The Wedding That Started a Republican Civil War

Virginia's gerrymandered 5th Congressional District.

Virginia is rapidly becoming a blue state despite the efforts of the majority of Republicans, particularly those from rural, economically moribund areas of the state.  A minority of Republicans recognize that the either the Virginia GOP changes or the state will have a Democrat majority for the foreseeable future (Republicans last won statewide office in 2009). In a nod to change, 5th Congressional District congressman Denver Riggleman officiated at the wedding of a same sex, mixed race couple, Alex Pisciarino and Anthony “Rek” LeCounte.  Little did Riggleman realize that this simple action would ignite a civil war within the Virginia GOP with the forces of reaction seeking Riggleman's expulsion from the party and primary defeat to replace Riggleman with a knuckle-dragging candidate with past ties to the religiously extreme Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.  As a piece in Politico reports, the forces of reaction won and Riggleman ousted - likely to the delight of Democrats.  Here are highlights:

Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.), who became a target of conservatives after officiating a same-sex wedding last year, was ousted Saturday by GOP voters in a drive-thru district convention. 

Good’s victory came after a day-long convention held in the parking lot of a central Virginia church. He ran as a staunch social conservative, campaigning on a traditional view of marriage, his support to make English the official language of the U.S. and to end birthright citizenship.

A piece in The Atlantic looks at the effort behind Riggleman's ouster and the push to drag the Virginia GOP even further rightward and homophobic and racist.  Here are excerpts:

Virginia Republicans have spent the past decade getting routed in elections. They lost three U.S. congressional seats and control of both chambers of the state legislature in 2018 [and 2019] alone. Yet today, with another tough election less than five months away, Republicans in Virginia’s Fifth District will gather in a church parking lot to decide whether to boot their incumbent congressman, Denver Riggleman, largely because he officiated a same-sex wedding last summer. The unconventional convention will earn the grooms, Alex Pisciarino and Anthony “Rek” LeCounte, a distinction in their first year of marriage that most people never achieve in a lifetime: They started a Republican civil war.

Virginia’s Fifth is a district where Bible Belt activists, suburban moderates, and college-town free-market types mix together in one massively gerrymandered area larger than New Jersey, stretching from the state’s southern border almost all the way to D.C. Riggleman, who owns a distillery outside Charlottesville, was one of the few rookie Virginia Republicans to win a competitive district amid the Democrats’ 2018 wave. But Riggleman’s success, and even an endorsement from President Donald Trump, may not save his job: The idiosyncrasies of Virginia election law mean there is a real risk he will be ousted by his own party. As Virginia turns blue, the question is whether the GOP can stay close enough to the center to hold competitive seats—or whether it will become more extreme as it shrinks.

“We don’t want a party so small that it just fits in the bedroom,” says Riggleman, an Air Force veteran with libertarian leanings on marijuana legalization, social issues, and small-business regulations. His opponent, Bob Good, who declined to speak with me, is a former athletics director at the evangelical Liberty University who has described himself in interviews as a “strong, bright-red,” “biblical,” and “constitutional conservative.” After Good was elected to the Campbell County Board of Supervisors in 2015, one of his first acts was signing onto a resolution declaring the U.S. Supreme Court “lawless” for legalizing same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, comparing the decision to the Dred Scott case.

“We’ve played the ‘Who’s the bigger Christian?’ game in the Republican Party for a long time,” says Matt Hall, a conservative commentator who writes for Bearing Drift, a website focused on Virginia politics. “Bob comes from that minority—that small group of people that says you have to be this way or that way to be a Republican.” Riggleman’s liability, at least in this district, is that he is unwilling to conform to a culture-wars strategy. “Bob Good doesn’t get to define what’s Christian and what’s not Christian,” he told me. “You can say you’re a Christian conservative all day long. What I’m going to say is that I’m going to protect your right to be a Christian conservative. But I’m also going to protect your right to follow any religion that you want to.”

When Pisciarino and LeCounte moved to Charlottesville for graduate school in the summer of 2018, they wanted to get involved in local politics. Pisciarino, who is white, and LeCounte, who is black, were impressed by Riggleman’s record on LGBTQ issues. After Riggleman won, they figured it would be fun to ask him to officiate their wedding, a way of “celebrating the fact that we had a congressman we liked and wanted to elect,” LeCounte told me. . . . . Although they expected that local papers might write a story or two about the congressman’s involvement in their ceremony, LeCounte said, “We were not remotely expecting it to become the kind of story where we’re giving interviews about it almost a year later.”

The backlash was immediate. Melvin Adams, the district committee chair, wrote a post on the district’s website about “inclusiveness,” emphasizing that the Republican Party is committed to recognizing marriage “as the union of one man and one woman.” One Republican group after another in the Fifth District voted to censure or condemn Riggleman: in Cumberland County, then in Rappahannock. “The sanctity of marriage does not need to be redefined because it has been defined for thousands of years as one man and one woman. That’s a standard that I don’t think you can change, because that’s the standard that I believe the God of Creation established in the very first chapters of the Book of Genesis,” Travis Witt, a Bob Good supporter and pastor who serves on the Fifth District committee and the Republican Party of Virginia’s state central committee, told me.

Riggleman may have had an easier time securing his seat in a primary election; he has pitched his campaign as one of broad, conservative-coalition appeal. But the GOP’s Fifth District congressional candidate is about to be chosen by the party’s most ardent activists. Virginia election law allows districts to hold nominating conventions rather than primaries. Out of the roughly 3,500 people preregistered as delegates, some will have to drive several hours to cast their ballot on Saturday morning in the parking lot of Tree of Life Ministries in Lynchburg—Good’s home turf—remaining in their cars to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The whole process is set up to encourage participation from the people with the strongest views.

All of this may end up putting a relatively safe Republican seat in jeopardy. . . . . Choosing the more socially conservative candidate may end being an expensive form of purity: “It will cost the party a lot of money to defend a seat, and possibly lose a seat, that otherwise they’d walk into,” Davis said.

