Tag Archives: Human rights

Womens march on Washington – the Lovettsville buses

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The Womens March on Washington

The Womens March on Washington

Many of your neighbors from Lovettsville, and not just women, felt it was necessary to March on Washington the next day after the Inauguration this past Friday.

They were doing what many other communities were doing across the Commonwealth.

One local woman said, “You know how a woman speaks at a meeting and is ignored.  Then a man repeats the very same thought he just heard her say – and then it’s treated by the men as if it was the man’s idea all along.”

“Worse than that,” she said, “is when a woman enjoys the right of privacy to control her own body – and that’s not respected.”

This latter observation relates to what was plainly a defining moment in the recent presidential election for very many women, when it was widely disclosed, what Mr. Trump thought about women.

Mr. Trump said, “You can do anything … Grab them by the pussy, you can do anything.”

“And when you’re a star, they let you do it,” Mr. Trump said.

“You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women],” Trump said, “I just start kissing them.  It’s like a magnet, just kiss.  I don’t even wait.”

In other words, a woman said, “a woman’s consent is irrelevant to this guy.”

Trump confided to a like-minded male that he tried to have sex with one woman the two were about to join, knowing she was married.  He said, “I moved on her like a bitch.”

Mr. Trump favors tic tacs “just in case I start kissing…”

In the recent campaign, it is undisputed that Mr. Trump, by word and conduct, was transparently intolerant of persons by their gender, race, color, religion and place of origin.

Mr. Trump, however, reserved his special abuse for women, no matter whether the woman was a Fox anchor or an Oscar-winning actor.

Contradicting Mr. Trump invited slander, lies and relentless trash talk.

Women the world over saw in Mr. Trump’s November election the danger of sexual discrimination going forward in his Administration, impermissible incursions into the sanctity of the person, of the constitutional right to be let alone, of access to medical records, of equal pay for equal work, of their dignity – meaning shame for being a woman. Continue reading →

Begin the world over again

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mlkMarchingTom Paine wrote that our new nation had the opportunity “to begin the world over again.”

This election year, voters seem to want to do just that – but the ratio of incomprehensible noise to common sense has been five to one.

The Reverend Martin Luther King said, “Let us be those creative dissenters who will call upon our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humaneness.”

When marchers walked on Martin Luther King’s Day from the court house to the school house. the diverse community of warmly bundled marchers, were conscious that their only inconvenience was the wind and weather.

The march in Selma, Alabama, however, was conducted at some risk, and helped to win the voting rights legislation in 1965.

Selma succeeded because, as King described it, a “stubborn sheriff” acted so wrongly in handling that protest, he “stumbled against the future.”

The Reverend King was focused on what was just and fair, on equality, and the guide for his activism was the non-violence of Jesus and of Gandhi.

After Selma, King said that, “Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it till the end. That is what I have found in nonviolence.”

Anticipating his own death, King said in the Ebenezer Church in Atlanta, that he identified with those who were poor and hungry and, “[i]f it means dying for them, I’m going that way, because I heard a voice say, ‘Do something for others.’”

The challenge for our nation, in his mind, was human rights. Continue reading →

Don’t go near that water

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pastor Guy Johnson

pastor Guy Johnson

The lead infused water crisis in Flint, Michigan has inspired Pastor Guy Johnson, who does outreach for the Loudoun Soil and Water Board in Loudoun, to raise funds to help the children and their parents in Flint.

“This is an issue of human rights,” said Guy, “Clean water is a human right, not a privilege. Poisoning our citizens is not acceptable. If ISIS had done this, it would be called ‘terrorism.’”

In April 2014, Governor Rick Snyder’s Emergency Manager overrode Flint’s Mayor and the City Council, switching the water supply from the Lake Huron water treated by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, to the Flint River, so they could cut costs; Snyder’s Manager didn’t spend a dime to add chemicals to the Flint river water to offset the water’s corrosive effect; as a result, lead leached from water pipes and fixtures into the tap water the citizens drank.

Lead is toxic, not safe at any level in humans, and can cause nervous system damage, stunted growth, kidney damage and delayed development; its effects are most severe on developing brains and the nervous systems of children and fetuses; it can effect reproduction among adults; it is a likely carcinogen.

It is estimated that 8,657 children in Flint drank this toxic tap water, and there is no estimate how many pregnant women living in Flint, or who visited Flint, also drank the water.

Guy said, “I’m angry because these children are doomed to a life of unrelenting medical care. How is it that, in 1978, we took lead out of paint, but we have lead in water in 2016? That’s why I’m raising this money, to help these poor people.” Continue reading →

Two days

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utah_marriageDuring the past 48 hours, we have learned that the Uganda legislature has passed what is one of the most draconian anti-civil rights bills targeting sexual minorities in the world – bookended between announcements that two more US states – New Mexico and Utah – are constitutionally prohibited from excluding same gender couples from civil marriage.

From the Salt Lake City Tribune this afternoon:

A federal judge in Utah Friday struck down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, saying the law violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and due process.

