An Open Letter To Tony Perkins: Why I Celebrate Gay Pride Month And Not Self-Righteous Pride Minute

The month of June is Gay Pride Month. Now, I have not yet seen where they have declared Adultery Pride Month, I have not seen where they have declared the Drunkenness Pride Month.

- Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, in response to a caller on American Family Association radio.

To: Mr. Tony Perkins
From: Rev. Dan Vojir

Dear Mr. Perkins:

For twenty years, you and the Family Research Council have demonized the LGBT community, comparing homosexuals to drunkards, adulterers, drug addicts, child molesters and even Nazis.

Where is your pride? What's more: do you celebrate it?

I know where my pride is:

It is in the courage of the hosts who overcame the prejudice instilled by fear-mongering and righteous arrogance.

It is in the creativity of people who gave us quilts and red ribbons to instill compassion and courage against hatred and bigotry.

It is in the audacity of people who loved each other openly, thereby creating more love for fellow man.

It is in the beauty of people who had a higher percentage of caregivers than your "righteous" families.

It is in the vitality of people who kept fighting for the civil rights of themselves and others.

It is in the humanity of the thousands of people who gave enormous compassion to those AIDS victims whom you unceremoniously evicted from their homes, while they were sick and dying,  during the worst epidemic our country has ever seen.

And it is now in the President who came to terms with his own conscience and declared that love for one another is a human right, one that should be celebrated and not be restricted by laws.

Mr. Perkins, you demonize the people and the celebration of all these things because you cannot believe that people can be good without your distinct imprimatur, masking it, of course, as "God's will". But in what love, compassion, and humanity you demonize and hold in contempt, I and millions of others have a deep sense of pride.

And I ask you again, where is your pride? Perhaps ...

It is in your ignorance of the love two people can for one another, regardless of gender.

It is in your self-righteousness which overshadows respect for humanity.

It is in your intolerance towards people who are different from you.

It is in the disdain you feel for diversity.

It is in the man-made authority vested in you by a group of people who share in your pride.

It is in your acts of destroying rights, livelihoods and yes, families.

It is in your fear-mongering and pronouncements of a fictional "homosexual agenda"

For twenty years your pride has been placed in these things.

As I witness Pride parades and celebrations throughout the country, I see the joy at knowing who we are and who we have been. I witness the effervescent streak of humanity. I witness the survival of the human spirit, the kind of spirit that cannot be put down by the demonizing you and your cohorts so arrogantly proclaim to be the "Word of God."

Mr. Perkins, over the last few months I have been nurturing a Rainbow Garden to grow for Pride Week here in San Francisco. It resides in the Juan Bautista Community Garden in Park Merced. Far more than just a tiny bit of flowers and sparkle amongst the other more staid garden beds, it has garnered respect as a small quadrant of Pride in beauty, and beauty in Pride. People recognize it as a celebration of life, love and survival. They have pride in it, and, I am happy to say, pride in me.

Yes, I know where my Pride is, and after twenty years, the country knows where yours is.

I feel sorry for you, Mr. Perkins. Very sorry. When I conduct a small ceremony in the garden this Sunday in celebration of San Francisco's Pride Day, I will say a prayer for you.

Very Truly Yours,

Rev. Dan Vojir
San Francisco

Channeling Mel Gibson: Bill Donohue's War Against All Things Non-Catholic Is Heating Up ...Against Jews.

Maybe he was drunk at the time.

"Jews Had Better Not Make Enemies Of Their Catholic Friends Since They Have So Few Of Them"

One pope shedding tears at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem did nothing to eradicate anti-Semitism in staunch pro-Catholic circles: the latest exchange of emails between Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League and Philadelphia Rabbi Arthur Waskow indicate an animosity worthy of Mel Gibson.