When Bob Good came to Charlottesville, Pisciarino and LeCounte attended one of his campaign events. They wanted to hear for themselves how their wedding had become part of his stump speech. Good moved through that section quickly, presumably because they were there, LeCounte said, but the experience was surreal: “It’s extremely bizarre to watch people argue about what they consider an abstract issue, which is our lives.” Pisciarino and LeCounte haven’t particularly enjoyed receiving calls from reporters to talk about the wedding that might unseat their friend and congressman. But they wanted “to take control of a narrative that was going to include us, one way or another,” LeCounte said. When the couple load up their blue sedan, with its Riggleman and UVA bumper stickers, and drive to Lynchburg today, they won’t just be voting for Riggleman. They’re voting for a different kind of Republican Party.

Sadly, there will not be a different kind of Republican Party in Virginia.  Only more and more electoral defeats will finally force change or see the much deserved death of today Virginia GOP..

Limbaugh Demonstrates the Continued Evil of Homophobia

Rush Limbaugh - a thrice divorced study in misogyny - who is a sycophant and cheerleader of Donald Trump (another man who cares little about the sanctity of marriage) recently attacked Pete Buttigieg and maligned his marriage to his husband. This after Trump awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, thereby severely denigrating the value of the award.  In doing so, Limbaugh - and by extension Trump - clearly was pandering to the anti-gay Christofascists who, along with white supremacists make up the core of Trump's base.  The entire episode underscores the continuing evil of homophobia and hate based religion belief that continues to foster it.  A piece at CNN reminds us of the work that needs to be done to rid the world of the evil of homophobia and those who continue to fan the flames of hate and bigotry.  Here are highlights: 

This week lawmakers in Iowa are debating whether a teacher can say "Pete Buttigieg is gay" in the classroom without first notifying parents.   I wish I were kidding but I am not.

The bill, which was introduced by 13 Republicans and advanced to the full House Education Committee on Monday, would require that lessons touching on the topic of sexual orientation or gender identity first be approved by parents, who would then have the option of sending a note to the principal excusing their children from class. It's the kind of story that supports the uncomfortable truth Rush Limbaugh spoke of during a homophobic rant he delivered on his radio show Wednesday, a week after Melania Trump hung a Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck. Limbaugh mused about the discomfort some voters would experience watching Buttigieg kiss his husband on the debate stage, especially if he's standing next to, as he put it, "Mr. Man, Donald Trump."

As offensive as Limbaugh's remarks about Buttigieg were (and as ironic as his holding up Trump as the epitome of manliness were, considering it was the gay dude who volunteered to fight for this country and the straight one who pleaded "bone spurs"), the reality is homophobia is not theoretical. As the lawmakers in Iowa are showing, it is actively practiced. There will be people who will see Trump's many alleged infidelities (which he denies) as well as his well-documented bullying as quintessential masculine behavior and will dismiss Buttigieg's levelheadedness and affection toward his husband as effeminate. And because homophobia is ultimately an extension of misogyny — that is, to be female is to be less than a man — some of the same prejudices that women seeking the highest office face also plague Buttigieg. That doesn't mean fair-minded people should placate homophobes, misogynists and or racists to win an election — although that does happen. It only means that when a loudmouth like Limbaugh spews his vitriol, people should not be surprised. Remember, he would not be a millionaire if a significant number of people didn't agree with him. So, the question isn't whether or not we should chastise the blowhard messenger, it's what are we doing to challenge the hateful message? Prejudice did not go away.  The people who listen to Limbaugh did not and will not go away. This is not meant to conflate supporting Buttigieg with fair mindedness. Only to remove who he loves off the list of reasons to not vote for him. Limbaugh recently revealed he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. He may survive it. He may not. But one thing for sure is the attitudes of those who delight in his hateful speech will remain.

So be mad at Limbaugh all you want. Just know there is a difference between how things are and how things should be. The bridge between the two is not constructed from denial and despair but rather acknowledgement of the enemy — in this case, it's prejudice — and a determination not to allow it to prevail.

How Buttigieg Found Support in Iowa’s Formerly Anti-LGBT Communities

The Iowa caucuses have proved to be an organizational nightmare for that state's Democrat Party.  As of now, only 62% of the results are in and surprising to some is the reality that Pete Buttigieg is in first place so far.  Even more surprising, if one looks at the maps of the areas the different candidates carried, is that much of Buttigieg's strength is in rural areas away for Iowa's larger cities.  A piece in Mother Jones looks at Buttigieg's strategy and also the not so distant anti-LGBT extremism in rural Iowa.  While some on the far left of the LGBT community have attacked Buttigieg for "not being gay enough," his apparent strong showing in Iowa underscores that just being one's normal, average self is perhaps the strongest means to change minds and perhaps hearts. Having been specifically recruited to be the first openly gay members of the Hampton Yacht Club, a bastion of old Tidewater Virginia, the fact that my husband and mine's marriage is so ordinary, if you will, and not so different from that of straight members, has seemingly made our welcome - and that of additional gay members - far better.  Buttigieg is on to something.  Here are highlights from Mother Jones:

Pete Buttigieg doesn’t often remind people that he’s running a historic presidential campaign. The 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has emphasized an easy-to-like persona: a nice-guy Midwesterner with middle-of-the-road policies and a bit of Obama-style hope-and-change rhetoric. As he campaigns across Iowa ahead of Monday’s caucuses, he doesn’t make much of the fact that he’s the first openly gay candidate with a serious chance of being the nominee of a major political party.

That Mayor Pete’s sexuality isn’t a primary point of conversation in the 2020 race is a remarkable testament to how much LGBTQ rights have progressed over the past decade. And it’s even more striking in Iowa, where Buttigieg has centered his campaign on winning smaller, rural counties, places that just a decade ago were the epicenter of anti-LGBTQ sentiment in the state. 

