More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Federal Courts Block DeSantis' Fascist Policies

Speaking of would be autocrats, two different federal judges have blocked two anti-LGBT laws pushed through the Florida legislature by Ron DeSantis and his minions as part of DeSantis' effort to bring evangelicals and Christofascists to his political standard. While these laws targeting LGBT individuals are depicted as "protecting children" and supporting "parental rights," the true goal is to denigrate and marginalize LGBT Floridians while protecting the rights of a minority of parents over the rights of the majority. Pending any appeal, DeSantis' anti-drag show law and ban on medical treatment for transgender minors cannot be enforced.  The irony, of course, is that despite DeSantis' fascist and anti-LGBT policies, his standing in polls against Der Trumpenfuhrer in the GOP presidential nomination contest remains pathetic. Hopefully, the bans on these laws and other DeSantis policies will become permanent and ultimately backfire on DeSantis.  A piece in the Tallahassee Democrat looks at the federal court setback to the anti-LGBT forces in Florida when it comes to drag shows.  Here are article excerpts:

A federal court blocked Florida's new drag show law, ruling the state's effort to bar children from attending "adult live performances," is overly vague and likely unconstitutional. 

The decision Friday by U.S. District Judge Gregory Presnell in Orlando comes only two days after a North Florida federal court overturned another Gov. Ron DeSantis-backed law prohibiting gender-affirming care in Florida from being covered by Medicaid. 

The two decisions undermine a high-profile new law seen by many as targeting the LGBTQ community that DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate, pushed through the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature.   It was one of at least 18 bills that directly or indirectly targeted transgender life, ranging from a ban on preferred pronouns in the classroom to a law governing which bathrooms they could use.

The drag show law was challenged by an Orlando restaurant, Hamburger Mary’s, which has hosted such performances for 15 years, including those it described as “family friendly.”  In court filings, attorneys for the restaurant argued that Florida already had laws on the books preventing minors from being exposed to “lewd, sexually explicit, obscene, vulgar or indecent displays.” 

[I]n blocking its enforcement, Presnell, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, found the measure conflicted with a state law that guarantees the rights of parents to make decisions in the best interests of their children.  He also said it likely violated constitutional free speech guarantees and was too vague to enforce. 

The judge raised doubts about state claims that blocking the law would “harm the public by exposing children to "adult live performances." 

“This concern rings hollow, however, when accompanied by the knowledge that Florida state law presently and independently... permits any minor to attend an R-rated film at a movie theater if accompanied by a parent or guardian,” Presnell ruled.

A similar law in Tennessee was overturned earlier this month by a federal judge citing similar free speech violations with that state's drag show prohibition.

Florida's law defines “adult live performances,” in part as “any show, exhibition or other presentation in front of a live audience which, in whole or in part, depicts or simulates nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement or specific sexual activities... lewd conduct, or the lewd exposure of prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts.” 

It bars local governments from issuing public permits for events that could expose children to the targeted activities. Also, state regulators could suspend or revoke licenses of restaurants, bars and other venues violating the law. 

The Florida law mirrored measures advanced in several other Republican-led states. It also came after the DeSantis administration had already imposed regulatory penalties on restaurants and bars mostly in South and Central Florida that had allowed children to attend drag shows. 

The Hyatt Regency Miami hotel was threatened with the loss of its liquor license for hosting a “Drag Queen Christmas,” in December. 

In challenging Florida’s law, the owners of the Orlando site said they were forced to cancel a Sunday series of family-friendly performances and that customers had already stopped coming to the restaurant.  In a Facebook post, the owners also said they thought the bill had nothing to do with children and “everything to do with the continued oppression of the LGBTQ+ community.” 

In his ruling, Presnell seemed to share at least some of this thinking. 

“This statute is specifically designed to suppress the speech of drag queen performers,” Presnell wrote in his 24-page decision. “In the words of the bill’s sponsor in the House, State Representative Randy Fine: (the legislation) will protect our children by ending the gateway propaganda to this evil – ‘Drag Queen Story Time.’” 

Supporters of the LGBTQ community, however, hailed the decision. “This is another legal win for the people of Florida and for the First Amendment," said Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando. "I am thrilled with this outcome and it’s especially meaningful for a decision to be released during Pride Month too."

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Rebellion in Russia - Wagner Group Revolts

At the moment it is difficult to know what is happening in Russia, but by all accounts Vladimir Putin is facing an armed rebellion by Wagner Group mercenaries who have been the shock forces in the unlawful invasion of Ukraine. While the Wagner leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin to date has said the revolt is against the Russian military leadership, it is hard to believe Prigozhin - who is a very nasty piece of work - might not have larger ambitions.  Meanwhile, Putin, who sees himself as Russia's new tsar, seems to be paralleling mistakes by Nicholas II that lead to the Russian Revolutions of 1917 as Putin's unpopular war is not going well for Russia's military.  In 1917 the Bolsheviks were a small group but they had a determination and ruthlessness that the Provisional Government forces could not match.   Yes, Putin needs to be overthrown, but it is difficult to see the extremely brutal Prigohzin as a better alternative or as someone who would end dictatorship in Russia. A piece in The Economist looks at the unfolding rebellion in Russia.  Here are excerpts:

THE LONG-RUNNING feud among Russia’s warlords has burst into an open revolt, with Wagner mercenaries taking control of a military base in the south-western city of Rostov-on-Don, close to the border with Ukraine, and fighting the regular army in the Veronezh region to the north. Amid accusations of internecine attacks, betrayal and insurrection, and signs that he has begun to lose control of his underlings, President Vladimir Putin, briefly addressed the nation on the morning of June 24th. Looking angry and shaken, he vowed to punish “those who went on the path of treason”, and said the armed forces had been given the “necessary orders” to put down Wagner’s mutiny.