Called "The Rottweiler's Rottweiler" (in reference to his defense of Benedict XVI and his own problems due to scandal and cover-ups), Donohue seems to goad people and groups into a fight. In fact, Donohue is such a staunch defender of the Catholic Church, he has turned offense into an art form: he has taken on progressive Catholic nuns ("totally lost their moorings"), the pay-away-the-lay controversy ("a severance package"), President Obama ( “He is now taking the culture war to the boiling point and he will pay.”) and gay marriage ("I want the law to discriminate against all alternative lifestyles, against gays and unions.").

Now he has taken on Jews as enemies of Catholicism.

It all started when Waskow, criticized the Vatican in a HuffPost op-ed piece for "attacking the religious freedom of millions of American women and the religious freedom of American nuns" on the matter of contraception. A rough email exchange ensued, with the indignant Donohue stating that "Jews had better not make enemies of their Catholic friends since they have so few of them." He then attributed the statement to former New York mayor Ed Koch. 

Koch has denied saying anything of the sort.

"Waskow is a man full of hate," he said, calling Waskow's op-ed "the kind of thing I'd expect from Bill Maher, not from a rabbi."

The exchange brought about a bit of irony as well: Donohue portrayed the recent Orthodox scandal of child abuse as an "epidemic" that Waskow (a Reformed rabbi) should take care of by "following the Catholic Church's reforms in dealing with clerical abuse." Rabbi Waskow obviously restrained himself from correcting Donohue on generalization of rabbis and - most notably - any comeback about cover-ups and pay-offs, the latter being a subject which Donohue has yet to fully address.

The odd connection to Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic sentiments comes in Donohue's defense of the Gibson's movie, "The Passion of the Christ":

[wikipedia] Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I‘m not afraid to say it. That's why they hate this movie. It's about Jesus Christ, and it's about truth. It's about the Messiah.

NUNS ON THE BUS gets the Donohue treatment.

Waskow's defense of American nuns brought out the animosity Donohue has displayed for socially progressive nuns, such as the current Nuns On The Bus event touring the country. In an aptly titled Daily Kos article Catholic League to Progressive Catholics: don't let the door hit you on the way out, Armando succinctly points out that Donohue thinks that disagreeable Catholics should simply leave the church - and that includes nuns:

“Do we have more than a handful of nuns who have totally lost their moorings?” Donohue mused. “Oh, yeah.”

The problem is that the number of nuns has shrunk considerably in the last decade (now down to a mere 60,000 in the U.S.) and if the trend continues, there won't be anyone left to pay homage and subservience to the likes of Bill Donohue anyway.

With his uneducated and inappropriate statements, Donohue continually shoots himself in the foot, but he doesn't care, because he has always relied on the support of the Vatican: Sedevacantist* Mel Gibson mirrors Benedict more than even Benedict is willing to admit.

And God knows, the current pope has never been truly anti-Semitic.

Right.

Could A Treason Trial Be In The Air? Newly Declassified 9/11 Docs Reveal The Real Enemy: George W. Bush

Another Reason For Mitt To Treat Bush Like Poison

Washington, D.C., June 19, 2012 – The National Security Archive today is posting over 100 recently released CIA documents relating to September 11, Osama bin Laden, and U.S. counterterrorism operations. The newly-declassified records, which the Archive obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, are referred to in footnotes to the 9/11 Commission Report and present an unprecedented public resource for information about September 11.

Hammering nails into the coffin of the Bush administration's involvement in 9/11 hasn't been easy: Republicans have avoided the topic for a decade. They'll certainly be spinning everything they can with this latest revelation: pointing to Clinton, distancing themselves from Bush, painting the CIA as dunderheads, maybe even saying that Al Queda didn't really exist before 9/11. Whatever the spin, however, the fact remains: Bush knew about eminent attacks from the very beginning of his Presidency and EVEN HAMPERED EFFORTS to catch/kill Bin Laden. 

Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.

From June to September 2001, a full seven CIA Senior Intelligence Briefs detailed that attacks were imminent, an incredible amount of information from one intelligence agency.

 Documents also show that the CIA gave warnings to the out-going Clinton administration, indicating that Bush knew about them from the very onset of his Presidency. 


Big News?


