The Evils of Religion: Athlete Disowned for Being Gay

Emily Scheck

Ironically, a group of us had already planned to see "Boy Erased" today when I came across this article about a young student athlete disowned by her parents for being gay.  Both the Buffalo News and Out Sports have coverage of the nightmare Emily Scheck has experienced since her parents learned she was gay and disowned her.  It is a story only too common for many in the LGBT community where parents cling to Bronze Age myths originating with ignorant herders and reject their own children.  Schenk's parents' claim that they did not want to force her into "conversion therapy" - a thoroughly discredited and dangerous practice often peddled by quacks and charlatans - seem disingenuous.  Thankfully, she found support  from here girlfriend who launched a GoFundMe page and her college community.   Meanwhile, conservative Christianity remains a toxic evil.  Here are excerpts from the Buffalo News story:

Canisius College sophomore Emily Scheck had just moved back onto campus in August as a cross-country and track athlete when her mother came across photos of Scheck and her girlfriend on a photo-sharing social media site.

That's when Scheck's life came crashing down.  Her parents, who had been unaware their daughter was a lesbian, demanded she come home to the Rochester area, give up her partial athletic scholarship to Canisius College, commute to a local college and participate in counseling sessions. When she refused, her parents cut her off.

"I couldn’t even get groceries, initially," said Scheck, 19. "I was just really relying on my roommates and my girlfriend."

What happened next launched her into a public controversy over whether money raised for a student through a GoFundMe page should disqualify that student’s athletic eligibility under NCAA rules.

After three months, a frustrated roommate posted Scheck's story on a GoFundMe page. Money started pouring in. But when the college alerted the NCAA to the GoFundMe page, Scheck's student athlete status and partial scholarship were suddenly in jeopardy.

OutSports first reported Scheck's predicament last week. At that time, the NCAA stated it was "currently reviewing all options" regarding Scheck's situation. The NCAA revised its position Friday after being contacted by The Buffalo News, and said Scheck could keep the money raised through her GoFundMe page as long as Canisius monitors the contributions.

"Emily Scheck can retain her eligibility and continue to receive GoFundMe donations that assist her with living and educational expenses," the NCAA said in a statement.

Her mother sent her a text that read, "Well, I am done with you. As of right now, declare yourself independent. You are on your own. Please don’t contact us or your siblings."

When Scheck asked her mother why she would do this, she said her mother texted back, "Because you disgust me."

Though Scheck owned a car, she said, her parents removed her from their insurance policy. And shortly afterward, her father drove to Buffalo from the Rochester suburb of Webster with Emily's remaining personal belongings, including her birth certificate, stuffed animals, trophies, childhood photos and clothing. He dumped them in her car and removed the license plates. The family asked her to participate in counseling sessions, but he said that did not mean conversion therapy. The family accepts her sexual orientation, he said. Scheck disputes her father's account.

Scheck said her family didn't change their behavior toward her until after the GoFundMe page went up. In the meantime, she said, she struggled to make ends meet, working two part-time jobs and going to cross-country practice every day. She relied on her roommates and girlfriend until she received her first paychecks, she said, and continued to field difficult and upsetting messages from her family. Scheck said she's not ready go home and be part of her family's plans when for months it seemed they didn't want her.  "As long as I stay in Buffalo and I don’t come home, they’ve made it clear that I’m still on my own," she said.

Another case of supposed "Christian love" that in truth is infused with hatred.  Time and time again I find the so-called "unchurched" and agnostics far more likely to exhibit behavior in keeping with Christ's gospel dictates than the self-congratulatory "godly folk."

America, the Banana Republic

Perhaps I am dating myself, but I have lived at this point under 13 different occupants of the White House and never has there been such an embarrassment - indeed, threat to the nation, like the current occupant. Given polling results, it appears that a majority of the citizenry agrees with that assessment.  Seemingly, only evangelical Christians - who have glaringly displayed their moral bankruptcy - white supremacists, and greed driven vulture capitalist on Wall Street appear to continue to support the current occupant who daily displays his unfitness for office.  His Vice President who makes Sergeant Schultz from Hogan's Heroes look like a pillar of decisiveness and wisdom.  America has become a caricature of the banana republics once so derided during my lifetime.  Frighteningly, there is no clear sign post of how the national nightmare will end.  Even America's closest ally, the United Kingdom, with all of its own problems, does not want Trump to visit. A piece at Moyers.com looks at how low America has fallen.   Here are excerpts:

When people call Donald Trump an authoritarian, it almost gives him more credit

than he deserves.  You don’t think favorably of authoritarians; they are despicable. But you do think of them as monstrously large, grievously terrifying, as somehow taking the measure of the polity they control and drawing on its stature to puff themselves up, even as they destroy their nation’s moral core. Despots like Mussolini and Hitler epitomized evil on the grandest possible scale. To call them clowns would trivialize the unconscionable horrors they inflicted.