The Wagner rebellion began with a series of video messages by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the group’s head, who accused Russia’s army of attacking his forces. He vowed to march thousands of his fighters to deal with his enemies, prompting authorities to charge him with insurrection. Uncertain-looking generals issued videos pleading with Wagner troops to remain loyal, to little avail.

As morning broke on June 24th, social-media footage showed combat troops, seemingly from Wagner, surrounding key sites in Rostov-on-Don, including the headquarters of the Southern Military District, which oversees the war in Ukraine. In one video they were watched by curious onlookers as a street-sweeper worked around them.

Soon after, Mr Prigozhin was filmed outside what appears to be a military building, berating Russian generals as “clowns”. He declared they would be allowed to continue prosecuting the war in Ukraine but demanded that the top brass should come to speak to him—otherwise he would march on Moscow. Things appeared more tense hundreds of kilometres further north, in the town of Pavlovsk, where videos appeared to show fighting involving helicopters. Wagner claimed to have shot one down, and that army units let its forces pass. Official Russian media did not report on events in Rostov-on-Don but, adding to the surreal air, the Tass news agency put out pictures of the soldiers identifying them (in English) as Wagner fighters.

Ukrainian forces, whose counter-offensive, launched earlier this month, has been making only slow progress, will be delighted by the disarray in their enemy’s ranks. Whether they are able to exploit it militarily remains to be seen. Russia claimed Ukrainian troops were “taking advantage of Prigozhin’s provocation” by concentrating for an attack near Bakhmut, the site of much bloody fighting involving Wagner. Ukrainian commanders say they have yet to commit the bulk of their forces, and are still probing for weaknesses. But, it seems, they have already put enough pressure on Russia to sow chaos among its military commanders.

The rivalry between Mr Prigozhin and the military command has been apparent for months. Mr Prigozhin has developed a cult following thanks to his video rants against the corruption and incompetence of the high command (but initially not directly of Mr Putin himself, though he later called the president “deeply mistaken”). His forces, packed with ex-convicts who were promised future pardons, have often proved to be better fighters than regular Russian units.

But his video posts on June 23rd were remarkable even by his spittle-flecked standards. One questioned the basis of Mr Putin’s “special military operation”, as Russia describes the invasion launched last year. Mr Prigozhin said there had been no real threat from Ukraine. Instead, Russian leaders—but not Mr Putin himself—had led the country to war for reasons of corruption and vainglory. He also asserted that Ukrainian forces were on the advance, contradicting the Kremlin’s claims to have repelled the onslaught. “What they’re telling us is a total fraud.”

Then his rants took an ominous turn when he stated that thousands of Wagner fighters had been killed by a missile strike launched not by Ukraine at the front, but “from the rear”, by Russian army units. Vowing that Wagner would “respond to this evildoing”, he announced a “march of justice” against Russia’s army, but was careful to say it was not a “coup”. He singled out Mr Shoigu, claiming he had ordered the alleged air strike on Wagner and then “ran away like a bitch to avoid explaining why he sent helicopters to destroy our boys”.

In another video, he declared: “The evil brought by the country’s military leadership must be stopped.” And without saying what precisely he would do, he added: “I ask that nobody resist. We will consider everyone who resists to be a threat and destroy them at once.”

As ever, there is much uncertainty about what Mr Prigozhin is up to. Mr Putin has given him extraordinary leeway to criticise his campaign when even those who call it a “war” are jailed. But Mr Prigozhin appears genuinely to have unnerved the top brass in the army and security services.

The FSB, Russia’s main security service, later announced it would prosecute Mr Prigozhin “over calls for an armed uprising”. It told Wagner fighters “not to make an irreparable mistake, to stop using any force against the Russian people, not to carry out Prigozhin’s criminal and treacherous orders, and to take steps to detain him”.

The seriousness of the feud was all the more apparent when senior Wagner-friendly generals took to issuing their own videos late at night. . . . . “I urge you to stop. The enemy is waiting precisely for the political situation in our country to worsen.” Calling on them to follow Mr Putin’s orders, he added: “Stop the columns, return to your places of permanent deployment.”

As security forces, including armoured vehicles, were seen in Moscow, Tass, the state news agency, explained: “Security measures have been strengthened in Moscow, all the most important facilities, state authorities and transport infrastructure facilities have been taken under increased protection.”

Mr Putin himself has been lying low. At one point during the war of videos, the Kremlin issued a pre-recorded film of Mr Putin congratulating school-leavers, saying: “Believe in yourself, dream bravely, achieve your goals, and you will definitely be successful!” Alina Polyakova, of the Centre for European Policy Analysis, a think-tank in Washington, DC, tweeted that Mr Putin’s silence was “another signal that this is a Shoigu-Prigozhin power struggle”.

Winston Churchill once compared Russian leaders to “bulldogs fighting under a carpet”. But more than a year after Mr Putin launched his reckless invasion of Ukraine, his dogs of war seem to be tearing at each other in the open.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Friday Male Beauty

 

The "Dechurching" of America

As the Republican Party is intensifying the culture wars in order to pander and prostitute itself to the evangelicals, Christofascists and white supremacists that dominate GO primary elections, the numbers of those with no religious affiliation and who never go to church is surging across all demographics, but particularly among younger voters.  Personally, I see the decline of religion as a good thing given the hate, division and violence it has sown over the centuries.   Seemingly, the trend away from religion shows no signs of slowing even as the shrinking GOP base becomes more desperate and hysterical in its efforts maintain its dominance and control over the majority  of the population.  Indeed, this extreme minority's dogmatic racial, gender, political and sexual attitudes are what is in large part powering the exodus from Christianity. Yet these modern day inquisitors seem unable to grasps that they themselves are the cause of what they fear most.   A piece in the New York Times looks at what the author calls the "dechurching" of America.  Here are highlights: 

In previous newsletters about Americans falling away from religion, I’ve talked about why so many Americans’ religious identities now fall in the category known as “nones” when, just a half-century ago, nearly all Americans had some kind of affiliation.

