is pure evil.

Read, too, about Tammy Aaberg. Her son Justin was an Anoka High School student who committed suicide in 2010 due to anti-LGBT bullying, and his death turned her into an activist. Readers who know me know I have a soft spot in my heart for equality moms (including, I’m proud to say, my own). Hell hath no fury like a mom fighting for her LGBT child. But I have nothing short of awe for moms like Tammy Aaberg and Judy Shepard who fight for a child whom they’ve lost. I don’t know how they do it, but I admire their strength.

This is why the fight for our equality is so important. Slowly but surely, we’re building a world where no more Judy Shepards have to bury a child murdered for being gay, where no more Tammy Aabergs have to discover their baby boy dead in his bedroom because he couldn’t take another day of being bullied for his LGBT identity.

Please, read and share this article and resolve to keep fighting.

Now it goes to the House, where it’s likely to pass by more than enough:

In the end, it wasn’t even close.

After more than a decade of laying the ground work and fretting that the votes would be just out of reach, state Sen. Ed Murray watched Wednesday night as the Senate easily passed legislation that would legalize gay marriage.

The vote was 28-21.

[...]

While it wasn’t final passage, the Senate always has been viewed as the biggest hurdle for same-sex marriage legislation, as it was for gay-rights bills in previous years.

The measure now heads to the House, where supporters say they have more than enough votes. It’s expected to pass as early as next week. The governor strongly supports the bill as well.

Of course, here comes the bigots with their new and different idea of voting on people’s civil rights, which goes against the definition of “rights,” but whatever.

This is awesome!

[h/t Watertiger]

Scott Lively, hate group leader extraordinaire, speaking at a church in California:

I want to just attack this idea that people have raised that homosexuality is just another sin because that’s not true and the more that we embrace that, the more that we accept that as a concept, the more distant we are from understanding the warning that God gives us when we see this phenomenon in our society.

Gay is especially bad! And not only because gay is the thing that Scott Lively is unnaturally fixated with!

When you see the gay pride parade going down the street in the major cities, what banner are they flying over them? They’re flying the banner of the rainbow. What is the rainbow? The rainbow is God’s covenant with man never to destory the Earth by water again …

God never promised not to send a flood of gays to cover the earth. Loophole!

So there’s an enormous warning there and, at the same time, we’re also given a clue as to what’s happening with apostasy in the modern age when people will raise the rainbow flag – and there’s a passage in Isiah, I forget the chapter and verse, that says “they parade their sin like Sodom.” And that is what is exactly going on with people who have defined themselves by this particular behavior and lifestyle. They parade their sin like Sodom. And they do it under the rainbow banner almost as if they’re saying “God, you can do nothing to us” because they don’t believe that Sodom was destroyed because of homosexuality so they aren’t learning the lesson from that.

Because the only way you can believe that Sodom was destroyed because of homosexuality is if you A. Have been taught that repeatedly and never looked at the verses for yourself, B. Only halfway glance at a bad translation and also do not own or know how to use a concordance, as the actual sin of Sodom is explained fourteen times throughout the Bible, and it’s not Gay, or C. Are like Scott Lively, and have such a weird, unhinged hatred of gay people that, even though you’re theoretically capable of studying the text for yourself, you simply continue lying because it props up your smelly bigotry.

In fifty years we have seen this tiny group of people – they really only represent about two percent of the population – that has grown from being a reviled subculture to now having more power in the legislatures and courtrooms of the world than the Christian church does.

Uh, no.

In fifty years! Nothing has ever grown that fast globally, nothing. Not Islam, not Darwinism, not Marxism, nothing has ever grown that fast. Which shows you that this is a spiritual phenomenon that is unparallelled and that’s why God has selected it, singled out this particular behavior to be the indicator of extreme apostasy, the furthest edge of deviance and the warning sign that things are in really, really bad shape.

Islam is a huge, ancient world religion with over a billion adherents. Darwinism is what morons call “evolutionary biology,” and as such, its “spread” is referred to as “education.” Etc. But none of these things have grown faster than GAAAAAAAY, says Scott.