In April 2009, six years before same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide, the Iowa Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in favor of it. The case, Varnum v. Brien, made Iowa the first state outside the liberal coastal enclaves to legalize gay marriage. Only Massachusetts and Connecticut had marriage equality at that time.

Beyond checking off another state for activists, Iowa represented something different from the previous victories, a test case for how marriage equality might be accepted in the more rural parts of the country.

It didn’t go well at first. In Iowa, state Supreme Court judges are subject to judicial “retention” elections, a yes-or-no vote on whether a judge should keep their seat on the bench. . . . . three months before Election Day 2010, Bob Vander Plaats, a leading figure of the state’s evangelical right, launched a campaign on the steps of the state capitol, pushing voters to say no to three of the Supreme Court judges up for retention that year thanks to their vote on Varnum. Vander Plaats’ efforts were boosted by a string of right-wing national groups—the American Family Association, the National Organization for Marriage, and the Family Research Council—with nearly $1 million spent to fund TV ads and a bus tour for the sort of race that typically had zero dollars in campaign cash. Each of the three Varnum judges lost. 

Buttigieg doesn’t ignore Varnum, but he doesn’t spend much time at his events dwelling on the trailblazing aspect of his campaign. At a Thursday morning rally in Decorah, a small town in the upper northeast corner of the state, he didn’t make any reference to his sexuality until the last minute of his prepared remarks. When I saw him at his next event 60 miles south in Independence, he excised that aspect as intro instead using it as his closing note at the end of the Q&A portion.

In both instances, he spun out that detail in the same fashion: “Iowa has this beautiful capacity for showing what can be done for people who aren’t quite sure,” he said in Decorah.

If you’d asked political analysts five years ago if an openly gay candidate could capture a swell of support in Iowa, that wouldn’t have been unimaginable. But they likely would have assumed that said candidate had gained momentum through anchoring support in the state’s cities, the places already more friendly to same-sex couples before Varnum came around.

But if Buttigieg ends up winning Iowa, it’ll be thanks to places like Decorah and Independence. While Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden have worked to rev up voters in the state’s cities and suburbs, Mayor Pete’s closing push has been all about the rural eastern part of the state, places that flipped from Obama to Trump.

Buttigieg’s campaign boasts that the large audiences he is turning out draw from some of the the same crowd who voted for Trump four years ago. “I am meeting so many of what I like to call future-former-Republicans, who are determined to replace this president,” Buttigieg said in Decorah. “And they are more than welcome to this movement that we built.”

“He’s getting support in the areas where we lost the worst on marriage,” says Troy Price, chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, . . . . “It’s the suburban areas, it’s the rural areas, that’s where he’s doing really well.”

Back in 2012, after a month of crisscrossing the state to track the Republicans challenging Barack Obama, I stuck around after the caucuses to try to answer a question: In the three years since Varnum, how had legal same-sex marriage changed perceptions in small-town Iowa?

I traveled to Clayton County, which went heavily against the three judges in 2010, voting them out by double-digit margins. . . . In Elkader, I met two men in their 80s who had moved to the town before the court decision, but married shortly after Varnum. They told me they hadn’t encountered much backlash, and continued on with their lives, still volunteering at the small local museum with no trouble. “You can do the same thing in a big city, but that’s because in a big city you’re anonymous,” one of them told me. “Well, nobody is anonymous here, and that’s what makes it very gratifying. That you are known.”

“The hearts and minds of people started changing so quickly on it, once they started seeing couples getting married,” Price says. “That was always the plan when they started down this path of the lawsuit in ’05, if we can get it in Iowa it will spread everywhere, because it’s not just an east coast or west coast thing.”

By 2015, when the US Supreme Court ruling came out, [the politics of marriage equality had become] a positive out there. You could feel it, you could see that out there. It just moved really quickly after 2010, it just moved really fast.”

Buttigieg’s hesitancy to make too much of his place as a first in presidential politics hasn’t exactly engendered good will from some activists in the LGBTQ community.  . . . . But the fact that Buttigieg’s allyship is quieter, that his marriage to Chasten Buttigieg would be a boringly bland political marriage were it not for their respective genders, might be what helps normalize his relationship for these rural communities. “The fact that he’s palatable to middle America,” Bruening says, “is why he’s popular in Iowa.”

Should Iowa send Mayor Pete forward as its top choice against Trump, it doesn’t mean the state is absolved of any lingering homophobia, just as Barack Obama’s win here in the 2008 caucuses didn’t mean racism was solved in the Hawkeye state.

But the fact that Pete is even a competitive candidate, and that the main reason he has a chance is thanks to the small towns that just a decade ago would have been highly judgmental to someone like him, is a quiet success story—one of the few political bright spots of the Trump era.

 And yes, I will likely make another contribution to Mayor Pete's campaign.  We need his normalcy and moderation if Democrats hope to defeat Trump.  Meanwhile, the LGBT left needs to realize that in his own way, Mayor Pete is a big time activist. 

Trump/Pence Regime Wages War Against Children of Gays

James Derek Mize, left, and his husband, Jonathan Gregg, are both American citizens. Under a State Department policy, their daughter, who was born abroad, did not qualify for citizenship.

Sickeningly, there seem to be few lengths the Trump?pence regime will not go to in its quest to limit the rights of LGBT Americans in order to win the cult like following of American Christofascists and evangelicals. On top of rolling back Obama era policies protecting transgender Americans and filing briefs arguing in favor of an employer's right to fire LGBT employees, the regime has now taken its attacks to the children of gays born abroad to surrogates.  Singling our gay couples, the Trump/Pence regime is taking the position that such children do not qualify for U.S. citizenship even though both fathers are U.S. Citizens. Anything to please the Christofascists and make life more difficult for married same-sex couple gay Americans.  While evangelicals claim to support "family values," this policy shows the lie of that claim.  The true value that they and their cult leader in the White House support id hate, discrimination and the abuse of others who do not share their toxic beliefs.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this insidious agenda,  Here are article highlights:

James Derek Mize is an American citizen, born and raised in the United States. His husband, who was born in Britain to an American mother, is a United States citizen, too. But the couple’s infant daughter isn’t, according to the State Department.

