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| Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (left) whines 'biblical worldviews' while hoping American forgets how he and his group spent four year kissing up to an orange devil. |
Say what you will about the Family Research Council (I have and I will continue to do so), you have to be amazed as to how obliviously brazen they and their president, Tony Perkins are. I received a fundraising email from the group today. I will spare you the entire spiel and go straight to the most amusing part:
A recent post-election survey by renown Christian pollster, Dr. George Barna, revealed troubling numbers. His polling found that the majority of those who voted for President Joe Biden were less likely to have a biblical worldview. And 75 percent of the president's base thinks there is no absolute moral truth. Barna responded to the findings, saying, "The more the United States puts distance between itself and its moral and spiritual moorings, the less likely we are to have an effective, vibrant government and a healthy and vibrant way of life."
. . . Just when Christian parents think their children might be safe from aggressive ideological indoctrination, they find it creeping into purportedly Bible-believing colleges. So how do we advance a biblical vision for human flourishing in a culture that appears to be on a downward spiral from its Christian heritage? We start with the Word of God! We can't stand for biblical truth if we don't know what it is. It's critical to understand what the Bible says and how to stand upon it.
Male movie stars who were hunks in Old Hollywood represented machismo and the classic expectation that they could always save the damsel in distress before a movie ends. Well, they are able to do this in movies because the script calls for it, but underneath all these bulging muscles and clean cut good looks, is a sexual orientation dilemma that have spooked a lot of these male celebrities. It's either they accepted who they were or suffered by repressing their identities until the end. Get to know who some of them are.
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| Spare us any of your criticism of Donald Trump, Franklin Graham. They are too little and much too late. |
Evangelical leader Franklin Graham, who has been one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters among the religious right, hit the former president with a reality check over his 2024 election chances. “I think for him, everything will depend on his health at that time. If he still has energy and strength like he does. I don’t,”Graham told Axios, adding: “You know the guy does not eat well, you know, and it’s amazing the energy that he has.” Graham added that Trump seems to have lost 15 pounds. “So he might be in good health and in good shape,” he said. “I don’t know.”
Rev. Franklin Graham admitted in a new interview that his pal, former President Donald Trump, shouldn’t have gone after the press the way he did.“I would never have said that. I think it’s hurt him. I think it built a wall. I think it created animosity when it shouldn’t have. Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn’t mean they’re your enemy,” Graham said in a sit-down with Axios.Mike Allen pressed the reverend, who has been a longtime supporter of Trump’s, on whether the one-term president’s attacks on the press were a mistake. “No question about it,” said Graham, the son of Christianity Today founder Billy Graham.
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| A Louisiana student was kicked of out her sorority for making fun of Dr. Rachel Levine and is now attempting to play the 'religious persecution' card. Not today, girlfriend. |
From Pink News:
Emily Hines was dismissed from the Delta Tau chapter of Alpha Phi for a post which saw her dancing in front of a picture of Dr Levine. In the video, which has since been deleted, Hines pointed at Dr Levine’s face as she lip-synched the Bee Gees lyrics: “More than a woman, more than a woman to me."
Hines was summoned judiciary board hearing where she was told her video was widely viewed as offensive. “They asked if I was remorseful at all, and I said I regret wearing the [Alpha Phi] sweatshirt but was not going to apologise for my beliefs,” she told Breitbart.Shortly after, Hines received an email notifying her that she’d been terminated from the sorority. She was outraged by the decision which she blamed on “hypocrisy and one-sidedness”. “The way this situation unfolded has been absolutely ridiculous. My religious beliefs have been pushed under the rug because the social construct of gender has become such a big issue,” Hines told Young America’s Foundation.
“My faith teaches me that God made male and female in his image, and that one cannot become the other."
In a leaked video of a private meeting with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group “boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country,” Mother Jones reports. Said Jessica Anderson of Heritage Action: “In some cases, we actually draft them for them or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.” She added: “Honestly, nobody even noticed. My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.'”
The Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told the foundation’s donors at an April 22 gathering in Tucson, in a recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with Mother Jones.Those included policies severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes, preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters, making it easier for partisan workers to monitor the polls, preventing the collection of mail ballots, and restricting the ability of counties to accept donations from nonprofit groups seeking to aid in election administration. All of these recommendations came straight from Heritage’s list of “best practices” drafted in February. With Heritage’s help, Anderson said, Georgia became “the example for the rest of the country.”
