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The Mormon Church’s support for gay boy scouts is no surprise at all
The Mormon church surprised many last week with its announcement supporting the proposed Boy Scout policy allowing gay scouts but not gay leaders. Having spent most of my life as a Mormon and having served in its local leadership, I wasn’t surprised at all. Here’s why. Though not true until relatively recently, the Mormon church does allow gay people to be members and even to have some local leadership jobs, as long as they stay strictly celibate…
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My lovely transgender friend, struggling to survive in Nigeria
I have a lovely friend. She is a transgender woman who lives in Nigeria. Her dream, at present denied her, is to be a professional dancer and actress. In her heart and in her spirit, she is both. As I think about her, I imagine the words and music from the song “Mirror and the Music” from the show A Chorus Line encompassing her as she goes to sleep each night…
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Still no justice for murdered South African lesbian activist Noxolo Nogwaza
Wednesday marks the two year anniversary of the brutal death of Noxolo Nogwaza, a South African lesbian and LGBT rights activist. In 2011, 24-year-old Noxolo, organizer of the Ekurhuleni Pride Committee, was murdered in South Africa, while on her way home from a night out with friends. Her attackers raped, repeatedly beat and stabbed her, apparently because of her sexual orientation, before dumping her body in a drainage ditch. Two years after her death, no progress has been made into the investigation of her murder…
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What happens when a son tells his gay dad, ‘I want to become a Boy Scout’?
I really don’t know why I can’t seem to see these things coming. I blog about them. I write about prejudices, I have argued with countless anti-gay people, and I have diligently parented to the best of my ability. And yet, these situations emerge and again, I am caught like the proverbial deer in the headlights, unsure which path to take, and positive that all choices lead to certain destruction…
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Ban me from my partner’s bedside? You’d have to arrest me too!
Marriage Equality is about being able to hold the hand of the person you love when they are sick and need your love and compassion the most. It’s about making decisions that all people will eventually have to make about life and death, and who you want with you at the end of your life. Two men have all the legal papers they were told they needed. They followed the law, and still, one man is in a hospital bed while his life partner is restrained and dragged from the premises.
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Did you hear the one about the homophobes who wanted to adopt out their lesbian daughter?
Jokes are supposed to be funny. They always start with a set up and then build to a crescendo where the plot twists and the listener bursts out laughing. Last week a “joke” went viral, but no one was left laughing. The “joke” was an article titled, “Parents put 16-year-old daughter up for adoption after learning she is gay.” … The piece was written as humor…satire… but none of the 72,000 who shared it took it that way. They believed it to be real. Who could blame them?
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Rick Santorum is a dead end for the Republican party
Although we just had an election, Rick Santorum, as tireless as he is tiresome, is already stumping in Iowa to prepare for his next defeat. His willful ignorance and woeful arrogance personifies why the GOP is losing the next generation of voters. Santorum, for instance, attacked marriage equality and foolishly pretended the huge cultural shift on this issue was no more than a passing fad – like a Hula Hoop or a Rubik’s cube…
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Fifty shades of red: The fight for equality marches on
There are just some people who will go to their graves believing what they believe. That is their journey – that is their little bit of racism, hatred and discrimination they will have to answer for. I believe at this moment in time, the red on the equality map needs to be celebrated. I believe the acceptance and support of our friends and families and co-workers and strangers needs to be celebrated, for these are the people who will stand by us and love us and help us to win whatever battles may lie ahead…
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Former S.C. Governor Mark Sanford: No gays on the Appalachian Trail
Mark Sanford perfectly encapsulates the particular sanctimony the Right reserves for homosexuality. Republican politicians perfected this selective intolerance back when gay people were a convenient political punching bag – an unfamiliar other with whom the majority could not immediately identify. Since then, gay people have come out of the closet in droves and most Americans have come to embrace gay rights. But the GOP is sticking with its reflex condemnation of gay people. Does it trouble Mark Sanford or give him any pause at all as he goes from being the ambassador of international love back to his embrace of a position that is now laughingly hypocritical?
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A gay dad sounds off about the anti-gay Easter dad and his ‘preacher’ son
My 10-year-old son Jesse had big plans Easter morning. His desire to rise early was not to go searching for the Easter basket the mystical bunny was likely to have left him, it was to make French toast as a surprise for me, his dad. That special pleasing Dad bond is an important one for many young boys. Jesse was not alone in that objective. Three thousand miles away, another boy, Nolan Cranford was preparing to please his dad. Unlike my son, Nolan’ endeavors did not involve syrup and buttery niceness. The way to his dad’ heart was to shout at exiting Church goers and condemn them to hell…