Cardinal: Catholic schools welcome kids of gays – but priest made OK call
(Boston) Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley on Wednesday defended a priest who denied admission to a parish school to a gay couple’s child, calling it a pastoral decision and saying the priest had his “full confidence and support.”
O’Malley’s comments on his blog were his first public remarks about the decision earlier this month by St. Paul Elementary School in Hingham to rescind the boy’s acceptance because his parents are lesbians.
A parent of the boy said the Rev. James Rafferty, the parish priest at St. Paul’s, said her relationship was “in discord” with church teachings, which sees marriage as only between a man and a woman. She said the principal told her teachers wouldn’t be prepared to handle the boy’s questions when he realized the church’s view of family conflicted with what he saw at home. The parent spoke to The Associated Press but asked not to be named to protect the welfare of the child.
The decision prompted calls for O’Malley to intervene. The Catholic Schools Foundation, which O’Malley chairs, said the decision was at odds with Gospel teaching, and it wouldn’t fund schools that made similar decisions.
The archdiocese’s head of education later called the parent, apologized and offered to help the 8-year-old enroll in another Catholic school.
O’Malley said Rafferty had come under “undue criticism” for the decision.
“He made a decision about the admission of the child to St. Paul School based on his pastoral concern for the child,” O’Malley wrote. “I can attest personally that Father Rafferty would never exclude a child to sanction the child’s parents.”
The archdiocese said it is creating a policy to clarify its schools don’t bar children with same-sex parents.
“It is true that we welcome people from all walks of life,” O’Malley wrote. “But we recognize that, regardless of the circumstances involved, we maintain our responsibility to teach the truths of our faith, including those concerning sexual morality and marriage.”
O’Malley began his post with a recollection about meeting the young daughter of a murdered woman who had run a brothel while he was bishop in the West Indies. He said the woman’s daughter had left public school because she was being badly taunted, and he immediately directed that the girl be admitted to the local Catholic school.
“Catholic schools exist for the good of the children and our admission standards must reflect that,” he wrote. “We have never had categories of people who were excluded.”
The Hingham case was similar to a situation in Boulder, Colo., in which a Catholic school said two children of lesbian parents could not re-enroll because of their parents’ sexual orientation, and the Denver Archdiocese backed the decision.
“It is clear that all of their school policies (in Denver) are intended to foster the welfare of the children and fidelity to the mission of the Church,” O’Malley wrote. “Their positions and rationale must be seriously considered.”
Country’s first legal gigolo starts work in Nevada
(Beatty, Nev.) A brothel in a Nevada desert town has hired the state’s first male prostitute, a muscular college dropout who abandoned a brief stint as a porn actor in Los Angeles to become the only legal gigolo in the United States.
The Shady Lady Ranch successfully won state and county …
LGBT health survey shows trouble spots
BOSTON. The largest survey to date comparing the health of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community to heterosexuals and non-transgender residents showed sharp health disparities.
The statistics:
In a survey of nearly 1,600 Massachusetts residents:
- Almost 31 percent of transgender citizens reported considering suicide in the past year, compared to just 2 percent for heterosexuals and 4 percent for gay or lesbian.
- Nearly 35 percent of transgender citizens said they were threatened with physical violence during their lifetime by an intimate partner, almost three times the rate of non-transgender residents.
- Just 45 percent of bisexual women said they had never had a mammogram, below the 59 percent of heterosexuals and 58 percent of lesbians.
- Bisexuals reported the most days binge drinking, having four or five drinks in a sitting an average of nearly two times in the past 30 days. Bisexuals also reported smoking marijuana nearly twice as often as heterosexuals.
See LGBT health survey shows trouble spots
Metro.us
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Swedish lesbians suck sperm banks dry
Sweden’s fertility clinics are racking up a serious backlog of people waiting for artificial insemination, due in part to a “spike” in demand from lesbian couples for vital supplies of man juice.
So bad have things got that expectant customers at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg are now forced to wait 18 months for treatment.
See Swedish lesbians suck sperm banks dry
Register
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Bisexuality 101: Am I bisexual?
Some people would say that everyone is bisexual, but I’m not going to buy into that line. That’s the easiest way to confuse those of you who may be on the fence.