“The state’s current laws deny its gay and lesbian citizens their fundamental right to marry and, in so doing, demean the dignity of these same-sex couples for no rational reason,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge Robert J. Shelby. “Accordingly, the court finds that these laws are unconstitutional.”

fischer_ugandaMeanwhile, Bryan Fischer, spokesperson for the American Family Association, was tweeting this about the situation in Uganda. I don’t know that we could have had a more timely and chilling reminder of the fact that as LGBTI people in the US move closer to attaining full civil rights, anti-gay activists who are rapidly losing ground here are focusing more of their lethal attention on our sisters and brothers in other countries.

Continue reading →

Are you being persecuted?

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‘Tis the time of year when well-fed privileged people of a certain majority religious persuasion traditionally appear before our local government bodies to complain of “persecution” by “storm troopers,” or deface property, or snarl at innocent strangers who are merely trying to wish them well.

Rachel Held Evans, who is awesome, has provided a helpful chart for determining whether or not you are in fact a victim of religious persecution. Please consult it before inadvertently being offensive to those who actually know what that means.

Coming next: Is that a terrorist?

are_you_being_persecuted

Gay – In the Image of God

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Pope Francis

In Genesis, it plainly says that “God created man in his own image.”

In the popular single, “same love,” the Seattle-based rap artist Macklemore warns of “man-made rewiring of a predisposition, [of] playing God …”  See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1TBgcctcco .

Macklemore speaks of gay slurs, born of “the same hate that’s caused wars from religion.”

“When I was at church,” Macklemore intones, “they taught me something else, if you preach hate at the services those words aren’t anointed, that holy water that you soak in has been poisoned.”

Rightly Macklemore concludes, “No law is gonna change us ..and I can’t change even if I tried.” Continue reading →

A good example of false equivalency

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I misunderstood a comment by the author of the letter to which I respond below. His letter was originally published almost exactly one year ago (publication dates don’t include the year), which means that it was the author’s reposting of the year-old link that was actually inspired by our online conversation. I think it’s fair to say that my reading of it as pre-meditated exploitation of a conversation that he initiated, and in which I was participating in good faith, led me to respond more harshly than I otherwise would have. For that I apologize to Mr. Dickinson. He obviously did not, as I suggested in my response, write this to deflect negative attention generated by the Grand Jury report, or the censure, or any other Delgaudio-related drama of the past year.

On the other hand, his point in posting the link to that thread was to say that he more strongly than ever endorses the idea that the reporting of hate group activity is the moral equivalent of the very hate group activity being reported, even openly warning that I, personally, could be responsible for “fomenting a hate attack” because I discuss the hate group activities of the Sterling supervisor. The veiled suggestion that I had best not continue reporting on his active campaign to incite fear and hatred of people like me is offensive.

Continue reading →

This is why they’re called “hate groups”

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Crossposted at Equality Loudoun

[The lawsuit] boils down to nothing more than an attempt to define my Biblical views against homosexuality as a crime..

..Clearly, this lawsuit is intended not only to silence me as an effective voice of opposition to the ‘gay’ agenda, it is also to intimidate everyone else who would dare to follow my example.

Now, who does that sound like? A certain disgraced and censured Sterling supervisor who fills his bank account by running a hate group at Loudoun taxpayers’ expense? And some of his shameless apologists?

Yes, but it’s actually another hate group director, Scott Lively. Mr. Lively is currently facing a federal lawsuit for his role in creating a deadly climate for the LGBTI community in Uganda. Readers may remember him also as the man who hired a known child rapist to run his fake “ministry” out of a coffeehouse designed to attract teenagers. But that was okay, because the predator had “accepted the salvation of Christ” (and of course, the children he preferred were female).

Mr. Lively has tried to have the lawsuit against him dismissed on First Amendment grounds. But it turns out that there are limits even to free expression when that expression is an integral part of criminal activity, and the criminal activity of which Mr. Lively is accused is aiding and abetting in the commission of a crime against humanity.

Continue reading →

Frank Wolf cosponsors Federal “Marriage” Amendment

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Frank Wolf trains Eugene Delgaudio (Sterlingfest, 2006)

Box Turtle Bulletin reports that Frank Wolf is co-sponsoring Rep Tim Huelskamp’s (R – KS) Federal Marriage [sic] Amendment. The language is:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.

And that language runs afoul of the recent Supreme Court DOMA ruling. Here are excerpts from Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion:

The history of DOMA’s enactment and its own text demonstrate that interference with the equal dignity of same-sex marriages, a dignity conferred by the States in the exercise of their sovereign power, was more than an incidental effect of the federal statute. It was its essence.

…The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

Continue reading →

Gay Men’s Chorus Benefit Concert at UUCS May 10

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Crossposted at Equality Loudoun

The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Sterling has always been a great friend to Equality Loudoun and the LGBT community. We are pleased be co-sponsoring this event with them, along with the Unitarian Universalist Church of Loudoun, St. James United Church of Christ, and Loudoun Out Loud.

The concert will benefit the outreach work of People of Faith for Equality in Northern Virginia, a subset of the People of Faith for Equality in Virginia (POFEV). POFEV is an interfaith collaboration that seeks equal rights for all citizens through prayer, education, organization, and advocacy while challenging those who equate religious faith and intolerance.

It’s unfortunate that there are people who do equate those things (!), but it’s clear to most that it’s all over but the shouting. So let the bitter folk shout and whine while the rest of us sing. Hope to see you there!