“It’s shocking,” said Mr. Mize, 38, a former lawyer who lives in Atlanta with his husband, Jonathan Gregg, a management consultant. The couple received a letter denying their daughter’s citizenship last month. “We’re both Americans; we’re married,” Mr. Mize said. “We just found it really hard to believe that we could have a child that wouldn’t be able to be in our country.”

Their case illustrates the latest complication facing some families who use assisted reproductive technology, like surrogacy and in vitro fertilization, to have children.

At issue is a State Department policy, based on immigration law, that requires a child born abroad to have a biological connection to an American parent in order to receive citizenship at birth. That is generally not a problem when couples have babies the traditional way, but can prove tricky when only one spouse is the genetic parent.

The policy has come under intense scrutiny in recent months amid lawsuits arguing that the State Department discriminates against same-sex couples and their children by failing to recognize their marriages. Under the policy, the department classifies certain children born through assisted reproductive technology as “out of wedlock,” which triggers a higher bar for citizenship, even if the parents are legally married.

In one instance, a married Israeli-American gay couple had twin sons in Canada using sperm from each of the fathers. The biological son of the American received citizenship, but his brother, the biological son of the Israeli, did not. In February, a federal judge sided with the couple, calling the State Department’s interpretation of the immigration law “strained.” The department is appealing.

The government is also fighting a similar suit from a lesbian couple in London, who did not use a surrogate. One is American and one is Italian. They took turns conceiving and carrying their two children. Only the child born to the American mother was granted citizenship. Last week, a federal judge allowed the case to proceed, calling the family’s predicament “terrible” and “outrageous.”

“Proof of the biological connection is necessary so that the born-abroad citizenship route is not susceptible to fraud by people claiming they are children of United States citizens when, in fact, they are not,” said John C. Eastman, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank in California.

The interpretation has led the State Department to regard births from assisted reproductive technology as “out of wedlock,” if the source of the sperm and the egg do not match married parents. Such a designation comes with extra requirements for transmitting citizenship, including showing that a biological parent is an American citizen who has spent at least five years in the United States.

[T]wo men in a marriage don’t have that option. “A same-sex male couple cannot conceive a child where both of them are a parent under this definition,” Professor Titshaw said.

Relatively few families go abroad to have children through assisted reproductive technology, but there can be financial or personal reasons for doing so.

Mr. Mize and Mr. Gregg, who met at a swim team practice in New York in 2014 and married the next year, worked with a close friend, who is British, to serve as their surrogate. Their daughter, Simone, was born at a British hospital last year.

Mr. Gregg, who had lived in Britain for most of his life before moving to the United States to be with Mr. Mize, did not have enough years in America, according to a letter from the United States embassy in London. “It’s a psychological trauma,” Mr. Mize said.

“When we went to the embassy and they said, ‘You’re not a family, you’re not married and, Derek, you’re not her father,” he recalled, “it was just like a flood of every emotion I’ve ever had since I was first called a faggot came rushing into my body.”

In court filings, the State Department said that officers are expected to carefully investigate all assisted reproductive technology cases, “irrespective of the sex or sexual orientation of the legal parents.” And there have been cases where different-sex parents were asked for biological evidence, lawyers in the field said.

But in practice, advocates say the policy has a particular impact on same-sex couples.

“The State Department is effectively saying our marriage doesn’t count,” said Adiel Kiviti, 40, another father who said that his child’s citizenship was recently called into question. “If you aren’t going to afford us the benefits of a married couple, what’s the point of giving us the right to marry?”

Adiel and his husband, Roee Kiviti, were born in Israel and later naturalized, they said. The men, whose interview with The Daily Beast drew renewed attention to the policy last week, have two children, each born with the help of a surrogate in Canada.

“Where are they going to deport our child to?” said Roee, who works as a television journalist. His husband runs a media production business in Washington. “We live in America.”

Mr. Mize, whose daughter is now 11 months old and learning to walk, feels a similar stress. He said he had been traveling back and forth to Britain with Simone, who has a tourist visa. He worries about disrupting her development at such a young age, and fears what could happen if her legal status is not resolved.

“This is where our life is. This is where our jobs are,” he said. “Our daughter can’t be here, but she has no one else to care for her.”

United Methodist Church on Edge of Breakup Over Gays

Demonstrators at UMC General Conference.

First it was the Episcopal Church, then it was the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America , a/k/a the ELCA (to which I remain a member), and now it is the United Methodist Church which is about to tear itself apart over the issue of gays, sames sex marriage and LGBT clergy.  In the case of the first two denominations, those who chose to cling to the Bronze Age myths and legends found in selected passages of the Old Testament left their denomination. Here in Virginia Episcopalians found themselves caught in legal battles with elements aligning with African Anglican archbishops (some of whom seemingly authorized anti-Muslim massacres) over ownership of church properties (the break away elements lost) and large ELCA parishes aligned themselves with the Southern Baptist want to be Lutheran Missouri Synod. Fox News looks at the impending schism which is more personal to me since a college and law school classmate is one of the pro-gay delegates at the United Methodist Church General Conference in St. Louis.  Here are article highlights (note how the "conservatives" are aligned with African segments of the UMC which, like the Anglicans rely on ignorance and lack of education of the populace to cling to power and control):

The United Methodist Church teetered on the brink of breakup Monday after more than half the delegates at an international conference voted to maintain bans on same-sex weddings and ordination of gay clergy.

Their favored plan, if formally approved, could drive supporters of LGBT inclusion to leave America's second-largest Protestant denomination.

