PEW HISPANIC CENTER: Majority Of US Hispanics Support Gay Rights

¨A majority of U.S. Hispanics say gay men and lesbians should be accepted by society, a new study has found.

The poll by the Pew Hispanic Center HERE found acceptance for gay rights among Latinos to be similar to the general public.

“Virtually identical shares of Latinos (59%) and the general public (58%) say homosexuality should be accepted by society,” the report's authors wrote.

Thirty percent of Latinos and 33 percent of the general public say gay rights should be discouraged.

While a majority (53%) of immigrant Hispanics favor gay rights, acceptance among second-generation Hispanics rises to 68 percent.

Women more than men favor such rights – 62 percent versus 55 percent.

And support is greater among younger Hispanics, with nearly seven-in-ten (69%) of 18-to-29-year-old Hispanics saying homosexuality should be accepted by society; 60 percent of Hispanics ages 30 to 49 and 54 percent of Hispanics 50 to 64 agree. Hispanics ages 65 and older are more divided, with 41 percent saying homosexuality should be accepted by society and 44 percent disagreeing.

The survey also found that 80 percent of Latinos believe gay people face discrimination, 74 percent support marriage or similar legal recognitions for gay couples, and 68 percent of Latino Catholics do not believe being gay is immoral. ¨ * HERE

·  Thanks to On Top Magazine, sidebar
·  Thanks to Pew Hispanic Center, HERE
·  Thanks to by Paul Taylor, Mark Hugo Lopez, Jessica Hamar Martínez and Gabriel Velasco
·  * Color/print size emphasis added by Leonardo Ricardo

HOMOPHOBE MELTDOWN/HEEBIE-JEEBEE ALERT: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology have found evidence that gay men and lesbians remind homophobes of themselves...

Bulletin from the Department of we told you so!

¨The claim that homophobic people are in secret attracted to members of their own sex, though they refuse to admit as much, will receive support from a series of psychological studies to be published later this month.

President Mugabe/Zimbabwe doesn´t want any of those ¨disgusting¨ queers around!
HERE

According to research to be published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, scientists across New York, Essex and California have found evidence that gay men and lesbians remind homophobes of themselves, causing an aversive reaction and instilling fear. The study also claims that the root of the problem lies in the homophobic attitudes in which they were brought up as a child.

Say no to selling your Soul! Janet Museveni, First Lady of Uganda pontificates against immoral ¨Gays¨ at a political rally HERE

The study involved four different experiments, each using 160 students in the US and Germany, and measured differences between self-reports concerning sexuality compared to how the subjects reacted during a time-controlled task where they had to look at images and words associated with homo- or heterosexuality.

Archbishop Drexel Gomez of LGBT blood drenched Jamaica/West Indies punitive ¨Anglican Covenant¨ author frets about bad behaving LGBT including ¨family¨ members -- he wants them kicked out of the Anglican Communion worldwide ¨family¨ for being fully inclusive at Church.
HERE

The second part of the experiment involved subject histories on family upbringing, after which they were invited to look at pictures of gay or straight couples. Then, levels of homophobia were measured both consciously and sub-consciously.

¨Pink Swastika¨ author, ¨Deadly¨ Scott Lively, knows the Nazi homosexuals quest -- top to bottom , front to back!
HERE

The authors of the study say that their findings might help explain why so much of bullying and hate crime is directed against LGBT people. Some homophobes who have not reconciled themselves to their true sexuality may feel the urge to hit out at gay people, who they fear might bring their repressed desires to the surface.¨  HERE

The biggest loser is:  MP/Anglican David Bahati, author of ¨Kill the Gays¨ Bill  currently (again) before the Parliament of Uganda HERE

Honorable dementia:  Schismatic/deposed TEC Bishop of Pittsburgh found a ¨place to stand¨ outside of the Anglican Communion  HERE

Anti-Gay happiness makes the heart grow fonder HERE

¨Getting Down¨ Under? HERE

Archbishop ¨Massacre at Yelwa¨ Akinola/Nigeria   HERE and Archbishop ¨Poisoness Episcopal Church U.S.A.¨ Orombi/Uganda believe there are no Holy/God Loving queers because the Bible told ´em so HERE (besides, ´Gays´ would be lower than pigs, even if God did)!