And no, just because you thought about doing something with a friend of the same sex—or maybe even did a little fooling around at one time—it doesn’t mean that you’ve got the “B” label branded on your forehead forever. Nor, does it mean if you’ve never actually had sex with both a man and a woman that you cannot declare yourself a bisexual.
In fact, many people who identify as bisexual have yet to experience full sexual relations with a man and a woman (and it doesn’t have to be at the same time, either!)
Bisexuality, in its simplest form, is the understanding or awareness that you can be attracted physically and emotionally to either gender at some point.
It doesn’t mean that you have to be equally attracted to both, and it doesn’t mean that you have to have regular sex with both genders to be happy or satisfied. And yes, bisexuals can be monogamous, and have one only one partner at a time and be very content. See Bisexuality 101: Am I bisexual?
Examiner.com -
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Gay incident reopens Salt Lake City’s Main Street plaza wounds
It’s the wound that won’t heal. The rift that won’t close. And earlier this month, two gay lovers’ purportedly innocuous late-night kiss — though LDS Church officials insist it was far more amorous than that — ripped it wide open. Utah’s simmering religious divide boiled over — once again — at the geographical and philosophical intersection of church and state: the Main Street Plaza in downtown Salt Lake City. “It is a scab that will continue to be peeled away — and may never heal,” says Dani Eyer, the former ACLU director who fought to preserve First Amendment rights on the plaza. Matt Aune and Derek Jones say they held hands, kissed and then squabbled with security guards on the LDS Church-owned square. Salt Lake City police issued a ticket for trespassing. In protest, supporters of the couple staged a “kiss-in” last Sunday outside the plaza and plan another such demonstration today. The LDS Church — a faith to which 60 percent of Utahns belong — defended its right to regulate “inappropriate behavior” on the plaza. “What we’re seeing now is a manifestation of what should have been obvious from the very beginning,” says former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson. “This block of Main Street never should have been conveyed to the LDS Church. It was a recipe for ongoing resentments between the LDS Church and those who are not members.” The church bought the strip of Main — from North Temple to South Temple — in 1999 after then-Mayor Deedee Corradini and the City Council, with the only two non-LDS members dissenting, signed off on the $8.1 million deal. But the controversy burned for five more years as federal courts were asked to settle the prickly issue of whether the church could govern expression on the plaza and whether the city could retain a public right of way (as outlined in the original deal). “It was meant to be for everybody,” Eyer says. “Where people come and go their constitutional rights go with them.” After a 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2002, First Amendment activities returned to the plaza. But demonstrations by anti-Mormon protesters — including cries of “whore” and “harlot” hurled at newlywed brides — “sustained divisions” that “reached to the point of hatred” between Mormons and non-Mormons, Anderson says. In the end, he agreed to trade the public easement for cash and LDS land to build a west-side community center.
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Author E. Lynn Harris dies at age 54
The openly gay, best-selling author E. Lynn Harris died earlier this morning while on a book tour along the West Coast. The tour was in promotion of his eleventh novel, “Basketball Jones“, the story of a player in the NBA and his gay lover. While the cause of death is still unknown, his personal assistant did say that the Harris’s health had recently declined. Further questions, however, went unanswered. The celebrated author, known best for his books centered on life as a gay, black man, was 54 at the time of his death.
Born in Flint, Michigan, E. Lynn Harris moved around a lot, finally finding his home and settling down in the South. As a student at the University of Arkansas, he become the school’s first male cheerleader and was, till his dying breath, a giant Razorbacks fan. Later in life, Harris returned as a visiting professor in the school’s English department.
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Best-selling author E. Lynn Harris has died Entertainment Weekly - -
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Online blogs report Atlanta author E. Lynn Harris has died Atlanta Journal Constitution
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E. Lynn Harris Dies of Heart Attack Advocate.com
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McEntee: Discrimination is still with us
o Salt Lake City is stepping out, urging a new anti-discrimination law that actually includes sexual orientation and gender identity in the traditional list of those affected by housing and employment discrimination. Take that, all you legislators who have squashed any such thinking on the state level, arguing disingenuously that “choosing to be gay” is not grounds for civil rights protection. Mayor Ralph Becker, a Democratic representative for 11 years, knows all about that ruse. And one of the most fascinating things is how the city’s Human Rights Commission got there: Its members sat down and talked to people in five “dialogues on discrimination” late last year. No lectures, no surveys. Just conversations about classism/poverty, people with disabilities, racism, faith and sexual orientation. Kilo Zamora, whose nonprofit Inclusion Center trained the commissioners, says the opener was, “How’s the city doing, and do you think there’s discrimination here?” As people talked, it became evident that race, gender, class, income and religious biases “we thought we had buried in the ’60s were much alive in our communities,” he says. People were shocked. “Are you sure?” they would ask. “I never knew racism was still alive!”
