Pope Francis Opts to Choose Ignorance With Respect to Sexuality

The Catholic Church has a centuries, if not millennium, long history of rejecting science and modern knowledge rather than admit that its antiquated dogma is flat out wrong. In the past, the Church's leadership refused to concede that the Earth revolved around the Sun instead of vice versa, it insisted that the Earth was flat, previous Popes supported slavery, and now, fast forwarding time-wise, Pope Francis is rejected modern medical and mental health science on sexual orientation and gender identity.  

Other than quacks funded by right wing groups or religiously affiliated institutions, the consensus among the medical and mental health professional community is that both sexual orientation and gender identity are set in utero BEFORE children are born as a result of hormonal influences that impact on both physical development as well as brain development that sets once sexual orientation and ones gender identity - the latter being the cause of individuals being transgender.  Like it or not, some people ARE born with mismatched physical attributes and gender identity.  Others are born gay.  Now, Pope Francis in true knuckle dragger form has dismissed the fact that a person’s gender can differ from the assigned sex at birth.  Anything rather than admit that the Church's ignorance based 12th century dogma on sex and sexuality is simply wrong.  No one "chooses" to be gay or to be transgender.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Francis' decision to place the Church once again on the wrong side of science and, down the road history.  One can only hope that Francis' wrongheaded decision will only serve to accelerate the flight from the Church.  Here are article excerpts:

ROME — Warning of a society “without sexual differences,” the Vatican on Monday dismissed the idea that a person’s gender can differ from the assigned sex at birth and said a fluid idea of identity was not “based on the truths of existence.”

The right to “choose one’s gender,” the Vatican said in an official document, is in “direct contradiction of the model of marriage as being between one man and one woman.”

The document, released as a guide for Catholic educators, held firm to the religion’s traditional teaching on gender and sexuality. But ­LGBT members of the faith said it put an official and updated stamp on viewpoints they had hoped were changing.

“This casts everything back to the Dark Ages,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of ­DignityUSA, a group that advocates for ­LGBT equality and inclusion in the church. “I think it is incredibly insensitive, to be talking still about gender and sexuality as a choice and a momentary whim rather than a fundamental God-given identity.”

The document, released by the Vatican office that deals with education, coincided with a month of Pride festivities in many countries around the world. It was not signed by Francis, but rather by two high-level officials — Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi and Archbishop Angelo Vincenzo Zani — in the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s bureaucracy.

The church’s retrenchment hints at one of the challenges it faces at a time of growing secularization — when many of its teachings on sexuality are being ignored as out of date. Francis has expressed an interest in outreach to ­LGBT followers, but he has also taken a clear stance on gender identity, decrying that children are taught in schools that “everyone can choose his or her sex.”

The church made a case that children had the right to grow up in a family “with a father and a mother,” and the document quoted an earlier Francis speech about how children benefit from seeing masculinity represented by the father and femininity represented by the mother. Traditionalist groups lauded the 31-page Vatican document, titled “Male and Female He Created Them.”

The Rev. James Martin, a prominent Jesuit who has advocated for the church to more openly welcome ­LGBT members, said on Twitter that the document calls for dialogue and listening “but sets aside the real-life experiences of ­LGBT people.”

“Sadly,” Martin wrote, “it will be used as a cudgel against transgender people, and an excuse to argue that they shouldn’t even exist.”

The good news is that the Church is hemorrhaging members.  In my youth, all of my family was made up of church-going Catholics.  Now, none of us remain in the Church and the newest generation has not been baptized at all.  This experience is not unique to my family.  Francis seems hell bent to cling to ignorance and, if it continues, the Catholic Church will one day be a church centered in the most ignorant and uneducated parts of the world, namely Africa and limited parts of South America. Given the evils the Church has done in the past, the collapse of the Church in the developed world will be a positive development.