Trump is certainly an authoritarian, but he is more of a tinhorn dictator, a tiny, negligible man who, rather than inflating himself with the nation’s grandeur, has managed to deflate the nation with his own insipidness. Thanks to him, America is now a banana republic. It is no longer a country of soaring ideas and idealism, a beacon to the world, an example of freedom at home and a protector of freedom abroad, an anchor of sanity in a world often bouncing on the waves of madness.

Whatever her failings, America was once majestic. Now she is hopelessly diminish

-ed — a wealthier version of the corrupt nations in the developing world that we 

used to ridicule. And we owe it all to Donald Trump for making America small again.

The meme of America withering into a banana republic is not a new one. Some observers made the claim after the 2000 presidential election, when Republicans successfully wrested the presidency from Al Gore, just the way cabals do in those banana republics. 

In Vanity Fair, the late Christopher Hitchens was more expansive. He enumerated 

the many ways in which America, the last great hope of mankind, had become 

a banana republic — primarily the way the government was willing to bail out 

the oligarchs while letting the general public suffer.

Hitchens added that there is absolutely no accountability for the thieves. This all 

should sound very familiar this week, as Republicans retool the entire tax system 

to rob from the poor and middle classes and give to corporations and the 

wealthy. If that isn’t a banana republic, I don’t know what is.

But Krugman and Hitchens were writing before we had a bona fide banana republic dictator to rule our kleptocracy. And while America long has had the economic and social characteristics of a banana republic, it took Trump, who has the instincts and temperament of a gangster, to finish the transformation. There is no disguising it now. We are what we are.

Trump is the kleptocrat-in-chief. He not only appears to be using the presidency as his own personal ATM, now promoting a tax-cut scam by which he stands to gain tens of millions of dollars, he also has been petty enough to steer business to his hotels and hawked his “Make America Great Again” tchotchkes. Check.

Apparently not satisfied to have enriched himself at the public’s expense, Trump has brought unprecedented nepotism to the presidency in a way that only tinhorn dictators do, giving his family access to the public trough while placing his unqualified cronies in positions of power. In this administration, everyone may be on the take. Check.

Just about every Trump directive, from health care to the environment to so-called tax reform to trade policy, seems expressly designed to give benefits to a small coterie of the wealthiest Americans while the rest of the country goes to hell. . . . Sure sounds like a banana republic to me. Check.

Like other tinhorn dictators, Trump has no use for the essentials of democracy. 
He openly attacks a free press and has a house press of his own, Fox News, and soon, 
quite possibly, Time Inc.

[T]here are allegations that he may using the levers of government to punish his 
press opponents, using the Justice Department’s antitrust suit against the
proposed AT&T purchase of Time Warner to try to force the divestment of CNN.  
This, too, is unprecedented in an American democracy, but not in a banana republic. 

Trump has taken aim at the electoral process itself, not only claiming that his loss 
of the popular vote was a fraud, but empaneling a government commission whose 
sole purpose is thought to be the disenfranchisement of voters who might oppose 
him. This is pure banana republicanism and an affront to democracy. Check.

Banana republics are often agent states — that is, they operate at the behest of larger
states. In fact the phrase “banana republic” first was coined by the writer O. Henry 
back in 1904, to describe the dependence of Central American countries on American 
businesses like United Fruit, which ran plantations in those countries and exported 
bananas.

Now, America itself is one of those agent states, thanks to Trump’s troubling obeisance to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Let’s not pretend otherwise just so we can save some face. There is no more face to save. American elections interfered with by Russia and a president intimidated by a Russian dictator? Check.

Tinhorn dictators do everything they can to dismantle a system of checks and 
balances. Trump has done everything in his power to do the same — from 
dismissing FBI Director James Comey, who was investigating Trump, 
intimidating the Justice Department and taking over the Consumer Financial 
Protection Bureau to…. well, you name it. Untrammeled power is his goal. Check.

In a banana republic, the dictator makes his own rules and lives by his 
own reality. Clearly, Trump thinks he is above the law, be it legal or moral. 
He boasts of it. He also is above fact. The latest example of the thousands 
of his presidency: According to The New York Times, he privately has 
declared that the Access Hollywood tape was not actually him! Banana 
republic time. Check.