The Anglican Province of the Southern Cone-alone: ¨Don´t pray for me Argentina¨ the truth is, I never left ye! HERE  

·  Thanks to Pink News, United Kingdom, sidebar
·  Thanks to Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
·   Edmund Broch 

¨New life comes in many forms, even in seasons that seem fairly wintry...¨ The Most Revd Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop and Primate, The Episcopal Church

A New Day with New Life at The Foot of the Volcano

¨...In this Easter season I would encourage you to look at where you are finding new life and resurrection, where life abundant and love incarnate are springing up in your lives and the lives of your communities. There is indeed greenness, whatever the season. Give thanks for Easter. Give thanks for Resurrection. Give thanks for the presence of God incarnate in our midst.¨  please read it all,   HERE

·  Thanks to The Most Revd Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop and Primate, The Episcopal Church
·  Thanks to Anglican Communion News Service, sidebar
·  Thanks to Thinking Anglicans, sidebar
·  Thanks to Simon Sarmiento
·  Thanks to Joan Fuetsch, photo

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

This sermon was given at Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral of Constantinople at the Easter Vigil in the year 400.  (and by Padre Mickey in Northern California in español tonight)

¨Is there anyone who is a devout lover of God?
Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival!
Is there anyone who is a grateful servant?
Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord!

Are there any weary with fasting?
Let them now receive their wages!
If any have toiled from the first hour,
let them receive their due reward;
If any have come after the third hour,
let him with gratitude join in the Feast!
And he that arrived after the sixth hour,
let him not doubt; for he too shall sustain no loss.
And if any delayed until the ninth hour,
let him not hesitate; but let him come too.
And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour,
let him not be afraid by reason of his delay.

For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first.
He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour,
as well as to him that toiled from the first.
To this one He gives, and upon another He bestows.
He accepts the works as He greets the endeavor.
The deed He honors and the intention He commends.

Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord!
First and last alike receive your reward;
rich and poor, rejoice together!
Sober and slothful, celebrate the day!

You that have kept the fast, and you that have not,
rejoice today for the Table is richly laden!
Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one.
Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith.
Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

Let no one grieve at his poverty,
for the universal kingdom has been revealed.
Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again;
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.
Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free.
He has destroyed it by enduring it.
He destroyed Hades when He descended into it.
He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh.
Isaiah foretold this when he said,
"You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below."

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it is mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.
Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.
O death, where is thy sting?
O Hades, where is thy victory?

Christ is Risen, and you, O death, are annihilated!
Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down!
Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is Risen, and life is liberated!
Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead;
for Christ having risen from the dead,
is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever.

Amen!

 St. John Chrysostom, the Patriarch or Arch-bishop of Constantinople in the fifth century
HERE

·   Thanks to Padre Mickey´s Dance Party, sidebar
·   Thanks to St. John Chrysostom

THE EASTER VIGIL 2012: ¨Tonight is not a recitation of doctrine or dogmas. It is a time to know the holiness into which we have been called¨

The Easter Vigil

¨This service is one of the oldest services in Christendom. The Easter Vigil was so important to the 3rd and 4th century Church because it was THE service of baptism. Baptisms were only performed by the bishop in those days and only at Easter.

A person seeking admittance to the mysteries of the Church became a catechumen on Ash Wed and spent the whole of Lent preparing to be admitted to Holy Eucharist. In those days, if you were not baptized, you were dismissed from the church before the time of Holy Communion. So full admittance to the Eucharist was an important experience for all of the Church.

In Christian communities all over, on Maundy Thursday all fires, not just the altar lights were extinguished. Hearth fires and all lights were extinguished for all of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. And until the building of the New Fire on Holy Saturday, people not only lived in darkness, they lived and slept in the cold. As soon as the new fire was lit, runners took torches to peoples’ homes, and the light and warmth of Christ’s light spread through the communities, hearth to hearth and heart to heart. Then the community gathered in their churches and the candidates for baptism returned from their retreat.

