Texas Pastors Group Sues Demanding License to Discriminate Against Gays

Between backing Republican policies which are the antithesis of what the Christ's Gospel message calls one to do and demanding the right to discriminate against others, conservative "Christians" - I use quotation marks because by their actions they prove they are not - provide an never ending example of why one might consider shunning the Christian label.  Instead of being known for their love toward their fellow man, these modern day Pharisees are best defined by their hatred of others and hypocrisy.  A case in point is the self-styled "U.S. Pastors Council" - comprised of twenty some Houston area churches - which is suing City of Austin, Austin Mayor Steve Adler, and Sareta Davis, chair of the Austin Human Rights Commission to block Austin's non-discrimination ordinance that includes LGBT protections.  A perusal of the group's website reveals that feeding the hungry, housing the homeless and caring for the sick is nowhere in its agenda.  Rather, its sole focus is demanding special rights for Christofascists and inflicting member churches' Bronze Age beliefs on all citizens.   KUT-TV looks at the lawsuit and the hate and batshitery that passes for Christian "values."  Here are excerpts:

A Houston-based religious nonprofit behind the so-called bathroom bill is suing the City of Austin over its anti-discrimination hiring ordinance. The U.S. Pastor Council filed suit in a federal district court late last week, alleging the city rule's lack of exemptions for churches or other religiously affiliated groups violates state and federal law.

The suit asks the court to block the enforcement of the ordinance on behalf of its 25 member churches in the Austin area "because these member churches rely on the Bible rather than modern-day cultural fads for religious and moral guidance, they will not hire practicing homosexuals or transgendered people as clergy."

In a June letter to the Austin City Council, Executive Director David Welch reasoned that the ordinance didn't provide wide enough berth for religious exemption 

In a written statement today, the city defended its anti-discrimination ordinance.

"The ordinance reflects our values and culture respecting the dignity and rights of every individual," said city spokesperson David Green. "We are prepared to vigorously defend the City against this challenge to the City’s civil rights protections."

First founded in 2003, the U.S. Pastor Council was the driving force behind a bill that aimed to require transgender Texans to use restrooms that correspond to their gender at birth – not their gender identity. That bill failed to pass the Texas House in 2017, though Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and other lawmakers may revisit the issue in the next legislative session.

 As LGBTQ Nation notes:

Federal law already allows churches to follow their religion when making hiring decisions if the position is religiously-related. For example, Catholic churches are not required to ordain priests.

The Austin ordinance includes similar religious exemptions already.

The Christian Terrorist Movement No One Wants To Talk About

I've often noted the parallels between far right Christian fundamentalists who seem to hate nearly everyone and the murderous Islamic fundamentalist of ISIS.  Baptist Pastor Steven Anderson's  suggestion that all gays should be killed is a case in point.  Interestingly, as reported by Addicting Information on a flight back from a trip to Turkey Pope Francis drew a parallel between Christian Fundamentalists and Islamic terror groups such as ISIS when a reporter sought to elicit a condemnation of Islam from Francis.  Indeed, Francis retorted: “You just can’t say that, just as you can’t say that all Christians are fundamentalists. We have our share of them (fundamentalists). All religions have these little groups.”  

Pope Francis was on to something.  Sadly, here in America, most journalists and news outlets refuse to reveal to the public the truth about Christian terrorist groups.  Yet again, religion and its followers are given undeserved deference.  Think Progress looks at a frightening and growing Christian terrorist movement in America.  Here are excerpts:

Last Friday, Larry McQuilliams was shot and killed by police after unleashing a campaign of violence in Austin, Texas, firing more than 100 rounds in the downtown area before making a failed attempt to burn down the Mexican Consulate. The only casualty was McQuilliams himself, who was felled by officers when he entered police headquarters, but the death toll could have been far greater: McQuilliams, who was called a “terrorist” by Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo, had several weapons, hundreds of rounds of ammunition. . . .

While the impetus for McQuilliams’ onslaught remains unclear, local authorities recently announced that he may have been motivated by religion — but not the one you might think. According to the Associated Press, police officers who searched McQuilliams’ van found a copy of “Vigilantes of Christendom,” a book connected with the Phineas Priesthood, an American white supremacist movement that claims Christian inspiration and opposes interracial intercourse, racial integration, homosexuality, and abortion. Phineas priests take their name from the biblical figure Phinehas in the book of Numbers, who is described as brutally murdering an Israelite man for having sex with a foreign woman, who he also kills. Members of the Phineas Priesthood — which people “join” simply by adopting the views of the movement — are notoriously violent, and some adherents have been convicted of bank robberies, bombing abortion clinics, and planning to blow up government buildings. Although McQuilliams didn’t leave a letter explaining the reason for his attack, a handwritten note inside the book described him as a “priest in the fight against anti-God people.”