Donald Trump has demeaned himself, but he has also demeaned the country
that was deranged enough to elect him. These characteristics speak to a corrupt
and desiccated nation, one that is staggering into oblivion.

The “alt-right” insist that until Trump, America was going the way of Rome — rotting from the inside. They are wrong. It is not decadence that is destroying America, but petulance. We are going not the way of Rome but the way of Guatemala or Zimbabwe or the Philippines — the way of banana republics. Thus does this once great nation tumble.

 

As for those who cite the fall of the Western Roman Empire as precedent, they miss two things (among others).  One of the precursor was that they system became so tilted in favor of the wealthy class, that average people simply ceased to see a benefit from living under the empire.  A second factor was the insidious rise of Christianity and its call to ignore fact and objective reason with its adherents withdrawing into a fantasy world that undermined the empire.  We see both of these elements growing under the Trump/Pence regime.

Teen Inauguration Singer Bullied by Trump Supporters Over Transgender Sister

By some reports Donald Trump has been having difficulty signing on entertainment for his inaugural extravaganza - some Washington, D.C. marching bands have not even applied to participate in the parade - since many entertainers do not want their names in any manner attached to Trump.  Eventually, Trump secured the agreement of  opera singer Jackie Evancho, a finalist on season five of “America’s Got Talent,” to sing the national anthem at Donald Trump’s inauguration.  In retrospect, Evancho is likely wondering why the Hell she agreed now that Trump supporters are heaping abuse on her and her transgender sister.  To quote Nancy Reagan - not exactly one of my idols - Evancho should "Just Say No."   The Washington Blade looks at the misogyny that is the new reality in Trump's Amerika.  Here are excerpts:

Opera singer Jackie Evancho, who will be singing the national anthem at Donald Trump’s inauguration, is facing an onslaught of criticism because she has a transgender sister.

Jackie, 16, received her big break when she was a finalist on season five of “America’s Got Talent” at 10 years old. Her sister Juliet, 18, came out as transgender at Global Lyme Alliance’s inaugural gala last year.

Juliet penned an essay, published on Wednesday, for Teen Voguedescribing her struggles with gender identity. “Jackie’s newfound fame put our entire family under a microscope. This made things even more difficult for me,” Juliet writes. “Now, I not only worried about what my family thought of me, but I also worried about some trashy magazine trying to make a spectacle out of me if they found out, and it hurting my family.” According to the Huffington Post, Juliet is also one of three transgender students suing a Pennsylvania school district over restroom access for transgender students. The essay, along with Jackie’s inauguration announcement, has brought lots of negative online attention to the Evancho family. People reports Trump supporters have tweeted abuse at the young singer because of her sister.

“My family is kind of a big target. I have a transgender sister and so a lot of hate goes towards us,” Jackie  Jackie has also performed twice for President Barack Obama. First, in 2010 she performed at the National Christmas Tree Lightening and again in 2012 at the National Prayer Breakfast.

I'm sorry, but in my view, these Trump supporters are basically human excrement. I'm sure most of those hurling abuse view themselves as "godly Christians."  I've ceased to call myself a Christian and have resigned my ELCA membership.  I want NOTHING to do with Christianity which has become a poison to humanity and the good of mankind. 

Rubio to Christian Conservatives: There are Costs to Gay Intolerance

Marco Rubio likely majorly pissed off some of the Christofascists attending a confab on the two month anniversary of the Pulse massacre, when he chastised them for their intolerance and cruelty towards the LGBT community.  Perhaps he was reacting to the sharp condemnation he has received for attending an anti-gay zealot gathering in the first place or perhaps he is realizing that in order to save his sorry - and rumored to be gay - ass in his upcoming primary challenge and then the general election, he needs more that just the votes of raging homophobes.  While some of what Rubio said was a vast improvement over what most Republicans say about LGBT individuals, he nonetheless repeated opposition to LGBT non-discrimination protections that would lessen special rights for Christofascists.   Here are excerpts from the New York Times:

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who has faced widespread condemnation for agreeing to speak at a conference alongside Christian conservatives who have denounced homosexuality and gay rights, used his speech to the group on Friday to warn of the costs of intolerance.

His remarks in Orlando, Fla., not far from the site of the massacre at a gay nightclub in June, were his most extensive yet in public on the subject of prejudice against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. And he struck a notably softer tone than during his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, during which he repeatedly reaffirmed his opposition to same-sex marriage.

