This is a supremely cool video, and it happens to have been made by a friend of mine.
Though we in the LGBT community run the gamut of belief and lack thereof, it’s so important that we have all of our different voices in play, speaking out in the ways we’re best suited for.
A Catholic priest, facing criminal charges and a lawsuit alleging that he sexually abused a teenage boy, is now charged with attempting to hire someone to kill the youth, authorities said Tuesday.
The Rev. John M. Fiala was in the Dallas County, Texas, jail on Tuesday, charged with one count of criminal solicitation to commit capital murder, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety and the jail’s website. He also is charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child. His bail totals $700,000.
Fiala, 52, of Dallas, was out on bond on other sexual assault charges involving the youth, now 18, when he allegedly attempted to negotiate the boy’s murder, said Tom Rhodes, the teen’s attorney.
Not only that, but he’s accused of raping the teen at gunpoint! Moreover, the lawsuits state that the archdioceses and religious orders Fiala was under ALL covered up his sexual abuse.
It’s not often that the Catholic Church can shock me these days, since child rape and Catholicism are so inextricably linked in the public mind, but this one…
My favorite thing about when churches change their minds, even slightly, on the subject of church teachings or sin or whatever else, they always move immediately into this “We have always been at war with Eastasia” stance, where the new definition of sin is, of course, timeless and eternal and revealed by the almighty Wizard God, and certainly not subject to the whims of the man behind the curtain, etc. It’s all so arbitrary.
So anyway, apparently the Mormon church now probably feels that their old guidelines on gayness were hurting their bottom line financially, so they’re tinkering a bit with the Revealed Eternal Truths to try to appear a little bit nicer. Don’t be shocked or anything, though — it’s not like they’re recognizing gay peoples’ dignity or anything:
Changes to LDS Church policy on homosexuality will be presented to LDS lay clerical leaders worldwide this Saturday, November 13.
The changes are being introduced through a global leadership training satellite broadcast for the release of the newly revised Church Handbook of Instructions (CHI), a 400-page lay priesthood manual reserved for use by LDS Church members in local and regional lay leadership positions.
Multiple advance copies of the CHI leaked on the internet reveal significant changes to Church policy on homosexuality.
Basically, here’s what’s changed: You’re no longer a hellbound sinner just for thinking gay thoughts, and they’ve decreed that if you are one of those homosexual thought-havers, but you promise to live under the authoritarian thumb of the church and never seek personal fulfillment, they will let you have all the perks of being a Mormon, which, from what I’ve heard, is quite a goodie bag!
Anyway, I don’t see that the fundamental message has changed. If you’re a gay person of integrity and love, you’re still unwelcome in the LDS church.
Two out of three Americans believe gay people commit suicide at least partly because of messages coming out of churches and other places of worship, a survey released Thursday found.
More than four out of 10 Americans say the message coming out of churches about gay people is negative, and about the same number say those messages contribute “a lot” to negative perceptions of gay and lesbian people.
Catholics were the most critical of their own churches’ messages on homosexuality, while white evangelical Christians gave their churches the highest grades, the survey found.
The Public Religion Research Institute asked 1,017 Americans their views on religion and homosexuality between October 14 and 17, in the wake of a highly publicized rash of suicides by gay people.
Gay rights campaigner Dan Savage said the idea that churches send out an anti-gay message “totally jibes with my experience and that of millions of other gay and lesbian people.”
It seems that Sally Quinn and Jon Meacham are at least trying to get messages out to counter the bile spewed forth by Tony Perkins last week in their “On Faith” column. First there was Sirdeaner Walker, mother of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, the eleven year-old who took his life after being driven to the edge by anti-gay bullying. Walker is now on the board of GLSEN, whose noble work Tony Perkins spit on in his WaPo column.
Across the country, parents, school officials, legislators, religious leaders, and others are recognizing that young people are deeply harmed by the message that being gay is sinful and wrong. For the first time, many voices are calling for accountability from groups and public figures who misuse religion to justify anti-gay bigotry.
Not surprisingly, those who have made careers of promoting anti-gay views are fighting back. Last week, Tony Perkins, the director of the Family Research Council, attacked those who “lay blame at the feet of conservative Christians who teach that homosexual conduct is wrong.” In an guest voices column for On Faith, Perkins cynically denied any connection between the harassment of gay youth and the belief that gay people are sinful and disordered. According to Perkins, all responsibility must be placed on the bully, and not on religious teachings that condemn homosexuality as a threat to society. Incredibly, Perkins claimed that if gay youth commit suicide, it is because they “recognize intuitively that their same-sex attractions are abnormal,” not because of rejection by family, friends, and religious leaders.
Perkin’s distortion of scientific research and callous disregard for the harm caused by his anti-gay views have been widely condemned, and rightly so.
Gold goes on to point out, though, that aside from religious leaders like Perkins himself, many of the people who hold similar views are essentially good-hearted people who don’t actually wish harm on people, and who, when confronted with the harm that such beliefs and teachings cause, are often surprised and dismayed to learn the true results of that worldview:
During my visits with people of faith in all parts of the country, I have spoken with Evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants and Jews who have been taught that homosexuality is immoral and wrong. Almost invariably, they are surprised and concerned when they hear about the harms caused by those teachings. Many have told me they had not fully considered the impact on a gay young person of being told that he is sinful and abnormal, or that he will be cut off from God’s love unless he can do the impossible and change who he is.
