J &/or K, the authors of the
CapitolHillSeattle blog, appear to have become a bit tired of the
frequent snipes taken by Sloggers at 43rd District House candidate Jamie Petersen. They explained the tiff much more elegantly than we did. In contrast to our
overly wordy exegesis, the
CapHill explanation neatly fits onto a t-shirt with a Stranger-esqe acronym: JP: TGFDS. The t-shirt even offers an acronym expansion: "Jamie Pedersen: Too Gay for Dan Savage".
Are Southern Baptists too gay?
Speaking of "too gay"... It seems incredible that anyone would find the Southern Baptist Convention too gay, but the wackos of Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas (aka "GodHatesFags.com") thought so when they sent some of their zanier members to
picket the church's annual convention in Greensboro, NC.
Fox's Julie Banderas as Carrie (left). Westboro's Shirley Phelps-Roper as Carrie's mom
Sissy Spacek as Carrie (left). Piper Laurie as Carrie's mom
The woman who spoke for Westboro at the convention also
appeared on Fox News in early June where she seemed to be channeling Piper Laurie's character in the movie Carrie.
FYI: Seattle's gay-friendly copper-topped
First Baptist Church on First Hill is a member of the more liberal American Baptist Convention and is not part of the larger Southern Baptist confederation.
Episcopal Church kind of apologizes for gay bishop
Another denomination was in the news last week as bigwigs of the Episcopal Church met in Columbus, Ohio for their triennial general convention. One of the big issues for conferees was responding to a
flurry of criticism from members of the worldwide Anglican communion about the US church's consecration in 2003 of a gay man, V. Gene Robinson, as bishop of New Hampshire.
The conference sidestepped a deepening controversy when the Episcopal Diocese of California in early May
voted to elect one of the four non-gay candidates as their next bishop. Three of the seven candidates for that post, including the Very Rev. Robert Taylor, dean of Seattle's St. Mark's Cathedral, were gay or lesbian priests.
An angry debate about the election of a gay bishop and the blessing of same-sex unions in the United States has frayed the church at home and threatened to fracture the Anglican communion, the world's third-largest church body. [NYT]
But then, the conference seemed to highlight their theological and cultural clashes with other Anglican conferences and some US Episcopal churches by electing a woman, Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schorli of Nevada, as their presiding bishop.
The election of the first woman to preside over an Anglican conference deepens the divide between the US church and other national conferences.
Many Anglican conferences do not even allow the ordination of women priests.
Jefferts Schorli told the New York Times
"We need to send a message that we fully intend to be part of the [worldwide Anglican] communion," she said on her way to the daily Eucharist service. "All of this calls for us to grow and stretch. I think we're willing to stretch very far indeed."
She quickly signalled that she
wouldn't back down from the US Church's embrace of its gay and lesbian members.
Interviewed on CNN, Jefferts Schori was asked if it was a sin to be homosexual. "I don't believe so. I believe that God creates us with different gifts. Each one of us comes into this world with a different collection of things that challenge us and things that give us joy and allow us to bless the world around us," she said.
Later in the week, however, the conference that had elected her adopted a less tolerant stance when it accepted a preliminary resolution that apologizes for offending other national Anglican churches in 2003 when it approved consecration of Robinson as bishop.
The approved statement says the U.S. church expresses its "regret for breaching the proper restraints of the bonds of affection" with the events surrounding the 2003 convention and "the consequences which followed."
It offers the church's "sincerest apology" to those "who are offended by our failure to accord sufficient importance ... to the impact on our church" and asks "forgiveness as we seek to live in deeper levels of communion one with another."
Executions in the name of god
More disturbing religious news filtered (without much US media coverage) out of Iraq where the US military (aka "coalition forces") admitted that it was aware of the murders, but hadn't done much about religiously motivated executions of gay folk in the country. The killings had accelerated when Iraq's primary Shiite cleric, the Ayatolla Sistani, issued a stern fatwa calling for executions of homosexuals. In May, A London-based group of gay Iraqi exiles managed to get Sistani's people to remove parts the fatwa from their website, but it remained in effect and the executions apparently continued as well. (The section of the fatwa calling for execution of lesbians remained on the website.)
The Army spokesman, Maj. Joseph Todd Breasseale, who talked with the Washington Blade insisted there isn't much that the US can do about any of this.
Faced with a highly volatile atmosphere brought about by warring Islamic factions, the U.S. and its coalition allies must use caution in addressing the issue of homosexuality, Breasseale said.
"It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, when we're in a fledgling time like this, to go in and say, 'Here's these issues that are going to repel 80 percent of the population and this is what we want to inflict on you,'" he said. "We're trying not to get into too many values judgment type issues and just do the right thing."
But that attitude might not be all that surprising given the US military's own recent
fatwa-light against gay folk.
Another indication of how bad things are for gay folk over there comes from
the story of a Canadian peace activist, James Loney, who was kidnapped and held captive for 118 days. Loney is gay, but his partner in Toronto, his family, the Canadian government, and the church group he worked with conspired to keep that a secret, fearing that he would be killed if his captors discovered his sexual orientation.
Back home in Toronto, Dan Hunt had to endure a double dose of pain. He had to contend not only with the daily anguish of wondering whether his partner was still alive, he also had to cope with being forced back into the closet.
Shout-outs
As part of its Pride issue, Seattle Weekly finds and talks to a few
gay evangelicals.
Metroblogging Seattle discovered that The Weekly's writers has now
started blogging. We're guessing that they won't call it "wogging". (Metblogs
also noticed our pride list. Thanks.)
Speaking of which... yesterday, we added a few more events that we missed in the original to our
roundup of Pride events. And let us note for
SOP's lawyers that when we put up a graphic on other pages of this site for the listing, we avoided using the term "Seattle Pride." Happy?
For whatever this kind of endorsement might be worth, the Seattle Times's Nicole Brodeur thinks that City Council member Sally Clark has
stepped to the front.
We were delighted to get a shout-out
from WonderRobbie, [we think that will take you to the post, but we'll admit to being often confused by MySpace] whom
we featured a while back. Rob was even kind enough to thank us in an email, "I just wanted to say thank you. Who'd have ever thought this little froot with a videocamera would be the topic of a fantastic blog?? haha I'm just having fun and I'm glad people love it." Now, we just hope that he might make it over here to the left coast in early August sometime so we could feature him on the Cruise.
We mentioned
CapitolHillSeattle up top. They were
feeling neglected a while back on behalf of all us little local blogs. Let us mention that we display links to them and other local blogs via a secondary way via those Squidoo links over to the right. The
Seattle Info page has links to CapHill and several other neighborhood blogs (most of which CapHill has pointed out to us), along with some of the local biggies. The
Gay Seattle page has some feeds and links to local LGBT resources. And the
Gay News page shows feeds from a few of our favorite gay-info blogs.
Tags: Link bites Washington politics, Iraq, equal rights, religionLabels: link bites, video, WonderRobbie, youtube
