Thursday Morning Male Beauty

Mormons Plan Mass Resignation Over Anti-Gay Policy

Homophobe - Dallas H. Oaks of the Church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

Perhaps Catholics can learn something from gay Mormons and their supporters.  In the wake of a cruel new policy that will bar children of gays from Mormon Church membership until they are 18 - and have disavowed their parents - many Mormons are planning a mass resignation from the Mormon Church on Saturday.  Faced with the outcry, the gathering of bitter old men who head up the Mormon Church are rumored to be rethinking their action. If one is leading a cult/clique, the last thing you want is mass resignations and the corresponding loss of funds from resigning members.  Another Washington Post story looks at the furor the mean old men in Salt Lake have brought down on themselves.  Here are excerpts:

Advocates for LGBT Mormons say they’re seeing an unprecedented uproar in the past week about a new church policy banning the baptism of same-sex couples’ children and declaring married gay couples apostates. Some longtime advocates say they know dozens of Mormons quitting over the new policy. A public group resignation is planned for Saturday and reports are surfacing that church leadership may already be preparing to tweak the controversial edict.

“I’ve seen lots of painful things, but nothing so widespread, in terms of the devastation and heartbreak. I personally talked to dozens of people who are walking away. And these aren’t people with LGBT ties. These are ardent, faithful, in-the-box believing Mormons who can’t abide this,” said Wendy Montgomery, an Arizona Mormon who has a 17-year-old gay son and who co-founded Mama Dragons, a group for church mothers with gay children.

When the group was founded four years ago it had six members. It now has more than 500. She worked to create groups like Sit With Me Sunday, a program that helps LGBT people who want to come to church but are afraid to connect with someone to take them. The volunteer running it shut it down last week after news broke of the new policy, Montgomery said. “She said, ‘It’s no longer safe to invite them. It’s better if we tell them to run.'”

Before the change, the church’s policy was that same-sex marriage might require discipline and it was usually left up to local leaders. Now that same-sex marriage is legal throughout the country, the church decided to identify those in a same-sex marriage as apostates, or people who renounce their faith. 

Rumors began this week that the church’s 15-man leadership — three in a body called The First Presidency and 12 in a lower-level unit called the Quorum of the Apostles — might change the document following the uproar.

The Salt Lake Tribute on Wednesday cited excommunicated activist John Dehlin as saying a major church governing group “sent out a memo to regional leaders, saying that ‘there will be additional clarification on these changes from the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve [Apostles] in the coming days,'” the Tribune quoted Dehlin as saying.

Former Mormons and others announced Wednesday that there will be a “mass resignation” from Mormonism Saturday at a Salt Lake City park. Critics of the church have in recent years occasionally held public “resignations,” emphasizing LDS bureaucracy that keeps people on the books until they formally quit and hoping to further their cause. 

A Utah lawyer told local station KIVI that he personally is helping more than 1,000 leave the church. You don’t need a lawyer to step away, but because the church is known for its record-keeping and keeping members on their books, some apparently enlist legal help.

Imagine if gay Catholics did the same type of mass resignations in front of  cathedrals around America and across Europe.  The media would eat it up and the PR for the Church would be devastating.  I for one would happily work to organize such events!  I hope the Mormon mass resignation effort is successful.

Homophobia and Hypocrisy at the Vatican

If one believes the Gospel stories, Christ challenged the hate, hypocrisy and self-aggrandizement of the  Jewish religious leader of his time and ultimately paid a high price on the cross. He rightly called out the self-anointed, falsely pious Pharisees and others who made the Jewish law into something ugly used to persecute and denigrate others, especially those who did not adhere to the legalism loved by the Pharisee crowd.  While by no means a Christ equivalent, Krzysztof Charamsa, a former official at Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — a/k/a the Inquisition has played a similar role and been booted from his position and attacked by the bitter old men who inhabit the Vatican, many of whom are closeted gays (or in some cases closeted until behind closed doors).  I applaud Charamsa's actions, although many gay Catholics do not.  Gay Catholics who in my view cannot let go of their own self-loathing and masochism that keeps them in an institution that despises them and denigrates them.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Charamsa's journey with which I can identify having been brought up Catholic and having remained in the Church far longer than I should have.  Here are article highlights:

Charamsa is unbowed. The church, he said, has deployed “Nazi words” against gays, and the time has come to respond. Referring to the 1969 New York riots that became a milestone in the American gay rights movement, he said, “The church needs a Stonewall.”