A final vote on rival plans for the church's future won't come until Tuesday's closing session, and the outcome remains uncertain. But the preliminary vote Monday showed that the Traditional Plan, which calls for keeping the LGBT bans and enforcing them more strictly, had the support of 56 percent of the more than 800 delegates attending the three-day conference in St. Louis.

The primary alternative proposal, called the One Church Plan, was rebuffed in a separate preliminary vote, getting only 47 percent support. Backed by a majority of the church's Council of Bishops in hopes of avoiding a schism, it would leave decisions about same-sex marriage and ordination of LGBT clergy up to regional bodies and would remove language from the church's law book asserting that "the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching."

Monday's voting did not kill the One Church Plan but makes its prospects on Tuesday far more difficult.

As evidence of the deep divisions within the faith, delegates Monday approved plans that would allow disaffected churches to leave the denomination while keeping their property.

Formed in a merger in 1968, the United Methodist Church claims about 12.6 million members worldwide, including nearly 7 million in the U.S. While other mainline Protestant denominations, such as the Episcopal and Presbyterian (U.S.A.) churches, have embraced the two gay-friendly practices, the Methodist church still officially bans them, even though acts of defiance by pro-LGBT clergy have multiplied and talk of a possible breakup has intensified.

The strong showing for the Traditional Plan reflects the fact that the UMC, unlike other mainstream Protestant churches in the U.S., is a global denomination. About 43 percent of the delegates in St. Louis are from abroad, mostly from Africa, and overwhelmingly support the LGBT bans.

"We Africans are not children in need of Western enlightenment when it comes to the church's sexual ethics," the Rev. Jerry Kulah, dean at a Methodist theology school in Liberia, said in a speech over the weekend. "We stand with the global church, not a culturally liberal church elite in the U.S."

Like the Roman Catholic Church, long term, the UMC seems bent on becoming a smaller, Africa based church. With anti-gay positions being the largest driver of Millennials from organized religion, expect the conservative remants of the UMC to shrink even more over time.

Kansas GOP Wants to Ban Same Sex Marriage

Survey after survey shows that younger voters across the country support same sex marriage.  Other surveys show that a majority of the 40% of Millennials who have walked away from religion to join the ranks of the "Nones" cite anti-gay extremism and homophobia as the leading motivation - the hypocrisy of evangelical Christians is not far behind - for leaving.  So what are Kansas Republicans doing?  Pushing a bill that would ban same sex marriages in that state.  With a new Democrat governor, the bill has little likelihood of becoming law, yet the Republicans continue to engage in this type of batshitery at the very time the GOP is hemorrhaging younger voters.  (Tennessee Republicans unsuccessfully pushed a similar bill in that state).  A piece in The Advocate looks at this insanity.  Here are excerpts:

Some Kansas legislators are pushing a bill that would classify same-sex marriages as “paody marriages” and prevent the state from recognizing them.

The bill has no chance of becoming law under the state’s new Democratic governor, who would undoubtedly veto it, plus it would be unconstitutional under the 2015 Supreme Court marriage equality ruling. But anti-LGBTQ politicians in Kansas are seeking to make same-sex marriage an issue as the legislature considers a measure to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, The Wichita Eagle reports.

“[Same-sex couples’] marriage probably doesn’t affect me — their union or whatever you want to call it. But in my opinion, they’re trying to force their beliefs on society,” Republican Rep. Randy Garber, the bill’s lead sponsor, told the paper. Garber’s legislation comes shortly after the introduction of a Tennessee bill that seeks to keep that state from recognizing same-sex marriages.

Garber acknowledged that calling same-sex unions “parody marriages” is “kind of harsh,” but he believes the only true marriages are male-female couplings. In addition to his measure to stop same-sex marriages, he is sponsoring another one that would create something called “elevated marriage” for opposite-sex couples and make it more difficult to get a divorce.

His legislation calls sexual orientation “mythology” and says it is different from race because “there are no ex-blacks but there are thousands of ex-gays.”

he Kansas legislature got its first two LGBTQ members in last year’s election, and they objected strongly to Garber’s move, as did activists.

Tom Witt, executive director of Equality Kansas, called Garber’s bills the “most vile, hateful and disrespectful legislation” he has seen during his career. “Every year, we see bills that restrict, remove, and limit the rights of LGBT Kansans, but never have we seen this level of extremist vitriol laid out in legislative language. These bills combined are 18 pages of insults and name calling,” he told the Eagle.
 NBC News has now reported that the language in Garber's bills is copied from drafts created by Chris Sevier, an anti-LGBTQ activist who filed lawsuits in several states seeking to marry his laptop computer. Sevier took credit in a Facebook post, but he declined comment to NBC on the matter, as did Garber. Bills with that language were introduced in Wyoming and South Caroline last year and went nowhere, NBC notes.
 The antidiscrimination legislation is sponsored by Ruiz and the legislature’s other new member from the LGBTQ community, Democratic Rep. Brandon Woodard. “I think the voters of Kansas have made it very clear that we should be open and inclusive to all Kansans,” Woodard, a gay man, told the paper. His bill, which would ban anti-LGBTQ discrimination in housing and employment, has many more cosponsors than Garber’s marriage bills.

Laura Kelly, the Democrat elected governor of Kansas last year, has signed an executive order banning discrimination against state employees on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, but Woodard’s bill would cover private companies as well.

