Sunday Morning Male Beauty

Salt Lake Tribune Slams Anti-Gay Judge

I previously noted the anti-gay bigotry of Utah judge who ordered a foster child removed from a legally married lesbian couple.  Judge Scott Johansen cited utterly discredited "research" bankrolled by and orchestrated by anti-gay "Christian" organizations.  Johansen chose to disregard the rulings of the 9th Circuit, 10th Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court that found his cited research to be wrong.  Now, after widespread outrage and a damning denunciation in the Salt Lake Tribune, Johansen is apparently rethinking his bigoted ruling.  As a had argued, the Tribune editorial indicates that Johansen's remaining on the bench should now be in doubt.  Coupled with some backtracking and PR damage control by the Mormon Church in the wake of its recent anti-gay guidelines, the last week has proved to be bad news for the Utah religious extremists.  Here are editorial highlights: 

Spare a thought, if you will, for Judge Scott Johansen.  The juvenile court judge in Utah's 7th District over the last week was the target of local despair, official puzzlement and national derision when he, on his own initiative, moved to undo the proper placement of an infant child with a state-approved foster family because the big-hearted parents involved happen to be two women. Two women who are legally married to one another.

The negative reactions were correct. The judge's order was wrong. The foster parents and the relevant state agencies are correct to be appealing it. The foster parents' plan to adopt the child should proceed with all deliberate speed.

The whole matter should be resoundingly disposed of just as soon as the relevant appeals court can sweep Johansen's bigoted order aside.

And, despite the fact that the judge is apparently rethinking his position, Johansen's continued position on the Carbon County bench should also be in question.

But, remember, it wasn't all that long ago that the transparently bogus reasoning Johansen claimed to be relying on in ordering the 9-month-old baby girl removed from her foster home and placed with "a duly married, heterosexual foster-adoptive couple" was part and parcel of the state's case against the acceptance of same-sex marriage in Utah.

As recently as the summer of 2014, the state of Utah, Gov. Gary Herbert and Attorney General Sean Reyes were trying to convince the local federal court and, having failed there, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, that same-sex marriage should be banned because any children raised in a household so configured would be at a serious disadvantage compared to those brought up in families headed by heterosexual parents.

The state backpedaled slightly on that claim as the appeal went along. But the opinion of the 10th Circuit went out of its way to shoot it down anyway, calling it, "an argument based only on pure speculation and conjecture."

Other appeals courts and, eventually, the Supreme Court of the United States, also rejected the case against raising children in same-sex households as being without scientific or legal merit. The state of Utah has complied.

Thus were all involved apparently stunned at Johansen's Nov. 10 ruling, an order that violated not only the Supreme Court's rulings but also current state law and administrative practice, which now allow foster placement in, and adoption by, legally married same-sex couples.

After the fallout, which ranged from tears in the home of the foster parents to a raised eyebrow by Herbert — who called the judge's ruling an example of improper "activism on the bench" — Johansen seems to have given the matter more thought.

Instead of ordering the child removed by Nov. 17, he has left the status quo in place through a hearing now set for Dec. 4. If he does anything other than fully repudiate his previous order, with a lot of apologies to all concerned, the state should have the appeal already drafted and ready to file.

This judge's retrograde opinion on the legal acceptance of same-sex marriage in case of foster care and adoption, if not fully squelched, threatens to spill over into other matters, such as custody disputes. That is particularly a problem given the recent policy statement from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints denying full church participation to children living with same-sex parents. 

Judge Johansen has created an opportunity for himself to right this wrong. If he doesn't, other state officials must do it for him. Immediately.

Ouch!!

Ted Cruz Uses Paris Attacks to Rally Hate Group Members

A column in the New York Times looks at the sicken rush by those on America's far right to capitalize on and self-promote through the horrid attacks in Paris on Friday.  As the column notes, the Paris massacres are used by the ugly "conservative" elements as springboards to attack Barack Obama on both foreign policy and climate change, advocate for even looser gun control laws, and, of course, attack Muslims across the board.  Perhaps one of the biggest hypocrites of all is would be presidential nominee Ted Cruz who used the terrible events to stir up and rally a fundraising gathering for The Family Foundation ("TFF"), a hate group in all but formal designation, that wants to impose the Christian version of Sharia Law on Virginia and, after that, all of America.  Sickeningly, Cruz uses the acts of one set of religious extremists to encourage acts and policies from another religious extremist group.  The Richmond Times Dispatch looks at Cruz's disgusting opportunism to promote himself and the Christofacists' message of hate through fear mongering before the bodies on the dead in Paris are barely cold.  Sadly, the piece fails to convey the true ugliness or extremism of TFF.  Here are highlights:

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in Richmond to boost his presidential bid in the commonwealth, said Saturday that the terrorist attacks in Paris underscore the threat the Islamic State poses to the United States.