Using the shorthand “L.G.B.T.” several times, Mr. Rubio told the group that the perception that many Christians are anti-gay is harming their faith. He urged them to resist passing judgment on gays.

“Do not judge, or you will be judged,” he said, echoing a verse from the Bible.

"To love our neighbors we must recognize that many have experienced sometimes severe condemnation and judgment from some Christians,” he said. “They have heard some say that the reason God will bring condemnation on America is because of them — as if somehow God was willing to put up with adultery and gluttony and greed and pride, but now this is the last straw.”

While he repeated his belief that marriage should not be redefined to include same-sex couples, his speech touched on the history of discrimination against gays, which he asked his audience to consider.

“When it comes to our brothers and our sisters, our fellow Americans, our neighbors in the L.G.B.T. community, we should recognize,” he said, that American history “has been marred by discrimination against and rejection of gays and lesbians.”

He then walked through a list of examples that included discriminatory hiring practices by the federal government, raids of gay establishments by the police and the proliferation of anti-gay slurs.

Mr. Rubio drew especially harsh criticism from gay rights activists for agreeing to speak to the group, the Florida Renewal Project, because he has said the killings at the Pulse nightclub caused him to reconsider his decision not to run again for the Senate. As he runs for re-election, social conservatives are an important constituency.

According to People for the American Way, which tracks anti-gay activists, several of the speakers listed on the invitation with Mr. Rubio have said many of the things the senator spoke out against on Friday. One of them, David Barton, a longtime Republican Party activist from Texas, has said that AIDS is a punishment for homosexuality. 

Do I trust Rubio or think he is really sincere?  Not at all, but perhaps he - and hopefully others in the GOP - is realizing that anti-LGBT extremism is becoming a negative with the majority of the American public.

Historically Illiterate Response to Obama's Prayer Breakfast Speech

As the right wing noise machine and Christofascists who would like to impose their own version of Sharia law on all Americans continue to hyperventilate and engage in spittle flecked rants over Barack Obama's accurate description of religion's evil force throughout history, thankfully some media outlets are documenting the evil of religion and supporting Obama's words with historical fact.  Those literate in history are less likely to fall prey to Christianist propaganda which is precisely why Christianist efforts to rewrite history in school text books must be strenuously opposed.  One should also be mindful that ancient Rome was tolerant of numerous religions - it was the Christians who sought to wipe out all differing religious beliefs and traditions.  And the Christians began this process long before the Koran and Islam appeared.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at some true history of what has been done in the name of religion right here in America that the "godly folk" would prefer the public not know or remember.  Here are excerpts:

People who wonder why the president does not talk more about race would do well to examine the recent blow-up over his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. Inveighing against the barbarism of ISIS, the president pointed out that it would be foolish to blame Islam, at large, for its atrocities. To make this point he noted that using religion to brutalize other people is neither a Muslim invention nor, in America, a foreign one:

Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

The "all too often" could just as well be "almost always." There were a fair number of pretexts given for slavery and Jim Crow, but Christianity provided the moral justification. On the cusp of plunging his country into a war that would cost some 750,000 lives, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens paused to offer some explanation. His justification was not secular. The Confederacy was to be:

[T]he first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society ... With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. . . .

Stephens went on to argue that the "Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa" could only be accomplished through enslavement. And enslavement was not made possible through Robert's Rules of Order, but through a 250-year reign of mass torture, industrialized murder, and normalized rape—tactics which ISIS would find familiar. Its moral justification was not "because I said so," it was "Providence," "the curse against Canaan," "the Creator," "and Christianization." In just five years, 750,000 Americans died because of this peculiar mission of "Christianization." Many more died before, and many more died after. In his "Segregation Now" speech, George Wallace invokes God 27 times and calls the federal government opposing him "a system that is the very opposite of Christ."

The interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power. That is what the Muslims terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian terrorists did for the lion's share of American history.

Pointing out that Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something similar to what ISIS is doing now does not make ISIS any less barbaric, or any more correct. That is unless you view the entire discussion as a kind of religious one-upmanship, in which the goal is to prove that Christianity is "the awesomest."

If you are truly appalled by the brutality of ISIS, then a wise and essential step is understanding the lure of brutality, and recalling how easily your own society can be, and how often it has been, pulled over the brink.

