Christian Leftist

The Pope has said that destroying aberrant sexuality — IOW, any sexual orientation or behavior that does not fall within post-marital, cis-gendered, heteronormative parameters — is as important work in the eyes of God as saving the environment.

Gender theory explores sexual orientation, the roles assigned by society to individuals according to their gender, and how people perceive their biological identity.

Gay and transsexual groups, particularly in the United States, promote it as a key to understanding and tolerance, but the Pope disagreed.

When the Roman Catholic Church defends God’s Creation, “it does not only defend the earth, water and the air… but (it) also protects man from his own destruction,” he said.

“Rainforests deserve, yes, our protection, but the human being … does not deserve it less,” the pontiff said.

Mmmkay. Yeah, I’ll go with The Pointy Hat Is Batshit Insane for $500, Alex. (thanks for the link to Ann Somerville.)

So…why do people still listen to this bigoted old geezer, again?

Our President-Elect has decided to try to appease the Religious Right (an impossible task for someone who is pro-choice, as most experienced politicians will tell you) by inviting the bigot Rick Warren to speak the invocation at his presidential inauguration ceremony.

So, so Not Cool.

The media really has done a bang-up job on making Rick Warren seem more moderate than he really is, or at least they did until he openly supported Proposition 8, that horrible and unconstitutional referendum in California that made equality marriage illegal.

GBLT groups and gay right advocates and allies are furious about Obama’s conscious decision to hurt GBLT people by selecting a man who has equated them with child abusers, incestuous couples and pedophiles for wanting to marry and have the same rights as the rest of us. He falsely claimed that religious officials would be prosecuted for hate speech if Prop. 8 was defeated, even though no one was seeking to prosecute religious officials for saying that homosexuality is a sin while 20,000 GBLT couples married in California before the ban.

Among the other choice beliefs that Rick Warren will be representing by his presence at the Inauguration — and that, by extension, P-E Barack Obama will be condoning — are, in no particular order:

· Women do not have the right to decide what happens to their own bodies. Instead, men in religious robes and in courts and legislatures will choose what health care is ‘moral’ or ‘immoral.’
· The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, should be assassinated.
· Embryonic stem-cell research, even research done on embryos that would otherwise be destroyed, is evil and wrong and should be banned, no matter how many lives it might save.

To be sure, Mr. Warren has done much for the causes of poverty in Africa, AIDS prevention, and environmental protection within the evangelical community. That is commendable. His good deeds, however, do not erase the harms he has done in the name of God against people who only want to live their lives in peace and comfort.

Obama contends that he is merely returning the favor that Warren paid him when he invited Obama to speak at his Global AIDS Initiative Conference.

But Obama is not inviting Warren to be a guest speaker at his church. He is not extending an invitation for tea at his Chicago home. He is picking someone who fundamentally believes that one in ten people on the planet (and all of the non-evangelical people besides those) have flaws that make them inferior to him, a lower class of species, second-class citizens, and inviting him to be the representative of all people of faith during one of the most profound events in modern history.

There are plenty of pastors who do not believe all of the prejudice crap Rick Warren does who are ready, willing and able to speak instead of him. Obam chose Warren, knowing full well that it would be the second in a series of slaps in the faces of gay people that they’ve had to and are going to face this year from Washington, D.C.

How are we supposed to believe that intersectionality, this promise to address all areas of inequality, if progressives are marginalized? This is not a ’social issue.’ This is a HUMAN RIGHTS issue.

Remember that if interracial marriage had been put to a vote in the sixties when the Supreme Court ruled on the Loving case, California would have banned interracial marriage, too. What is popular is not always right, and what is right is not always popular.

Old (Bible) verse, same as the first.

I’ve been so busy with job hunting and volunteering for the Obama campaign that I literally have had to bookmark about 20 or so stories I’ve found in the past week that are so ridiculous or rage-inducing that I have to blog about them someday. I hope I’ll catch up to the present. Here’s one that is both fresh and prescient, a news byte I guarantee will not make the front pages of many papers tomorrow.

From the Davenport Liveblog of a McCain rally by John Deeth of the Iowa Independent:

Before McCain’s arrival, a minister delivering an invocation said, “There are plenty of people around the world who are praying to their god, be they Hindu, Buddah, or Allah, that (McCain’s) opponent wins. I pray that you step forward and honor your own name.”

