All God's Children (2) (Video Sunday)

All God's Children (Video Sunday)

Get married, get fired?

From Al Jazeera (BTW, I really like their reporting)

[T]he dilemma now facing a growing number of gay couples: They can legally marry, but they may also be fired from their jobs, thrown out of their apartments and denied service at businesses because of their sexual orientation. Many say the increased visibility of same-sex partners, even in small towns in conservative states, will lead to greater acceptance of gays. But particularly in the short to medium term, it could prompt more instances of discrimination.

...

“I didn’t expect marriage equality to happen so quickly — and it’s a good thing. I’m not complaining,” says Ted Martin, executive director of Equality Pennsylvania, an LGBT advocacy group. “But because you don’t have civil rights protections in place, someone even talking about their marriage could be used as grounds to terminate someone.”

It's in your hands (video Sunday)

From the Irish marriage equality campaign:

You can't be "nice" and deny equality

As we move into the end game of the marriage equality issue, our opponents are trying to figure out how to live with us married LGBT folk.  (Mostly, they are trying not to , on the basis of religious freedom).

Some of them are trying to tell us there's nothing personal, that they may oppose our marriages but hey, they aren't anti-gay bigots.

Here's an oldie but a goodie, on how you can't be "nice" while denying equality. 

First, the author begins with a discussion of a writer named Halee Gray Scott , who wants to separate her anti-marriage equality views from that of a more openly homophobic man, Charles Worley.

Worley wants to deny LGBT people their basic civil rights and legal equality because he hates them. Scott wants to deny LGBT people their basic civil rights and legal equality for other reasons.

See? See how very different they are? Same result. Same vote. Same fundamental discrimination enshrined in law. But Worley is mean. Scott is nice.
...
That sort of assumption — lumping her in with people like Charles Worley just because she wants the same legal outcome as they do — is hurtful. It wounds her feelings. Being compared to people like that is not nice.

And people should be nice to her, just as she’s being so nice to all the LGBT citizens whose legal equality she wants to nicely deny.

“I’m not asking for anyone to approve or accept my views,” Scott writes, magnanimously.

And it’s true. She doesn’t want anyone else to approve or accept her religious perspective. All she asks is that they allow her to write it into law....

Yeah, that's the part they miss.

But the argument is that you can't be NICE and still treat people badly.

Look, here’s the deal: It doesn’t matter if you think you’re a nice person. And it doesn’t matter if your tone, attitude, sentiments and facial expressions are all very sweet, kindly and sympathetic-seeming. If you’re opposing legal equality, then you don’t get to be nice. Opposing legal equality is not nice and it cannot be done nicely.

...

It’d be terrific if Scott’s heartfelt plea for “a hermeneutic of grace” toward Christians who oppose legal equality had also thought to include such a presumption of grace toward the human beings whose legal equality those Christians continue to deny.
....

Scott wants to carve out a space in which she can be unfair, but still kind. Such a space does not exist and cannot exist.

Kansas and South Carolina

We added Kansas and South Carolina this week...at least, technically, although they are still kicking and screaming.  Here's the map from ThinkProgress.

So, who's left?

A Federal Judge in Mississippi heard a case this week.

The 5th Circuit (TX, MS and LA) and 11th circuit (FL, AL, GA) have cases moving up from the states. Cases are pending in SD, ND, and NE and AR;  these haven't had federal rulings yet or circuit decisions.  MO is (like KS and SC) trying to resist the circuit ruling that applies.  In  Puerto Rico  the case  may be moving up to the 1st circuit.  (All the states in the 1st have already got marriage equality.)

I will bet that we will have 50-state marriage equality by the summer of 2016.  I think it is possible that the Supremes will hold off on a case this year.

America is Ready: A view from the south (video Sunday)

6th circuit signs date with SCOTUS

The Supreme Court has been silent on the subject of marriage equality, tacitly approving it by ignoring appeals requests. Since all the circuit courts thus far have found for equality, there's been no conflict for the Supremes. This has led to a huge expansion of equality to 32 states.