To many people, the new evidence is not surprising, but what is the most damning of the situation is that the Bush administration defunded the CIA operations as it was getting the info. Even the associated security meetings were downgraded to mere deputy level. Conspiracy theories have always centered around "intentional neglect" of some sort, and now that part of the theories seems more plausible than ever. 


But can Bush be held accountable IN TIME? 


And will Democrats make the revelation a stance against any of Romney's foreign policies? As de-regulator in national economic affairs, Romney has struggled to distance himself from the disastrous effects of the Bush administration while trying to convince the American public that Bush had set the stage for bin Laden's death.

“I think the tools that President Bush put into place — GITMO, rendition, enhanced interrogation, the vast effort to collect and collate this information — obviously served his successor quite well,” Rove said on Fox News.

The revealed docs now catapults statements like this into the highest category of BS in U.S. history. 


Accusations of war crimes have hung over the Bush administration for years with nations such as Malaysia creating tribunals, entities having little effect on the former President's image of himself as defender of democracy. The latest evidence of prior knowledge of imminent attacks, however, may be approached from a different angle: treasonous neglect. Failure to act sufficiently in defense of the country and the act of downgrading and defunding intelligence efforts certainly calls for action of some sort. 


The timing of the declassification of the documents couldn't be more ironic: with President Obama declaring Executive Privilege in the matter of "Fast and Furious" and in defense of Attorney General Holder, Republican congressmen will have a hard time maintaining focus. 


Spin. Cover-ups. Focus.  Distractions. If the CIA docs  have any traction in the coming weeks, our political scene is going to get a lot dirtier ...and definitely more entertaining.

The Monday Sermon: What if Your Church-Going Community Wants You To ...Die?

It is a simple fact that in today's culture wars some people want others ... to die. And while it may be considered a cowardly act for those people to hide behind God for their desires, calling for the death of gays has occurred with brazen, unapologetic intensity.

The last weeks have seen a spate of unprecedented hatred spewed from the pulpit for gays. First we found out about the North Carolina "concentration camp' preacher, Charles Worley. Then we saw two little boys singing "aint' no homo goin'n to heaven". And the most recent incident concerned the preacher who unabashedly stated that gays should be executed by the state. Wanting people to die and go to hell has become a mantra of extreme fundamentalist circles. And while the dogma of some churches may seem to be contained within that church, it is not:


May 31, 2012:

Joao Simoes sued Trinitas Regional Medical Center in Union County Superior Court. He says that the hospital admitted him in August 2011, but that "requests for his lifesaving medication were not honored," and his sister was denied visitation rights.Susan V. Borga, M.D., from the Department of Behavioral Health and Psychiatry, allegedly approached Simoes while he was confined to the hospital's mental health wing. Borga is not named as a defendant.

Trinitas Regional Medical Center is a Catholic hospital and according to its website: "At Trinitas Regional Medical Center we dedicate ourselves to God's healing mission." Dr. Borga's reason for withholding medication was that "this is what he gets for going against God's will." She also accused Simoes' primary care physician of being gay and made disparaging remarks about the doctor having an accent. In certain cases, withholding "life saving medication" is a felony.


And nothing says "we want you to die" more than withholding life-saving medication.

It should be noted that the Indiana town of the "ain't no homos goin' to heaven" toddlers was the setting for one of the first nationally known teen suicides caused by bullying: Billy Lucas' death subsequently spurred gay sex columnist Dan Savage to form the It Gets Better movement.

The Wages Of Sin

Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel:

[Speaking about a relative] "He was seduced. Found a group of people who welcomed him and embraced him and accepted him. And they had counselors and others who said, 'This is what you are, you're gay, embrace it and be proud of it.' You know the rest of the story. He's in his thirties, his young thirties now, and he's dying of HIV/AIDS. The wages of sin is death."The sentiment of Matt Barber may seem steeped in the early days of the AIDS crisis, but "the wages of sin is death" has today been maintained as a warning for gays. Indeed, AIDS as a "gay disease" has never left the Christian Right mind set. The sentiment is echoed in Dr. Borga's statement. The problem today as many gay people see it, is that it has been transformed from a mere biblical warning into a threat: it has gone from "you will die" to "we want you to die!".