But it’s not just how Americans identify that has greatly shifted. In their new book “The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?” Jim Davis and Michael Graham with Ryan Burge argue that the most dramatic change may be in regular attendance at houses of worship. “We are currently in the middle of the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country,” they postulate, because “about 15 percent of American adults living today (around 40 million people) have effectively stopped going to church, and most of this dechurching has happened in the past 25 years.”

[E]very group is trending away from traditional worship. As Davis, Graham and Burge put it: “No theological tradition, age group, ethnicity, political affiliation, education level, geographic location or income bracket escaped the dechurching in America.”

The data they shared with me suggests that “dechurching” is particularly prevalent among Buddhists and Jews, with nearly half not attending worship services regularly, and around 30 percent of most Christian denominations and around 20 percent of Mormons and Orthodox Christians.

But many said they did miss aspects of traditional attendance, and often these people still believed in God or certain aspects of their previous faith traditions. They’d sought replacements for traditional worship, and the most common were spending time in nature, meditation and physical activity — basically anything that got them out of their own heads and the anxieties of the material world. Kathy Keller, 60, who lives in Michigan and left the Catholic Church because of its child sex abuse scandals and intrusion into health care that adversely affects women, has had a fairly representative experience. She said that while she no longer goes to church regularly, she still believes in a higher power and prays occasionally. “I try to spend Sunday morning outside appreciating the glory of nature,” she said.

Others are trying to forge new kinds of religious paths for themselves. One example is the trend of mostly younger Americans who are “deconstructing” Christianity . . . . “deconstruction has a broad range of definitions and outcomes, from understanding more about a faith once accepted uncritically to full abandonment of religious belief.”

The process of deconstructing Christianity, . . . often begins with questioning the conservative racial, gender, political and sexual attitudes of the churches they were raised in — an approach that has particular relevance right now: Just last week, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to bar women from its pastorate.

Donnell McLachlan, 29, who lives in Chicago, has been sharing the story of his deconstruction on TikTok @donnellwrites, where he has nearly 250,000 followers, since 2021. He was brought up in what he describes as a small Black church on the South Side of Chicago in the Pentecostal and Apostolic traditions. Though he says the church did a lot for him and his family when he was growing up, he came to feel that it was a faith rooted in fear and judgment.

“I started to notice the distance between what we professed and what we actually did,” he told me, especially when it came to women, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and Black Lives Matter. For a while, he and his wife tried attending a different church that seemed more modern, but, McLachlan said, “I started to see a lot of the same patterns” of religious conservatism “that were just repackaged in a kind of shiny cool way.” . . . . McLachlan said he now describes himself as a “spiritual pluralist” rather than a Christian, though he still embraces some rituals from his Christian heritage, like prayer, gospel music and “drawing upon the love-rooted, justice-centered wisdom found in the Bible.”

Jill Fioravanti, 45, who lives in Maryland, is another example of a reader seeking a new kind of interfaith community. Fioravanti “was bat mitzvahed at a Conservative Jewish synagogue and was involved in Hillel at my university but became disillusioned when I could not find a rabbi who would conduct an interfaith marriage ceremony for me and my husband, who is Catholic,” she said.

One of the main qualifications readers seem to be looking for in their new spiritual communities is something that is less exclusionary than the denominations they were raised in. But it’s precisely the more “dogmatic” denominations and religious sects that are better able to keep adherents, according to Merril Silverstein, a sociologist at Syracuse University . . . . Mormons and evangelical Christians were able to recreate themselves more strongly across generations in their sample than Jews, mainline Protestants and Catholics, Silverstein said. Meanwhile, “the secular, the anti-religious or nonreligious people are producing nonreligious, anti-religious children,” Silverstein told me. It’s creating a new and more polarized religious landscape in our country than what we’ve had before.

I asked whether he thought the trend of falling away from regular attendance at traditional houses of worship would continue at its rapid clip. He said he thinks it eventually has to slow down, because so many people will become dechurched that there won’t be enough traditionally observant Americans left to keep up the pace. And he agreed with Silverstein that dechurched Americans will have “unchurched” or fully irreligious children. He summed it up this way: “I think the religious disaffiliation as a cultural phenomenon will continue.”

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 Dedicated to Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito

The Hypocrisy of Samuel Alito

The U.S. Supreme Court has an ethics and corruption problem which has been writ large by the corruption of Clarence Thomas who has received a huge amount expensive gifts by those with business before the Court.  As new reporting from ProPublica is documenting, Thomas has equally company in the person of seemingly equally corrupt Samuel Alito who in the Dobbs case overturning Roe v. Wade proved to be a shrill right wing extremist in the mold of the Spanish Inquisition. And just like many in the Inquisition of old, Alito has proven to be a total hypocrite who demands that all Americans live strictly in accordance with his 12th century beliefs yet views himself above the laws and rules by which  he wants to bind others.   Indeed, Thomas and Alito, while the most reactionary of the justices and the most inclined to erase religious freedom for the majority, have shown a breathtaking level of arrogance and total disregard for the need to avoid the appearance of impropriety. A piece in Politico skewers Alito and looks at his total cluelessness about public relations for a Court already facing legitimacy challenges.  It is far  past time for ethics reforms for the Court and possible removal of some of the corrupt justices.  Here are column highlights: 

Not since 1974 when New Times magazine called Sen. William Scott (R-Va.) Congress’ dumbest member and he called a press conference in response to deny the charge and thereby prove mental deficiencies has a member of the Washington elite so mishandled a critical press salvo as Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. did this week.