The candidates for baptism would prepare for this night with fasting and prayer and then be brought into the church in darkness following the Pascal candle. The Exultet is one of the few ancient chants that we preserve in our tradition along with the litany and the sursum corda. The Pascal candle signifies the Pillar of Fire by night that led the Children of Israel through the desert... HERE

·  Thanks to Stone of Witness, sidebar
·  Thanks to  Muthah+

THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO (still): ¨ Kill Gays Bill¨ promoters alive and spiritually/emotionally unwell in Uganda

Uganda Pastors Accuse U.S. Of Spreading ‘Gayism,’ Imposing ‘An Agenda For Homosexuals’

¨PBS’s Newshour featured a segment on Uganda’s ongoing struggle for LGBT equality Thursday, and the nation’s hostility to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s historical call to treat gay rights as human rights. Polls still show that 95 percent of Ugandans favor criminalizing homosexuality — and many back the infamous “kill gays bill,” which would impose harsh penalties on homosexual behavior.

The piece includes Pastor Joseph Serwadda, who heads an association of Pentecostal and evangelical churches, accusing the West of spreading “gayism” and imposing “an agenda for homosexuals in Uganda.” He claims that “Nobody has gone to jail; nobody has been harassed; nobody has been ostracized because of their sexual orientation” and says that he has never met a gay person. Watch it: HERE

·  Thanks to PBS, Newshour
·  Thanks to Igor Volsky
·  Thanks to Think Progress, sidebar
·  Thanks to U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton
·  Thanks to U.S. President, Barack Obama

END LIFE REALITY: LGBT Elders See More Poverty, Isolation and Bias

“Disparities and Resilience among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Older Adults.”

¨Researchers at the University of Washington School of Social Work, in Seattle, found in the first nationwide LGBT study on aging and health. It shows that LGBT seniors experience higher rates of disability, physical and mental anguish, as well lack of access to services than the non-LGBT population in the United States.¨   HERE

¨Ricardo Urrieta, 61, claims to face discrimination times four: "I am old, I'm Latino, I'm gay and I have HIV," he declared. "This is the end for many people.”

Urrieta 's life has not been easy in recent months. And his struggles reflect findings or a recent national study of older lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) seniors, including significant samples of ethnic elders.

"I was a nurse, but one day I could not continue working. I fell down all the time in the hospital because a disk in my back protruded. The doctor told me I could no longer work," he recalled.

Disabled and Homeless

While Urrieta waited for his disability-insurance checks to start arriving, everything became complicated. With no income and no family, he had to leave his apartment in Los Angeles.

"I spent a week in my car, I became homeless on Skid Row. I had to join the queue for a ticket to get me a sandwich and a soda."

Eventually he got a room in a hotel for homeless people. "It did not even have windows," he said... HERE

·  Thanks to New America Media, Elders, HERE
·  Thanks to New America Media/La Opinion ,
·  Thanks to Araceli Martinez Ortega

THREE YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF GAY MARRIAGE IN IOWA: Varnum v. Brien decision brought marriage equality to the Midwest/U.S.A.

¨Gay marriage celebrated its third anniversary in Iowa on Tuesday.


In was on April 3, 2009 that the Iowa Supreme Court handed down its unanimous Varnum v. Brien decision which brought marriage equality to the Midwest.

The following year, angry social conservatives successfully campaigned to oust three judges off the bench. The Republican-led House last year approved a constitutional amendment which would define marriage as a heterosexual union, but Democrats have blocked the measure in the Senate.

For Erin and Rachel Dobb-McConnell, who are raising two children, the ruling has changed their lives.

“It's very fulfilling.” Erin told Des Moines ABC affiliate WOI. “We're very proud of our family and our children. We can go to school and they have a married couple as their parents.”

The couple, who fell in love 12 years ago, married one month after the ruling was handed down.

“My marriage hasn't changed their lives at all but it sure has changed mine,” Erin said of marriage equality opponents.

“Absolutely,” Rachel added. HERE

Massachusetts will celebrate eight years of marriage equality next month.