When Charamsa was young, the church’s teachings on homosexuality — something it calls an “intrinsic moral evil” — led him to personal torment and self-hate, he said. Today, he blames the church’s grip on largely Catholic Poland for a powerful strain of homophobia that still lingers there.
“It was the horrible problem of my life,” he said. “It was like hell. I prayed for years for God to take away this illness.”

His thinking had not changed, he said, when he began working at the Vatican in 2003, laboring in a mid-level administrative post and analyzing doctrinal papers. There are regular, if unofficial, social meetings of gay priests in Italy, including those from the Vatican, according to one gay priest who has attended them. But Charamsa says he was never part of that crowd.

Instead, until meeting Eduardo, he led a highly closeted life that allowed him to observe homophobia close up at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — once known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition. 

Inside its halls, Charamsa said, the issue of homosexuality “is only spoken about in jokes.” He compares it to the macho climate of, say, a sports team. Modern textbooks on human sexuality are rarely, if ever, studied. He said he saw careers destroyed after clerics appeared to get soft on gays. Suspicion of being gay, meanwhile, was reason enough to bar the promotions of priests to higher ranks.

Any move toward a more accepting stance, he said, was routinely stamped out. He recalls, for instance, an “internal persecution” of Bishop Piero Marini in 2013 after the Vatican official openly called for recognition of the moral value of same-sex unions. The Congregation, Charamsa said, insisted the bishop clarify true church teachings.

On the day in July 2013 when Pope Francis responded “Who am I to judge?” after being asked a question about gay priests, Charamsa said, there was an uproar within the Congregation. Its conservative prefect, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, had “only bad things” to say about the pope in response, Charamsa said.  The Vatican declined to comment on any of Charamsa’s allegations.

Today, he calls his highly public coming out a form of “protest,” one that came together recently after he accepted himself and came to feel that the church, not his sexual orientation, was the problem. He is now on a one-man mission to challenge its teachings — something he is doing in regular media interviews, a book he is penning, even a blunt letter to the pope in which he derided the church for its “diabolical instruction.” It is a series of decisions that have come with a high price.

Charamsa was evicted by the nun running the Rome convent where he had lived for years as a chaplain, he said. His brother’s children are being bullied at school, and his mother is facing pressure at her church in his native Poland, he added. The Vatican fired him on the spot, leaving him unemployed. And his bishop in Poland suspended him, stripping him of the right to wear the Roman collar and celebrate Mass.

Charamsa says that gay Catholics advocating less confrontational methods have thus far failed to produce results. He welcomes Francis’s more inclusive approach but also describes it as mostly “words.” Rather than being a product of his coming out, the lack of a new approach at the synod is the product of entrenched church thinking that needs to be more boldly challenged, he said.

I agree with him.  The Vatican needs to be strongly and aggressively challenged and efforts need to be made to convince gay Catholics, their friends and families to leave in droves, making it clear why they are leaving.  Similarly, any and all financial support of the Church and its affiliated entities needs to cease.  All of this will take time, but if one looks at the Vatican, one thing alone gets its attention and prompts change: loss of members and loss of revenues. The Millennials are leaving the Church in droves.  Others need to do likewise. The condemnation of the Church and its lies and hypocrisy also must not cease.

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White Supremacist Cults Are all the Rage in Parts of Southern Virginia.

Robert Doyle and Ronald Chaney

The Hampton Roads area of Southeast Virginia has its problems but compared to areas of the southern tier of the state to the west make Hampton Roads look like a center of the enlightened, rational, liberal universe.  White supremacy is alive and well in many of these areas and homophobia and anti-gay bigotry is likewise off the charts.   The Daily Beast looks at  recent arrests that ought to send shivers down one's back.   Not surprisingly, one of the white supremacy groups hails from near Lynchburg, Virginia, home of the always toxic and extreme Liberty University.   While the group mentioned purports to subscribe to Nordic pagan traditions, its views on blacks and gays (and Jews) differ little from those held by the Liberty University crowd.  Oh, and did I mention that these areas vote Republican?  Here are article excerpts:

Viking-inspired white supremacists trying to terrorize black Christians in the South: not as rare as you think.

News broke yesterday that the FBI arrested two young men under the suspicion that they were planning to start a race war by bombing black churches in their home state of Virginia. The men, Robert Doyle and Ronald Chaney, allegedly ascribe to an Icelandic pagan faith called Asatru that has a disturbingly large following among white supremacists.