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| Caitlyn Jenner |
Recently, the Family Research Council published a post about 'cancel culture.' In part, this is what it says:
Over the past few years, the language of “cancel culture” has become ubiquitous in our society. Social media platforms are cluttered with hashtags and campaigns urging us to “cancel” someone or declare that they are “over.” Whether the context is politics, sports, entertainment, or business, no one seems safe from the reach of the so-called cancel culture movement. However, many people are increasingly becoming wary of it. When asked about cancel culture in a recent interview, comedian Dave Chappelle quipped, “I hope we all survive it.” Chappelle’s passing comment points to a growing awareness that a movement that might have begun with good intentions has taken on a life of its own, resulting in a variety of unintended consequences. What is cancel culture? How should Christians think about the notion of “canceling” people, institutions, or ideas?
The American Principles Project (APP) is one of the numerous extremist Catholic organizations founded by Robert P. George and Luis Tellez. (The professor and the Opus Deist). APP isn’t very principled when it comes to telling the truth. First of all, LGBTQ people are routinely denied basic medical care (see below). Secondly, sexuality — including sexuality that Schilling disapproves of — is not an ideology. Thirdly, there is no such thing as a “sex-change procedure.” Moreover, hospitals do not perform procedures. People perform procedures and hospitals, including Catholic hospitals, have complete autonomy in the extension of privileges.
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| Former Trump appointee Roger Severino is no longer hiding his distaste and bigotry of the transgender community. |
When it comes to former Trump appointee Roger Severino, I think I can speak for the LGBTQ community when I say:
We told you that SOB was a snake.
First, a little background. In 2017 when former president Donald Trump appointed Roger Severino as director of the Office of Civil Rights at Health and Human Services, many LGBTQ Americans and our allies loudly voiced our fear and disapproval. As an employee of several far right groups, Severino worked to undermine LGBTQ rights and safety on several fronts from the fight for marriage equality to the fight against the fraudulent practice of 'ex-gay therapy.'
In his new position in the Trump Administration, Severino proved our fears to be accurate as he instituted rule after rule designed to either erase LGBTQ rights in healthcare or allow healthcare workers - from doctors and nurses to ambulance drivers - to not treat us by citing their "religious freedom." Specifically, Severino was responsible for an attempt to create a rule which would roll back protections for the trans community against discrimination through Obamacare, and a "conscience rule" which said any healthcare worker could deny services to LGBTQ people based on "moral or religious" reasons. In November 2019, three different federal courts struck down the rule and one court found that HHS exaggerated a justification for the rule. Severino was pointed out in an NPR article to have contributed to that exaggeration.
And while doing all of this, Severino gave out lip service claiming that "discrimination has no place in healthcare" or gaslighting people into believing that the changes were to protect people's religious beliefs
But now that Trump is gone and Biden is president, Severino no longer has to "fake it," so to speak. Since losing his job at HHS, he has joined another far right think tank (Ethics and Public Policy Center) devoted to undermining LGBTQ rights and health. In doing so, Severino has embraced a nastier tone. One can see that by the tweets and retweets he sends out smearing transgender Americans.
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| Tucker Carlson |
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| From Anita Bryant's 1977 campaign to 'save children from homosexuality' (top picture) to today's legislative attack on transgender youth under the guise of 'saving girl's and women's sports' (bottom picture), the religious right and their allies have always hid their bigoted undermining of LGBTQ rights by falsely claiming to be "protecting" the most vulnerable. |
This right here below is a 48 second history lesson which folks like myself have been trying to communicate to the public for the longest. The recent legislative attack on transgender Americans under the guise of "protecting women and children" is nothing more than a continuation of the lies the religious right and their allies used to claim that children needed to be "protected from homosexuality in the 1970s. It also illustrates that our community cannot rely on the media (and especially podcasting frauds like Joe Rogan) to do the right thing in telling the story. It's up to us and our allies to forcefully educate people on this.
