Gay Persons Told to Leave Public Facility - for Being Gay

When will these type of stories join history's waste basket?

Activists in Kentucky are planning a peaceful response after two gay men with developmental and intellectual disabilities were kicked out of a public pool.

A maintenance technician reportedly cited the Bible while telling the two men they couldn't swim at The Pavilion, a government-funded recreational facility in Hazard, Kentucky.

When people working with the disabled person pointed out that the actions of the public pool staff were completely and legally-defined as discriminatory, the response was (wait for it)

The man stated that what he was doing was in the Bible and he could do it.

Well THAT settles it.

When I read stories such as this, I forget what it must be to live in "the rest of the world". I have worked for public colleges and universities for so long, where anything approaching this type of behavior has been long proscribed, and indeed where I have a hand in enforcing such proscriptions, that it seems actions like this are coming from a place that has become alien to me.

Anyone have this feeling? Does your atheism/rationality/progressiveness make you feel like an outsider? How do you choose to deal with those feelings?

Full Article.

Are the Religious Capable of Respect?

Isn't the entire point of monotheistic religion that those who believe in a particular religion are the only ones who will be rewarded in the afterlife and that all others will go to hell? Certainly, “polite” believers will not go out of their way to point that out, but it is very clear in their holy books that disbelievers are destined for eternal torture. If someone is required to believe that all but their co-religionists are hell bound, regardless of how ethical they are or how much they say they love them, I find it difficult to believe that such a person can treat “non-believers” with respect.

To quote truth-saves.com, “Most Christians are Moderate Christians, those who take the Bible in moderation. They tend to only treat select claims as truth, the claims related to what they are seeking answers on. Regardless they still claim the Bible, in its entirety, is the inerrant inspired word of an infallible god. Because of this they are still making it socially acceptable to act upon all of the Bible's claims as truth.”

I propose that when you, the polite, sane, moderate Christian claim that the Bible is the word of a god, you are guilty of giving intellectual cover and complete license to those who take the entire Bible at its word (instead of cherry-picking the nice parts) to enact its Neolithic dictates in all of their barbarity.

"Don't Ask Don't Tell" Repealed - A Victory in the War for Reason!

Seventeen years ago, then-President Bill Clinton had a crazy idea that all of the men and women serving in the United States Armed Forces were human beings, regardless of their professed sexual orientation. Clinton was motivated, in part, by a man named Allen Schindler, a radioman in the U.S. Navy who was stomped into unrecognizability and, ultimately, murdered by two of his fellow sailors because Schindler was gay. And so he promised to undertake a massive effort to make it so that gay soldiers could serve in the military without fear or discrimination.

Read more here.

Baptist Pastor Wishes Death on Homosexuals

Yep...Religion sure it just one more way to look at the world...perfectly valid....doesn't lead people to hate or anything...

Christians Boycott Someone with Different Opinions: In other news, Sky Still Blue

Recently, several freethinking and atheist groups have had the courage to express the unpopular fact of their existence by taking out ads and billboard in selective cities. The biggest stink has been raised by the billboard in New Jersey, where it seems that it is ok for the faithful to bombard their neighbors with their beliefs but atheists should just shut up and be glad that all those followers of Christ don't burn or lynch anymore. Well, not usually.

So now, ministers and such of the Ft. Worth area are calling for a boycott of city buses because the public transit authority accepted adds promoting atheism. (They simply declare "Millions of Americans are Good Without God.")

When it was suggested that they could buy counter adds on buses, the "Rev. Kyev Tatum says residents shouldn't ride the buses -- and churches shouldn't buy Christian ads -- because the Fort Worth Transportation Authority has put profit over principle."

What "principle" would that be? That Christians own December? That Christians should never be confronted by opposing opinions?

More here: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/7323085.html

Anne Hathaway Tells Why She Left the Catholic Church

During a recent interview with the excellent Terry Gross of NPR's "Fresh Air" Ms. Hathaway talked about why she could not longer be a member of the Catholic Church:

GROSS: I should mention, this is maybe a good place to talk about it, that your brother is gay, and he got married in Canada. And I read that your family left the Catholic Church when your brother came out because the Catholic Church is so, like, anti-homosexual.

So was it a hard decision or just like a no-brainer to leave the church when your brother came out?

HATHAWAY: Well, it wasn’t really like we had a family discussion about it. We didn’t sit around the dinner table and say, okay, this is the decisive action we’re going to take now. It was more something we realized we’d all done as individuals, and then it became something that we’d done as a family.

And gosh, was it difficult? You know, when it’s family and someone is excluding your family, and someone is not accepting of your family, it does become a bit of a no-brainer, doesn’t it?

GROSS: So was it hard for you to leave the church? Was the church important to you before?

HATHAWAY: Faith is important to me. You know, being raised with one faith and having to go out into the unknown and try to cobble together another, that was hard. But I wasn’t really leaving something because I realized I couldn’t have faith in this religion that would exclude anyone, particularly my brother, for the way he’s born and for loving someone. I mean, how do you exclude someone for love? That seems to be the antithesis of what religion’s about.

And by the way, you know, I [don't] mean to Catholic Church-bash. I do understand that, for a lot of people, the religion provides a lot of peace and direction. But I don’t know… if they could be accepting of women and of gays… I think that the religion gets a lot of things right.

But for me, I couldn’t lose myself in it. I couldn’t look to it for guidance because it’s like I said, I don’t believe in this aspect.

While I will disagree with Ms. Hathaway about her view that "religion gets a lot of things right" I will praise her for doing what too few have the honesty and courage to do: to refuse to be part of an organization that treats their own family members as second-class human beings. It just goes to show that if you are part of an organization that does so, then you really are little more than a coward.

Apple Goes Full Homophobe

Apple fully approves of new "Anti-Gay" app with a 4+ rating.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/24/apple-manhattan-declaration-app_n_788075.html