Its defenders say the religion itself isn’t inherently bigoted. But many white supremacists find it appealing because, unlike Christianity, it isn’t influenced by Judaism. If you think the KKK is soft on the Jews because it’s Christian-friendly, Asatru might be for you.

The SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] notes that Odinism, which has ties to Asatru, played an important role in some corners of Nazism. 

“Its Nordic/Teutonic mythology was a bedrock belief for key Third Reich leaders,” the group noted in a 1998 write-up, “and it was an integral part of the initiation rites and cosmology of the elite Schutzstaffel, which supervised Adolf Hitler’s network of death camps.”
And they aren’t the only young white men to target black churches in Virginia.

In 2012, Maurice Thompson Michaely pleaded guilty to arson—specifically, to charges of Unlawfully Entering Property of Another with the Intent to Damage and Maliciously Destroying or Defacing Church Property, according to the Bristow Beat. Michaely tried to burn down a historic black church, the 135-year-old Mount Pleasant Baptist Church. The fire didn’t injure anyone since the building wasn’t occupied when he attempted to burn it down. However, the fire caused about $1 million of damage, according to ABC affiliate WJLA and he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison.

According to social media screenshots on the Fools of Vinland blog, Michaely goes by the name Hjalti and is part of a group based outside Lynchburg, Virginia., called Wolves of Vinland. . . . . Matthias Waggener, one prominent member of the group, described it as an “Odinic Wolfcult.”  He also said the group practices animal sacrifice.

And at least one prominent white supremacist, Jack Donovan, is affiliated with their group. Donovan, who recently spoke at the white supremacist National Policy Institute’s event in Washington, D.C., instagrammed a picture of a dead sheep, tagged #wolvesofvinland.  “Wolves and prospects preparing to butcher the sheep we sacrificed this afternoon at moot,” he wrote.

Animal sacrifice, Norse mythology, wolf-themed weekends—it all sounds like something out of a heavy metal music video or a Live Action Role Play convention. But as yesterday’s arrests evince, viking-inspired white supremacy is alive and well and weird in Southern Virginia.

For more on this frightening rising form of white supremacy, read the SPLC report here.

Bigoted Utah Judge Orders Child Removed from Same-Sex Parents

Johansen - the face of a bigot

America continues to have a huge problem of bigoted judges who allow their own prejudices and all too often religious beliefs to impact their rulings.  Rather than impartially apply the law and defer to legitimate expert knowledge, these individuals who are unfit for the bench apply their own religious beliefs (and often racial bigotry) to the detriment of litigants whom they disfavor.  In my own divorce, the presiding judge who is still on the bench - and a total cretin in my opinion - stated that being gay was a choice and therefore sought to punish me. Now, in Utah we see the same kind of religious based bigotry in the ruling of Judge Scott Johansen of the Seventh District Juvenile Court who ordered that a foster child be removed from the child's legally married foster parents.  Laughably, Johansen claimed he had "research" that showed that children fared better with heterosexual parents.  As regular readers know, the only research that finds that result is fraudulent Christofascist financed research that has been rejected by the federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.  The foster parents need to appeal and Johansen needs to be permanently removed from the bench. The Washington Blade looks at this batshitery.  Here are excerpts:

A same-sex couple in Utah is about to lose their foster child as a result of a state judge’s determination children don’t do as well in LGBT homes.

As local CBS affiliate KUTV first reported on Wednesday, April Hoagland and Beckie Peirce of Carbon County say the baby they’ve loved and raised for the last three months will be taken from their home and moved to an opposite-sex household.

Judge Scott Johansen of the Seventh District Juvenile Court ordered the child removed in seven days. According to the couple, the judge said he has research indicating children don’t fare as well in same-sex households, but hasn’t produced his findings.

“We’ve been told to care for this child like a mother, and I am her mother,” Hoagland says in the report. “That’s who she knows. And she’s just going to be taken away in seven days to another probably good loving home, but it’s not fair, and it’s not right, and it just hurts me really badly because I haven’t done anything wrong.”

It’s hard to imagine the judge would have any accurate research showing children are worse off with same-sex parents. Major medical and psychological organizations, including the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association, have concluded there’s no scientific basis for same-sex couples are less capable parents than straight couples, or that their children are less psychologically healthy and well adjusted.

According to KUTV, the couple is legally married, want to adopt the baby and plan to appeal the decision. The biological mother of the child reportedly has said she wants the child to remain with the same-sex couple. 