The False Equivalency of "Outing" Lindsey Graham and the "Lavender Scare"

A piece in Politico tries, in my view, to falsely equate those who are insinuate or flat out state that Senator Lindsey Graham is a closeted gay - I've called him the Palmetto Queen myself - with those who hunted down and "outed" and fired gays back during the so-called "Lavender Scare" of the 1950's.  Society of today is far different than six decades ago, not the least because thanks to Lawrence v. Texas handed down in 2003, same sex relationships no longer carry the potential of a felony conviction.  Then of course, there is the legality of same sex marriage - something the far right wants to reverse despite public support - spousal benefits for same sex couples, the ability to file joint tax returns, and even full adoption rights for same sex couples in some states.  In short, outside of Christofascist circles and GOP politicians who prostitute themselves to them, the social stigma (or lack thereof) and legal jeopardy of being gay nowadays is in no way comparable to the 1950's and 1960's.  Thus, saying those speculating on which team Graham plays for are no better than J. Edgar Hoover - himself a closeted gay - is simply is simply not true.  That said, the piece does look at the ugly history of government persecution of gays.  Here are article highlights:

In March 1953, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover prepared a secret report for Sherman Adams, President Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff. The document concerned Charles “Chip” Bohlen, whom Eisenhower had nominated to succeed George F. Kennan as ambassador to the Soviet Union. A career diplomat, Bohlen had served as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s interpreter at the 1945 Yalta Conference, where the Allied powers ceded control of postwar Eastern Europe to Soviet Premier Josef Stalin. Bohlen’s involvement at Yalta made him suspect in the eyes of some Republicans, led by Senator Joe McCarthy, who tried to paint him as not only soft on the Soviets but also gay.

Washington at the time was in the grips not only of the Red Scare, but a more destructive (and less-remembered) “Lavender Scare.” In the popular imagination, communist disloyalty was intertwined with sexual immorality; communists were more likely to be “sexual deviants” and vice-versa. “I don’t say every homosexual is a subversive and I don’t say every subversive is a homosexual,” Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry had warned in 1950. “But a man of low morality is a menace in the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied up together.”

Bohlen, (who was, in fact, straight) was eventually confirmed as ambassador to the Soviet Union, and went on to have a long and distinguished Foreign Service career. He was later immortalized as one of the postwar “Wise Men” of American diplomacy.

Moral disgust was not the only consideration that made being gay a disqualifying trait for government service at the time; gays, it was widely believed, were also uniquely vulnerable to blackmail. So reprehensible was being gay, the thinking went, that a gay person would rather betray his country than risk exposure of his shameful secret.

Fast-forward over six decades to the present, and the same smear tactics are being employed, again in service of a dubious narrative involving supposed corruption of presumed gay people by a hostile foreign power. Except this time, the inquisitionists are not reactionary Republicans, but supposedly enlightened progressives.

Jon Cooper, chairman of a Democratic Super PAC which purports to be “the nation’s largest grassroots Resistance organization,” tweeted that “a Republican” had told him “he doubts [Graham] is kowtowing to Trump (and indirectly Putin) because he’s being blackmailed over his sexual orientation (an open secret) or even financial corruption. Rather, he thinks it probably involves some pretty serious sexual kink.” And that same day, MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle speculated, “It could be that Donald Trump or somebody knows something pretty extreme about Lindsey Graham.”

Last January, after Graham had positive words for Trump following a meeting with senators at the White House, comedian Chelsea Handler tweeted the following missive to her 8.3 million followers: “Hey, @LindseyGrahamSC what kind of #$%&-sucking video do they have on you for you 2 be acting like this? Wouldn’t coming out be more honorable?” She followed that up in October with, “If you’re wondering why Republicans took a sick day today, it’s probably because it’s #NationalComingOutDay. . . . And this week, the Washington Blade, the capital’s LGBT newspaper, put Graham’s smiling mug on the cover of its “50 Most Eligible Bachelors” issue.

[O]f all the Americans who did betray their country by committing espionage for a foreign power, there is not a single example of a gay person blackmailed into doing so. A 1991 study found that in the 117 spy cases discovered since World War II, only six involved gays, and in none of these was sexual orientation a deciding factor. That same year, asked about the impending outing of his spokesman, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney referred to the blackmail rationale as “an old chestnut” used to bar gay people unfairly from serving in sensitive government positions. To claim today, baselessly, that a closeted gay person is being blackmailed into working against his country, retroactively validates the Cold War persecution of gays, who could be denied security clearances until a 1995 Executive Order by Bill Clinton reversed Eisenhower’s mandate.

The sad irony is that the only informing some gay men and women did during this time was under duress from their own government, which pressured them into identifying fellow gay people so that they, too, could be purged.

In one of the few cases where the Soviets did try to blackmail a closeted gay man, their plans backfired. When the virulently anti-communist newspaper columnist Joe Alsop visited Moscow on a reporting trip in 1957, the KGB lured him into a honey trap with an attractive young agent and took photographs of the ensuing sexual encounter. Confronting Alsop with the dirty pictures, the KGB men demanded that he work on their behalf back in Washington. Yet rather than cower and do the Soviets’ bidding, Alsop archly asked for copies of the photos depicting him in flagrante delicto, hurried straight to the U.S. Embassy and revealed everything that had happened, including his history of gay experiences. Over the rest of his long career, despite knowing that the Soviets could have exposed him at any moment (and they tried), Alsop not only never softened his strident anti-communist views, he became even more assertive in espousing them.

It seems never to have entered the fevered imaginations of Graham’s antagonists that the reason he has changed his tune about Trump is not to protect the secret of his scandalous peccadilloes, but because of something even grubbier: politics. Graham is, after all, a Republican from a deep red state where Trump is popular with the people Graham needs to win re-election. But such quotidian explanations do not suit our increasingly conspiratorial times. . . . By stooping to gay baiting, the McCarthyism of the “Resistance” has come full circle.

It’s Dangerous to Forget about Mike Pence

With all the focus on Donald Trump and the FBI's launch of an investigation  of his possible role as an agent of Russia and his efforts to hide communications with Russia, including interpreter notes from one on one meetings with Vladimir Putin, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that a removal of Trump from office could potentially hand the White House to Mike Pence, provided, of course, Pence is not swept up into the effort to collude with Russia.  As noted a number of times before on this blog, Pence is about as extreme as one can get and has an ugly history of embracing discrimination, particularly anti-LGBT discrimination.  Moreover, like Rick Santorum and Ken Cuccinelli (who are a  little too hysterically anti-gay), Pence has all of the hallmarks of an extreme self-loathing closeted gay who believes attacks on the LGBT community are his best camouflage for his hidden "secret." His wife, Karen Pence, a/k/a mother per Pence himself, is not much better given her current work with a school that bans gay employees.  Thus, removing Trump who is demonstratively unfit for office could place someone equally unhinged in but a different way in a position to do great harm.  A piece in The Progressive looks at Trump's ugly history. Here are excerpts:

Since his Inauguration, Trump’s merry-go-round administration has been a consistent source of horror and amusement, most recently illustrated in Michaels Wolff’s expose, Fire and Fury. In the midst of the chaotic palace intrigue, one man seems to remain above the fray: Vice President Michael Richard Pence.