But today, the conservative 6th circuit broke the streak, and issued a ruling finding that marriage discrimination is okay. For some reason, the bulk of their argument is that the people should be able to decide. Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote,

When the courts do not let the people resolve new social issues like this one, they perpetuate the idea that the heroes in these change events are judges and lawyers. Better in this instance, we think, to allow change through the customary political processes, in which the people, gay and straight alike, become the heroes of their own stories by meeting each other not as adversaries in a court system but as fellow citizens seeking to resolve a new social issue in a fair-minded way.

The problem is this. The Constitution exists in part to protect the rights of unpopular minorities from the tyranny of the majority. We do not put basic rights to the ballot. If we had, schools in the South would still be segregated, inter-racial marriage would still be illegal, and husbands could control a woman's property.

This was called out in a brilliant dissent by Judge Martha Daughtrey.

The author of the majority opinion has drafted what would make an engrossing TED Talk or, possibly, an introductory lecture in Political Philosophy,” Daughtrey wrote in her dissent. “But as an appellate court decision, it wholly fails to grapple with the relevant constitutional question in this appeal: whether a state’s constitutional prohibition of same-sex marriage violates equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, the majority sets up a false premise—that the question before us is “who should decide?”—and leads us through a largely irrelevant discourse on democracy and federalism. In point of fact, the real issue before us concerns what is at stake in these six cases for the individual plaintiffs and their children, and what should be done about it.

This makes for a "circuit split" and the appeal to the Supremes is on its way. And then Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy must decide what they want their legacies to be.

If I have gay children .... (Voices of Faith)

Click image for more
Voices of Faith

From a pastor, a promise to his children:

As a pastor and a parent, I wanted to make some promises to you, and to my two kids right now… 

1) If I have gay children, you’ll all know it. 

My children won’t be our family’s best kept secret. 

..... Childhood is difficult enough, and most gay kids spend their entire existence being horribly, excruciatingly uncomfortable. I’m not going to put mine through any more unnecessary discomfort, just to make Thanksgiving dinner a little easier for a third cousin with misplaced anger issues.....

2) If I have gay children, I’ll pray for them. 

I won’t pray for them to be made “normal”. I’ve lived long enough to know that if my children are gay, that is their normal. 

I won’t pray that God will heal or change or fix them. I will pray for God to protect them; from the ignorance and hatred and violence that the world will throw at them, simply because of who they are. .... 

3) If I have gay children, I’ll love them. 

I don’t mean some token, distant, tolerant love that stays at a safe arm’s length. It will be an extravagant, open-hearted, unapologetic, lavish, embarrassing-them-in-the-school cafeteria, kind of love. ....

If my kids are gay, they may doubt a million things about themselves and about this world, but they’ll never doubt for a second whether or not their Daddy is over-the-moon crazy about them. 

4) If I have gay children, most likely; I have gay children. 

If my kids are going to be gay, well they pretty much already are. 

God has already created them and wired them, and placed the seed of who they are within them. .....

And then he goes on to take on his fellow "Christians" who are angry or offended.

This isn’t about you. This is a whole lot bigger than you. 

You’re not the one I waited on breathlessly for nine months.
You’re not the one I wept with joy for when you were born.
You’re not the one I bathed, and fed, and rocked to sleep through a hundred intimate, midnight snuggle sessions. 

You’re not the one I taught to ride a bike, and whose scraped knee I kissed, and whose tiny, trembling hand I held, while getting stitches.
You’re not the one whose head I love to smell, and whose face lights-up when I come home at night, and whose laughter is like music to my weary soul.
You’re not the one who gives my days meaning and purpose, and who I adore more than I ever thought I could adore anything. 

And you’re not the one who I’ll hopefully be with, when I take my last precious breaths on this planet; gratefully looking back on a lifetime of shared treasures, and resting in the knowledge that I loved you well.

Video Sunday: The Body of Christ

Lutheran Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber asked her LGBT congregants to speak on being part of the body of Christ.  From her Facebook page:

I was asked to make a 5 minute video for an Evangelical on-line church leadership conference called The Nines http://thenines.tv/speakers/. The conference is centered on "culture clash" - including what is called "the issue of homosexuality". I conceded my time to a bunch of queer folks at church. Here is the result.

 You'll have to click through to watch this one.