Today’s attacks on trans youth are the latest in a long line of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric focused on kids. pic.twitter.com/ngZAjsSNZi
— ACLU (@ACLU) May 10, 2021
Republicans saw a ready-made wedge issue to rally the GOP’s base when, soon after Joe Biden took office, he moved to expand protections for transgender people, including in school sports. The president and his Democratic allies, conservatives said, were ruining women’s athletics, and Republican lawmakers across the country advanced a raft of bills designed to keep transgender women and girls from playing on female teams. Yet what once promised to be a galvanizing force for the Republican Party ahead of the midterm elections and 2024 has instead devolved into a source of division within the GOP, hobbling one potential presidential contender — Kristi Noem — and pitting other Republican governors against lawmakers of their own party.. . . Far from a unifying new fixture in the GOP’s culture wars, the question of how to treat transgender student athletes is instead inflaming rifts within the party — and quickly becoming a litmus test for Republicans who aspire to higher office. “For those who dream about a 2024 future, starting with Kristi Noem,” said Bill McCoshen, a Wisconsin-based Republican strategist, “you don’t want to be in a position to be against your own party, which all of those governors have done so far.”
On Thursday morning, South Carolina state Senators held a committee meeting to discuss a bill which would ban trans girls from playing in high school and middle school sports. A bill similar to this had already been killed five times - two being in the state House of Representatives.
But lawmakers did not take a vote because there were so many people signed up to speak about the bill. According to The State:
A panel of senators on the Education Committee heard about two hours of testimony on the bill Thursday before deciding to come back in the summer to take up the issue again. Lawmakers did not take a vote on the bill, sponsored by Sen. Richard Cash, R-Anderson.
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| Brothers Osborne |
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| Abigail Shrier |
I've written about Abigail Shrier several times. She is the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, a book which makes negative and false claims about transgender people, particularly transgender youth.
As you can guess, the book is highly controversial, with Shrier basking in all of the infamy and attention. She has also skillfully exploited recent controversies to make it seem that she is a victim of censorship. To hear her and her supporters tell it, transgender activists and others on the "left" are attempting to "cancel" her and ban her book simply because she supposedly dares to have an opinion opposite from theirs. Or because she is simply "asking questions."
The following tweet she recently sent defending her book speaks to that claim
In its attacks on the transgender community, the Family Research Council is getting sloppy And by sloppy, I mean telling easily refuted lies and boldly showcasing its own hypocrisy.
First, let's talk about the lie. In blog posts on its site, FRC spins conspiracy theories about transgender people. This particular post, To Counter The Transgender Lie, We Must Speak Truth, is a yawner much akin to what the group used to say about gays. But to me, one part stood out:
A 2011 U.S. study found that 41 percent of transgender participants reported attempting suicide in comparison to 1.6 percent of the general population. Is this because people aren’t accepting of them or because they have mental health problems the rest of the population does not? The Centre for Suicide Prevention says on its website that transgender people experience mental illness at a much higher rate than the general population. While 6.7 percent of the U.S. general population suffers from depression and 18 percent grapple with some form of anxiety, nearly half of all people who identify as transgender experience one or both of these issues. Telling these people that they should try to change every single part of their physical bodies in order to feel better is abhorrent. Their problem is not in the body, it’s in the mind.
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| President Biden supports trans youth. |
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| Family Research Council president Tony Perkins has his terms mixed up. |
Tony Perkins, head of hate group the Family Research Council, should be very glad that the adage about lightning striking one down for lying isn't factual.
Religious-right activist Tony Perkins says that men "were created to be warriors for Christ" and complains that when he says stuff like that, critics accuse him of "trying to take over the world" ... then admits, "Yeah, we are." pic.twitter.com/T9yw0y6yzX
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 4, 2021
Warriors for Christ? Really, Tony? I suppose it could be possible except for the Biblical prohibitions against lying and bearing false witness - two things which Perkins and FRC have done extensively against LGBTQ people including:
claiming that we want to create an anti-Christian Holocaust,
calling us pawns of Satan,
falsely linking us with pedophilia time and time again,
and constantly using junk science and partnering with other users of junk science to undermine our rights and demonize us. Perkins and FRC are so shady that they even went after a Star Wars video game for being inclusive.
