Interesting hour-long look at the Bible and what it says (and does not say) about homosexuality. As The Stranger put it:
Vines’ argument and his insights are highly relevant to gay Christians, to their families, to Christians who point to the bible to justify their bigotry and the pain they inflict on LGBT people (including their own LGBT children), and to anyone who happens to live in a country that is majority Christian.
Full transcript found here.
Context: Rick Santorum pledges to repeal 130,000 legally recognized same-sex marriages if elected president.
Reblogged from motherjones with 6,367 notes / Rick Santorum Gay Rights Election 2012
It was, after all, the trustees of the Smithsonian Institution, not a Bible Belt cultural outpost, who bowed to pressure from the militant Catholic League just fifteen months ago to censor the work of a gay American artist who had already been silenced, long ago, by AIDS. It was a Democratic president, with wide support from Democrats on Capitol Hill, who in 1996 signed the Defense of Marriage Act, one of the most discriminatory laws ever to come out of Washington. It’s precisely because of DOMA that to this day same-sex marriages cannot be more than what you might call placebo marriages in the eight states (plus the District of Columbia) that have legalized them. DOMA denies wedded same-sex couples all federal benefits—some 1,000, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ programs—and allows the other 42 states to ignore their marriages altogether.
(via longreads)
Reblogged from longreads with 23 notes / Long Reads Gay Rights Politics Democrats USA
A chart that displays the percentage of a state’s population that supports same-sex marriage with the current realities in the law.
Related: How the 2012 Election Will Determine the Future of Gay Marriage
"A federal appeals court panel ruled on Tuesday that a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage in California violated the Constitution, all but ensuring that the case will proceed to the United States Supreme Court."
If you haven’t already, this is a must-read:
On the death of Tyler Clementi, a gay Rutgers student, and the charges against his roommate, Dharun Ravi, who used a webcam to spy on him. Clementi took his own life shortly after the incident:
An online video chat, using an application like iChat or Skype, starts like a phone call: one person requests a conversation, and the recipient must accept the request. But Ravi had tweaked his iChat settings so that the program could automatically accept incoming calls. According to Ravi, he had made this his computer’s usual setting. Whatever the case, that evening the program was set to auto-accept; he also turned off his monitor, or darkened it to black. At 9:13 P.M., he was beside Wei at her computer. He opened iChat, and clicked his name on her chat list. A few feet away, his computer accepted his request, and Ravi and Wei saw a live video image of Room 30.
Reblogged from longreads with 43 notes / Long Reads Gay Rights Suicide Homophobia Sad News
Worth your time: great response from Newark Mayor Cory Booker on New Jersey’s Marriage Equality Referendum and the treating of homosexuals as second class citizens.
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For the first time ever, all 100 firms on Fortune’s Best Companies To Work For list this year have non-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation.”
This is not because they are somehow being noble. It is because they are serving their shareholders by employing the absolutely best people for the jobs they have and do not want to miss someone’s talents because of something irrelevant like sexual orientation.
Hence capitalism enables equality. And the last entity to get with the program is the government.
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(via huskerred)
Reblogged from jgreendc with 207 notes / Andrew Sullivan Politics Gay Rights Inequality Business Opinion
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In short, if you’re still disappointed in Barack Obama, it’s only because you never understood whose job it was to produce change in the first place. But don’t take out your own failings in this regard on the rest of us, by giving ideological cover and assorted journalistic love taps to a guy who believes the poor should rely on the charitable impulses of doctors to provide for their medical needs, including, one presumes, chemotherapy; or that America was meant to be a “robustly Christian” nation, but is being currently undermined by “secularists;” or who puts the term gay rights in quotation marks when he writes it, and believes states should be free to criminalize homosexual intercourse, and who is such a homophobe that he won’t even use the bathroom in a gay man’s house; or who has all but said that he would like to take America back to the early 1800s, in terms of the scope of government: a truly glorious time to be sure, if you were white, male and owned property.
Ya know, like some of the liberal “thinkers” who have, as of late, decided to praise Ron Paul.
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(via azspot)
Although, I am still disappointed with Obama.
“Diversity creates conflict. If we celebrate diversity, we create conflict.”
Reblogged from kohenari with 376 notes / Gay Rights Homophobia Racism USA Politics News Election 2012 Rick Santorum