Religious Views on Gender Laws Are at Odds With Science

A few weeks ago Katie Couric did an excellent documentary on the National Geographic Channel called "Gender Revolution" that looked at the science on transgender individuals.   The show should be mandatory viewing for every Republican member of Congress, every Republican in state legislatures, and every right wing hate spewing "Christian" pastor (Christian is in quotation marks since these pastors are the antithesis of Christian behavior).  Among other things, the show looked at medical science's knowledge of in vitro development of fetuses and how hormones influence not only outward physical gender, but also how one perceives their gender internally.  It is this hormonal influence and interplay that causes some to be born outwardly one gender when internally they deem themsevlse the opposite gender of their bodies.  Something similar happens to gays and lesbians that causes what the "godly folk" deem to be sinful attraction to those of the same sex. Science and medicine tell us that there is nothing "wrong" about these attractions and internal feelings of gender.  They are natural phenomenon and no "choice" is involved in such individuals love or view themselves.  Only religion - specifically Abrahamic religions that trace their origins to myths propounded by uneducated Bronze Age herders - says that same sex attraction and/or gender identity are wrong.  Sadly, rather than admit these truths and the reality of the source of their beliefs, the  "godly folk" who are in my view desperate to maintain their make believe fantasy world, reject science and medical knowledge and cling to ignorance.  In the process, they condemn gays, lesbians, and the transgender.  A column in Time bu a judge and former Justice Department official looks at the fallacy of applying religious belief to the issue of gender.  Here are highlights:

A person’s biological sex seems simple but is deceptively complex. It appears to be binary: An XX chromosomal pair is female, and an XY chromosomal pair is male. Doctors look at a newborn’s genitalia, pronounce the baby a boy or a girl, and the birth certificate reflects that sex assignment.

Deep-seated religious beliefs, cultural constructs, the regulation of sports (such as the rules confronted by Texas high-school wrestler Mack Beggs) and recent laws are premised on the bedrock belief that each of us is either a man or a woman. Yet the reality is that today in the United States alone there are approximately one million people who — from the moment of birth — cannot clearly be defined as either male or female.

This physiological truth is unrelated to whether someone is straight, gay or transgender. Many individuals are born with sex chromosome, endocrine or hormonal irregularities, and their birth certificates are inaccurate because in the United States birth records are not designed to allow doctors to designate an ambiguous sex. Countless people likely have no idea that they fall into this group. The more we learn about our DNA, the more that biological sex — from the moment of conception — looks like an intricate continuum and less like two tidy boxes. This understanding makes it virtually impossible for judges to consistently apply a law that permits or prohibits conduct based on whether someone is a man or a woman.

On February 22, the Trump Administration reversed the Obama policy [on transgender students]. Since President Trump was elected, Alabama, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Wyoming lawmakers have introduced legislation that would determine access to public restrooms and changing rooms based on one’s assigned sex at birth.

The most prominent case that has been in the crosshairs of this debate is G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board (“Grimm”), which challenges a Virginia school board’s policy that requires students to use bathrooms according to biological sex.

Many people share the ubiquitous notion that biological sex falls into two, mutually exclusive categories. In 2009 my perspective changed when I read an article written by a woman who learned shortly after marriage that she and her husband couldn’t have biological children because she had an XY chromosomal pairing. While she looked like a woman, and she and her parents had always believed she was female, from a genetic standpoint she was a man. The article was published the year after California passed Prop 8, a version of DOMA.

I was curious whether her situation was an obscure medical anomaly that was statistically and legally irrelevant. It wasn’t. A regularly cited 1991 study of nearly 35,000 newborn children found that 1 in 426 did not have strictly XX or XY chromosomes. In addition, the World Health Organization reports that 1 in every 2,000 births worldwide are visibly intersex, because the child’s genitals are either incomplete or ambiguous, which equates to five newborn Americans a day. This represents a sizable U.S. population that cannot be ignored by the law.

If such individuals have the right to equal protection, to privacy and to use a public restroom, what clear and science-based legal principle can our judiciary employ to determine whether they lawfully used the correct bathroom? Reliance on a birth certificate might appear to be a legitimate method to establish sex. But birth certificates are surprisingly fluid documents. They are amended regularly to add or remove parents due to adoption or because DNA results reveal paternity that is inconsistent with the original record. They are also amended to address biology.

In 2016, I received a request from parents seeking to change the name and sex of their baby’s birth certificate. The parents were initially informed they gave birth to a daughter. Genital irregularities and months of additional tests revealed that from a chromosomal and hormonal standpoint their child was, while not strictly genetically male, more “properly" categorized as a son. I granted their request to modify the birth certificate to designate the child as male. The new birth certificate replaced the original, yet neither was precisely accurate from a biological perspective.

The United States’ stringent adherence to a two-sex paradigm is inconsistent with science and incongruous with the historic and modern understanding of sex throughout many regions of the world. Dating back to 2000 B.C., three or more sexes can be found in classical Greek, Sanskrit and Hindu texts. Currently, numerous countries recognize a third or indeterminate sex including Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Japan, Nepal and New Zealand. If the bill introduced into the California state legislature in January 2017 passes, California will be the first state in the U.S. to recognize a third, non-binary gender, for birth certificates and driver’s licenses.

