The Agenda: Equality

John Cena really made a fantastic video here. I was overwhelmed.

Happy National Coming Out Day!

Come out, come out, whoever you are!!

GLAAD.ORG

Entertainment Overnight -- We're Going to Hell

These Are the Days, My Friends

It's actually a pretty incredible time to be alive.

Millions more Americans recently came much closer to having full equality here in their own nation.

Greece just got yet one more cash bailout from it's Eurozone members yesterday.

It was announced today, Tuesday, that a nuclear agreement between Iran and 6 other nations to keep them from getting nuclear weapons was reached, taking off economic sanctions.

And there's a flyby of our satellite near Pluto today.

Big times. These are incredible times, indeed.

We take things so for granted.

Missourians, Lamenting Equality in America

Sadly, shamefully, really, Dent County, Missouri, Southeast of Fort Leonard Wood, is mixing their religion and opinions with government just now, it seems.

Dent County, Mo., votes to lower flags in protest of Supreme Court's gay marriage ruling

That these people would, as I said above, laament or protest further equality busting out in our country is not just sad but wrong and unjust. It's not completely surprising but it is unfortunate, certainly.

Quote of the Day -- Timely

What part of equality do people not understand?

The Last Week in America

They're both improvements.

Worried About Gay Marriage?

Relax!

Right Wing, "Conservative", Religious, Supposedly "Christian", Republican Springfield Repeals Equality

There's a shocker, huh?

LGBT protections repealed in Springfield

The bigots from the pews won.

This one, this time.

The thing is, what they don't recognize is that we all want equality.

This is America, right?

Didn't we always say, haven't we always been told, from grade school? that "...all men are created equal"?

What too many don't recognize is that the opposite of equality id discrimination.

Kansas heads will be 'asplodin' today

First this:

Federal judge orders Kansas to allow same-sex marriages

And then tonight, some Republicans losing, and big time?

Power to the people x 2

Great news yesterday, for America, and on two different fronts, from two different places in the country.

The first is that highly Catholic Rhode Island passed equal rights legislation yesterday by allowing, finally, same-sex marriage, becoming the 10th state in the nation to do so:

Rhode Island Senate passes marriage equality, 26-12

The second was and is that so many workers in Chicago banned together to walk off their jobs in protest for a true, living wage:

Chicago Fast-Food, Retail Workers Stage Walk Out to Protest Minimum Wage

 

Good for them.  Good for us. Good for all low-wage workers, nationwide, yes, but this needs to spread.

 

Workers of the world...

 

So good for you, America.  We're making some advances.

I miss Communism

I miss Communism.

I kind of miss the "Cold War."

Back when there was the big, bad, ugly Russian Communists, we knew who our enemies were and it was "them." Now, we don't know who our enemies are as well so we attack one another. We attack fellow Americans.

It was far less Republicans vs Democrats and "Left" vs "Right."

We've stopped talking to one another, we've stopped discussing our problems and possible solutions, instead attacking one another.

Now we attack opposing political stances, gays, blacks, Hispanics, Mexicans, Muslims, you name it. All fellow Americans but we attack 'em.

It's crazy.

This is no way to run a nation.


I miss it when we were all Americans, when we were all on the same side.

The Republican jobs plan for America

More on the Catholic Church's gay hypocrisy

First Andrew Sullivan and others call out the Pope for his boyfriend (which I reported on yesterday) and now this from Newsweek:

Rome' s Subculture of Gay Priests Rocks the Vatican

 

For residents of Rome, the sight of courting priests is hardly an anomaly. But a recent exposé is rocking the Catholic Church

In the basement dining room of Le Mani In Pasta, a trattoria in central Rome, a young, glossy-eyed couple stare at each other across a table for two. They smile and blush over a private joke. There is no handholding or kissing, but they are clearly more than friends, even though they are both wearing dark shirts and the telltale white clerical collar.

For residents of Rome, the sight of courting priests is hardly an anomaly. The phenomenon is a well-known secret here, and one that was largely ignored until last weekend, when the Italian weekly magazine Panorama published a shocking exposé called “Le Notti Brave Dei Preti Gay,” or “Good Nights Out for Gay Priests.” Investigative journalist Carmelo Abbate spent 20 days undercover posing as the boyfriend of a man who ran in gay clerical circles, secretly videotaping the sexual escapades of three Rome-based priests. Abbate caught the priests on hidden camera dirty dancing at private parties and engaging in sex acts with male escorts on church property. He also caught them emerging from dark bedrooms in time to celebrate mass. In one postcoital scene, “Father Carlo” parades around seminaked, wearing only his clerical vestments. Abbate’s “date” even had sex with one of the priests to corroborate the story. “This is not about homosexuality,” Abbate, who is not gay, told NEWSWEEK. “This is about private vices and public virtues. This is about serious hypocrisy in the Catholic Church.”
 