As I noted in a post last October about religion's ugly history beyond America's borders throughout history:

Throughout history religion has unleashed untold hate, misery and bloodshed.   Yes, some religious groups engage in charitable works, but even then many engage in proselytizing at the same time.  It's always about winning others over to their belief systems and often punishing those who don't yield - e.g., the Salvation Army's anti-gay policies and past rejection of gays needing shelter.  Meanwhile, we see ISIS demonstrating just how evil fundamentalist religion can be even as anti-Muslim Christians forget Christianity's own ugly past that has included the Inquisition, the extermination of the Cathars in France and many other acts of genocide against those deemed to hold heretical beliefs.  Yet despite this horrible track record we still see apologist defending religion . . .

For those unfamiliar with the Cathars, here how the Catholic Church dealth with them: between 15,000 and 20,000 were slaughters in the French city of Béziers alone and 140 burned at the stake in city of Minerve; and here's a contemporary account of a massacre carried out  in 1219 at Marmonde, a town of some 7000 people:

…terror and massacre began. Noblemen, ladies and their little children, men and women stripped naked, all were slashed and cut to ribbons by keen edged swords. Flesh, blood, brains, torsos, limbs and faces hacked in two; lungs, livers and guts torn out and thrown away - laying on the open ground as if they had rained down from the heavens. Marshland and firm ground, all was red with blood. Not a man or woman was left alive, neither young nor old, no living creature, except perhaps some well-hidden infant. Marmond was razed and set alight…

To this death toll - which some estimated totaled 500,000 in France - one must add the "old believers" in Russia, and those across the Mediterranean region who were labeled heretics.  A lengthy compilation of the atrocities can be viewed here.  This is a sample of the fate these individuals suffered in the name of God:

Anyone in Villaro who declined to go to a Roman Catholic mass was liable to be crucified upside down, but there was some variation in the manner of killing in other towns. Some were maimed and left to die of starvation, some had strips of flesh cut off their bodies until they bled to death, some were stoned, some impaled alive upon stakes or hooks. Some were dragged along the ground until there flesh was scraped away. One at least was literally minced. Daniel Rambaut had his toes and fingers cut off in sections: one joint being amputated each day in an attempt to make him recant and accept the Roman faith. Some had their mouths stuffed with gun-powder which was then ignited. Paolo Garnier of Roras was castrated, then skinned alive. Children were killed in various ways before the eyes of their parents. Those few who escaped to the mountains were mostly killed by exposure, starvation or disease.

 ISIS and Islam have nothing on Christianity!

Speaker of Italian Parliament Writes Open Letter to "Suicidal" Gay Teen

While much of Europe is increasingly gay friendly, one stand out for continued anti-gay bigotry to date has been Italy, perhaps because of the insidious influence the Vatican and Roman Catholic Church continue to exert in that nation.  At times I find it a baffling phenomenon given the world wide sex abuse scandal with cover up efforts that track right back to the Vatican.  One can only wonder when modernity will win out over the ignorance and bigotry and centuries long track record of being wrong on scientific knowledge issues that are the reality of the Catholic Church.   Now, correspondence between Laura Boldrini (pictured above) , the Speaker of the Italian Parliament and a 17 year old gay youth has garnered national attention.  The Independent reports on the situation.  Here are highlights:

the speaker of the parliament has asked to meet a young gay man who says he feels suicidal in one of Europe’s most homophobic societies. Davide Tancredi, said: “I am gay, I am 17-years old and this letter is my last alternative to suicide in a troglodyte society; in a world that does not accept me even though I’m born that way. In a public exchange of letters that has touched many Italians, The letter published in La Repubblica newspaper on 25 May, by  “Not everyone is fortunate enough to be born heterosexual. If there was a little less discrimination and a little more sympathy or Christian charity, people would stop hating.”

In response to the letter, which was given considerable prominence by the centre-left newspaper, Laura Boldrini, the speaker, responded with an open letter of her own. “I have a daughter not much older than you, and I’m deeply disturbed by your cry for help,” she said, before asking to meet Mr Tancredi in parliament to discuss how the situation for gays might be improved.

Italy is, officially at least, the most homophobic country in Western Europe. Thanks largely to the influence of the Vatican, there is no legislation allowing for civil partnerships and no measures to deter homophobic violence or discrimination in the workplace. In this regard it also lags behind South Africa and several Latin American countries.

“A country that considers itself civilised cannot afford to live without a law against ‘homophobia, an evil that drives many young people to take their own lives,” Ms Boldrini said. The supposedly political neutral speaker has angered the Italian right after several proclamations on social issues.

Note how the "godly folk" are up in arms with Ms. Boldrini.  Christianity is increasingly all about hate and bigotry.  Following the Gospel message of love of others and caring for the less fortunate is disappearing from conservative denominations except in terms of lip service.