(Reuters) – The Philadelphia Archdiocese has ordered a local parish hosting events for gay and transgender Catholics during Pope Francis’ U.S. tour next month to cancel the program, organizers said on Tuesday.
Workshops and other discussions around lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues were scheduled to be held at St. John the Evangelist Church on Sept. 26, the day the pope arrives in Philadelphia for a two-day visit.
Pope Francis will attend a summit on families being held in the city, and LGBT Catholic groups have asked for an official presence at the gatherings to express their view that gays and lesbians should be more included in the Church.
Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput has said he would allow the presence of openly gay and transgender Catholics at the World Meeting of Families but did not want the groups to lobby for their issues during the event.
AUSTIN — A federal judge is threatening to hold Texas state health officials in contempt of court unless they allow an embattled El Paso abortion provider to open a new clinic.
The judge, Lee Yeakel, ruled Monday that the Texas Department of State Health Services must immediately stop enforcing the state’s sweeping abortion law against the provider, called Reproductive Services.
“Failure to comply with this Order shall subject (state officials) to sanctions for contempt of court,” Yeakel wrote.
A health department spokeswoman said officials will comply with the order, likely meaning that the clinic will be allowed to reopen.
Police were called to the South Wind Women’s Center on E. Kellogg at around 3:30 Monday afternoon.
Staff at the clinic reported a man came into the clinic with a backpack which contained knives. 911 dispatchers say the man was also carrying a small box wrapped in tape. The clinic was evacuated temporarily.
Wichita Police say the man had a small improvised explosive device which was set to explode. WPD Captain Doug Nolte says the device was small, but still dangerous. It is illegal to make an IED in the City of Wichita.
Now there’s been an update that is even weirder than the original story.
WPD spokesman Lt. James Espinoza says Moises Trevizo had no intent to set off the explosive and he was not trying to damage the facility.
According to police, Trevizo was applying for a position at the clinic. Officers went through a backpack the man brought with him and found several knives and a pill bottle with a fuse coming out of the top.
Lt. Espinoza says the security guard placed the item in an office and asked people to evacuate the building.
Trevizo was booked on one count of unlawful possession of an explosive. Lt. Espinoza says the device was dangerous and made of materials used to make fireworks.
He told police he had just moved out and had all of his personal belongings with him. Police say they’ve ruled out any destructive act against the clinic, and that it was just bad judgment for him to bring the bag into the clinic.
This was the assassinated Dr. Tiller’s clinic. I’m sure it’s just a big old coinky dink, and everyone carries tiny bombs in Wichita.
I love archaeology, always have. I spent many hours of my childhood, wandering through museums and looking at ancient artifacts. (Just a couple of years ago, I toured the site of a Colonial-era dig near my house.) For years, I thought wanted to be an archaeologist when I grew up. And when I read this story today, it made me very sad — but also awed. You may already know this, but one of the many unthinkable things the Islamic State forces has been doing is stripping places of their ancient history by destroying historic artifacts and sites. (And selling off the pieces to fund their war.)
This great man was apparently killed because he refused to tell them where Palmyra, the historic Syrian town (a trading hub on the ancient Silk Road and a Unesco World Heritage site), had hidden their antiquities — their sense of themselves as a ancient people. The murder, the rapes — well, we’ve all heard those stories before, from time immemorial. But to deliberately destroy history? What kind of assholes do that? Khaled Asaad was old and may have figured he was going to be dead soon enough anyway, because it looks like he traded his life for the heritage of his people.
A tragic blow to the archaeology community: Islamic State militants have beheaded one of Syria’s most prominent antiquities scholars in a square in the seized city of Palmyra, where dozens of people gathered to watch, Syrian state media and a British activist group report, via the AP. The body of Khaled al-Asaad, 81 or 82—who spent half a century as head of antiquities in Palmyra—was then taken to the town’s archaeological site and hung from a Roman column, sources say.
“Just imagine that such a scholar who gave such memorable services to the place and to history would be beheaded … and his corpse (is) still hanging from one of the ancient columns in the center of a square in Palmyra,” says Syria’s antiquities chief.
QADIYA, Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.
He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.
[…] A total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery, including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run Islamic courts. And the practice has become an established recruiting tool to lure men from deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and dating is forbidden.
A growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last month. Repeatedly, the ISIS leadership has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Quran and other religious rulings to not only justify violence, but also to elevate and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually beneficial, even virtuous.
[…] The Islamic State’s sex trade appears to be based solely on enslaving women and girls from the Yazidi minority. As yet, there has been no widespread campaign aimed at enslaving women from other religious minorities, said Samer Muscati, the author of the recent Human Rights Watch report. That assertion was echoed by community leaders, government officials and other human rights workers.
Mr. Barber, of the University of Chicago, said that the focus on Yazidis was likely because they are seen as polytheists, with an oral tradition rather than a written scripture. In the Islamic State’s eyes that puts them on the fringe of despised unbelievers, even more than Christians and Jews, who are considered to have some limited protections under the Quran as “People of the Book.”
Josephine King has been a member of Bainbridge’s First African Baptist Church for more than 50 years, but she has just been informed by letter that the church no longer wants her. Their reason: She hasn’t been showing up at church or tithing as she once did. The letter the 92-year-old Ms. King received specifically says… Continue reading “I’m sure Jesus would be perfectly OK with this”→
Here goes Mike Huckabee with the Hitler analogies again. He must be down in the polls if he’s running to Breitbart and saying things like this to get attention: Huckabee: Obama marching Israelis ‘to the door of the oven’: Former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee blasted President Barack Obama on Saturday over the… Continue reading “Huckabee: Obama marching Israelis ‘to the door of the oven’”→
Dan Savage has a few things to get off his chest regarding Bristol Palin, abstinence lecturer, and her second pregnancy out of wedlock:
This will be Bristol Palin’s second child. This one is either by her second ex-fiance or some poor man to be named later. There’s more from Bristol here, if you’re so inclined and you have a high tolerance for platitudes (I’m not and I don’t), and here are three things I gotta get off my chest…
1. If Bristol Palin’s last name was “Obama” the whole Hee Haw gang at Fox News would spend half of every day for the next nine months telling us that Bristol Obama has terrible parents—”Maybe Michelle should be less concerned with what your kids are eating and more concerned with what her kids are doing!”—and the other half of the day pretending to fret over the terrible example that Bristol Obama was setting for other African American women and girls. But unplanned pregnancies and kids in fatherless homes and two different children by two different fathers? IOIYAR.
2. Does anyone remember what Bristol Palin had to say back when Barack Obama endorsed marriage equality for the first time as president? (He had previously endorsed gay marriage back when he was a candidate for state office in Illinois in 1996.) President Obama told ABC News that Sasha and Malia’s perspective had informed his own. Both of his daughters had friends with gay and lesbian parents. It didn’t “make sense to them,” the president said, “that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently.”
While it’s great to listen to your kids’ ideas, there’s also a time when dads simply need to be dads. In this case, it would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage. Or that—as great as her friends may be—we know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home. Ideally, fathers help shape their kids’ worldview.
The irony here? Besides that Bristol Palin opposes same-sex marriage because she believes that kids—other than her own—need to grow up mother/father homes? We now know that Obama’s story about Malia and Sasha is bullshit. Both probably have friends with gay and lesbian parents—they live in White House, after all, and they go to Sidwell Friends—but seeing as Obama was for marriage equality all along it was Obama who shaped his daughters’ views on marriage equality and not the other way around.
The Aftermath of Arson at the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes at Tabgha, on the Sea of Galilee. The Launch of Religious Jewish Terrorism Once again, a Church is vandalized by Jewish extremists. This time, however, the religious motive is more overt. Instead of “price tag”, the graffiti quotes a passage from… Continue reading “The advent of religious Jewish terrorism”→
Republicans in Idaho are pushing a bill to make the Bible a reference book in public school classes teaching science and law, Patheos reports.
Members of the state’s Republican party have published a set of proposed resolutions following a central committee meeting this past weekend among Idaho GOP higher-ups. The policy initiatives the state’s conservative leadership dreamed up include “A Resolution Supporting Bible Use in Idaho Public Schools.”
Republican party chairperson for Idaho County, Marge Arnzen, submitted legislative language to infuse the state’s curriculum with biblical teachings. The proposal, partially captured in screen shots below, begins with a nod to the Christian supreme being :
Concluding that theocracy is the rightful law of the land, Arnzen’s bill would see the Bible stand on academic par with textbooks in the state’s biology and government classrooms.