Alito, who shares with Donald Trump a toddler’s lack of impulse control, once again demonstrated his inability to plan more than one move ahead at a time after the investigative news outfit ProPublica emailed a list of questions for its story pegged to his flight to a comped 2008 luxury fishing trip in Alaska on a hedge fund billionaire’s private jet.

As if to shout, “I’m not on trial here,” the justice declined to answer ProPublica’s questions, sending that message to the news organization through a court spokesperson. But in a contradictory move, Alito mounted a 1,200-word defense in the form of a Wall Street Journal op-ed to dispute ProPublica’s article — which had not yet been published. Essentially, the justice scooped the news outlet on its own story.

Alito had every right to sting ProPublica before it stung him. But in his case, getting out in front of the story before it published was a little like a judge delivering a verdict after hearing the charges but before the trial had taken place. For one thing, his dense-as-a-legal-brief argument was hard to follow because it lacked the connective tissue to explain what precisely ProPublica’s piece was accusing him of. A billboard mounted on a flatbed truck reading “ProPublica Is Being Mean to Me” and driven in a circle around the Supreme Court Building would have been a more effective public relations ploy. Perhaps the most blockheaded thing about Alito’s preemption was that it gave fresh publicity to the latest installment in a growing series about the justices licking sugar off the tummies of their sugar daddies.

Alito’s excuse-making was William Scott caliber but with a modern, Trumpian twist. While Alito wasn’t as incoherent as Trump was in his recent credibility-destroying appearance on Fox, the justice did himself no favors, even in an ostensibly friendly forum. Like Trump, he is not actually denying anything, just waving his hands. To wit: The seat he took on the private jet would have gone empty if he had not claimed it, he wrote. Yes, there was wine at the retreat, but it didn’t cost $1,000. . . . as if that erases the onus of avoiding the appearance of conflict of interest.

When the ProPublica story, “Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court,” landed Tuesday evening after the Alito hors d’oeuvre, the capital’s appetite was hyper-stimulated for the main course. Alito didn’t report the Alaska trip, in apparent violation of the law that requires members of the Supreme Court report most gifts. Also, the billionaire’s hedge fund came before the Supreme Court at least 10 times after the trip, ProPublica reports, and the outlet got several ethics cops to say Alito should have recused himself from these cases but didn’t.

Alito’s ProPublica blow-up is only his latest PR miscue. In April, he gave an interview with his allies at the Wall Street Journal editorial page in which he complained resentfully about the criticism leveled at the court. “We’re being bombarded with this,” Alito said.. . . Instead of accepting or battling the criticism, Alito chooses to whine. He didn’t exactly convene a press conference to say he’s not the dumbest member of the Supreme Court, but almost.

Essentially, Alito wants to get away with something a mere federal employee could get busted for and probably fired.

As somebody who makes his living pushing words around on a page that govern the conduct of hundreds of millions, Alito should have had a better rejoinder to the ProPublica article than his Journal prebuttal. Is it a lack of intelligence or an emotional deficiency that compels him to go off half-cocked like this?

Poor, poor, pitiful Sam. Report on the ethics of the justices, and in his view you’re undermining government. Report on how the court’s decisions are shaped, and you’re trying to intimidate it. Why, things have gotten so bad for the justices, to see it Alito’s way, that a guy can’t accept a plush vacation from people who do business with the court without being criticized for it. Such protestations could be dumber than anything William Scott ever said or did.

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

The Titanic's Enduring Grip On the Public’s Imagination

Since I was a child I have been a huge fan of classic transatlantic ocean liners, something sparked perhaps by seeing the old movie "Titanic" starring Barbara Stanwyck, Clifton Webb and a very young and gorgeous Robert Wagner, my mother's travel by ships in her youth from Central America, and one of my maternal aunts and her husband who regularly went on cruises.  In fact, in August the husband and I and two friends are doing a westbound transatlantic cruise on Cunard's Queen Mary 2 from Southampton, England, to New York City, following in the steps of our ancestors who sailed from Europe to America for a better life and/or fortune, not to mention the ancestors of so many Americans.  The Titanic was the largest and arguably most luxurious liner when launched but it was not the largest or most elegant of all the classic liners - this title, in my view belongs to the French liner Normandie, an art deco palace  - and it was half the tonnage of today's Queen Mary 2, the last true liner.  Similarly, Titanic's sister ship and near twin, the Olympic was in service until 1935, yet is unknown to most people.  Indeed, the public remembers the Titanic while other magnificent liners that were larger, equally luxurious and faster are unknown outside of ocean liner enthusiast circles and history buffs.  Part of this may be due to James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster movie "Titanic", but also I think due to the fact that the sinking of the Titanic ended some of the confidence of the Edwardian era and was a slap-down of man's hubris that deemed the ship "unsinkable."  Now, with the missing OceanGate Expeditions submersible and the desperate search to save its passengers, the enduring lure of the Titanic is again brought to mind. A piece in the Washington Post looks at Titanic's continuing allure.  Here are excepts:

More than two miles under the sea, off the remote coast of Newfoundland, sits the skeleton of a ship that has captured the public’s imagination for more than a century — rusting, decaying, but still emitting a siren call that draws historians, explorers and regular people alike to study its tragic history.

The Titanic has inspired books, films, video games and musicals and has afforded researchers decades of exploration and debate. It is immortalized in at least seven museums, and artifacts circle the globe as part of traveling exhibits. One hundred and eleven years after sinking to the depths of the Atlantic, the ill-fated luxury ocean liner still regularly makes news: new images of the wreck are released, replicas are built, salvage missions are launched.

On Sunday, a submersible vessel carrying five people bound for the Titanic’s wreckage went missing, prompting a desperate search that was continuing Wednesday. They were part of a $250,000-a-person trip run by OceanGate Expeditions, a private company that began taking paying customers on the voyage in 2021.