It’s incumbent upon religious leaders like Tony Perkins to stop cynically lying to their people about the reality of LGBT people. For whatever reason, good people around the country actually respect Perkins, Focus on the Family, and similar groups and leaders. What I’ve found over the years is similar to what Gold states in his piece — many people of the conservative persuasion simply don’t know how awful and dishonest their leaders really are.
Atheists and agnostics have always known this, but it’s fun to see it confirmed:
A new survey of Americans’ knowledge of religion found that atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons outperformed Protestants and Roman Catholics in answering questions about major religions, while many respondents could not correctly give the most basic tenets of their own faiths.
For instance:
Forty-five percent of Roman Catholics who participated in the study didn’t know that, according to church teaching, the bread and wine used in Holy Communion is not just a symbol, but becomes the body and blood of Christ.
More than half of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the person who inspired the Protestant Reformation. And about four in 10 Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the greatest rabbis and intellectuals in history, was Jewish.
Writes the New York Times, “Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.” Ha ha, that’s racist right there, against white people.
Yes, ’tis. But it’s hilarious. We are truly a nation of dumbs.
Here’s an interesting report from the BBC about a church in London which holds mass twice a month specifically for gay and lesbian Catholics. It’s been referred to as “the fault line” in the Catholic church, because, as you will see, these gay Catholics are terribly frightening, singing songs and going through the rituals of Mass just like any other Catholics. I put the video after the fold because it auto-plays. Sorry about that.
As P.Z. Myers says, here’s a pretty good reason not to attend a religious university. A Mormon student at Brigham Young wrote a letter to the school’s newspaper addressing the LDS’s positions on Prop 8 and gay rights, which was published for a hot minute before the paper decided to censor the student and pull the letter:
Yesterday, Brigham Young University’s student paper The Daily Universe featured a letter to the editor that argued that the legal case for Proposition 8 is “indefensible.” Its author, BYU student Cary Crall, also asked Mormons to admit that their only opposition to gay marriage is religious. The letter attracted enormous attention and praise from both the Mormon and ex-Mormon online communities. People were most impressed that BYU—in a refreshing display of academic freedom—published it.
But shortly after the letter was posted to the Universe‘s website, it was quietly pulled. This is disappointing, but not terribly surprising; the letter nearly didn’t get published at all. Crall told me in a Facebook message that he submitted the letter to the Universe a few weeks ago, but it was rejected by the summer editor who felt it was inappropriate for a “newspaper funded by the LDS Church.” It wasn’t until after some edits and the approval of a new editor that it was published, albeit briefly.
If you click the above link, the letter is posted in its entirety, and it’s probably getting more attention than ever for being censored, so that’s good. Here’s a key passage:
It is time for LDS supporters of Prop 8 to be honest about their reasons for supporting the amendment. It’s not about adoption rights, or the first amendment, or tradition. These arguments were not found worthy of the standards for finding facts set up by our judicial system. The real reason is that a man who most of us believe is a prophet of God told us to support the amendment. [This is a privately held religious belief that we are using to support legislation that takes away a right from a minority group. If our government were to enact legislation based solely on such beliefs, it would set a dangerous precedent, possibly even more so than allowing a homosexual to marry the person he or she loves.] We must be honest about our motivation, and consider what it means to the delicate balance between our relationship with God and with His children here on earth. Maybe then we will stop thoughtlessly spouting arguments that are offensive to gays and lesbians and indefensible to those not of our faith.
I tend to agree with P.Z.’s assessment — the letter is just a tad bit too honest for the Mormon church.
In Saturday’s New York Times, columnist Charles Blow said the flowing:
A Gallup report issued on Tuesday underscored just how out of line we are. Gallup surveyed people in more than 100 countries in 2009 and found that religiosity was highly correlated to poverty. Richer countries in general are less religious.
But that doesn’t hold true for the United States.
Sixty-five percent of Americans say that religion is an important part of their daily lives. That is compared with just 30 percent of the French, 27 percent of the British and 24 percent of the Japanese.
I used Gallup’s data to chart religiosity against gross domestic product per capita, and to group countries by their size and dominant religions.
The cliché goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”
Even in a America, the more religious states are generally the most backward, uneducated, and poor. The situation would be infinitely worse if such states weren’t propped up by the good fortune of sitting on oil or given tax money hand-outs from the more productive — less religious — states, all the while whining about “big government” and “awful liberals”. (You know, those terrible liberals who are actually coming up with innovative, financially viable ideas that are keeping this nation afloat! Think Silicon Valley, Seattle, New York City etc.)
Indeed, word on the street has it that economic growth in Massachusetts has consistently gone up since the pilgrims liberalized and people stopped burning witches. Oklahoma ought to try to follow in Massachusetts footsteps.
Oh, I kid you Oklahoma! I’ve been there – it’s a fine state with some very nice people who aren’t named Tom Coburn or Sally Kern.