[H]is association with the hateful religious group highlights a very real — but often under-reported — issue: terrorism enacted in the name of Christ.

To be sure, violent extremism carried out by people claiming to be Muslim has garnered heaps of media attention in recent years, with conservative pundits such as Greta Van Susteren of Fox News often insisting that Muslim leaders publicly condemn any acts of violence perpetrated in the name of Islam (even though many already have).

But there is a long history of terrorist attacks resembling McQuilliams’ rampage across Austin — where violence is carried out in the name of Christianity — in the United States and abroad. In America, the Ku Klux Klan is well-known for over a century of gruesome crimes against African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and others — all while ascribing to what they say is a Christian theology.
[R]ecent decades have also given rise to several “Christian Identity” groups, loose organizations united by a hateful understanding of faith whose members spout scripture while engaging in horrifying acts of violence. For example, various members of The Order, a militant group of largely professed Mormons whose motto was a verse from the book of Jeremiah, were convicted for murdering Jewish talk show host Alan Berg in 1984; the “Army of God”, which justifies their actions using the Bible, is responsible for bombings at several abortion clinics, attacks on gay and lesbian nightclubs, and the explosion at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia; and Scott Roeder cited the Christian faith as his motivation for killing George Tiller — a doctor who performed late-term abortions — in 2009, shooting the physician in the head at point-blank range while he was ushering at church.

Yet unlike the accusatory responses to domestic jihadist incidents such as the Fort Hood massacre, news of McQuilliams’ possible ties to the Christian Identity movement has yet to produce a reaction among prominent conservative Christians. Greta Van Susteren, for instance, has not asked Christian leaders such as Pope Francis, Rick Warren, or Billy Graham onto her show to speak out against violence committed in name of Christ. Rather, the religious affiliation of McQuilliams, like the faith of many right-wing extremists, has largely flown under the radar, as he and others like him are far more likely to be dismissed as mentally unstable “lone wolfs” than products of extremist theologies.

McQuilliams’ attack is a stark reminder that radical theologies exist on the fringes of most religions, and that while Muslim extremism tends to make headlines, religious terrorism is by no means unique to Islam.

Economic Winners and Losers Among America's Cities - The Cost of Intolerance

Click image to enlarge

Since the economic crash of 2008, economic winners and losers have been shaking out among America's cities.  Not surprisingly, cities in more liberal states and/or which are liberal islands in their own states are leading the pack among the winners while conservative (perhaps anti-knowledge is a better term) cities with low wages are filling the ranks of the losers as evidenced by the map above.  In Virginia, outside of the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., and Charlottesville - perhaps the most liberal city in Virginia outside the D.C. area - the loser category predominates.  So what is a city to do to prosper?  As a lengthy piece in The Atlantic suggests, welcoming diversity, innovation and knowledge are perhaps the key.  Sadly, outside of less than a dozen or so cities in Republican dominated states, diversity, innovation and modern knowledge are not welcome.  Low taxes are not the panacea that the GOP claims to be the cure for economic backwardness.  Here are highlights from the article authored by Richard Florida:

Back in the spring of 2009, I wrote in these pages that the financial crisis would “permanently and profoundly alter the country’s economic landscape.” Some cities and regions “will eventually spring back stronger than before,” I predicted. “Others may never come back at all.”

It might have sounded apocalyptic, but tectonic shifts of this kind are not unprecedented. They are the geographic counterpart to what the economist Joseph Schumpeter dubbed “creative destruction”—the great gales of change that level some companies and industries, and give rise to others. As powerful as they might seem in the moment, it is only when we look back through the lens of history that the full extent of economic and geographic changes becomes clear.

Five years after the crash, with the national economy just beginning to return to something resembling normalcy, we can begin to trace the outlines of America’s emerging economic map—and take inventory of the places that are thriving, those that are declining, and those that are trying, in novel ways, to come back.

A variety of measures can be used to divine the health and prospects of these different places—population growth, job growth, housing prices, and the unemployment rate are among the more common. Each of these measures has its uses, but some of them can conceal as much as they reveal. Population growth, for instance, tells you nothing about the skills and education of the people arriving; job growth says nothing about whether the new jobs are good or bad.