·  Thanks to On Top Magazine, sidebar

Christianity in Crisis: ¨Christianity has been destroyed by politics, priests, and get-rich evangelists...Ignore them, writes Andrew Sullivan, and embrace Him.¨



¨If you go to the second floor of the National Museum of American History inWashington, D.C., you’ll find a small room containing an 18th-century Bible whose pages are full of holes. They are carefully razor-cut empty spaces, so this was not an act of vandalism. It was, rather, a project begun by Thomas Jefferson when he was a mere 27 years old. Painstakingly removing those passages he thought reflected the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson literally cut and pasted them into a slimmer, different New Testament, and left behind the remnants (all on display until July 15). What did he edit out? He told us: “We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus.” He removed what he felt were the “misconceptions” of Jesus’ followers, “expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves.” And it wasn’t hard for him. He described the difference between the real Jesus and the evangelists’ embellishments as “diamonds” in a “dunghill,” glittering as “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” Yes, he was calling vast parts of the Bible religious manure. Andrew Sullivan

 Organized Religion in Decline

¨....Meanwhile, organized religion itself is in trouble. The Catholic Church’s hierarchy lost much of its authority over the American flock with the unilateral prohibition of the pill in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. But in the last decade, whatever shred of moral authority that remained has evaporated. The hierarchy was exposed as enabling, and then covering up, an international conspiracy to abuse and rape countless youths and children. I don’t know what greater indictment of a church’s authority there can be—except the refusal, even now, of the entire leadership to face their responsibility and resign. Instead, they obsess about others’ sex lives, about who is entitled to civil marriage, and about who pays for birth control in health insurance. Inequality, poverty, even the torture institutionalized by the government after 9/11: these issues attract far less of their public attention.

For their part, the mainline Protestant churches, which long promoted religious moderation, have rapidly declined in the past 50 years. Evangelical Protestantism has stepped into the vacuum, but it has serious defects of its own. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explores in his unsparing new book,Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, many suburban evangelicals embrace a gospel of prosperity, which teaches that living a Christian life will make you successful and rich. Others defend a rigid biblical literalism, adamantly wishing away a century and a half of scholarship that has clearly shown that the canonized Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ ministry, and are copies of copies of stories told by those with fallible memory. Still others insist that the earth is merely 6,000 years old—something we now know by the light of reason and science is simply untrue. And what group of Americans have pollsters found to be most supportive of torturing terror suspects? Evangelical Christians. Something has gone very wrong. These are impulses born of panic in the face of modernity, and fear before an amorphous “other.” This version of Christianity could not contrast more strongly with Jesus’ constant refrain: “Be not afraid.” It would make Jefferson shudder.

It would also, one imagines, baffle Jesus of Nazareth. The issues that Christianity obsesses over today simply do not appear in either Jefferson’s or the original New Testament. Jesus never spoke of homosexuality or abortion, and his only remarks on marriage were a condemnation of divorce (now commonplace among American Christians) and forgiveness for adultery. The family? He disowned his parents in public as a teen, and told his followers to abandon theirs if they wanted to follow him. Sex? He was a celibate who, along with his followers, anticipated an imminent End of the World where reproduction was completely irrelevant...¨ there is much more, HERE

·  Thanks to Frank Schaeffer, sidebar
·  Thanks to Andrew Sullivan (The Daily Beast)  HERE

SEMANA SANTA/HOLY WEEK: ¨It’s a difficult week for people who take this seriously. It ends well, but getting to the end is hard work¨

¨This is a lot nearer than we think; it happened yesterday, it's happening now¨

Holy Week:  Cling to Hope
By Josh Thomas

¨For most Christians this is Holy Week, the Week of Christ’s Passion, encompassing four of the most important events in the life of Jesus: his triumphant entry into Jerusalem (Palm Sunday) a few days before Passover; his last supper, the seder of Passover, which he transformed into the Sacrament of His Body and Blood (Maundy Thursday, including washing his disciples’ dirty feet); his execution nailed to a cross (Good Friday); and his returning to life, the Feast of the Resurrection, or Easter Day...¨ please, read it all,   HERE

·  Thanks to Gay Spirit Diary, sidebar
·  Thanks to Josh Thomas