Neither DOMA nor HB2 reference gay or transgender individuals, but there is little doubt that both laws were designed with those populations in mind. When the Obama Administration announced its opposition to HB2, several states swiftly voiced disapproval. Then Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (now the Administrator of the EPA) sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Education stating, “Your determination thus elevates the status of transgender students over those who would define their sex based on biology and who would seek to have their definition honored in the most private of places.” The Trump Administration guidance letter reversing the Obama Administration’s policy referenced the ruling of a federal district court in Texas that “held that the term ‘sex’ unambiguously refers to biological sex.”

Ironically, Trump's and Pruitt’s arguments are perhaps the most compelling ones against HB2 and similar sex- and gender-based legislation. Our biological variability means that a two-bathroom, based on two-sex approach is inadequate — and that’s before judges ever get to the issue of gender identity.

In the United States, judges are obligated to see the world through a secular lens. They must apply the law without the influence of any religious construct or political agenda. If modern science recognizes that sex has countless natural permutations, and if birth certificates, physical observation and even chromosomal testing cannot reliably categorize every individual as either male or female, then our judiciary cannot be required to make gender findings antithetical to that reality.

When legislators blur the lines of church and state and enact laws that permit or prohibit conduct based on biologic gender as only male or female — whether it is for the purpose of authorizing marriage or designating the use of public bathrooms — they place an impossible burden on our judiciary, and ultimately on our country and all of its people.

Norfolk Bans LGBT Hiring Discrimination

While Republicans in the Virginia General Assembly continue to push a Christofascist backed anti-LGBT agenda, Virginia's cities lead the way in creating a business friendly economy and society welcoming to all.  The latest example id Norfolk amendment of its City Code to ban hiring discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.  No doubt there is gnashing of teeth going on among the hate merchants at The Family Foundation and Regent and Liberty universities.  The Virginian Pilot looks at the development which will hopefully pressure other Hampton Roads cities to follow suit.  Here are story highlights:

Discrimination in city hiring or contracting based on sexual orientation or gender identity is now illegal.

In two 8-0 votes, the City Council voted Tuesday night to add protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people – among others – to the law. They took effect immediately.

Councilman Martin Thomas Jr. said he was “very proud” to vote for the new measures.
“It was something that needed to be done,” he said. “Norfolk is an inclusive and diverse city.”

Michael Berlucchi, president of the LGBT rights group Hampton Roads Pride, called the changes “a big deal.”

“It changes policy, but it also changes culture,” Berlucchi said. “It sends a message about the posture our government takes toward a minority community like LGBT, and that’s really significant.”

Virginia Beach also has a policy prohibiting discrimination in city hiring based on sexual orientation or gender identity, a city spokeswoman said. Chesapeake lists sexual orientation as a protected class, but not gender identity, according to a city regulation. The anti-discrimination laws in Suffolk and Portsmouth do not include either category.

In Norfolk, city contractors were already barred from discriminating on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, disability or national origin.

The law passed Tuesday requires any city contract above $1,000 to include protections for sexual orientation, gender identity, age, genetic information, marital status, political affiliation, whistleblower activity, parental status and military service. Another new law provides all the same protections in city hiring.

Councilwoman Andria McClellan said Norfolk’s government has already been respectful of LGBT rights for years and has guidelines for how to treat an employee undergoing a gender identity transition.

But she and Thomas said they wanted to make sure the protections were codified in law.  “I prefer to be on the cutting edge of equality,” Thomas said.

Meanwhile, in rural Republican voting regions in Southwest Virginia most residents cling to their bibles and bigotry and wonder why few, if any, businesses want to relocate to their areas.  Bigotry carries an economic price - something lost on Christofascists and their self-prostituting Republican representatives.   Kudos to Norfolk. 

