Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

Vatican Cardinal Guilty On Multiple Child Sex Charges

Pope Francis with Cardinal George Pell.

The already besieged Roman Catholic Church was just hit with a major earth tremor as Cardinal George Pell, formerly Australia's highest ranking cleric, and Vatican treasurer and adviser to the Pope, has been convicted on multiple charges of sexual abuse of minors.  The rot and cover ups truly go all the way up to the highest levels of the Vatican.  Pell like other sexual predators was elevated to the rank of cardinal by the far from saintly John Paul II, who the Vatican ridiculously fast tracked to sainthood under former Pope Benedict XVI who protected predators while launch a war against normal, well adjusted and non-predator gays and lesbians.  CNN looks at this damning conviction which hopefully will force Pope Francis to begin a long, long over due house cleaning of the ranks of the hierarchy.  If Francis fails to do this, it will be clear that his claims of ending the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy will mean nothing.  Here are article excerpts:

One of the most powerful men in the Roman Catholic Church was found guilty of multiple historical child sex offenses at a secret trial in Melbourne in December, the existence of which can only now be revealed.

Australian Cardinal George Pell, 77, is almost certain to face prison after a jury found him guilty of one charge of sexual penetration of a child and four charges of an indecent act with or in the presence of a child in the late 1990s.

The conviction of Pell, the Vatican treasurer and a close adviser to Pope Francis, will send shockwaves through the church, which is already reeling from accusations of sexual abuse committed by priests worldwide.

Pell is the most senior Catholic official to be found guilty of child sex offenses to date. His conviction brings the escalating international controversy around the abuse of children in Catholic institutions straight to the doors of the Holy See.

A court order banning media reporting of Pell's five-week long trial, which began in November 2018, was lifted by Chief Judge Peter Kidd on Tuesday.

The prosecution's case hinged on the testimony of one man, who said Pell sexually abused him and another boy in Melbourne's historic St. Patrick's Cathedral after mass one Sunday.

Pell has repeatedly maintained his innocence. His legal team confirmed on Tuesday they had filed an appeal against the guilty verdict.

The Vatican has yet to comment on the verdict. Pope Francis quietly removed Pell from his small council of advisors for "reasons of advancing age" in December, before the news of the cardinal's conviction became public.

Pell is due to be sentenced at a separate hearing in March.

Pell's conviction is a stunning fall of grace for a man who once ran the Catholic Church in Australia with an iron fist. . . . He was made Archbishop of Melbourne by Pope John Paul II in 1996. While in the post, Pell created a program to respond to the increasing tide of sexual abuse allegations against priests.

But Pell's "Melbourne Response" program was criticized for capping compensations to victims at just tens of thousands of Australian dollars. There were allegations people were advised not to go to the police.

In 2014, Pell moved to Rome after he was handpicked by Pope Francis to serve as treasurer of the Vatican and become one of nine advisers on the Council of Cardinals to the Pope. But Pell's fortunes began to sour after the Australian government announced a Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sex Abuse in 2012.

The damning report by the commission in 2017 found 7% of Australian Catholic priests abused children over the past six decades.

Build Central America, Not a Wall

The maternal side of my family is intertwined with Central America. My own mother was born in Honduras - which has become a hell hole on the mainland - and later lived in Panama.  I myself qualify for dual citizenship under Honduran law.  As a family, my siblings and I own investments in Honduras that were handed down through my mother's family which left Central America before I was born.  Sadly, Honduras' horrific state of affairs is  in no small part due to bad decisions made in Washington, DC, that focused on supposed strategic decisions that paid no concern for the welfare of that nation's population.  Now, Honduras is one of the main points of origin of the thousands seeking asylum in the USA to escape the fruits of the USA's bad actions and decisions.  An editorial in the New York Times argues that building the economies of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras would go much farther than building a fruitless wall is the real solution to the USA's illegal immigration issue.  Here are excerpts:

As thousands of families fleeing violence, poverty and oppression in Central America arrive at the American border, the Trump administration has responded by separating children and parents and cracking down on asylum claims.

A more humane, and effective, response would be to address the sources of the desperation that propelled these people north. President Trump chose on Monday to reaffirm his punitive bent, complaining about the exodus of migrants and saying he told the leaders of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, whose countries receive millions of dollars in annual aid, “We’re not sending it anymore.” But what if the United States truly prioritized helping these nations?

Plagued by corruption, violence and gang terror, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras need stronger and more honest judges and police officers, better schools and economic development. Elites control much of the land and avoid taxes, even at some of the lowest tax rates in Latin America. Bribery is rampant, and too often leaders lack the interest, competence or will to manage such problems.

Over the years, the United States has contributed to instability by supporting autocrats in civil wars and tolerating corruption that has bred criminality. In 2017, Washington recognized the results of the Honduran presidential election days after the Organization of American States called for new elections because of voting irregularities.

The United States has also invested in Latin America for decades to promote democracy and economic and social development. But the Trump administration has begun to place “more emphasis on preventing illegal immigration, combating transnational crime and generating export and investment opportunities for U.S. businesses,” . . .