And I’m not ashamed of it. He [God] said put them to death. Shall the church drag them in? No, I’m not saying that. The church has not been given the power of the sort; the government has. But the government ought to [kill them]. You got a better idea? - Pastor Curtis Knapp of New Hope Baptist Church, Seneca, Kansas.

The Collective Mind

Today's church stresses that it is part of the community at large, but in many towns across the country, the church IS the community and the community IS the church. The bullying of Greensburg, Indiana's Billy Lucas is now tied to its Apostolic Truth Tabernacle. The supportive congregants of Charles "concentration camp" Worley's Providence Road Baptist church make up 40% of the town of Maiden, NC. The ratio for Knapp's church to Seneca, Kansas is higher. The governance of Trinitas Regional Medical Center was formed from three hospitals and covers all of Elizabeth, NJ (population: 120,000).


Each Monday, some communities reflect what the pulpit preached on Sunday.


When will it all stop? When will the hate speech disappear? Only when these churches are disciplined enough to choose their words carefully will the awful rhetoric subside: the pulpit should guide an community's spirituality, not manipulate a community mindset. Only when they realize they are dealing with people, not demons, will they cease their calls for concentration camps, for state executions, for the "wages of sin."

"Vatileaks" Article Its #1 on OpEdNews FOR THE MONTH OF MAY!!

Even though you've read it here, help spread the word by clicking HERE and send the page view numbers through the roof! This article is the ONLY one on the "Vatileaks" scandal featuring past cover-ups and bringing to light the fact that Benedict KNOWS ALL. 

Monday Sermon: Should We Honor The Soldiers Of The Culture Wars On Memorial Day?

" ...the culture wars are still inevitably significant, for the very simple reason that there’s no common ground on which to call a truce."

- Ross Douthat, New York Times, The Persistence Of The Culture War, Feb. 7, 2012

The scene is iconic and always unforgettable: the President laying the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It is a symbolic gesture filled with dignity, solemnity and, yes... hope: hope that our casualties of war will someday dwindle to nothing. It also brings to mind horrendous battle scenes, matchless courage... and bloodied bodies strewn across vast landscapes: the detritus of war.

And while it is a time of remembrance, it is a time when we forget that we are engaged in wars of another sort, wars that have had just as many casualties, wars that have changed the lives of past generations and generations to come. They are wars in which we have been engaged in for many years, wars which seem to have no end. And they are civil wars because they are fought with our own citizenry.

The culture wars are spoken of so casually that people forget that they are just as deadly and fought on a landscape just as perilous as any mine-laden field. Yet we have no tomb upon which to lay a wreath nor do we have a day to commemorate the casualties - to stop and think about the culture warriors and about those conflicts effecting our world.

As with all wars, the culture wars of America have had two sides - two sides which mourn their dead, be they people or ideologies. The ferocity of the battles are equal to the battlegrounds: abortion, women's rights, homosexuality/gay rights, racism, multiculturalism, gun politics, environmentalism, capitalism, socialism, religious intolerance, global warming, birth control, energy, evolution are some which have had more prominent scenes of battle.

Perhaps the most telling difference between the sides is that one side deals in huge numbers, broad terms and generalities - 40 million aborted babies, the "death" of civilization," the scourge of "socialism", while the other side focuses more on specifics, personalities and issues: Matthew Shepard, Dr. Martin Luther King, the specific rate of unemployment, the 99%, gun control. One warrior has been trained to fight virtually everything of the opposing view, while the other warrior is slightly more focused.

Both warriors are courageous and fierce when engaged in mortal combat.