I ask that you re-read that and let the works sink in for a moment.

This is one of those nasty, devilishly clever smears against one’s opponent that the McCain campaign has let others make for them or don’t care if they make or not because they’ll benefit from the consequences regardless.

1. It states a point that is nearly impossible to prove or disprove and that the Obama campaign may not want to disprove: there are a ton of people outside of the U.S.A., many of them people of color and/or non-Christians, who believe that the Democratic candidate’s victory would be immensely better for the earth at large and who are hoping and probably praying that Obama wins the presidential election.

I don’t personally have a problem with that, though it is clear from the context of the location where the minister spoke the words, his explicit identification of non-white and non-Christian people of faith, and the sentence that the minister does. When every single country in the world outside of ours except for Russia, Israel and religiously-controlled dictatorships would elect a Democrat over a Republican, a Leftist over a Rightist, a Liberal over a Conservative as defined in America, I have to conclude that they might have a point. They feel their interests are intimately connected to our own. They have seen, fron far less biased viewpoints, in most cases, the cause and effect of American politics and our government’s economic and foreign policies. It has very little or nothing to do with their individual religion in most cases, except when they’re bemoaning the path on which George W. Bush’s religion of blind faith and blockheaded attitude has taken him during his quest for “freedom.” This brings me to the second point.

2. By stating that scary, non-Christian brown people (OMG! OMG! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!!!1!11) want Obama elected, the minister implies that everyone outside of McCain supporters are in on some big secret that they aren’t. That Obama is a Seekrit Muslim, maybe?

Thus, the actions of millions of people over whom Obama has absolutely no control prove that ‘Obama is a dangerous terrorist who must be stopped.’

…Say whaa?

3. But wait, that’s not all! Not only do you get a nice, healthy dose or race-baiting, fear-mongering medicine, but you also receive a free sample of religious prejudice and judgemental hypocrisy!

You see, anyone who votes for Obama, That One, The Other Fella, well, they aren’t REAL Christians. They’re just fake Christians who will burn in Hell when Jesus shows up and takes over. Don’t count on receiving Communion if your priest sees that O-shaped bumper sticker on your car.

This, my fellow human beings, is how you smear someone without actually coming out and saying what you really feel. Wrap it up in the professional cloak of one’s religion, disguise it as pseudo-fact, then repackage it as a call to arms for the faithful and sell it back to the sheeple in a somber prep speech.

What’s the worst part about this? It probably happens every day in pulpits across the country. We just don’t see it because most of us have never wanted to look for it before.

The sad thing is that I’ve heard this argument before. I let my Jewish friend listening to something similar from my own youth pastor, thinking it was the right thing to do.

I cannot believe how stupid and ignorant and anti-Semitic that was. I cannot believe that I let myself be so blinded by the good intentions of my church at that time that I allowed myself to miss the negative effects of what I was doing in trying to proselytize my friend.

As with any -ism, it is the EFFECT, not the intent, that matters to the people who you hurt.

I wish Pat Hagee and John McCain could realize this, too.

There are now 462 children, some of whom are young mothers in their teens and others no older than five, who are in temporary foster care in Texas today after acourt in San Angelo ruled that their parents cannot have the children back until DNA tests are done.

The Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), a breakaway Mormon sect that practices polygamy and marrying off its girls when they are underage or barely legal, has its own batch of lawyers. What sounds like a “class-action child removal” may bring about legal challenges to the state’s right to remove children based solely on the treatment of a smaller number of girls and women from the Yearning for Zion Ranch.

The Washington post has an article about the Constitutional challenges Texas may face when the case splits into individual child-custody hearings. There is no question that were the children to be returned to their parents, they would be forced to conform to the sect’s religious and sexual practices. What is not so clear is whether or not the government has the right to take children away from their parents if the abuse has no yet occured. The Supreme Court has consistently upheld the freedom of religious expression in previous cases.

In my opinion, practising your religious freedoms is one thing; forcing a teenage girl to conform to them is not. Hoever, it sn’t difficult to say that there is no clear line in the sand as to how much religion one is allowed to insert into a child’s life.