Throughout this article, I will draw on some of these measures. But I’ll lean most heavily on three measures less commonly seen in the popular press, but perhaps more telling: the composition of job growth (high-wage, mid-wage, or low-wage); productivity growth (which is the basis for improvements in the standard of living); and venture-capital funding (a proxy for the sort of entrepreneurial innovation that can power future growth).

The economic landscape is being reshaped around two kinds of hubs—centers of knowledge and ideas, and clusters of energy production. Overwhelmingly, these are the places driving the economic recovery. Outside them, the economy remains troubled and weak.

New York City was widely expected to be devastated by the financial crisis. Wall Street’s collapse, the conventional wisdom went, would bring the whole city down with it. In 2009, I predicted that New York would in fact prove to be one of the country’s most resilient places. Even so, the speed and strength of its rebound has surprised me—its explosive growth as a start-up center especially so.

New York’s rise as a tech center signals a major shift in the locus of venture-capital-fueled innovation. For a long time, high-tech start-ups have clustered in suburban office parks along freeways, places that are sometimes called “nerdistans.” But since the crisis, start-ups have taken an urban turn. San Francisco, which has fared extremely well since the crash, is a striking case in point. Over the past several years, Twitter has established its headquarters downtown, Pinterest has moved from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, and even Yahoo has created a new facility in the old San Francisco Chronicle building in the South of Market neighborhood.

America’s “knowledge metros,” large and small, make up perhaps the biggest group of winners, overall, since the crash. Data provided by Economic Modeling Specialists International show that a handful of knowledge metros have an overwhelming lead in generating the high-wage jobs (those paying more than $21 an hour) that America needs. Nearly two-thirds of San Jose’s new jobs have been high-wage, as have nearly half of the new jobs in nearby San Francisco. San Jose also leads the nation in productivity growth . . . .  Portland, Oregon, posted the second-highest level of productivity growth among large metros, nearly 7 percent, belying its Portlandia caricature as a place for slackers. Austin’s tech-fueled economy combined the fastest job growth of all large metros (10.5 percent between 2009 and 2013) with well-above-average growth in productivity and in high-wage jobs.

Knowledge, it turns out, is what allows metros to generate good high-wage jobs. Across America’s metro regions, I have found that high-wage jobs are closely related to several key markers of regional knowledge economies: the share of adults who are college grads; the share of the workforce in professional, technical, and creative jobs; the levels of innovation and venture-capital investment.

The Sun Belt features two kinds of regional economies: declining real-estate economies and booming energy economies. Energy stands alongside knowledge as the second pillar of America’s recovery.

Houston’s high-wage-job growth stems from two main sources—the fossil-fuel industry and information technology. The city is home to more than a third of the country’s petroleum engineers and by far the highest concentration of geoscientists. From 2009 to 2012, Houston added 30,000 jobs in a mix of industries related to oil and gas extraction and scientific and technical consulting services. These pay an average salary of $124,000. Houston has also seen rapid growth in software-development jobs (16 percent) and information-technology jobs (12 percent), along with consistent growth in its medicine-and-health-care sector.

Back in 2009, I predicted that the crisis would exact its steepest toll in “the interior of the country—in older, manufacturing regions whose heydays are long past,” and “in newer, shallow-rooted Sun Belt communities whose recent booms have been fueled in part by real-estate speculation, overdevelopment, and fictitious housing wealth.”

Sadly, the data bear me out. Just before the crisis, greater Las Vegas was one of the nation’s leaders in population growth; today it has the highest concentration of fast-food jobs in the nation. Palm Coast, Florida, the metro with the fastest population growth since 2001, has seen the nation’s worst rate of growth in economic output per person since that same year (negative 3.2 percent through 2011).

Population growth alone has never proved a sufficient foundation for future prosperity—not when many of the new arrivals are retirees or modestly educated people looking to get in on a real-estate boom. But since the crash, even that imperfect engine has failed many Sun Belt cities.

The metros where low-wage jobs make up the largest share of job growth since 2009 are in the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt: St. Louis (where 90 percent of new jobs are low-wage); California’s so-called Inland Empire of Riverside–San Bernardino (where nearly three-quarters of new jobs are low-wage) . . .

The main threats to America’s growth model don’t come from other countries, but from domestic contradictions. The more talented people cluster, the greater the economic returns they produce.