The passengers’ decision to embark on the deep-sea journey — and the international attention the vessel’s disappearance has received — reflects the enduring grip the Titanic has on the public’s imagination.

The Titanic has occupied a special place in human history and lore for over a century, taking on “a great metaphorical and mythical value in the human consciousness,” as director James Cameron — whose 1997 blockbuster about the sinking remains the fourth-highest-grossing film ever — said in a 2005 interview with the Independent. The fascination, researchers say, is a result of a human interest in the passengers’ stories and the unique circumstances surrounding the shipwreck.

“It’s the implausible story: The biggest ship in the world on its maiden voyage, it’s supposed to be unsinkable and it’s full of rich and famous people, and then it hits an iceberg and it sinks,” said Titanic historian Don Lynch, “and it goes down so slowly that there’s all this drama to be acted out.”

The Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, in the Atlantic Ocean after hitting an iceberg in the dead of night. Around 1,500 passengers died while about 700 were rescued. Despite numerous efforts, it was another 73 years before the wreckage was discovered in 1985, about 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland and 12,500 feet underwater.

Other shipwrecks that were as deadly — or more deadly — have been lost to history. But the Titanic endures. The way the tragedy unfolded, the use of radio and photography, and the array of people on board all created a deep well of history that has afforded people decades of study and analysis, researchers said: how and why the ship sank, where and when it broke in two, what stories survived and what were lost to sea.

“It’s one of the few disasters that had time to develop the full drama of human choices,” said Stephen Cox, a retired professor of literature at the University of California at San Diego and author of “The Titanic Story: Hard Choices, Dangerous Decisions.” “Usually if a ship is going to sink, it sinks pretty quickly. Titanic lasted for two hours and 40 minutes . . .

The number of people aboard, from all classes, created scores of stories. And specific details about the circumstances have long captured the public imagination: the rescue of women and children first; the band continuing to play; the survivors leaving the ship with only the items in their pockets.

Those elements have factored into a century’s worth of pop culture touchstones that all but sealed the disaster as a household name. The first film came out 29 days after calamity struck; the most recent is a Chinese documentary, “The Six,” released in 2020. An entire online reference guide, Encyclopedia Titanica, is dedicated to the topic. People swap stories on clubs and fan pages, and share information on podcasts.

“It’s a never-ending story,” said Paul Burns, vice president and curator for Titanic Museum Attraction, two museums in Branson, Mo., and Pigeon Forge, Tenn. “Titanic is never-ending. You take the 2,208 or so that were on board, you take the ones that survived, you take the ones that perished, and there’s so many stories.”

Some are fascinated with the wreck itself, and the boat’s slow sinking “gives them the opportunity to study how and why it sank.” Others “just love the human drama, and they want to know what exactly did the band play, and who was this person, and who was that person,” said Lynch, the historian for the Titanic Historical Society, who has written books about the shipwreck and dove to the site twice for the Cameron documentary “Ghosts of the Abyss.”

It also occurred in a time modern enough that people today can relate closely to it, Lynch said — and news about it was able to be documented and disseminated in new ways.

“Suddenly, by sending out the SOS and the distress signals, the world was aware that this was unfolding even before it had ended,” Lynch said. “And … it was one of the first, except for the San Francisco earthquake, to be documented in photographs. … You never had photos involving a shipwreck; that was unheard of.”

The ship also represented the pinnacle of luxury at the height of the industrial revolution, Avila noted, and its downing by a force of nature represented “a slap in the face to the hubris that humanity was feeling at the time,” perhaps even marking a turning point in history.

For some, the site of the wreck holds as much fascination as the story itself. Cameron, who has journeyed there multiple times, said wrecks are “human stories” that “teach us something about ourselves.”

“There are people who aren’t even born yet who are going to grow up and be fascinated by the Titanic,” Lynch said. “There’s something about it.”

What is most heart wrenching to me is the youth of so many of those lost when the Titanic sank.  Peruse the list of those lost and it underscores the tragedy and lost potential of so many lives.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Federal Court Strikes Down Anti-Transgender Arkansas Law

The mantra of racist and anti-LGBT legislators as they seek to ban books and erase history they don't like and LGBT students in general is that they are protecting "parental rights."  However, the real agenda is to please knuckle dragging evangelicals and Christofascists who want to sanitize history of the rampant racism that defined the Jim Crow era and want to send LGBT individuals back into the shadows because we challenge their mythical story line on marriage between one man and one woman - polygamy was the actual norm of the Old Testament - and their at 12th century of human sexuality which ultimately traces back to the writings of Bronze Age herders. Thus, the rights of parents who do not subscribe to such ignorance and bigotry simply do not matter nor does legitimate medical and scientific knowledge.   The result has been the hundreds of anti-LGBT laws passed by Republican controlled legislatures, including bans on transgender care in backwaters like Arkansas and states like Florida and Texas.  Now, a federal court has struck down Arkansas' ban on care for transgender youth which noted in part the untruths pushed by supporters of the ban (as always, if evangelicals' and Christofascists'lips are moving the safest bet is to assume they are lying).  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the welcomed ruling.  Here are highlights:

A federal judge has struck down a 2021 Arkansas law banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth, forbidding the enforcement of the nation’s first law blocking medical treatment for transitioning young people.

U.S. District Judge James Moody of the Eastern District of Arkansas ruled the law unconstitutional Tuesday, saying it violated the rights of doctors and discriminated against transgender people. Gender-affirming medical care includes such treatments as puberty blockers and hormone therapy. The law also prohibited doctors from referring trans youth to other providers for gender-affirming care.