Again, Johansen needs to be removed from the bench and state judicial review boards need to make it clear that the moment a judge steps onto the bench, his or her religious beliefs and prejudices need to disappear.  Otherwise, they need to resign from the bench.  It is really that simple.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

Best Moments From Tuesday's GOP "Debate"

Last night saw another circus debate between the would be GOP 2016 presidential nominees.  It was a spectacle that ought to send chills down the spines of thinking Americans and could best be described as a plan for the road to serfdom for most Americans, the mass deportation of Hispanics, and more endless, losing wars in the Middle East.  Of course, the tax policy proposals all benefit the wealthy to the detriment of the majority of citizens.   While the hapless Jebbie Bush stood up to The Donald on immigration (Trumps insists that millions of Hispanics must be deported) at one point, overall, he looked weak and proved yet again that debates, even of the GOP type, are not his strong suit.  Mother Jones looks at the disturbing batshitery.  Here are highlights:

The Republican presidential candidates met for the fourth time Tuesday night, with a slightly less crowded debate stage after Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee were demoted to the JV event. With fewer candidates competing for speaking time, a few were able to shine through with the extra breathing room: Marco Rubio stuck to his well-rehearsed talking points, Ben Carson bypassed his biographical oversights, and Rand Paul awoke from his slumber in the previous debates (while Jeb Bush did not).

Here’s a roundup of the debate’s best moments:

No one wants to raise the minimum wage.  The debate started off with Fox’s Neil Cavuto highlighting New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's promise to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for public employees. The moderator asked the current front-runners if they'd like to see the federal minimum wage—currently just $7.25—increased.

Trump, Carson, and Rubio all quickly said that they don’t think the floor on wages needs to be any higher. "We don't win anymore," Trump bemoaned, reciting one of his favorite sayings. Why is that? "Taxes too high, wages too high."

Trump calls for another "Operation Wetback."  John Kasich attacked Trump’s plan to deport the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. "We all know you can't pick them up and ship them back across the border," he said. "It's a silly argument. It's not an adult argument. It makes no sense!"

But Trump defended his plan by citing an episode in American history: "Operation Wetback."
"Let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower...moved a million and a half illegal immigrants out of this country." Trump responded. "Moved them just beyond the border, they came back. Moved them again beyond the border, they came back. Didn't like it. Moved 'em waaaay south, they never came back. Dwight Eisenhower. You don't get nicer, you don't get friendlier. They moved 1.5 million people out. We have no choice. We. Have. No. Choice."

But the actual operation under Eisenhower in the 1950s was less than successful and very inhumane.

Ted Cruz dodges his own "oops" moment.  In 2011, Rick Perry sank his first ill-fated presidential run when he failed to name the three federal agencies he would eliminate, following his painful memory lapse with his now-famous "oops."  On Tuesday night, Ted Cruz could have had a similar moment. But he dodged it. When trying to name which five agencies he would eliminate, Cruz mentioned the Department of Commerce twice. "Five major agencies that I would eliminate," he declared. "The IRS, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, and HUD."  But did he say oops? No, he kept on going as if he hadn't just pulled a Perry.

Paul and Rubio go to war on military spending.  After keeping mostly quiet at the past few debates, Paul finally got a chance to go all-in on how he diverges from the rest of the field when it comes to foreign policy. "We have to decide what is conservative and what isn’t conservative," Paul interjected after Rubio touted his conservative credentials. Paul singled out Rubio’s tax plan, which includes a refundable tax credit, as well as Rubio’s hawkish approach to the military.  Rubio fought back. "I know Rand is a committed isolationist," Rubio said. "I'm not. I believe the world is a stronger and a better place when the united states is the strongest military power in the world." Paul wanted a debate. "Marco, Marco, how is it conservative—how is it conservative to add a trillion dollar expenditure to the federal government?" he shot back.

Bush grows a spine.  Trump came to the defense of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Syria, saying that Russia is going after ISIS. . . . Trump concluded that the United States shouldn't have to take on the international crisis alone. "We can't continue to be the policeman of the world," he said. "We owe $19 trillion, we have a country that's going to hell, we have an infrastructure that's falling apart. Our roads, our bridges, our schools, our airports, and we have to start investing money in our country."  Enter Bush. "Donald's wrong on this," he said. "He is absolutely wrong on this. We're not going to be the world's policeman, but we sure as heck better be the world's leader."

