The Boston Globe reports today that state officials stopped a United Church of Christ volunteer program from distributing soup to homeless people on the streets after diners got sick eating food that had been prepared in volunteers’ home kitchens.
The church swiftly acknowledged its responsibility to the public, and its obligation under the law, to ensure that food is prepared in safe, licensed kitchens.
Now let’s contrast the UCC’s law-abiding response to the reactions of antigay activist Maggie Gallagher, the Roman Catholic Church, and the ex-gay movement, when their churches are urged to protect the public health and obey the law like everyone else.
1. When the same state, Massachusetts, last week considered legislation to regulate the medical practice of circumcision, Gallagher lost her nerve and proclaimed that Jews were being threatened with religious persecution — a facetious claim, largely unsupported by the state’s Jews, that merely served as a token effort by Gallagher to drag Jews into her holier-than-thou war against the religious freedom of sexual minorities.
2. After social-justice advocated urged the Pope to condemn antigay genocide in Uganda — out of respect for international law, public health, and common human decency — the Pope did the opposite last week:
…In his address to the bishops of Uganda last Friday, Benedict XVI made no reference to the anti-gay bill or the international outcry surrounding it.
Instead he called on the bishops to “encourage the Catholics of Uganda to appreciate fully the sacrament of marriage in its unity and indissolubility, and the sacred right to life” — the latter a reference to abortion. He also urged them “to resist the seduction of a materialistic culture of individualism which has taken root in so many countries” — a reference to concerns about an encroaching cultural influence from Europe and North America.
Far worse than the UCC’s well-intentioned serving of spoiled food, the Roman Catholic Church in Uganda has greased the wheels of a church-state death machine: A barbaric apparatus to sweep up thousands of LGBT people and their relatives for indiscriminate mass execution at the gallows. The Pope’s naked repudiation of life (when it isn’t heterosexual and preferably Catholic) is an act of negligent homicide against Ugandan minorities. The Pope’s silent affirmation of genocide also plainly repudiates international law regarding nation-states’ obligations to stop genocide, and finally the Pope’s ongoing promotion of abstinence-only public policy promises to accelerate the growing loss of human life that has occurred since conservatives began to silence Uganda’s comprehensive education, prevention, and treatment programs for HIV/AIDS in 2003.
3. Finally, when Tennessee intervened to stop youth sexual abuse and negligent treatment at Exodus’ flagship Love In Action residential facility back in 2007, Exodus responded by declaring that so-called “ministries” enjoy a blanket religious freedom to (mis)treat children — under the guise of phony pseudo-medical marketing — as their religion dictates. In the end, to the chagrin of concerned regulators, Tennessee’s conservative Baptist politicians agreed: Where the potential for medical malpractice and sexual abuse is concerned, churches are largely above the law.
What is it about the Christian Right family of political organizations that prompts them to defy law and health in order to preserve the same — and to deny religious freedom to all but themselves?
There is a stark difference between churches that obey humanitarian law, serve the public good, and respect public health — versus those that accumulate power by repudiating law, undermining human rights, sickening the public, and deliberately harming their chosen enemies.
One side believes that it should act on the assumption that God is love, while the other acts on the assumption that God is fear, sadism, and avarice.
“I’m not surprised that Miss Beverly Hills, Lauren Ashley, opposes gay marriage — after all 45 percent of young Californians voted for Prop 8, as did 7 million Californians generally,” the organization’s president, Maggie Gallagher, told us. “But I have to say, I am impressed with her courage in coming forward and for speaking up for Carrie. The elected officials of city of Beverly Hills are not demonstrating tolerance or kindness by continuing the avalanche of hatred against supporters of Prop 8.”
“The Bible says that marriage is between a man and a woman. In Leviticus it says, ‘If man lies with mankind as he would lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death and their blood shall be upon them.’ The Bible is pretty black and white.