Moody’s closely watched ruling marks the first time a federal court has decided the legality of such bans, which have been taken up by a growing number of state legislatures in recent years. As of June 20, at least 20 additional states had enacted restrictions or bans on gender-affirming care

Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said in a statement posted on Twitter that, in the ruling, “Judge Moody misses what is widely known: There is no scientific evidence that any child will benefit from these procedures, while the consequences are harmful and often permanent. We will appeal to the Eighth Circuit.”

A few medical organizations have raised concerns about gender-affirming care, but leading medical associations, including the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society, all recommend that transgender youth be able to access this kind of health care.

For now, the ruling affects only Arkansas. But its impact is expected to extend further, particularly once it is appealed, said Holly Dickson, executive director of the ACLU of Arkansas.

This is the first federal court ruling on a categorical ban on gender-affirming care and follows rulings in Florida, Alabama and Indiana blocking enforcement of those bans while challenges against them proceed.

Moody already had temporarily blocked the law from taking effect. In his decision Tuesday, he wrote: “Rather than protecting children or safeguarding medical ethics, the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients and that, by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing.”

Before 2020, not a single state had introduced legislation to ban gender-affirming care, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonpartisan think tank that tracks LGBTQ+ policy. When Arkansas passed its ban in 2021, it was considered the strictest anti-trans law in the country. . . . . It was originally vetoed by then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R), who called it “vast government overreach.” A Republican supermajority in the state legislature then overrode his veto.

But these bans, as well as other restrictions on transition care, have gained steam since. Two states, Arizona and Alabama, passed similar bans last year. In the first six months of 2023, roughly 34 states have introduced more than 100 different gender-affirming care restrictions in their legislatures, according to the ACLU.

These bills note that these procedures remain legal — including genital surgeries and breast augmentation for minors — as long as they are not used to treat gender dysphoria. In its challenge to the Arkansas ban, the ACLU argued that this selective prohibition was discriminatory.

In response to increasing efforts to make such care illegal, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement in August 2022 pushing back against “rampant disinformation” fueled by extremists.

“There is strong consensus among the most prominent medical organizations worldwide that evidence-based, gender-affirming care for transgender children and adolescents is medically necessary and appropriate. It can even be lifesaving,” wrote the group’s president. “Pediatricians will not stay silent as these lies are waged against our patients and peers.”

The plaintiffs in the Arkansas lawsuit include a doctor who provided gender-affirming care in the state, as well as four transgender youths and their families. Dylan Brandt, 17, and his mother Joanna Brandt of Greenwood, Ark., were among them.

The Brandts joined the ACLU lawsuit in part because they did not feel the same pressures that other families did to lie low, said Joanna Brandt. She owns her own business, and she “chose to believe” her participation in the legal challenge would not affect it. But, “if for some reason it did, it was still a worthwhile cause,” she said.

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

Pride Month Has Taken Center Stage in the Culture Wars

As church attendance has dwindled, the number of "Nones" - those with no religious affiliation - has soared and larger and larger percentages of the younger generations identify as LGBT, the evangelicals and Christofascists have gone into a veritable melt down as their ability to denigrate and persecute gays and others who do not embrace their fear, ignorance and bigotry based dogma has been impeded.  Enter amoral and cynical Republican politicians who (i) seek to court the evangelical and Christofascist voters who dominate the GOP primary voter base and (ii) care nothing about the harm of they inflict.  Under the guise of "parental rights" - but only if parents subscribe to the Christian extremist war on gays and those who are transgender - and "protecting children," hundreds of anti-LGBT bills have been introduced by Republican legislators that seek to erase gays from public schools, ban science-based medical treatment of transgender individuals, drive drag shows from public view and generally label gays as "groomers" or "predators".  Never mind that there have been ZERO convictions of drag queens for sexual abuse of minors even as the arrest and conviction of pastors, priests and church youth ministers numbers in the hundreds, if not thousands.  A piece in The Economist notes the renewed culture war and the role Christofascists and Republicans who prostitute themselves to them is playing in efforts to ban Pride events and denigrate LGBT citizens in general.  Here are article excerpts:

[T]he Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are not nuns at all. They are transgender and queer drag queens dressed in technicolour—or sometimes leather—habits, who raise money for local charities. The sisters’ fame grew last month when the Los Angeles Dodgers invited, uninvited and then re-invited them to the club’s annual gay-pride night game. The baseball team suddenly found itself caught between conservatives who consider the drag nuns an anti-Catholic group and liberals outraged that the team capitulated to appease the conservatives.

As absurd as the fight over the sisters has become, it is just one of many political skirmishes over gay-pride events this year. In Glendale, a city next to Los Angeles, a brawl erupted outside a school-board meeting in which officials were deciding whether to recognise June as LGBTQ pride month for the fifth year running. Parents protested against a pride assembly at an elementary school in North Hollywood. Nor is the backlash limited to California. Conservatives [a misnomer, in my view] called for the boycott of Bud Light, Cracker Barrel, Target, The North Face and other brands that recognise pride month, work with transgender influencers or hawk rainbow-flecked merchandise.

Bill Clinton first declared June to be national “gay and lesbian pride month” back in 1999. So why, more than 20 years later, has pride become controversial? Two connected trends explain it. First, the scope of pride has changed over the years, perhaps faster than public opinion. During their presidencies Barack Obama and Joe Biden expanded their pride declarations to include more people of different sexualities and gender identities. This year Mr Biden proclaimed June to be “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex pride month”. LG has become LGBTQI+.

More Americans than ever, about 71%, support gay marriage. But there is less enthusiasm for the latter bits of the initialism. A recent survey for The Economist by YouGov suggests that about a third of Americans think society has gone too far, and the same think it has not gone far enough, in accepting trans people.