Montenegro Pulls Ahead of USA and Virginia in Civil Rights Protections

In my view it is increasingly embarrassing that the United States - falsely claimed to be the land of freedom and liberty - is falling increasingly behind other parts of the world in terms of non-discrimination laws that protect all citizens. Countries once viewed as banana republics in South America and former satellites of the Soviet Union now have more comprehensive non-discrimination protections. Indeed, the USA seems to be moving into a noxious group lead by Iran, Saudi Arabia and other quasi-theocracies in terms of the manner in which religious discrimination is upheld by American laws. Virginia ought to be severely embarrassed too. Now Montenegro - and I mean no offense to Montenegro - has broader non-discrimination protections than the home state of the author of the Declaration of Independence. One has to wonder when Virginia will start erecting signs at its borders stating that no gays, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and other non-Christianist are unwelcome in the state. Here are highlights from ILGA Europe on this development in Montenegro:
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On 27 July 2010, the Parliament of Montenegro with a large majority (67 votes for, 6 votes against and 4 abstained) adopted all inclusive anti-discrimination law which bans discrimination in on the grounds of various characteristics, including sexual orientation and gender identity.
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ILGA-Europe welcomes this development and congratulates Montenegrin parliamentarians, human rights groups and LGBT activists with this important step towards respecting human rights of all citizens.
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At the same time, ILGA-Europe expresses its disappointment with the statements by Mr. Ferhat Dinosha, the Minister for Human and Minority Rights, who repeatedly opposed the protection for LGBT people from discrimination on the basis of the ’moral code of the society’.
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Montenegro is a potential candidate country for joining the European Union and the last in the Western Balkans to adopt a comprehensive anti-discrimination law.

State by State LGBT Equality Rankings

eQualityGiving has an interesting (and depressing depending upon one's state of residence) chart that ranks states based upon their treatment of LGBT citizens. Among the factors considered are whether the state has hate crimes protections, employment non-discrimination protections, marriage equality, laws allowing for amending ones gender, LGBT youth protections, and laws allowing same-sex parenting rights. Under this criteria, LGBT friendly states can receive up to a 6 ranking. Currently, no state achieves a 6 ranking, although California gets a 5.5. In contrast, Virginia ranks only a score of 1.5. (Virginia does allow birth certificate amendments and the situation on parenting rights is untested, but no other protections are provided to LGBT citizens).

Take a look at the cahrt and find out whether or not you are a second class citizen in your home state.

HRC Staffer Responds To Trans “Conspiracy Theories”

I hate to say it, but in my opinion, the transgender community is not helping their cause by making allegations that lack a factual foundation. Making wild statements while demanding that possibly achievable employment protections that would protect millions be set aside until the trans community gets equal employment non-discrimination protections too is not going to win them friends. In fact, it may alienate those who are otherwise supportive of their cause. As I have said repeatedly, I support an inclusive version of ENDA, but if that cannot get passed, then it is time for a pragmatic reality check and we need to realistically push for what can get passed through Congress. By actions like the wild claims on Bilerico cited below, all the trans community will achieve is dividing the larger LGBT community further. Some of them need to wake up, smell the coffee and grasp the reality that without the full support of gays and lesbians across the country, trans inclusive legislation will NEVER get enacted. Bilerico Project made this allegation earlier today (http://www.bilerico.com/2008/04/hrc_calls_hpd_to_stop_houston_dinner_pro.php):

The HRC Dinner is being held at the convention center hotel across the street from the George R. Brown Convention Center on April 12. The protest is being coordinated by the distinguished stateswoman of the Houston transgender community Phyllis Frye and veteran leaders Vanessa Edwards Foster and Josephine Tittsworth. But it seems as though HRC has a problem with the Houston transgender community exercising their First Amendment rights. The National HRC office called the Houston Police Department in an attempt to shut down the protest.

Yeah, the Homosexual Rights Corporation is a friend of the transgender community. If you still believe that fairy tale, I have some waterfront property along I-10 in the Atchafalaya Swamp between Breaux Bridge and Baton Rouge I'd like to sell you.

The problem is that HRC did not call the police. Rather, as reported by Queerity (http://www.queerty.com/hrc-staffer-responds-to-trans-conspiracy-theories-20080411/) this is how the situation unfolded with no conspiracy whatsoever:

The fact is that the standard procedure is when we are notified of a protest, then it is our obligation to notify the hotel/venue. The hotel/venue then takes the necessary precautions to make sure their guests are safe and that any protests happening outside of their property is also done so in a safe manner. One of those precautionary steps that the hotel/venue takes is to notify the local police department. This was done in DC, NYC, and Philadelphia previously without any problems, complaints, or conspiracy theories. So, with all that being said we are looking forward to a great Houston dinner which will be attended by the Mayor of Houston. And was the case at previous dinners, those who want to wear their stickers and stand in protest will be more than welcome to do so.