“At the same, these terror attacks underscore the menace that we face,” he continued. “President Obama may think that we’re not at war, but the radical Islamic terrorists who attacked Paris yesterday, they didn’t get the message. They’re at war with us.”

Cruz added: “This attack that we just saw in Paris, mark my words, ISIS intends for this to come here.”

He criticized the number of airstrikes being devoted to combating the Islamic State — often called ISIS or ISIL — in the Middle East, advocating for “overwhelming air power.” Cruz also said the U.S. should be arming the Kurds with sufficient firepower and modern weapons to fight ISIS, saying they are, in “a very practical sense, our boots on the ground.”

Despite conservative support, Cruz would have an uphill general election fight in Virginia if the election were held today.

A Christopher Newport University poll taken in mid-October had Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton defeating him in Virginia, 49 percent to 41 percent.

Among fellow Republicans, Cruz was in sixth place in Virginia, polling at 5 percent, behind Donald Trump (23), Carson (17), Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida (14), former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina (13) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (9).

Cruz could not have picked a better event to corral conservatives than the annual gala of the Family Foundation — a faith-based, socially conservative nonprofit “pro-family public policy” organization that wields considerable influence in the General Assembly, advocating for religious freedom in public life and against abortion and gay marriage, among other issues.

More than 1,000 people attended the event, which attracted a constellation of current and former conservative stars, including U.S. Rep. Dave Brat, R-7th; former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli; and former Gov. Bob McDonnell, who sported a beard.

Attendees paid $99 a ticket, with sponsorships costing $400 to $25,000 for the organization’s main fundraiser for the year.

The gala has been a popular stop for conservatives seeking to curry favor in Virginia, having hosted several members of the GOP’s 2016 presidential field, long before they became candidates.

TFF promotes license to discriminate laws, anti-gay discrimination by agencies receiving taxpayer funds, describes anti-gay  non-discrimination laws as "elevat[ing] sexual behavior to a protected class," disseminates every conceivable lie about LGBT individuals, and is vitriolic in its animus towards Muslims.  In addition, behind what much of TFF does are dog whistle calls to racists and white supremacists.  Personally, I am dumbfounded that the Southern Poverty Law Center has not give TFF an official hate group designation.  

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

Don't Criticize France When Bush and Cheney Ignored 9-11 Warnings

The death toll in Paris is not even final, yet many on the far right in America's chattering class and GOP politicians are already insanely laying blame on Barack Obama, french gun control laws, and any number of irrelevant things - liberals, college students, the list is nothing short of crazy.   Yet through all of this is a total failure to admit that the more serious failure to stop Islamic terrorism occurred on the watch of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who remain darlings of the far right.  Making all of this far worse is new information that makes it painfully clear that Bush and Cheney were warned and did nothing. A piece in Salon looks at the shocking failure of Bush/Cheney and they failure to hold them accountable (and let's not forget the war crimes they committed).  Here are column highlights:

Documentarian Chris Whipple has some new bombshell revelations about how the Bush administration ignored the advance warnings of 9/11 in story for Politico, “‘The Attacks Will Be Spectacular,’” a spin-off of his documentary, “The Spymasters,” set to air this month on Showtime, in which he interviews all 12 living former CIA directors.

Whipple’s most stunning revelations revolve around a July 10 meeting that’s been mentioned by others in books before—Bob Woodward, George Tenet, Condi Rice—but always in a manner that drastically underplays the urgency of CIA’s warnings, and how much they had to go on, according to Whipple’s new information:

By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.” “There were real plots being manifested,” Cofer’s former boss, George Tenet, told me in his first interview in eight years. “The world felt like it was on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July, the threat continues to rise. Terrorists were disappearing [as if in hiding, in preparation for an attack]. Camps were closing. Threat reportings on the rise.”