While the administration has tried to scale back aid, Congress has resisted, appropriating $2.1 billion for the region from 2016 to 2018, roughly double what had previously been allocated.

Results are mixed: While murder rates in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras declined in 2018, they are still very high, fueled by the trafficking of 90 percent of the cocaine bound for the United States. Economic growth has been steady since 2014, but poverty rates are relatively unchanged. While officials have pursued criminal cases involving presidents and other leaders, opposition from political and economic interests threatens to upend their work.

Eradicating gangs, which drive much of the northward migration, is especially difficult. The International Crisis Group has warned that mass deportations from the United States risk fueling gang violence unless accompanied by serious economic investment in impoverished communities. Just subjecting gang members to harsh prisons and branding them terrorists has backfired, the group said.

In the end, it is Central American leaders who must carry out reforms. They are more apt to do that with international support. But America can slow the exodus of the desperate by investing in democracy, judicial reform and economic growth. So far, Mr. Trump has shown little interest.

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.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

GOP Cries Against Voter Fraud Go Silent in Face Of GOP Fraud

Mark Harris, the disgraced Republican candidate.

For years now Republicans have whined about almost non-existent "voter fraud" as a justification for voter ID laws and other restrictions on voting that are aimed at disenfranchising voters not-inclined for voting for Republican candidates. Instances of individuals illegally voting are rare, but as North Carolina's 9th congressional distract race has revealed, organized GOP efforts to commit voter fraud is not equally rare.  Indeed, the 2018 election results are being thrown out and a new election has been ordered.   And those GOP shrieks about voter fraud?  They are almost non-existent.  The GOP hypocrisy is stunning and seemingly parallels that of the GOP's evangelical base.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the deafening GOP silence.    Here are highlights:

Republican politicians across the country have for years railed against the threat of voter fraud. Some have made unproven claims about how rampant it has become in order to pass voter ID laws and open sweeping investigations. The sanctity of the vote, they have said, must be protected at all costs.

But when a hard-fought congressional election in North Carolina — in which a Republican candidate appeared to narrowly beat his Democratic opponent — was overturned this week because of election fraud by a Republican political operative, the party was measured, and largely muted, in its response.

The state party chairman, Robin Hayes, issued a statement after officials ordered a new election calling the affair “a tremendously difficult situation for all involved.” National Republicans have been mostly mum.

Mark Harris, the Republican nominee, had eked out a 905-vote lead over Dan McCready. But the North Carolina Board of Elections refused to certify Mr. Harris as the winner and opened an investigation into irregularities. This week, the five-member board, made up of Republicans and Democrats, convened an evidentiary hearing in Raleigh at which witnesses described a voter-turnout effort that relied on the rogue collection of absentee ballots.

Witnesses detailed how people working for a Harris campaign operative, L. McCrae Dowless Jr., had filled out parts of some absentee ballots and improperly collected others. On Friday, Lorrin Freeman, the district attorney in Wake County, said she could seek charges within weeks against Mr. Dowless and some of the people he hired.

State Republicans, who over the past few years have tightened voting laws and had fought to preserve Mr. Harris’s victory, were far less vociferous in denouncing voter fraud than they have been in the past.

That stands in marked contrast to 2016, when the state’s Republicans filed many complaints and claimed for a month that Roy Cooper, the Democrat who was elected governor that year, should not be seated because rampant fraud had enabled his victory. The charge proved baseless.

Among Mr. Harris’s supporters, Tami Fitzgerald, the executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition, a group that works with pastors throughout the state and has close ties to Mr. Harris, would not say whether fraud had taken place in the Ninth District. Instead, she called the board’s unanimous decision a “stolen victory.”
 Prosecutors in the Trump administration have been conducting a high-profile investigation in North Carolina for months to find noncitizens who cast illegal ballots, many of them in apparent ignorance of the law. But although the state elections board sent Justice Department officials evidence of absentee-ballot fraud by Mr. Dowless as early as January 2017, they took no action before last November’s House election, and it is unclear whether they are investigating the matter.
 The party has given scant attention to the more frequent kind of election fraud — the inside-job schemes in which campaigns or election officials manufacture fake votes and destroy their opponents’ real ones — that appears to have taken place in the Ninth District race. Absentee ballots are especially susceptible to manipulation.

On Friday, Mr. Berger, the Republican state senator, resisted suggestions that his party had ignored the fraud potential and noted that state law already banned the misconduct outlined at the hearing this week. But he said, “I think it’s clear that something needs to be done if there’s a reasonable thing that can be done.”

More Sunday Male Beauty

Evangelicals Furious Over Trump Plan to Decriminalize Homosexuality

Trump and Pence with hate merchant, Tony Perkins.