Second, issues around gender identity have become core to the culture wars. The Republican Party’s presidential hopefuls are betting that framing their fight against drag shows and books with queer characters as a battle for parental rights will win them votes. Nikki Haley has suggested, without evidence, that trans children playing in girls’ sports has led to more teenage girls contemplating suicide. Mike Pence called the Dodgers’ drag-nuns invitation “deeply offensive”. And Ron DeSantis, by prioritising anti-LGBTQ bills as governor of Florida, has turned himself into America’s biggest anti-woke warrior.

Florida has pushed anti-LGBTQ bills, such as the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, . . . . But it is not the only state doing so. The American Civil Liberties Union reckons state lawmakers have introduced nearly 500 gender-identity bills in 2023 alone.

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are declaring victory. “May the fans be blessed!” they wrote after being invited back to the baseball game. “May the beer and hot dogs flow forth in tasty abundance!”

Hate, ignorance and bigotry are increasingly the face of Christianity in America and are driving the younger generations from religion.  Indeed, nowadays when I hear someone wearing their "conservative" religious beliefs on their sleeves or engaging in feigned piety, my first reaction is to view them as hypocrites and not nice people.  Opportunistic Republicans could care less about the damage they do to the Christian brand, but one would think true Christians would do more to oppose those who have made Christianity something toxic and ugly. 

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

The "Christian" Right's Unholy Campaign

For centuries religion has fueled hate and division and all too frequently the murder of those of other faiths and those deemed "sinners."  Indeed, the European wars of religion were much on the minds of the Founding Fathers who wanted the new nation to be free from any established church and that freedom of religion was not reserved to one sect or dogma.  Despite this reality, many within the wrongly named "Christian Right" continue to falsely claim America was founded as a "Christian nation" and to strive to inflict their beliefs on all citizens.  What is frightening is the manner in which the Republican Party has been captured to a large degree by Christian extremists and evangelicals who want to impose a theocracy on the nation and eliminate those who oppose their agenda.   To these extremists, their dominion over all is the main goal and increasingly they are only too happy to egage in violence as demonstrated by the large presence among these supposed Christians among those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.  A piece in Salon looks at the ongoing efforts among this faction to undermine democracy and religious freedom.  These are not nice and decent people and they have a mindset akin to the Spanish Inquisition of old. Here are article highlights:

"You've got a friend in Pennsylvania!" was the theme of the state's  ad campaign to promote tourism in the 1980s. That was a veiled historical reference to the Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, the liberal Christian sect to which William Penn, for whom Pennsylvania is named, belonged. But since the early 2000s there has been a quiet campaign in the Keystone State and beyond to unfriend anyone outside certain precincts of Christianity — and most Quakers would almost certainly be among the outcasts.

That campaign got a lot less quiet this April, as many leaders of the neo-charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, who have been hiding in plain sight for a generation, began ramping up a contest for theocratic power in the nation and the world. Their first target is Pennsylvania.

On April 30, Sean Feucht, a musician and evangelist for conservative Christian dominion, spoke at Life Center Ministries, the Harrisburg megachurch of Apostle Charles Stock. . . . Sometimes Feucht's tour has ventured into darker terrain. He told an audience in Austin, Texas, that "no one has hope for" their city: Why are we going to all these 50 capitals — because they're amazing cities? … they're actually not. They're the most horrible cities in America.

Indeed. Feucht and his movement consider the 50 state capitals to be demon-infested bastions of ungodly government. His tour has openly become a campaign to "unfriend" the nation. He wrote in an "Open Letter to Church Leaders" on April 23: Unfriend? That seems a little harsh for some. Yet [New Testament author] James didn't seem to think so — "Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God."

Feucht's effort to connect young people with what his movement considers William Penn's ancient vision for Pennsylvania is part of the wider, epochal campaign of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a movement at the cutting edge of Pentecostal and Charismatic evangelicalism, which is now the second largest Christian faction in the world after the Roman Catholic Church and the largest growth sector in American and global Christianity.

This is a central story of our time, and one that has scarcely penetrated our national consciousness. . . . Books have been written on the NAR and there has been prominent reporting in the Washington Post, the New Republic, the New Yorker, Religion Dispatches and Salon. But little of this seems to get absorbed into a shared common understanding about the Christian right. 

Although many NAR leaders have been closely aligned with Donald Trump, they insist that they aim for a utopian biblical kingdom where only God's laws are enforced. Most therefore hold to a vision of Christian dominion over what they call the "seven mountains": religion, family, education, government, media, entertainment and business. (This is what is meant by Dominionism.) 

[T]he NAR's notion of what God requires is a matter of interpretation, and in this case God's intentions are said to be revealed through modern-day, mutually recognized apostles and prophets, some of whom lead vast networks of believers, whom they often call "prayer warriors." These dynamic networks seek to dissolve traditional Christian denominations and institutions, peeling away members and sometimes whole congregations.

The NAR's long-term plan is to transform all of institutional Christianity to their vision of how the church was organized in the first century A.D. In their view, the only legitimate church offices, as described in the Book of Ephesians, are apostles, prophets, teachers, evangelists and pastors (but no popes, bishops or presidents). This is called the "fivefold ministry."

NAR leaders understand perfectly well that their views are revolutionary. In addition to wanting to take over government at all levels, they are engaged in a long-term erosion of institutional Christianity, including the destruction of doctrines and denominations that they see as obstacles to advancing the Kingdom of God. They call such errors the "sin of religion."

Some apostles are patient revolutionaries. Others are accelerationists. Some participated in planning meetings at the White House before the Jan. 6 insurrection and played visible roles in the days leading up to the storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Dr. Anthea Butler, a historian of African-American and American religion at the University of Pennsylvania, offered a blunt assessment of the situation to an audience at Harvard last year, saying that evangelical Christianity has been "captured by Pentecostals and Charismatics." "I worry about our democracy," she said. "Democracy is belittled" in the "theocratic way in which all of these people are positioning themselves." 