If you read the entire Newsweek  article, you'll find it pretty fascinating.

Not to be done there, amazingly enough, there's another, too:

Did A Cross-Dressing Priest Sex Ring Bring Down Benedict XVI?

Of all the rumors floating around about just why Pope Benedict XVI is hanging up his camauro, one has taken on a life of its own. According to several well-placed vaticanisti—or Vatican experts—in Rome, Benedict is resigning after being handed a secret red-covered dossier that included details about a network of gay priests who work inside the Vatican, but who play in secular Rome. The priests, it seems, are allegedly being blackmailed by a network of male prostitutes who worked at a sauna in Rome’s Quarto Miglio district, a health spa in the city center, and a private residence once entrusted to a prominent archbishop. The evidence reportedly includes compromising photos and videos of the prelates—sometimes caught on film in drag, and, in some cases, caught “in the act.”

If you're Catholic, you'll likely find both articles shocking and surprising.

One of my favorite quotes from these articles and that keeps getting repeated is this:

“This is not about homosexuality,” Abbate told The Daily Beast when he published the exposé. “This is about private vices and public virtues. This is about serious hypocrisy in the Catholic Church.”

That second article. above, gets even more provocative in its description of what may have taken place even than the first.

Someone by the pseudonym "gardgengirl" wrote the following comment after the 2nd article:

the catholic church...

quite possibly the single, most corrupt organization on the planet.

highly cunning, they created a facade to hide their double lives behind.

raised a catholic, i saw the sham at about age 14.

at its core, it's a secret society for sexually perverted, greedy men.

hello?

virgin birth? ruby slippers & brocade gowns? women excluded from the hierarchy? altar boys galore?

a sovereign country unto itself? stolen riches, properties, & art?  tax-exempt status?

a genius, tho evil, concept that  lasted for centuries, until the internet came along.

And who, at this point, can be certain she's completely wrong?

In case you're not done there, there is another article here:

 

Conspiracy Theories: Why Did the Pope Really Quit?
 

And then there's this, too, that broke last evening:

 

Vatican 'knew of Cardinal O'Brien claims'

Curiouser and couriouser, indeed.

On Equality

The White President you can trust!

The fact is, it transcends time and nature

Click on picture for larger, better viewing:

I think it's over too many people's heads or comprehension but actually, same-sex attraction--and that's all it is--goes back to the dawn of humankind and is also in nature. Scientists have found over 400 species that exhibit this trait.

So just deal with it, folks.

Move on. There's nothing to see here.

And nothing to over-react to.

Missouri's state-sponsored inequality

The Kansas City Star has an excellent page in the op/ed section this morning, showing the winners and losers of the past week in the state capitols of Missouri and Kansas.

It's a terrific idea on their part.

It gives a pretty concise, if brief and encapsulated overview of what our legislators worked on and did or didn't do the past week.

It also tells, like 3 of my posts earlier this week, how they wasted their and so, our, time and money with their "work."

They pointed out that, nearly unbelievably, the Missouri legislature worked to make it illegal to discriminate against gun owners but that--wait for it--it's still legal to fire someone in the workplace if someone finds out they are same-sex attracted. Read: gay or homosexual.

And here you thought we were all equal in the United States.

As my brother will occasionally, for humor, say to me, quoting an old, favorite Doonesbury comic I love so much:

"Dream on you fascists."

(Click on comic for larger, better viewing)

These two legislatures seem to want to make us more and more like the worst attributes of the Right Wing, red-neck Southern states.

Pitiful.

Link: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/05/25/3627515/the-stars-editorial-lawmakers.html

To the Black--African-American--community

‎"We have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppressed people in the society." --Huey Newton, Co-founder of the Black Panther Party
August 15 1970

It's about equality, people.

Equality.

That's all.

The same thing you've been working and fighting for.

That's all.

Link: http://hiphopandpolitics.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/looking-back-at-huey-newtons-thoughts-on-gay-rights-in-the-wake-of-obamas-endorsement/

Equality in America and this Sunday's sermons

Can you imagine some of the sermons this Sunday morning--especially in the fundamentalist churches--and how ugly, angry and hateful they're going to get, given the news that this President came out squarely for same-sex marriage equality (read: equality)?