In a time when anti-gay hysteria seems to be sweeping the African continent, when gay people are being set upon in nation after nation by mobs hopped up on the genocidal rhetoric of religious fundamentalists and political extremists, some vacant beauty pageant wannabe starts waving Leviticus around and Maggie Gallagher immediately, Immediately rushes to praise her for her…courage…of all things, without the slightest shred of thought to any consequences for gay people that this Their Blood Is Upon Them thing might possibly have. The danger to gay people clearly, obviously, sickeningly, never crossed her mind. And seriously…if you thought it might, you have not been paying attention.
Can we please dispense now with all this love the sinner hate the sin claptrap. There is no love in Maggie Gallagher for gay people. None. There is not a shred of regard in that barren wasteland she calls a conscience for our lives, let alone love. In her novel The Charioteer, the author Mary Renault described Gallagher’s kind, and Ashley’s, precisely…
Not wicked, he thought: that’s not the word, that’s sentimentality. These are just runts…They don’t sin in the sight of heaven and feel despair: they only throw away lighted cigarettes on Exmoor, and go on holiday leaving the cat to starve, and drive on after accidents without stopping. A wicked man nowadays can set millions of them in motion, and when he’s gone howling mad from looking at his own face, they’ll be marching still with their mouth’s open and their hands hanging by their knees, on and on and on…”
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. See it there in Gallagher’s reflexive solidarity with anyone willing to denounce same-sex marriage regardless of that little Their Blood Is Upon Them thing. She’s not ignoring it. She didn’t even see it. It did not register. The threat to our lives her crusade rouses in the mob does not concern her one iota. No, it is not hate. It is indifference.
Indifference…
They have no instinctive sense of sympathy. Their moral compass only points inward. They are unmoved…indifferent…
…utterly, starkly, shockingly, indifferent…
These are the ones who, in another time, in another place, could live right friggin’ next to the concentration camps and say later, with horrifically genuine sincerity, “We heard the rumors but we didn’t believe them…”
Courage. Courage is taking your lover’s hand in yours in a world where moral thugs praise beauty queens who use their moment in the spotlight to tell the world: Their Blood Is Upon Them.
I am not a gay conservative…to say the least. And I’ve questioned in the past the wisdom of GOProud, the gay conservative group, participating at CPAC along with groups that want to legislate away their dignity. I still question that wisdom. They’ve been sending out reports from CPAC along the lines of “Nobody has beat us up yet, so that means conservatives aren’t bigots after all!” They’re also stupidly suggesting that because Dick Cheney got a standing ovation, that the wingnuts are somehow supportive of gays because Dick Cheney supports gays.
It’s pathetic. Newsflash: Wingnuts like Dick Cheney because Dick Cheney is a torture-mongering ghoul, and wingnuts are weak people, so they feel strengthened by the idea of torturing people, as long as they don’t have to personally exhibit any strength or courage of their own.
Anyway. I don’t care how nice people are to the gay CPAC-ers; what matters is what policies they support. Lots of people are nice to people they hate, especially Southerners, who I would imagine are overrepresented at Winguttapalooza. It’s so ingrained in our culture that we have code phrases that express disdain while always being able to claim the mantle of gentility. (”Bless her heart.”) So personally, the fact that the gay conservatives haven’t been shot at yet at CPAC isn’t impressive.
Also, they’re dealing with the fact that the GOP line on their dignity and existence is that they shouldn’t have any. Consider this quote from Chris Plante, who’s running the National Organization for Marriage (nom nom nom) booth just a few feet away:
“Gays and lesbians have the right to live as they choose, but they don’t have the right to redefine marriage for the rest of us,” Plante said.
Uh huh, right. And believe me, NOM is more welcome there than GOProud is. Again, I don’t care now nice and polite CPAC-ers are to the gays in their midst. The fact that gay conservatives are impressed and excited to be included without having to wear pink triangles is pathetic and reveals the self-loathing and the deeply ingrained beliefs in their own inferiority that we’ve always seen in them.