Finally, things boiled over:

That morning of July 10, the head of the agency’s Al Qaeda unit, Richard Blee, burst into Black’s office. “And he says, ‘Chief, this is it. Roof’s fallen in,’” recounts Black. “The information that we had compiled was absolutely compelling. It was multiple-sourced. And it was sort of the last straw.”

Tenet called Rice for an immediate meeting with her and her team—Bush was out of town:

“Rich [Blee] started by saying, ‘There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.’” [Condi said:] ‘What do you think we need to do?’ Black responded by slamming his fist on the table, and saying, ‘We need to go on a wartime footing now!’”

But nothing happened. “To me it remains incomprehensible still,” Black told Whipple. “I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It’s kind of like The Twilight Zone.”

It was not just a failure to respond to warnings, however. There was a broader refusal to even consider thinking proactively. Along these lines, Whipple writes more broadly about Tenet and Black’s plan to “end the al Qaeda threat” with a combined military/CIA campaign “getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.” They pitched the plan in spring of 2001, according to Whipple, “‘And the word back,’ says Tenet, ‘was “we’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking.”’ (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they’d been warned.)”

Black chalks this up to the Bush team being stuck in the past, thinking of terrorists as “Euro-lefties,” but there was a deeper story, with more to the state of denial than Whipple discusses, since the Bush team was also actively fending off dealing with the recommendations of bipartisan Hart-Rudman Commission (officially the “U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century”). It had warned that “Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.”

Not only did Hart-Rudman see terrorist attacks as a possibility, it highlighted five key areas for reform, the first of which was “ensuring the security of the American homeland.” It regarded a 9/11-style attack as so likely that defending against it should be a top priority in rethinking our entire approach to national security.

" . . . EIGHT Benghazi investigations yet Bush WH sat on its hands while bin Laden got ready to kill 3K Americans,” Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert tweeted. “if this story were abt Benghazi, GOP would introduce Obama impeachment proceedings today,” he followed up. Boehlert’s point is obviously valid, but even more troubling is how the lack of accountability has made things so much worse, actually crippling our ability to win the war on terror.

The failure to hold anyone accountable for 9/11 is inextricably intertwined with the broader failure to go back and rethink fundamental questions on all aspects of national security—something that was obviously needed at the time, and that remains imperative still.

Why Is the Media Ignoring Ted Cruz's Embrace of 'Kill the Gays'?

Ted Cruz attends "Kill the Gays" gathering

Even before I learned of the horrors occurring in Paris yesterday where we have again seen the ugly finger prints of fundamentalist religion, I had planned to write about the American media's silence on the the attendance of several GOP presidential nominee candidates at the falsely named National Religious Liberties Conference where the execution of gays was called for numerous times.   Imagine if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders attended an event where the murder of Christians (or blacks or Jews) was advocated - the media would be beside itself and the coverage would have been non-stop.   But the advocating of the murder of gays bu the "godly folk" gets almost a free pass as do the GOP contenders who attended.   Yes, the GOP candidates are all claiming that they did not know about the agenda of some of the event hosts - even though in Ted Cruz's case he had been asked about the very issue BEFORE he attended the event - but all that proves is either (i) they support the execution of gays, (ii) they are liars, or (iii) that their campaigns are so poor at vetting events that the candidates are too incompetent to ever occupy the White House.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at this disturbing near silence.  Here are highlights:

Last weekend Senator Ted Cruz, along with fellow GOP presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, spoke at a conference in Des Moines headed up by a man who advocates the execution of gay people -- per his interpretation of the bible -- and who made his call for mass extermination once again, onstage at the event, the National Religious Liberties Conference. Pastor Kevin Swanson has said in the past that Christians should attend gay weddings and hold up signs telling the newly married gay and lesbian couples that they "should be put to death." He was an advocate of Uganda's infamous "Kill the Gays" bill, which he saw as a "model."

At the confab over the weekend, where he introduced Huckabee, Jindal and Cruz to the audience -- and where Ted Cruz's father, Rafael Cruz, an anti-gay Tea Party crusader, was a star speaker -- he reiterated his death penalty call . . .

On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, using extensive clips of video of the speech that had been posted by the indispensable Right Wing Watch, covered the conference in depth, and was rightly horrified that it even took place and that presidential candidates were there.

"This is a political event. This is a Republican presidential candidates' event," Maddow said. "It really was a 'kill-the-gays' call to arms. This was a conference about the necessity of the death penalty as a punishment for homosexuality."