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Humpday Isn’t Really About Gay Sex
Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, a sexual sitcom, opens with a pair of breeders in bed. A youngish married couple, Ben (mumblecordeon Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore), confess they’re too tired to procreate that night and then confess their mutual relief. As if in response, the doorbell rings at 2 a.m. and Ben’s long-lost college buddy, Andrew (Blair Witch Project survivor Joshua Leonard), stumbles in from deepest Mexico. Anna, who has never had the pleasure, watches the unexpected bromantic action with grim incredulity. Aggressively loud, demonstrative, and hairy, Andrew is a credible representation of Ben’s id.
Reuniting an uptight married man with a footloose old pal, Shelton’s third feature offers a (much) more extreme version of Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, also a sort of buddy movie, also shot in the Pacific Northwest. In this case, the lost weekend is steeped in sexual anxiety. Friday night, Ben has to retrieve merry Andrew from a house called “Dionysus” — home to a bi cutie (the director herself) and an omnisexual assortment of roisterers. No orgies, but plenty of stoned dancing. Anna, who has prepared her signature pork chop dinner, sits home alone. She stews; Ben gets stewed. Prompted by news of an amateur porn festival — sponsored by a local alt-weekly — Ben finds himself proposing to costar with showoff Andrew in a mad art project, dude-on-dude action, totally straight, yet somewhere “beyond gay.” Maybe they’ll be famous. The only problem: Just who is going to bone whom?
Having thus invested its protagonists in a game of “chicken,” played to justify their respective life choices, Humpday delivers some excellent situation comedy. The scene where Andrew and Anna have a get-acquainted drink and Andrew inadvertently exposes Ben’s boastful lie that his wife has signed off on their “project” is pure Honeymooners. (Bang, zoom, straight to the moon!) Ben can’t tell Anna why he wants to have sex with Andrew, only that it’s very, very important to him. And, terrified that Ben might think he really did have a yen, Andrew can only sigh, “I wish I was more gay.” Of course. Just as Brüno is more of a comment on celebrity culture than the love (or hate) that dare not speak its name, Humpday is actually less a queer comedy than a satiric view of macho. Appreciative as Shelton may be of her dudes, she has another agenda. Each in his own way, the guys have been freaked by a manifestation of assertive female sexuality — although the term “pussy-whipped” is never used.
See Humpday Isn’t Really About Gay Sex
Miami New Times
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Conservatives reject funding for Montreal gay festival
A gay and lesbian arts festival that was told it met all government criteria under a new tourism stimulus program learned Tuesday it was rejected for funding.
The news arrived at Montreal’s Divers-Cite a few weeks after tension swept the Conservative caucus over funding for Toronto’s Pride week, and just days before the beginning of the event.
The directors of Montreal’s Divers-Cite had actually sprung to the defence of Stephen Harper’s government earlier this month, telling The Canadian Press that the Conservatives had never treated them differently. Some in the gay community attacked them for their comments.
They had submitted a bid under the new Marquee Tourism Events Program for $155,000 to add performers and promotion to this year’s $2-million event.
Government relations and marketing director Paul Girard said bureaucrats handling his file at Industry Canada told him his application met all the criteria, and had been sent up to Minister Tony Clement’s office for final approval.
When he phoned to check on the bid Tuesday, Mr. Girard says he was told by a senior bureaucrat that the $100-million program had received so many requests, the government simply had to make a choice.
“We knew that anybody that was to be refused and didn’t meet the criteria got a quick No,” Mr. Girard said. “As time advanced, we became more and more confident.”
Paul’s sister Suzanne, the festival’s director, says the organization was completely shocked by the response. Divers-Cite has received funding from Economic Development Canada for several years, as well as Canadian Heritage.
See Conservatives reject funding for Montreal gay festival
Globe and Mail
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