The cultural, political, and economic gulfs that separate advantaged and disadvantaged people and places go well beyond the wage gap. Knowledge workers benefit from living in neighborhoods with better schools, better amenities, and lower crime rates, while less advantaged groups are sometimes stuck in place, with limited prospects for climbing even one rung up the economic ladder, and insufficient resources to move out of stagnant areas. Americans have seen a dramatic decline in economic mobility, overall. But a poor person from a knowledge center like San Jose or San Francisco has twice the chance of becoming wealthy as a poor person from some Rust Belt or Sun Belt centers like Cleveland or Atlanta.

On November 5, 2013, here in Virginia voters will select a new Governor, Lt. Governor and Attorney General as well as a new House of Delegates.  Sadly, the Republican ticket is a case study on those who reject knowledge, reject diversity, and reject innovative thinking as they seek to drag Virginia and society backwards in time.  For future economic reasons alone, they need to be defeated.  Meanwhile, localities need to stop trying to do things the way they have always been done and make themselves more welcoming for diverse and innovative individuals.  Hampton Roads has a long, long way to go on this front. 

Austin Passes Resolution Supporting Gay Marriage

Earlier in the week I noted that the City of Austin, Texas was poised to take up a resolution endorsing gay marriage.  As it turned out, the vote to pass the resolution was unanimous.  There must be some serious spittle flying among Christofascist groups like FRC.  Here are highlights from KUT News:

Today Austin became the first city in Texas to pass a resolution in support of same sex marriage.  The measure passed the City Council unanimously this morning.

Before the vote, local civil rights groups declared their support for the resolution, which was sponsored by Mayor Pro Tem Sheryl Cole and co-sponsored by Mayor Lee Leffingwell and Council member Laura Morrison.

At a press conference, Mayor Pro Tem Cole spoke about the evolution of rights in Texas, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King: “… Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. Whatever afflicts once directly also afflicts one indirectly.”

Council member Morrison acknowledged the progress made within the Austin community, when it comes to civil rights, but said there was still a ways to go. Morrison pointed to practicality when making her point.

“Marriage equality provides important legal and economic protections including access to health care, parenting rights, property rights and other protections,” said Morrison.

The practical implications of the resolution are unlikely to be great. In 2005, Texas voters approved an amendment to the state constitution, banning same sex marriage and civil unions. Travis County was the only county in the state where a majority did not support the amendment.

Austin Poised to Adopt Resolution in Support of Gay Marriage

This should be fun to watch!  What?  The city of Austin, Texas (i.e., the capital of Texas) is likely to pass a resolution supporting gay marriage.  Can't you see the spittle flying and the convulsions over taking Texas Christofacists?  Frankly, the city's action make sense.  The creative class has been documented to be attracted to cities with high "gay indexes."  Thus, what better way to make the city stand out as gay friendly and gay welcoming than to adopt a resolution that will send the Neanderthals in the Texas legislature and the closet case in the governor's mansion crazy.   Gay Star News has details.  Here are excerpts:

Austin, already known as the most progressive city in Texas, could become the first city in the state to officially support gay marriage.

The City Council on Thursday (27 September) will vote on a formal resolution which comes after a petition in support of the resolution posted by Equality Texas was signed by 1,700 people.

Equality Texas says in a statement that the council resolution 'recognizes that marriage is a powerful and important affirmation of love and commitment and a source of social support and recognition.'

'Passage of this resolution will send the message to state and national leaders that Austin is a community that values equality for all its citizens,' the group states. 'The resolution will also send the message that the City of Austin believes all couples in loving and committed relationships should be given the opportunity to create stronger and more successful families through civil marriage.'

Also supporting the resolution are the Human Rights Campaign, the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

I hope the resolution passes and I find it interesting that both the NAACP and Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund - which represent citizens despised by today's GOP - are backing the measure.  Don't expect any city in Virginia other than perhaps Charlottesville to even consider such a resolution anytime soon. 

My Readers - Part 10

Continuing something I have done in the past, but not very recently, I am introducing another one of my readers. His name is Austin [pictured above] and he is a song writer who performs his work at various venues in eastern Virginia and eastern North Carolina. He sent me a CD and has songs that range from soothing ballads to more lively and heated renditions. One of the latter deals with the Catholic Church since like me, he is a "recovering Catholic." He describes his song writing and composing as follows:

"I don't really feel that these songs are coming out of my mind. I feel more like I am a filter for them to have access to this world through. Like they already exist . . . It's the most gratifying aspect of my life, to finish a piece of work and share it with the world."

I have added a link in my blog roll for Austin's page.