But except for scattered online media coverage and blog posts, that was it. CNN's Jake Tapper asked Cruz if it was appropriate to speak at the conference before the event -- and Cruz dodged the question, claiming to know nothing of the pastor's views, and spinning back to religious people supposedly being under attack -- but there was no coverage I could find on CNN after the conference and focused on this evangelical leader who called for a future genocide after introducing presidential candidates who lauded him. As far as I can tell, no broadcast networks or major American newspaper covered the blood-curdling speech in which several times Swanson said the punishment for homosexuality is the death penalty. 

It's 2015 and much of the media seem to accept, still, that LGBT people can be talked about this way at an event attended by presidential candidates and that it's not news. They view it as par for the course, religious conservatives doing what they do. It's as if they have blinders on. Indeed, if Ted Cruz -- or Huckabee or Jindal -- attended an event at which the host hinted at mass murder of Jews, African-Americans or any other group it would be a massive media story. He'd be forced to answer questions about it, at debates (and it didn't come up at the last debate), in press conferences and in interviews non-stop. 

Swanson may not be Huckabee's, Jindal's or Cruz's own pastor, but they attended a hate conference organized by Swanson, who introduced them onstage, in the middle of a presidential primary race. The fact that it seems to be viewed as just another ho-hum campaign stop suggests we've not come as far on LGBT right as we all like to tell ourselves.

Hate flourishes when not challenged and condemned.  Just look at ISIS.   What is frightening about Swanson and the tacit endorsement of his views by Cruz and the other GOP candidates is that it sets the stage for some Christian fundamentalist to decide to put the call to murder into action thinking, just like the murderers in Paris, that they are doing god's work.  And most of the American media will be complicit in it because the haters were allowed to go unchallenged.  And people wonder why I hold "journalists" in low regard?

Hollande Blames ISIS for ‘Act of War’ on Paris

With ISIS now claiming responsibility for the horrific attacks in Paris yesterday that so far have taken 127 lives, in my view, it is time to treat the foul members of ISIS for what they are: savage rabid animals that need to be exterminated just like a rabid dog.  It is also time to admit that religion - and I mean ALL religion - is ultimately a great evil and that the "deeply religious" no matter their faith tradition suffer from deep and often dangerous psychological issues.  Nothing else other than psychological illness explains clinging to religious traditions that trace back to ignorant unknown authors or, in the case of "The Prophet" a likely psychotic.  It will be easy for many on the far right to attempt to single out Islam as the problem, yet just last weekend we had GOP presidential nominees, including Ted Cruz, attending a hate fest where the execution of gays was promoted repeatedly.  ISIS is an evil, but so is fundamentalist Christianity and both religious factions are rebelling against modernity itself which threatens their increasingly unsustainable fairy tale belief systems.   The New York Times looks at the horrible events in Paris.  Here are excerpts:

President François Hollande called the terrorist attacks that killed 127 people in Paris on Friday night an “act of war,” and blamed the slaughter on the Islamic State.

“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” Mr. Hollande said from the Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”

The Islamic State on Saturday claimed responsibility for the attacks, calling them “miracles” in a statement released by one of its publications and distributed on Twitter — a claim that could not be independently verified.

The authorities continued to look for possible accomplices of the eight attackers known so far, all of whom died on Friday: seven by detonating suicide bombs and one in a shootout with the police at a concert hall, the Bataclan, where gunmen methodically killed at least 80 people.

Dozens of others died in apparently coordinated attacks outside the Stade de France, where the French and German soccer teams were playing an exhibition match, and four other restaurants and bars in the city. Nearly 200 others were wounded, at least 80 of them in critical condition, French television reported.

Witnesses on French television said the scene at the concert hall, which can seat as many as 1,500 people, was a massacre, describing how gunmen with automatic weapons shot bursts of bullets into the crowd.  “What you are doing in Syria, you are going to pay for it now,” one of the gunmen shouted, a witness said.

The main shooting broke out at around 9 p.m. at the Bataclan, where the American rock band Eagles of Death Metal was among those playing.  A witness told BFM television that he heard rounds of automatic rifle fire and someone shouting “Allahu akbar!” at the Bataclan.

Unlike the attacks against Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January, terrorism experts said, the attacks on the targets on Friday had no apparent rationale. Instead, assailants appeared to strike at random in hip neighborhoods on a Friday night when many people would be starting to enjoy the weekend.