Meanwhile, an insane press conference happened, featuring Elaine Donnelly, Queen of the 101st Chairborne Brigade, and Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family (who apparently can’t pronounce the word “debacle”), who projected their pathetic Fear of the Gay onto our brave troops as they came out in opposing DADT repeal. Also speaking were know-nothing Tony Perkins and David Keene, who organized the entire conference. Oh, also, there was an old retired admiral who probably had to be helped onto the stage, testifying about his 1930’s version of reality. Watch it if you want, but you’ll lose a few brain cells.
All of that being said, though, this video of Jimmy LaSalvia, the King of the Gay Wingnuts, is pretty funny:
ZING! The boys at the NOM booth are total pansies! On that, we agree.
Anyway, so there you go. Jimmy LaSalvia made a funny and nobody’s been gay-bashed yet at CPAC. Glad to see, again, that they’re persevering in their quest to win the gay rights battles of the 1970’s.
UPDATE: Okay, so all of that being said, this video is also funny. Ryan Sorba, a hysterical and likely closeted anti-gay activist, decided to take to the stage and condemn CPAC for inviting GOProud to the event, and he was received poorly by some in the room. What I notice is that at the beginning, some were booing him, and some were cheering him, but as his childish tantrum grew more hysterical, the boos got louder. Mike Madden at Salon’s War Room opened his report on this by saying, “Turns out CPAC isn’t quite the place for insane jeremiads against homosexuality.” I would suggest, rather, a more balanced reaction, because if you click on the link above to watch the aforementioned press conference, you’ll see that there is indeed a place for insane jeremiads against homosexuality at CPAC. It seems to me that what’s become socially unacceptable, even in CPAC, is the kind of frothing, unhinged anti-gay ranting that’s the hallmark of Ryan Sorba’s “career.” I guarantee you that, for a lot of people in that room, their issue is not the content of Sorba’s tirade, but rather the unfiltered nature of it, because they know that their bigotry is not acceptable in intelligent society. So NOM and Elaine Donnelly and Tom Minnery are fine with them. The rhetorical equivalent of playing with your dingleberries on stage, as exhibited by Ryan Sorba, is not.
Over the past week or so, it’s been reported that Vaughn Walker, the judge in the Prop 8 trial, is gay. This shouldn’t matter, because those of us who understand how the judicial system works know that judges are charged with interpreting the law in light of the Constitution, and nothing more. Cries of “judishul activizms” from the Religious Right in gay rights cases are ringing more and more hollow, as straight white Republican-appointed judges around the nation are ruling in favor of our equality in increasing numbers. So, if Vaughn Walker rules in the plaintiffs’ favor in the Prop 8 trial, he’s simply joining a growing group of Republican appointees who agree that equal protection means equal protection for ALL American citizens. But of course, the Religious Right doesn’t see it this way.
So let’s tack off the Religious Right reactions to this revelation:
1. Matt Barber issued a hysterical press release, suggesting that Walker’s behavior during the trial has been “bizarre,” and that his (overturned) decision to allow cameras in the courtroom contributed to a “circus” atmosphere, which hurt the anti-gay side, because, like the cowards they are, they imagine themselves “victims” in the wake of the Prop 8 vote. Barber calls the judge’s sexuality a “conflict of interest,” because Matt Barber stubbornly and childishly clings to definitions of sexuality that have been disproven for decades. If I were being charitable, I would suggest that maybe all those years he spent groping and being groped by men in tight shorts resulted in some sort of long lasting head injury.
2. Brian Brown attempted to take a gentler approach, saying that regardless of whether Walker is gay or not, he’s still an “activist” judge, and that the deck has been stacked against the anti-gay side from the beginning. Apparently it hasn’t crossed his mind that the deck might have been stacked against bigotry and discrimination because reality is stacked against bigotry and discrimination.
3. Rick “Frothy Mix” Santorum farted out some sort of jumbled words where he claimed that Prop 8 voters had been harassed and blacklisted over their votes. The hysteria surrounding the aftermath of the Prop 8 vote would lead an uninformed observer to think there was some sort of bodycount among the Religious Right after that vote, but reality, of course, knows otherwise. Santorum also accused the judge of “rigging the trial.” Uh huh. TS at Instaputz replies, “It’s not every day that a former Senator accuses a Reagan and Bush-nominated federal judge of ‘rigging’ a trial.”