But it’s a bad idea to lose track of Mike Pence, particularly if you care about gay, lesbian, trans, and queer rights. In many ways, the Vice President has made attacking LGBTQ+ rights the cornerstone of his political career. And a look at his past crusades against this community leaves little room for doubt that he will continue that mission. 

As Vice President, he has made six tie breaking votes in Senate, more than Vice Presidents Al Gore and Joe Biden combined. He cast the final vote scrapping federal rules to protect consumers from predatory financial organizations, what Senator Elizabeth Warren called a “giant wet kiss to Wall Street.”

It was Pence’s vote that confirmed Trump nominee Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education and kickstarted a debate on Obamacare repeal. Most controversial, perhaps, was Pence’s approval of a bill to allow states to withhold federal funds for Planned Parenthood and other organizations providing reproductive healthcare, a longtime goal of Pence and his rightwing evangelical Christian allies.

Predictably, Pence used religious justification to push his agenda. “The day Obamacare passed was also a day of disappointment for the sanctity of life, but hope is finally shining through,” Pence said. “When this bill passes, it will be one of the defining victories for life.” According to a March 2017 poll, 75 percent of Americans, Republicans as well as Democrats, support the federal government’s continued funding of Planned Parenthood.

From early in his career, Pence has expressed outlier views. . . . . In an op-ed in 2000, Pence denied the correlation between smoking cigarettes and mortality. . . . . In similar fashion, Pence has denied global warming, citing “growing skepticism among scientists” about climate change and saying CO2 from fossil fuels can’t increase temperatures because it “is a naturally occurring phenomenon in nature.” He has also dismissed climate change as “an issue for the left."

But it is toward the gay community that Pence has expressed his most extreme views, so much so that Donald Trump once joked that Pence “wants to hang them all.”

In 2006, as head of the Republican Study Committee, a group of the most-conservative House members, he defended marriage as between a man and a woman and argued that any change to that threatens the stability of society.

In 2010, he opposed the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which barred military service people from openly identifying as gay, claiming the military was no place for “social experimentation.” The website for his 2000 congressional campaign asserted that funding for HIV prevention “should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.”

Pence gained infamy that same year for a pushing a bill to jail same-sex couples who applied for marriage licenses.

The passing of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was met with outrage by companies, celebrities, and thousands of Indiana residents. Angie’s List cancelled its $40 million expansion in Indianapolis, a move that would have brought a thousand new jobs to Indiana. New York, Washington, Connecticut, and Vermont all banned state-funded travel to Indiana. . . . Even the Republican mayor of Indianapolis, Greg Ballard, called on the legislature to repeal the bill, saying it “sends the wrong signal.”

Following the backlash, Pence signed a revised amendment to the bill, barring businesses from discriminating based on gender identity or sexual orientation. However, statewide laws concerning discrimination outside the workplace remained unchanged.

Pence’s dogged championing of “religious freedom” at the expense of civil rights for LGTBQ+ people poses equally dangerous threats for groups already very vulnerable to prejudice and violence.

In twenty-eight states, LGBTQ+ people don’t have anti-discrimination laws that protect them in the workplace, housing, and public accommodations.

And Pence remains dedicated to rolling back civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ people. He was behind the implementation of a transgender ban in the military, an effort subsequently blocked by federal judges. He also championed the transgender bathroom ban in public schools, a policy Trump later adopted.

A survey by the Human Rights Campaign released in January 2017 showed that 36 percent of transgender youth reported being personally bullied or harassed, and 56 percent had changed their self-expression or future plans since the election.  Just recently, on December 28, Kerrice Lewis, a lesbian woman of colour, was shot and burnt alive in the trunk of a car in Washington, D.C.

In pushing “religious freedom” at the explicit expense of this community’s safety and well-being, Mike Pence reveals the depth of his dangerous bias. A country that allows discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation, or gender identity is not a country with equal rights.

Ireland's Gay Prime Minister Blasts Catholic Church

There are few countries in which the Roman Catholic Church has fallen further than in Ireland.  Once a bastion of Catholicism that exported priests across the globe, attendance at mass has plummeted and scandal after scandal has rocked the nation as crimes and horrible mistreatment of individuals ranging from young altar boys to young unwed mothers and their babies have been revealed.  One has to wonder what possessed Pope Francis to visit Ireland to attend the World Council of Families -  a gathering that is anything but progressive and open to tolerance.  If Francis thought his visit would heal raw wounds, he seemingly was mistaken as Ireland's gay prime minister let loose on the Church's ugly history of abuse and wrong doing.  The Advocate looks at the comments of Ireland's "out" prime minister, Leo Varadkar as Francis stood by.  Here are excerpts::

In a Saturday speech referred to as "blistering" by The Guardian, Ireland's out prime minister, Leo Varadkar, highlighted the numerous scandals and abuses of the Catholic Church, as Pope Francis stood to his side.

The Dublin speech took place during the pontiff's first visit to Ireland in almost 40 years; he was there for the Church's World Meeting of Families. During Varadkar's speech, the prime minister repeatedly brought up the sexual abuse of children perpetuated by Catholic priests and made mention of a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report that detailed systemic clerical abuse.

