This is the anti-gay marriage DVD that was “made possible by the Knights of Columbus,” produced by the New Jersey Catholic Conference, and distributed free of cost to Catholics throughout the State of Minnesota weeks before Election Day 2010. Over $1 million in postage was paid by an anonymous donor. Why? Well, the Church simply wanted to remind people that they think gays and lesbians are “intrinsically disordered,” and shouldn’t be allowed to have full Constitutional rights in America. Read the rest of this entry »
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Even President Obama says, “It gets better.” But I find it a bit disingenuous underneath the good intentions. It gets better, but only in certain ways. For it to be possible to truly get better, our culture would need to undergo a dramatic change which would eliminate the harassment and assault upon kids.
Eventually, the homophobic kids who tormented the queer kids will become adults whose homophobic votes matter deeply to both of the major political parties. Most of the politicians on either side of the aisle will throw civil rights for any and all minorities (be it gays/lesbians, women, people of color, or people with disabilities) to the side whenever it is most convenient.
During mid-January 1991, a few hundred people gathered from across the world in an Internet Relay Chat room to share and seek any information they could on what was to become known as “Operation Desert Storm” of the Gulf War. Among the participants were Israeli eyewitnesses to Iraqi Scud missiles.
Ever since Jews rejected Moloch, Ba’al, Jesus, Mohammad, and every other foreign god/prophet/messiah/whatever, the world has been obsessed with Jewish approval in one way or another. It’s actually kind of creepy! There are even organizations which exist solely to spend billions of dollars annually trying to convince Jewish people to follow a foreign god.
Charles Blow enjoys his fair share of making up fake, misleading, and otherwise nonexistent “trends” to fill up space around the advertisements and obituaries in the NYT. (In a past weird column, he asserted that hooking up is an entirely new phenomena only done by people under age 30.) One such trend that doesn’t exist in the natural world is the current media meme in which President Obama is quickly losing steam amongst American Jews.
Aside from the general weirdness of specifically singling out Jews, this isn’t really happening at all:
From January to July 2010, Jews gave Obama a 61 percent approval rating, down from 66 percent from July to December 2009. Muslims gave him a 78 percent approval rating during the first half of 2010, and Mormons a 24 percent rating. The overall approval rating is 48 percent, down 15 points from the first half of 2009.
Obama received average job approval ratings from Catholics, and below-average ratings from Protestants.
Despite drops in the overall job approval rating from January 2009 to July 2010, Muslims have consistently given Obama the highest rating and Mormons the lowest. Jews’ approval ratings have remained above average.
There’s a bill in the Knesset which aims to invalidate conversions and marriages, and re-define Jewish identity at the exclusion of the majority of the world’s Jews.
Most important is the fact that this isn’t the Orthodox vs liberal Judaism battle that some people are trying to make it out to be, it is a power-grab by the Haredi minority. As such, the silence and shrugs by people who don’t seem to understand it (either willfully or not) are just as frustrating as the attempts to purposely misrepresent the intent behind the bill.
Last week, there was an op-ed in New York Times by Alana Newhouse (of Tablet) that does a really great job at explaining what is going on and what is at stake:
[...] The problem is not simply that some of these rabbinical functionaries, who are paid by the state and courted by politicians, are demonstrably corrupt. (To take the most salacious of a slew of examples, an American Haredi rabbi who had become one of the most powerful authorities on the question of conversion resigned from his organization in December after accusations that he solicited phone sex from a hopeful female convert.) Rather, it is that the beliefs of a tiny minority of the world’s Jews are on the verge of becoming the Israeli government’s definition of Judaism, for all Jews.