One need not rely on this disturbing item from NRO to conclude that American jurisprudence is in big trouble given the expanding number of judges who are, to use modern parlance, “openly gay” (which is to say: proudly practicing or inclined to practice perversion). If they regard their homosexuality as (part of) “who they are” and, by extension, view foes of homosexuality as akin to racists, it is difficult to imagine them being truly impartial on “gay”-related cases.
Having said that, given the ferocity with which many straight liberals promote homosexualist ideology today, there surely is plenty of left-wing judicial bias to go around without laying all or even most of the blame at the feet of America’s homosexual judges. A straight liberal who regards homosexuality as a pure “civil rights” issue is just as capable of being a reactionary, anti-religious bigot in his approach toward moral opponents of homosexuality as an openly homosexual judge.
Waaaah. Peter’s comment does start to expose the obvious problems with the Religious Right’s logic on this (he’s good for that, because he’s just not put together correctly). The NRO piece Peter links to is from Ed Whelan, and if you know NRO, you know it’s a fairly hysterical analysis, itself. These are the people, after all, who pay Kathryn Jean Lopez to fawn over 15 year old boys at anti-choice rallies and to mangle the English language on a daily basis, while Jonah Goldberg continues to suck at the teat of wingnut welfare, riding his mother Lucianne’s coattails all the way to the bank, writing columns about how global warming isn’t real because hey look, meteors! (For instance.)
Anyway, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. I’m sure there are many more Religious Right luminaries going through the roof over this, and if you really want to know, may I suggest Google, but I personally can take only so much of their garbage before my brain cells start feeling threatened.
If you have a working brain, you already know the obvious flaw in the Religious Right’s logic. If being part of a minority group disqualifies a judge from presiding over any cases involving that minority group, then judges would have to recuse themselves from so many cases that our system would fall apart. For instance, Scalia would have to shut it, forever, about anything involving the Catholic Church. And again, this betrays a willful refusal to understand what the judicial system IS. I have no idea whether or not these Religious Right figures actually do understand what judges do — I mean, come on, we’re dealing with people who think Liberty is a real law school, for god’s sake — but their public stance is obviously to misinform an already civics-stupid culture about the role of judges in our society, because Religious Right figures don’t value the American system of governance like the rest of us do.
I could go on, but John Aravosis already smacked them all down quite thoroughly, so I’ll just excerpt what he said, and then you should click the clicky to read the rest:
If a gay judge is unfit to rule on a case involving gay people or the religious right, then using the far right’s logic, a straight judge would be just as biased towards straight people in any anti-gay discrimination case. But it’s worse than that. African-American judges would never be able to rule on civil rights cases – well, no one would really, since every human being is a member of at least one race, thus, under the religious right’s logic, we’d all either be a minority or the majority, making us a party to any civil rights suit. (Or perhaps Latino judges would be able to rule on discrimination cases involving African-Americans, it’s not entirely clear.) And Republican judges clearly couldn’t rule on political cases, nor could Democratic judges. Which means the entire Supreme Court, the entire federal judiciary, and really any judge who ever voted or who has any political views whatsoever, is ineligible from any case that involves politics. And female judges couldn’t preside over cases involving women, or men I guess, and so on.
And in fact, the religious right’s logic, to its illogical conclusion, means that conservative Christian judges also would not be permitted to preside over any case involving gays, non-Christians, Christians who aren’t members of some religious right sect, cases involving politics (since the religious right became a de facto subsidiary of the Republican party decades ago), cases involving discrimination (since the lead religious right groups routinely promote bigotry – in fact, their raison d’etre is to promote bigotry), any case in which a black person is involved (the religious right used to use the Bible to justify slavery (and still think slavery was a good thing for blacks), and the Mormons excluded blacks from the upper levels of their church up until the 1970s), and lots of other issues. And let’s not forget that the Southern Baptists were formed because they split with the north over slavery – the SB’s were for it. But hey, they apologized…. in 2009.