The spittle is flying and shrieks of outrage are echoing form evangelicals over the purported Trump/Pence regime play to push for the decriminalization of homosexuality across the globe.  Most in the LGBT community have yawned and discounted the legitimacy of purported effort in light of Trump/Pence's continuous attacks of LGBT Americans. At this point, most wonder where the purported effort is headed since Trump himself pleaded ignorance about it. If the plan proceeds, it will be one of the few times Trump has failed to deliver on promises to his loyal, misogynist evangelical base.  A piece in The Advocate looks at the evangelical melt down.  Here are excerpts: 

The Trump administration’s push to decriminalize homosexuality abroad — which the president seemed strangely unaware of when questioned by reporters this week —  is drawing the ire of the religious right.

Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany and the highest-ranking openly gay official in the administration, is leading the effort to persuade countries where homosexuality is illegal to change their laws, administration officials said Tuesday. Grenell wrote an article on the plan for a German newspaper, referring to Iran’s reported execution of a man believed to be gay as an example of the harm caused by such laws. The campaign has met with skepticism from LGBTQ advocates, given the administration’s homophobic and transphobic domestic policies.

Religious right activists, while not endorsing the death penalty for LGBTQ people, denounced the push for decriminalization.

“Let’s find common ground in calling for an end to all forms of physical violence against homosexuals —  but refrain from imposing the values of the sexual revolution on the rest of the world.” Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, a longtime supporter of Donald Trump, wrote in his Washington Update column Thursday.

Massachusetts minister and occasional political candidate Scott Lively, always a virulent homophobe, was even more pointed in a column for World Net Daily, a right-wing website. “Reasonable tolerance and sympathy for people who suffer from same-sex attraction disorder is warranted — as is protecting them from violence — but sanitizing homosexuality and transgenderism as if they were morally, psychologically and behaviorally equivalent to sexual and gender normalcy is PC-driven lunacy,” he wrote.
 In a commentary for BarbWire, another far-right site, Julio Severo denounced Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a conservative Christian, for supporting Grenell’s effort, and took the opportunity to accuse LGBTQ people of being a danger to children.

“Such push coming from the Trump administration is a shame.” Severo wrote. “Coming from an evangelical who is the State Secretary, helping homosexual activist Grenell, is a bigger shame, because he is doing exactly what left-wing Protestant Hillary Clinton was doing when she was also a State Secretary.”

“When I think about violence and homosexuality, the first thought coming to my mind is not individuals suffering violence for their sexual lifestyle,” he added. “The first thinking is children suffering homosexual violence — physical and psychological. There is a massive effort to cover up the suffering of children in the hands of homosexual predators.”

Scientists have found no link between homosexuality and pedophilia, but Severo continued to push the assertion that gays are predators, and he blamed gay priests for the widespread abuse of children and teens in the Roman Catholic Church.

The commentators were still reluctant to blame Trump for the decriminalization campaign. . . . Perkins was encouraged that Trump seemed not to know of the campaign when reporters asked him about it Wednesday.

There may be another reason for Trump appearing to be ignorant of the move, however. New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman floated a possible explanation on Twitter: Or he does and doesn’t want to acknowledge on camera because it risks offending portions of his base.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

States Progressives and Liberals May Want to Avoid

Click image to enlarge.

When the husband and I travel, we generally try to avoid conservative states and countries since there typically is a strong correlation between what passes as "conservative" and being anti-gay or at least less than gay friendly. Why go somewhere where you are not liked and why spend your money to boost an local economy comprised of bigots. A new Gallup survey has come up with a map that shows the most reactionary states and those that are more liberal.  Thankfully, Virginia now falls into the "less conservative than average" category with the larges component of the population describing themselves as "moderate."  Not surprisingly, the states to avoid include the remainder of the Old South, the northern Great Plains states and Utah.  Check out how your state ranks here.  Here is a summary of the findings (yes, Mississippi is a place to avoid): 

Nationally, the conservative advantage in ideological identification is nine percentage points, and reflects a narrowing of the conservative-liberal gap from 21 points in 2004.

These findings are based on aggregated data from Gallup's 2018 tracking poll in which respondents were asked to indicate whether they describe their political views as liberal, moderate or conservative.

States in which the conservative-liberal gap is 20 points or greater are considered "highly conservative." The "more conservative than average" states have gaps of between 15 and 19 points. "About average" states' residents prefer the conservative description by seven to 14 points, and those with gaps of zero to six points are considered "less conservative than average."

The number of states in which more residents identify as liberal than as conservative is down slightly from nine in 2017. Many of the changes are within the margin of error for the state's sample -- states that barely tilted liberal in 2017 barely tilted conservative in 2018 -- so it is unclear how meaningful these changes are.

Mississippi ranked as the most conservative state in 2018, with 50% of residents identifying as conservative and 12% as liberal, for a gap of 38 points. Twenty-nine percent of Mississippians said they are moderate, and 9% had no opinion.

Massachusetts was the most liberal state in 2018, with 35% of its residents describing their political views as liberal and 21% as conservative. Massachusetts was the first state Gallup measured with more liberal than conservative identifiers (in 2008) and has been the state most consistently leaning more liberal than conservative.