“It’s a Friday night, and there’s a lot of people out, a lot of tourists out,” said a senior European counterterrorism official. “If you want maximum exposure, you do it like this, in the dark, when it’s scarier and more difficult for police to act.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in my view, summed up what this is really all about:

“Those who we mourn were murdered in front of cafes, in restaurants, in a concert hall or on the open street. They wanted to live the life of free people in a city that celebrates life,” . . . . . “And they met with murderers who hate this life of freedom.”

Contrast Merkel's statement with that in the purported ISIS statement:

“Today brothers from all across the world set foot in Gaul and remind the kaffir (disbelievers) in dur Al Kuffr (the land of disbelievers) that we live beside you,”

Why Paris?   Because it symbolizes everything that fundamentalist Islam (and Christianity) is not and that terrifies the fundamentalist religious extremists of both religions.  Paris is an educated, secular, multi-racial city where logic and enlightenment are respected and the ignorance of religion is increasingly disregarded and headed toward the trash heap of history where it belongs.  It is the antithesis of everything ISIS stands for, including the embrace of Medieval religious fundamentalism.  P.S. I am part French, so this is personal to me for that reason as well.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

GOP Establishment in Near Panic Over Trump and Carson

The so-called Republican Party establishment cynically welcomed the Christofascists and white supremacist crowd into the party base with the short term view of winning elections by catering to the ugliest elements of society.  Now, that same crowd is in a near panic over the fact that they may have to lie in the bed they shortsightedly made by allowing the crazies and haters to hijack the party base, driving sane and moderate voters to flee the party in droves (I and my extended family all fled the asylum).  The shortsightedness - or perhaps hubris in thinking that they could control the swamp fever addled  base - of the establishment set the stage for the candidacies of Donald Trump and Ben Carson.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the GOP establishment's belated consideration of the monster it created.  Here are excerpts:

Less than three months before the kickoff Iowa caucuses, there is growing anxiety bordering on panic among Republican elites about the dominance and durability of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and widespread bewilderment over how to defeat them.

Party leaders and donors fear that nominating either man would have negative ramifications for the GOP ticket up and down the ballot, virtually ensuring a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency and increasing the odds that the Senate falls into Democratic hands.

The party establishment is paralyzed. Big money is still on the sidelines. No consensus alternative to the outsiders has emerged from the pack of governors and senators running, and there is disagreement about how to prosecute the case against them. Recent focus groups of Trump supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire commissioned by rival campaigns revealed no silver bullet.

“The rest of the field is still wishing upon a star that Trump and Carson are going to ­self-destruct,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, a former adviser to 2012 nominee Mitt Romney. But, he said, “they have to be made to self-destruct. . . . Nothing has happened at this point to dislodge Trump or Carson.”

According to other Republicans, some in the party establishment are so desperate to change the dynamic that they are talking anew about drafting Romney — despite his insistence that he will not run again. Friends have mapped out a strategy for a late entry to pick up delegates and vie for the nomination in a convention fight, according to the Republicans who were briefed on the talks, though Romney has shown no indication of reviving his interest.

For months, the GOP professional class assumed Trump and Carson would fizzle with time. Voters would get serious, the thinking went, after seeing the outsiders share a stage with more experienced politicians at the first debate. . . . . None of that happened, of course, leaving establishment figures disoriented. 

“You have a lot of people who were told that if we got a majority in the House and a majority in the Senate, then life was gonna be great,” she [Nikki Haley] said in an interview Thursday. “What you’re seeing is that people are angry. Where’s the change? Why aren’t there bills on the president’s desk every day for him to veto? They’re saying, ‘Look, what you said would happen didn’t happen, so we’re going to go with anyone who hasn’t been elected.’ ”

There are similar concerns about Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who is gaining steam and is loathed by party elites, but they are more muted, at least for now.

[T]he party establishment’s greatest weapon — big money — is partly on the shelf. Kenneth G. Langone, a founder of Home Depot and a billionaire supporter of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, said he is troubled that many associates in the New York financial community have so far refused to invest in a campaign due to the race’s volatility. . . . . “People don’t want to write checks unless they think the candidate has a chance of winning.”

“I’m very worried that the Republican-base voter is more motivated by anger, distrust of D.C. and politicians and will throw away the opportunity to nominate a candidate with proven experience that can win.” 

The apprehension among some party elites goes beyond electability, according to one Republican strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the worries.