But see, they don’t actually believe that. The Religious Right, incorrectly, thinks that they should have an elevated place in society. They have done nothing to deserve that place, and in fact, have been a solid stain on American history, but they’ve convinced themselves otherwise. There is no “logic” to speak of in their statements. No, they believe, in general, that they should be the final arbiters of all law in this country, in direct contravention of the actual American system, which guarantees us freedom from the tyrannical notions of bigoted, white male supremacist fundamentalist religion. And as their numbers continue to decrease with each passing year, pronouncements of this sort will become more and more extremist. The good news is that the American public is greeting these statements more and more with a collective yawn of boredom.
A feature article in this week’s New York Times Magazine refers to Princeton professor Robert P. George as the “intellectual architect” of the extreme right. This is hardly an honor, considering the main competition for “Values Valedictorian” is Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Mike Huckabee. One also has to consider admiration comes from the likes of George W. Bush and FOX instigator Glenn Beck, who calls George “one of the biggest brains in America.”
George’s primary accomplishment has been denying gay couples the right to marry, by forming an unholy political union between conservative Catholics, like himself, and Evangelical Christians. He is the chairman of The National Organization for Marriage, the group that most recently worked to strip marriage rights from LGBT couples in Maine.
Quite frankly, I’m hardly impressed with George’s cognitive abilities. If one looks at the numbers in Maine, his allegedly intellectual arguments against same-sex marriage failed miserably in cosmopolitan Portland and in Orono, home of The University of Maine. His primary talent, it seems, is to trick the unschooled and easily fooled. Given this reality, George is more back woods propagandist than deep professorial thinker.
Indeed, one of the simplest ways to succeed in America is to rabble rouse and scapegoat. It takes no brains to peddle belligerence and play the gay card by pandering to people not playing with a full deck. George exploited an undereducated constituency and fed them red meat, which is no more than a cheap shortcut for those incapable of the more difficult task of bringing Americans together. In a diverse nation paradoxically frightened by diversity, demagogues such as George are a dime a dozen and unworthy of praise.
What George offers is sophistry disguised as scholarship. For example, his opposition to gay people having sex or marrying rests on his version of “natural law”, allegedly based on “practical reason.” In the Times Magazine article, Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali parrots George’s idea of “natural law” at a press conference, with George at his side, cheering on his protégé.
“Sexual relations outside the marital bond are contrary not only to the will of God but to the good of man,” said Rigali. “Indeed they are contrary to the will of God precisely because they are against the good of man.”
The “good” of which men (and women) might Rigali and George be referring to?
Is it the teenage boys who were molested in the Catholic Church because such conservative ideologues insisted on turning gay men into sexually repressed and emotionally stunted shells and then placing them in the priesthood?
Is it “good” for the gay youths who commit suicide in disproportionate numbers because men like George and Rigali tell them their love is inferior?
Perhaps, they can illuminate how such “practical reason” was “good” for Welsh rugby legend Gareth Thomas who came out of the closet this weekend after hiding his sexual orientation for two decades.
“Sometimes I felt so alone and depressed,” said Thomas. “I’ve stood on so many cliff edges. I used to go to the cliffs overlooking the beach near our cottage in St Brides Major and just think about jumping off and ending it all…I was like a ticking bomb. I thought I could suppress it, keep it locked away in some dark corner of myself, but I couldn’t. It was who I was, and I just couldn’t ignore it any more.”
Maybe George can explain how his philosophy was somehow “good” for Gareth’s wife Jenna, who is about to be divorced?
If “practical reason” has proven one thing, it has shown the closet, particularly for the Catholic Church, to be destructive on so many levels. George has demonstrably failed to articulate how openly gay people harm heterosexuals or how living a lie helps homosexuals be more productive members of society. His entire presentation is a ruse meant to rally the rubes.