Varadkar also spoke of the Church's forced adoptions of children from unwed mothers, a mass grave of infants recently found near a Catholic mother-and-baby home, and Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, where "fallen women" were housed and often subjected to horrors.

"I cannot fail to acknowledge the grave scandal caused in Ireland by the abuse of young people by members of the church charged with responsibility for their protection and education," Varadkar said. 

The failure of ecclesiastical authorities — bishops, religious superiors, priests and others —  adequately to address these repellent crimes has rightly given rise to outrage and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community. I myself share those sentiments."

Varadkar described "brutal crimes perpetrated by people within the Catholic church, and then obscured to protect the institution at the expense of innocent victims... stains on our state, our society and also the Catholic church. People kept in dark corners behind closed doors, cries for help that went unheard.”

Varadkar also spoke of a changed Ireland; one where homosexuality and abortion were illegal during the last papal visit. Now, Ireland is led by a gay man and grants women the right to make their own reproductive decisions.

The Irish people understand "that marriages do not always work, that women should make their own decisions, and that families come in many different, wonderful forms, including those headed by a grandparent, lone parent or same-sex parents, or parents who are divorced."

It is a speech that Francis very much needed to hear and which foretells what will happen to the Church if radical changes do not occur. Until bishops and cardinals are punished and removed from office (and not sent into retirement with plush perks) and the Church's stance on sex and sexuality leaves behind 12th century beliefs, the exodus of churchgoers will continue.  The Washington Post also looks at the meeting of Varadkar and Francis and the reality of a vastly changed Ireland:

On Saturday, Varadkar welcomed Pope Francis to Ireland, a nation that has radically changed since the last papal visit, in 1979. At that time, homosexuality was still a crime. Now, the country’s prime minister is gay. 

Varadkar is a distinct example of how what was once an overwhelmingly white, Catholic nation is now increasingly diverse and its laws increasingly secular. Ireland is the first country to have legalized same-sex marriage through a popular vote, and this year, the country repealed its restrictive abortion ban. Many see the country’s new policies and shifting demographics as evidence that the Irish are moving further and further away from the Catholic Church.
 And in his remarks in front of the pope Saturday, the prime minister said the Irish have “voted in our Parliament and by referendum to modernize our laws.” He said new policies reflect the country’s understanding that “marriages don’t always work, that women should make their own decisions, and that families come in many different wonderful forms including those headed by a grandparent, lone parent or same-sex partners or parents who are divorced and remarried.”

Brian Finnegan, editor of Ireland’s Gay Community News, said that the last time a pope visited, 39 years ago, Irish leaders were more likely to have said: “ ‘We wont have any contraception or allow people divorce or even talk of homosexuality,’ just ‘your eminence, you’re here, and we love you, and we love the church.' ”  “There would’ve been no defense at all,” he said.

That makes Varadkar’s meeting with the pope that much more symbolic. For many, an openly gay leader of a predominantly Catholic country meeting the leader of the Catholic Church, an institution that does not recognize same-sex marriage, would have once been unthinkable.

Varadkar had a brief meeting with the pope following his more public remarks Saturday. His spokesman told the Irish Times that he “said to the pope that there are huge numbers of people here who have faith in their heart but who feel excluded and alienated from the church because of what happened.” . . . . campaigners for sex abuse survivors said the pontiff had not gone far enough in taking responsibility for the Vatican’s role in covering up abuse at the hands of the clergy.

I do not envy Francis' situation, but clearly, more inaction and crocodile tears will not save the Church from the consequences of it many wrongdoings. 

Costa Rica's Supreme Court Strikes Down Same Sex Marriage Ban

While Donald Trump, his "Christian Taliban" Vice President, Mike Pence, and their Christofascists supporters are working to rescind same sex marriage equality or at a minimum turn it into a "separate but equal" status without the rights and benefits of heterosexual marriage, progress and equality are on the march  across other parts of the Western Hemisphere. Just this week the Supreme Court of Costa Rica struck down that country's ban on same sex marriage that had been orchestrated by the Catholic Church and evangelical Christian groups who believe their rights and beliefs supersede those of others and who rather than loving their neighbors per Christ's admonition, hate anyone who looks different than them or who holds different beliefs.   The Costa Rica ruling follows one earlier this year by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights which will pressure even reactionary Catholic Church bastions like Honduras to strike down religious based discriminatory laws.   Interestingly, Costa Rica's new president, Carlos Alvarado, campaigned on a pro-gay marriage platform and won.  Here are highlights via Reuters:

Costa Rica’s top court has ruled that a ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, a decision seen as a win for gay rights activists and welcomed by the country’s new president.

The Supreme Court gave lawmakers up to 18 months to legalize gay marriage, which has long been opposed by the Roman Catholic Church and evangelical groups in the Central American nation.

President Carlos Alvarado, who came to power earlier this year on a pro-gay rights platform, has publicly advocated same-sex marriage and vowed to implement the ruling.

“Our commitment to full equality remains intact,” he tweeted on Thursday. “We will continue to boost actions that guarantee no person will face discrimination for their sexual orientation or gender identity.”

The decision follows a judgment issued in January by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), the top rights body of the Americas based in Costa Rica.

It said its signatory member countries, including Costa Rica, must grant equal rights to same-sex couples, including the right to marry.

The change is likely to face stiff opposition from conservative and evangelical lawmakers in Costa Rica.

But Supreme Court judge Fernando Castillo told reporters after the ruling that the ban on gay marriage would automatically cease to exist if parliament failed to change the law by the deadline.

Many countries in mainly Catholic Latin America and the Caribbean ban same-sex marriage, but that is slowly changing.

Argentina, Colombia and Uruguay have all dropped their opposition in recent years.  “(To) those who are against this, we say live and let live,” said Castillo. “Many oppose for religious reasons, but the Bible says love your neighbor.”

As same sex marriage continues to spread across South and Central America, the America envisioned by Trump?pence and their toxic and hypocrisy-filled evangelical supporters will increasingly be on the wrong side of history.