No one can doubt that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is a monument to a stereotypical U.S. soldier, a kind of military Everyman, so the concept of a memorial for a universal culture warrior seems nearly impossible. But it is not ridiculous: all of us on both sides, need a focal point for reflection, a reminder that people have fought for something they believe in, will continue to fight, and that the outcome of the battles will determine the fate of mankind more than any number of bullets and bombs. The Tomb of the Unknown Culture Warrior would not be a monument to Good vs Evil or Right vs. Wrong, but to the one thing that glorifies humanity more than anything else: passion for a cause.  

Paying tribute at the Tomb Of The Unknown Culture Warrior might actually provide that which Ross Douthat doubts could ever happen: a ceasefire.

Yes, a tiny, but much needed truce for our culture-war weary world.

"Tough Love" On Trial: Support Of Pastor Worley's Genocidal Homophobia Has Finally Made Gay Rights Into Civil Rights

“Sometimes you’ve got to be scared straight. He is trying to save those people from Hell.” 
“He had every right to say what he said about putting them in a pen and giving them food. The Bible says they are worthy of death. He is preaching God’s word.” 

- genocidal congregants, Providence Road Baptist Church

Pastor Charles Worley's version of "Tough Love" to his congregation has sparked a protest around the country that may become a form of "tough love" in itself - much tougher than Worley and his congregation would expect in any case. 


And not in the form of electrified fences or nooses. 


The Catabwa Valley Citizens Against Hate has begun to organize a peaceful protest outside Worley's "old time religion" church to take place this Sunday. Originally thought to garner several hundred protesters, it is quickly mushrooming into a major event, with whole church congregations being bused in. Current estimates are at 2000, but other groups are planning to attend. Local police will be in force to contain crowds. And since the pastor has indicated that he will not back down on his words, animosities will be hard to retrain. 


The country will be focused on Maiden, North Carolina this Sunday.

Thank you, Pastor Worley! 

Thank you, North Carolina!

The recent machinations of North Carolina pastors have brought to light the abject homophobia still embedded in the Christian Right. It is a phobia that has been recently covered up by calls for "reparative therapy" and "pray away the gay" strategies. It is a phobia that has been given the imprimatur of the Catholic Church via the Vatican's stance that homosexuality is still a sinful lifestyle "choice." It is a phobia that has had the protection of "love the sinner, hate the sin." It is a phobia that has legislated bullying in schools under the guise of freedom of religious expression.

But despite all the cover-ups, it is a phobia that says gays are worthy of discrimination, hatred ...and death. Worley's sermons* have made that very, very clear. Besides God, Pastor Worley himself wants...people...to...die. Worley has also made it clear that he will not back down from his words. 

We hope he doesn't. For in his words are the seeds of hatred quite akin to the hatred for another group of people: the "sons of Ham." One wonders if his congregation has any African Americans in it, for if there are, they fail to see the parallel: the Bible being used to discriminate against and subjugate an entire group of human beings. But modern society has disregarded the Bible and dictated that a once-maligned group, a group thought to be only 3/5ths human,  be given equal status, so who's to take up the slack in regards to Biblically sanctioned contempt? 

The vitriol currently being spewed by demonizers such as Tony Perkins and Bryan Fischer, the dire warnings of impending disasters by Pat Robertson and Cindy Jacobs all underscore the hatred formerly reserved for people who dared to considered themselves equal to whites. Worley’s own references to hangings – a clear assent of what should be done today – certainly smack of Ku Klux Klan sentiments.

The NAACP has recently come out with a statement supporting the right of gays to marry. It was also reacting to the current spate of North Carolina sermons against gays - and abuse of gays. This has angered the Christian Right to no end: any connection of gay rights to civil rights destroys any hope of the “wedge” the CR can drive between the black and gay communities. 

So perhaps the gay community should thank pastor Worley for his diatribe. It has brought to the fore the very thing that the Christian Right has denied from the very beginning of its homophobia: gay right are civil rights.


Now if only Tony Perkins would be dumb enough to give Worley a medal...

* As early as 1978, Worley referenced hanging and his congregation has stated that he has always shown an inordinate hatred of homosexuality, couching it in biblical terms.