Interestingly, George believes in restricting marriage because, in his view, only a husband and wife can experience, “comprehensive unity” and become a “one-flesh union.” He blatantly ignores that millions of people can achieve this state only through homosexual relations. By forcing GLBT people to conform to his views and presumably marry the opposite sex, he is creating the conditions to achieve the polar opposite of what he claims is necessary for a healthy marriage.
George is equally disingenuous in claiming that marriage is based on procreation. These days, the vast majority of people marry for love. Many couples choose not to have children, while others are unable to. To suggest otherwise is to proffer an incoherent and intellectually dishonest view of modern marriage.
George is an intellectual lightweight without an original idea in his head. His claim to fame is organizing like-minded conservatives and providing a veneer of education to mask his goal of discrimination. This is not the pride of Princeton, but a paean to prejudice.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence on Sunday hosted the National Organization for Marriage’s rally for antigay heterosexual Christian couples. The Providence Journal covered the event.
Antigay couples in attendance listened to Christian music, attended a worship service, and “renewed vows” against gay couples and their children.
One couple in particular, Paul and Lori Thomsen, traveled from out-of-state to convey the message that gay couples don’t love God, their families, or their partners:
“I came because I love God. I love my family. And I love my wife,” said Thomsen, a Warren native who now lives in Mansfield, Mass., with his wife of 21 years, Lori.
These couples implicitly declared to about 20-30 gay people in attendance:
“Marriage is for US and not for YOU.”
Some gay couples who attended opted not to bring their children, for fear of the children’s safety. (Read More)
Today’s e-mail alert from the National Organization for [Heterosexual-Only] Marriage offers a glimpse of the organization’s efforts to merge religion with partisan politics — and to subject civil marriage to control by conservative Christian political activists.
Here’s an excerpt from the end of the alert, which was signed by Brian S. Brown, executive director:
More news: This Sunday NOM president Maggie Gallagher will be speaking at the first annual Celebrate Marriage and Family Day sponsored by our Rhode Island chapter. This day is not intended to be a political event; it’s an opportunity for husbands and wives and their families to come together for an ice-cream social, listen to a nationally-recognized Christian band, renew their vows with pastors standing by, and celebrate the vision of marriage as the union of husband and wife.
But when gay-marriage advocates found out, what did they do? They organized a boycott against a company that donated a few hundred cups of coffee to the event. All Canadian media was agog! Give coffee to bigots!?! (Translation: by “bigot” they mean people like you and me and the majority of Americans, who support and promote marriage as a union of husband and wife.) On the one hand this kind of thing is small potatoes, more bemusing than outraging. …
Then again, here’s what I keep wondering: What kind of movement would threaten to hurt people’s jobs for a few cups of coffee donated to an event to celebrate traditional marriage?
We expect a great event on the beautiful Narragansett Bay on Sunday. But for people who think gay marriage is just about helping two individuals lead their own private lives the way they choose, this kind of thing is a real eye-opener, isn’t it? If gay-marriage advocates act this way while marriage in Rhode Island remains a union of husband and wife, how will they treat traditional faith communities and other marriage supporters, if they succeed in getting the power of the law on their side?
Here, we see a supposed defender of marriage protesting against gay couples who don’t want to consume coffee served by a company that would support discrimination against them and their children. Brown seems outraged that gay couples might make their own decisions about the businesses that they determine to be ethically operated.
That sounds political to me. But if any doubts remain about the intent of NOM’s rally, take a look at the main topic of this very same e-mail. The e-mail begins:
Does the Republican Party in New York want to commit political suicide? Is the national party going to help them?
New York’s 23rd Congressional district has a special election. NY 23 is what Manhattanites would think of as “way upstate NY”–the northeastern corner. The sitting Congressman, John McHugh, is a Republican whom Obama just named to be Secretary of the Army.