Perhaps it’s more that none of those things keep Scott Lively awake shivering at night, and that’s why he views the gays as more powerful.

Oy. The more he talks, the more I’m inclined to feel sorry for him. Right Wing Watch has the video.

Please join Truth Wins Out (TWO) founder and executive director, Wayne Besen along with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and a local panel of LGBT clergy, a licensed therapist, ex-gay survivors, and families who’ve struggled with acceptance for a community discussion about the dangerous practice of conversion therapy.

Tragically, Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi committed suicide last fall after being outed by his roommate. His death was a starting point in what has become a rallying cry for the LGBT community and our allies in stopping the bullying and humiliation that so sadly leads far too many gay kids to take their own lives.

His older brother James is also gay, and has written his little brother a series of beautiful, sad letters, published by Out. Please read it all, and have tissue handy. I’ll excerpt some of it here, and then click over.

James describes the moment when he realized that his younger brother was also gay, and how they eventually came out to each other:

I ’m not sure when I first realized my younger brother was gay. I think I knew he was for as long as I knew I was. I had no idea how to bring it up; it was just something we left dangling in the air, unsaid. I was open about my sexuality with friends, but around my family there was this barrier that felt unbreakable. It slowly dawned on me that I wasn’t the only one, that I had a brother who was also gay — my baby brother, whom I had always felt protective and paternal toward. I knew I was in a position to be a confidant, a role model. But I wasn’t ready to do any of that. It would have made it much less lonely for me to grow up with an older brother who had gone through and understood everything I was dealing with — and I wanted to be that for Tyler.

[...]

It was the Fourth of July. We had spent the day at the movies, the diner, the fireworks. So many opportunities, and I kept chickening out. That night, I found him in the house listening to Katy Perry, and I saw that, if I couldn’t do this now, something was really wrong with me. I overthought it — because it ended up being this simple.

Me: “I’m gay.”
Tyler: “Oh. Me too.”

Heh. Now a few excerpts from the letters:

Pipsqueak,
You were one noisy kid. I remember walking inside and the most beautiful sounds of Tchaikovsky and Mozart would waft through every room. And I hated it.

Remember how I used to bang on your door and scream at you to stop being so loud? It was so unfair that I had to listen to your noise all the time — why couldn’t you just pick up a quieter hobby!? I would refuse to attend your recitals and concerts because I had to listen to you play all the damn time at home. Wow, do I regret that.

It is so quiet now. You were really talented; it was a gift. I’m not sure I ever told you that… maybe you didn’t care. It’s not like you needed my validation; I know nothing about classical music and you knew you were the shit when it came to that damn violin. I just feel really bad for not telling you how awesome you are, how much I respect your skills and dedication. I regret not listening to every note with open ears, not going to more concerts. Fuck you for making me feel bad; it’s not fair that you did that to me. But I would tell you now if I could, I really miss the noise!

About all the publicity surrounding Tyler’s death:

I wonder what you would think, seeing all the commotion you’ve caused. It is surreal and meaningless to see you as a mere story on The New York Times, a brief glimpse at a life with none of the detail. You were a typical college freshman, trying to adjust to a dorm room, make some friends, meet a cute guy, and enjoy your independence, and no one noticed. The headlines tell of how you were violated and ridiculed; your last moments are a cautionary tale, a scandal, something to sell and entertain.

You are on every talk show, newspaper, and blog, being held up as the issue du jour for the masses to “care about,” like they ever read you a story or wiped away your tears or spun you around in the air until you were dizzy. I wish it didn’t take you dying for your soul to know peace. I wish you could read the hundreds of letters we got, hear the thousands who rallied and marched for you, know the millions who followed your story on the 6 o’clock news. You were never alone; it just felt like it.

Having a younger brother who is close to me, I can’t handle the beginning of this letter:

Little Peanut,
I always thought that, between you and I, you were the stronger one.

That entire letter is amazing, but I don’t want to spoil it by merely excerpting it. Nor do I want to spoil the rest.

Take a few minutes.

[h/t David Badash/photo via Out Magazine, courtesy of James Clementi]