Carson has a plan to make "global jihadists" look like "losers."  Carson jumped into a foreign policy conversation, veered off to discuss "global jihadists," and continued to describe what sounded like another invasion of Iraq—. . . . 'How do we make them look like losers?' Because that’s the way that they’re able to gather a lot of influence."  He continued, "I think in order to make them look like losers, we have to destroy their caliphate. And you look for the easiest place to do that, it would be in Iraq. Outside of Anbar in Iraq there’s a big energy field—take all of that land from them. We could do that I believe fairly easily, . . .

A piece in Slate summarizes the GOP contenders' lack of concern for ordinary Americans:

[T]he GOP contenders were out of step with the actual economic needs of ordinary Americans. Each candidate talked about relief for workers and families, but outside of Rubio’s child tax credit, few offered it. Instead, candidates came out against raising the minimum wage, called for a new gold standard for currency, and pushed plans for massive upper-income tax cuts. Unlike the first Democratic debate—when Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb, and Lincoln Chaffee tusseled over college affordability and health care costs—there was little in the Republican debate that spoke to the challenges of ordinary people  rather than businesses.

Why Society is Responsible for the Sins of Religion

I often complain of the undeserved deference given to religion in America.  The complaint also applies to other nations as well, but of the modern industrial nations America alone has the strongest fixation of hanging onto discredited religious beliefs and institutions.  True, most of us - especially in older generations - were brainwashed growing up in pews across the country, but at some point one needs to grow up and open their eyes.  Most of us grow up being fed with the Santa Claus myth, but at some point we acknowledge that the story line is untrue and that adults have misled us.  The same needs to happen with religion in general and denominations that preach division and contempt for others in particular and demand exalted respect for themselves.  A column in the New York Times from last week looks at the horrible consequences of giving undue respect to religious and clergy.  While focused on the Roman Catholic Church, the piece could just as easily be about the Southern Baptist Convention which likewise has a huge problem of sexual abuse by clergy.  Here are column highlights:

It’s fashionable among some conservatives to rail that there’s insufficient respect for religion in America and that religious people are marginalized, even vilified.

That’s bunk. In more places and instances than not, they get special accommodation and the benefit of the doubt. Because they talk of God, they’re assumed to be good. There’s a reluctance to besmirch them, an unwillingness to cross them.

The new movie “Spotlight,” based on real events, illuminates this brilliantly.

“Spotlight” — which opens in New York, Los Angeles and Boston on Friday and nationwide later this month — chronicles the painstaking manner in which editors and writers at The Boston Globe documented a pattern of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests and the concealment of these crimes by Catholic leaders.

[I]t isn’t about journalism. Or, for that matter, Catholicism.  It’s about the damage done when we genuflect too readily before society’s temples, be they religious or governmental. It’s about the danger of faith that’s truly blind.

It takes place in 2001 and 2002, and that time frame itself is a remarkable reflection of how steadfastly most Americans resist any intrusion into religious groups, any indictment of religious officials. 

“Spotlight” is admirably blunt on this point, suggesting that the Globe staff — which, in the end, did the definitive reporting on church leaders’ complicity in the abuse — long ignored an epidemic right before their eyes.

Why? For some of the same reasons that others did. Many journalists, parents, police officers and lawyers didn’t want to think ill of men of the cloth, or they weren’t eager to get on the bad side of the church, with its fearsome authority and supposed pipeline to God.

“Spotlight” lays out the many ways in which deference to religion protected abusers and their abettors. At one point in the movie, a man who was molested as a boy tells a Globe reporter about a visit his mother got from the bishop, who was asking her not to press charges.

“She put out freakin’ cookies,” the man says.  When the cookies finally went away, many Catholic leaders insisted that the church was being persecuted, and the crimes of priests exaggerated, by spiteful secularists.

But if anything, the church had been coddled, benefiting from the American way of giving religion a free pass and excusing religious institutions not just from taxes but from rules that apply to other organizations.

A 2006 series in The Times, “In God’s Name,” noted that since 1989, “more than 200 special arrangements, protections or exemptions for religious groups or their adherents were tucked into congressional legislation, covering topics ranging from pensions to immigration to land use.”

To cloak sexual abuse and shield abusive priests, Catholic leaders and their lawyers routinely leaned on the church’s privileged status, invoking freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, and the secrecy of the confessional. They thus delayed a reckoning.

“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one,” says a character in “Spotlight.” Indeed it does: a village too cowed, and a village too credulous.

We all need to grow up, open our eyes and demand tat the special privileges and exemptions enjoyed by churches and religious organizations (and their often charlatan leaders) end.  If they cannot operate and survive under the dame rules and tax policies as other institutions, then the deserve to wither and die.

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