[A]udio recordings and transcripts of these calls reveal a religious movement that sees itself at war with demonic forces, and believes that God may enter the fray soon and carry his believers to ultimate victory. . . . A number of elected officials and political figures — nearly all of them Republicans — also participated. These recordings provide an intimate look at the relationship between the Republican Party and this burgeoning theocratic movement. The presence of prominent Republicans on these calls — and sometimes their remarks — reveal the depth and breadth of the movement's role in state-level GOP politics. 

"In [William] Penn's day, and for many generations afterward, his writings stood as a vigorous, clear, anti-theocratic religious witness" Fager writes. But Penn's notion of religious liberty, he says, "has been revised into the 'religious liberty' of the Dobbs decision, the 'Don't say gay' bills, the guns-everywhere laws, anti-vaxxerism and targeting trans folk and same-sex marriage."

Since the 2022 elections, there has been a noticeable uptick in the threatening rhetoric of NAR leaders and the political figures associated with them, both on the prayer calls and in public. Their politics appear to be animated less by "conservative" political philosophy or even strong religious values than by a vengeful vision of purging those who refuse to be converted and are deemed to be demonically possessed enemies. 

The struggle between what actually happens and conspiracy theories about what doesn't happen will almost certainly continue. There will always be someone to blame — Freemasons, Communists, witches, antifa, Black Lives Matter or someone else from the long menu of potential scapegoats. The responses will not necessarily be peaceful.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Monday Male Beauty

 

You Can’t Protect Some Lives and Not Others

One of the biggest hypocrisies of the far political right and evangelicals is that they claim to be "pro-life" yet other than being anti-abortion yet care nothing about children once they are born and nothing about the poor and less fortunate and they certainly care nothing about the lives of racial minorities.  Indeed, there political agenda applauds putting migrant children in cages, seeks to cut child nutrition programs and shred the social safety net, marginalize and stigmatize LGBT individuals and cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Once a child exits the birth canal, all bets are off in this false "pro-life" agenda.  A column in the New York Times stresses this reality and the need for those with a "consistent ethic of life" to demand change in our political parties and not be silenced by the most extreme elements of the far right or the far left.  In the process, perhaps political polarization could be lessened and more of a focus on the well being of all citizens, not just the wealthy, could be the result.  Given what the Republican Party has become, this is perhaps wishful thinking, but the effort might be worth making.  Here are column excerpts:

With over a year to go until the presidential election, I am already dreading what this next political season will feel like — the polarity, the vitriol, the exhaustion, the online fighting, the misinformation, the possibility of another Trump nomination.

People like me, who hold . . . . a “consistent ethic of life,” and what the Catholic activist Eileen Egan referred to as “the seamless garment” of life, don’t have a clear political home. A “whole life” ethic entails a commitment to life “from womb to tomb,” . . . a consistent ethic demands equal advocacy for the “right to life of the weakest among us” and “the quality of life of the powerless among us.” Because of this, it combines issues that we often pry apart in American politics.

Of course, not all Christians, and indeed not all Roman Catholics, share this view. It is however a common idea expressed in Catholic social teaching. Similar views have also been championed by many progressive evangelicals, mainline Protestants and leaders in the Black church. Yet no major political party embodies this consistent ethic of life. I find it strange that a view that is respected by so many religious bodies and individuals is virtually absent from our political discourse and voting options.

We, as a nation, are seemingly at an impasse, split on abortion, immigration, guns and many other issues, with no clear way forward. Maybe the only way out of this stalemate is a remix. Maybe there needs to be a new moral vision that offers consistency in ways that might pull from both progressive and conservative camps. To embrace and articulate a consistent ethic of life, even while inhabiting the existing political parties, helps create the space necessary to expand the moral imagination of both parties.

In decades past, it was entirely possible to be a pro-life Democrat or an anti-gun Republican. Roman Catholic leaders could support both traditional sexual ethics and radical economic justice for laborers and those in poverty.

The most polarizing issues of our day are divisive precisely because they are moral in nature. They derive not from different ideas about the size of government or wonkish policy debates but are rooted in incommensurable moral arguments. To move forward, we have to rebundle disparate political issues, re-sort political alliances and shake up the categories, so that those who now disagree on some things may find common cause on others, and so that people committed to a consistent ethic of life might actually feel as if they have at least a modicum of — a possibility of — representation.

In the conservative churches I grew up in, single-issue “pro-life” voters became part of the Republican coalition, and eventually they came to embrace the party platform as a whole, regardless of how well it cohered with an overall commitment to life outside of the womb. . . . “You can’t protect some life and not others.”

The political scientist Morris Fiorina writes in “Unstable Majorities” that the common perception that the American people are more polarized than ever is an illusion. What is true, however, is that the Republican and Democratic Party platforms have become more polarized and, in Fiorina’s words, more “sorted” than they have been historically. The most devoted members of the base of each party maintain that polarization, but they don’t reflect the majority of voters, or even a majority of those who identify with the dominant parties. This party polarization and intensive sorting have created an artificial bundling of platform positions that does not necessarily reflect the moral vision of most voters.

This artificial bundling is, however, constantly reified, Fiorina says, by the strident discourse of party leaders, elected officials and the most vocal members of the base, which creates what he calls a “spiral of silence.” . . . “Left unchecked, this dynamic leads the majority to believe that there are no dissidents, whereas members of the dissident minority believe that they are alone in their views. As a result, both majority and minority members of a group come to believe — erroneously — that the group is politically homogeneous.”

As the saying goes, “If nothing changes, nothing changes.” There is no reason that the current bundling of political issues must continue interminably. Those of us who feel morally alienated from both parties must speak up and offer hope for a different sort of politics in America.