We are talking solid GOP territory. But for some reason (a deal with Tim Gill?) some New York Republican leaders decided that out of all the people they could choose to carry the GOP flag, they would pick Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, one of the very, very few Republicans who have ever actually voted for gay marriage. (Oh, and she’s pro-abortion too, naturally.) This makes the New York Daily News describe her as a “moderate” Republican. But really, is “moderate” the word for a GOP politician who passionately advocates for gay marriage as a “civil right”? (Fight back by donating to NOM’s New York PAC!)
Most of the e-mail alert is a call-to-arms among NOM’s Catholic and Mormon Republicans to write letters to GOP leaders in opposition to GOP chairman Michael Steele — and to “fight back by donating to NOM’s New York PAC!”
In the view of NOM, it sometimes seems that gay couples aren’t the only people who are treated as second-class citizens: Democrats and independents appear to be kicked to the sidelines, too.
The antigay National Organization for [Heterosexual-Only] Marriage is being persecuted by homosexuals, and NOM wants you to know it — because you’re next.
Tim Hortons and Blount Fine Foods were misled about the full purpose of NOM’s antigay cookout and rally in Warwick, R.I. on Aug. 16. When the companies were contacted by thousands of alarmed consumers, the companies revoked their sponsorships.
NOM was going to charge adult diners $10 and kids $8 to eat donated food. Now food may have to be purchased by NOM.
As a result of Tim Hortons’ decision, NOM Rhode Island organizer Christopher Plante tells Xtra.ca that coffee will no longer be served at this weekend’s event. “Time is of the essence,” he says. “Finding another sponsoring vendor is out of the question.” The rally also may be unable to serve Blount’s donated New England chowders.
No free coffee. No free soup. If that’s not life-threatening persecution, what is?
“It’s stressful, it’s sorrowful, it’s saddening,” Plante told The Advocate. “The marriage equality folks are making this a boycott threat. That’s sad. It has become our job now to remind Rhode Islanders that this is what’s to come.”
Wow. Are you as afraid of the future as we and Christopher are?
“This is not about Tim Hortons,” Plante told Xtra.ca. “This is about the organized approach to squash all private and public comments on marriage.” Take that, you… umm… no-good, anti-coffee, marriage-loving-gay-couples!
The NOM rally included Christian singers and a worship service, and its marriage ceremony was to exclude LGBT couples. Nevertheless, Plante maintains that the rally was apolitical and non-religious — and therefore worthy of the food companies’ sponsorship.
That sounds reasonable: When was the last time a conservative worship service and Christian concert were considered “religious”?
A coast-to-coast effort to correct a mistake by Tim Hortons began with a tip by one attentive man in Warwick, R.I., who tuned in to Christian radio and alerted friends online.
“The religious right has presented itself as a majority,” Paul Auger told Xtra.ca. “But when the true majority speaks up, international corporations have to respond to that. People can make change in the world, and that’s a good thing.”
Recently, Tim Hortons was approached in Rhode Island to provide free coffee and products for a local event, as we do thousands of times a year across Canada and the United States.
For 45 years, Tim Hortons and its store owners have practiced a philosophy of giving back to the communities in which we operate. As a company, our primary focus is on helping children and supporting fundraising events for non-profit organizations and registered charities.
For this reason, Tim Hortons has not sponsored those representing religious groups, political affiliates or lobby groups.
It has come to our attention that the Rhode Island event organizer and purpose of the event fall outside of our sponsorship guidelines. As such, Tim Hortons can not provide support at the event.
Tim Hortons and its store owners have always welcomed all families and communities to its restaurants and will continue to do so. We apologize for any misunderstanding or inconvenience this may have caused.
Please thank Tim Hortons graciously for its statement — but politely ask them to clarify whether any local store owners will provide support to the antigay rally.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence on Sunday hosted the National Organization for Marriage’s rally for antigay heterosexual Christian couples. 
A coast-to-coast effort to correct a mistake by Tim Hortons began with a tip by one attentive man in Warwick, R.I., who tuned in to Christian radio and alerted friends online.
Revised 2 p.m. Aug. 10: 