For the record, Perkins and his kind can brag about taking over all they want, but there is a big difference between talk and action. On that same note, Perkins can bray about being a "warrior for Christ," but the same rules still apply. And there are enough receipts and paper trails out there to prove that Perkins and his group can't consider themselves "warriors for Christ." That is unless they think that "lying for Christ" is a noble endeavor.
The sad thing though is that they probably do.
Hat tip to Right-Wing Watch.
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| Chase Strangio |
Chase Strangio is a brilliant transgender attorney who has been working against the recent ugly attacks on trans children in state legislatures. He is a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union and has been the recipient of several awards. Even as I write this, Strangio is arguing in front of the US Appeals Court against an Idaho law banning trans athletes.
But this is how he is described by an organization called Save Women's Sports
According to The News & Observer:
Lawmakers decided not to move forward with a controversial bill that would prevent transgender girls from playing on female sports teams. House Speaker Tim Moore confirmed to The News & Observer Thursday that House Bill 358, also known as the Save Women’s Sports Act, is dead after legislative staff found that there had been no complaints in North Carolina on this topic. “A wise legislature does not go out looking for social issues to tap,” Moore said.. . . Moore’s announcement comes one week after Senate leader Phil Berger’s staff confirmed that another bill opposed by LGBTQ advocates would not move forward in his chamber. Senate Bill 514 would have prevented transgender people under 21 from getting gender-affirming health care and forced teachers to tell parents and guardians about students who did not conform to the gender assigned to them at birth, potentially outing them.
THIS is the group with the bullseye on transgender children.
Editor's note - Unfortunately, the Texas Senate did pass the bill which could criminalize parental support of trans children and lead to those children being taken out of the home. It now goes to the House.
As we watch the attack on our trans children via statewide laws backed by a narrative of lies, it's important to remember from who and where it's all coming from.
According to an article in March from The American Independent:
Many of the proposed bills introduced in state legislatures have been connected to the right-wing group Alliance Defending Freedom, which has drafted some or all of the legal language used in them, provided testimony in favor of anti-trans measures from purported experts in state legislatures, and conducted public relations campaigns to promote the bills and attack the federal Equality Act.The group works under the umbrella of "The Promise to America's Children" coalition with other right-wing organizations, including the Heritage Foundation and the Family Policy Alliance, to attack transgender rights. The Alliance Defending Freedom has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which cites its work to recriminalize sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ people, support for sterilization of transgender people, and promotion of myths about pedophilia and LGBTQ sexuality.According to its 2017 tax returns, the nonprofit group brought in over $55 million in donations. It has over the course of its 27-year history poured millions of dollars into the fight against LGBTQ rights and the right of women to have abortions.. . . In its attacks against transgender people over the years, the Alliance has insisted on misgendering them, referring to transgender women as "males" and "biological males." It has also demonized gay people in publications, saying that pedophilia and homosexuality are "often intrinsically linked" and that there is a "definite link" between "child molestation and later homosexual behavior." Claiming that there's a plot against Christians, the group's founder, Alan Sears, compared activists for LGBTQ equality to "Nazis" who were "tightening the screws" against Christian churches and claimed they were manipulating data on LGBTQ suicides in order to "entrap more children in a dangerous behavior."
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| Get over yourself, Franklin Graham. |
Just because something is “authorized,” that doesn’t make it right! Why should a flag representing one group of people and a specific agenda be literally raised up above all others and allowed to fly at our embassies and consulates? The embassies represent the United States of America on foreign soil—only the U.S. flag should be flown. Not the gay pride flag, not the Christian flag, not any other flag. The previous administration had a one-flag rule that the Biden administration has rescinded. Our U.S. flag represents the sacrifice, the honor, the unity, the patriotism—and the blood—that made America great. Pray for our nation and our leaders.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has authorized US embassies to fly the Pride flag, according to a State Department cable first reported by Foreign Policy. Blinken gave US diplomatic outposts the greenlight to fly the rainbow flag before May 17, the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, and to keep it on display through Pride Month in June. But the top US diplomat in the cable also said that this was not mandatory, leaving it up to diplomats to "determine that such a display is appropriate in light of local conditions," per the New York Times, which also reviewed the cable.. . . This move reverses a decision from the Trump administration, which rejected requests from US embassies to fly the Pride flag. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who publicly opposed same-sex marriage, said only the US flag should appear on the flagpole at US embassies.