“We’re potentially careening down this road of nominating somebody who frankly isn’t fit to be president in terms of the basic ability and temperament to do the job,” this strategist said. “It’s not just that it could be somebody Hillary could destroy electorally, but what if Hillary hits a banana peel and this person becomes president?”

Angst about Trump intensified this week after he made two comments that could prove damaging in a general election. First, he explained his opposition to raising the minimum wage by saying “wages are too high.” Second, he said he would create a federal “deportation force” to remove the more than 11 million immigrants living in the United States illegally.

“To have a leading candidate propose a new federal police force that is going to flush out illegal immigrants across the nation? That’s very disturbing and concerning to me about where that leads Republicans,”

“If we don’t have the right [nominee], we could lose the Senate, and we could face losses in the House. Those are very, very real concerns. If we’re not careful and we nominate Trump, we’re looking at a race like Barry Goldwater in 1964 or George McGovern in 1972, getting beat up across the board because of our nominee.”  

These "elites" should have seen the likely consequences of allowing those detached from any form of objective reality  taking over the party based.  Instead, they merely looked at the short term.  Now they need to face the results of their own blindness and stupidity.  Karma can be a real bitch.

 

Christofascists Now Target Dallas Non-Discrimination Ordinance

Flush with victory in Houston where they overturned a non-discrimination ordinance that protected LGBT citizens - and many other categories of residents - the Christofascist hate merchants now plan to attack Dallas' non-discrimination ordinance.  One has to wonder if LGBT activists learned anything from their poorly run campaign to protect the Houston ordinance.  On also has to wonder where the IRS is in yanking the tax exempt status of churches that actively sought to impact legislation in direct contravention of the bans of such activity in Section 501(3)(c) of the Internal Revenue Code.  As noted often on this blog, there are few forces more evil in the world than religion be it murder and mayhem under ISIS or the systematic denigration and stigmatization of other done by the "godly folk" in America.  Note how these foul individuals equate restrictions on their ability to mistreat others as a "threat to freedom."  The New Civil Rights Movement looks at this new effort by the hate merchants.  Here are excerpts:

A week after scoring a major victory in Houston, anti-LGBT groups and Republican Texas lawmakers are threatening to try to overturn Dallas' 13-year-old nondiscrimination ordinance, which the City Council unanimously amended Tuesday to strengthen transgender protections. 

The Dallas City Council's vote came just one week after Houston voters overwhelmingly rejected an Equal Rights Ordinance, or HERO, based largely on the debunked "transgender bathroom myth" — with opponents falsely claiming the measure would lead to sexual predators entering women's restrooms to prey on victims.

In the wake of the Houston vote, LGBT advocates said they feared anti-LGBT groups would attempt to replicate their fear-mongering Houston strategy in other places across the country, and now it appears their first target could be Dallas. However, Dallas has a significantly higher bar than Houston for repealing ordinances by referendum, which would make opponents job that much harder.

The anti-LGBT hate group Texas Values, which was part of the anti-HERO campaign, issued a statement Tuesday calling the Dallas ordinance “a threat to safety and freedom.” 

“This Dallas bathroom ordinance will allow men into women’s bathrooms and that’s why the Dallas City Council is deliberately trying to avoid the people," Texas Values President Jonathan Saenz said.

The Texas Pastor Council, which was behind the petition drive and lawsuit to get HERO on the ballot in Houston, said in an email that the ordinance "removes the doors of women’s restrooms, showers and locker rooms in Dallas, as well as criminalizes businesses, employees as well as eventually, churches who attempt to keep men out.”

"We will work with Dallas pastors to determine how to appropriately respond to the wholesale catering by City Council to the radical, anti-faith, anti-family agenda of the LGBT Human Rights Campaign,' said Dave Welch, executive director of the Texas Pastor Council.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings noted that the ordinance, first approved by the council in a 13-2 vote in 2002, already prohibited discrimination against transgender people in employment, housing and public accommodations. However, gender identity was included under the definition of sexual orientation. The amendments approved Tuesday list gender identity and expression alongside sexual orientation and more clearly define the terms.

Rawlings also noted that in 2014, voters approved an amendment to the Dallas charter, by a margin of 77 percent, prohibiting discrimination against LGBT city employees.

I hate to say it, but I long for the day when Christianity is a dead religion.  As for the "good Christians," they need to get off their asses and loudly condemn their toxic co-religionists otherwise their churches deserve to die as well.