George Floyd Killed by Police, Catholic Bishops' President Takes Six Days to Speak; Supreme Court Forbids Workplace Discrimination Vs. LGBTQ People, USCCB Instantly Finds Its Voice

Police kill George Floyd, Archbishop Gomez responds six days later; SCOTUS files a ruling about LGBT people, Gomez responds six hours later. https://t.co/LHMFVHp1Wo

— Dan Cosacchi (@dcosacchi) June 15, 2020

New York Times, "Gay Rights Are Civil Rights":

The vote was 6 to 3. It should have been unanimous.

Holding the Moral Center As Trump Takes Office: "We Must Resist. There Are No Sidelines. There Is No Middle Ground."

Tweets on Eve of Historic U.S. Election: "Will Always Be Remembered as the Presidential Election in Which the KKK, the KGB and the FBI All Supported the Same Candidate"

This will always be remembered as the presidential election in which the KKK, the KGB and the FBI all supported the same candidate.

— Victor Laszlo (@Impolitics) November 2, 2016

The Twittersphere is on fire today, with one zingy tweet after another commenting on American political life (and culture) on the eve* of a monumentally important election. To save you the trouble of weeding through tweets, I'm sharing some I've noticed today. And liked, admittedly, because of their wry humor, something I see myself in desperate need of on the eve of said monumentally important election. Here goes:

Robert P. Jones and The End of White Christian America: LGBTQ Rights, White Christian America, and a Trump Presidency — Questions for Consideration

As I noted yesterday when I offered you my first installment of excerpts from Robert P. Jones' new book The End of White Christian America (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2016), this book is important for us to consider in the 2016 election cycle. As I noted, Maureen Fiedler recently reported that when she interviewed Jones for Interfaith Voices a number of days back and asked him, "When Donald Trump says he wants to 'make America great again,' is he really saying, 'Bring back white Christian America?,' " Jones replied,

Jason Sokol on White Southern Resistance to Civil Rights Movement: "Some White Southerners Perceived the Civil Rights Movement as a Threat to Their Very Notion of Freedom" — Implications for "Religious Freedom" Discussion

In his book There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (NY: Knopf, 2006), Jason Sokol writes about the response of white Southerners to the Civil Rights movement of that period:

Whites were so deeply influenced by a racial caste system that few could imagine a world in which blacks and whites would share power. They thought in terms of white supremacy or black supremacy: if blacks gained rights, whites would correspondingly "wear the yoke" (p. 80, citing Albany [Georgia] Herald, August 19, 1962, p. 18; and interview with James McBride Dabbs, by Dallas Blanchard, Southern Oral History Program).

Want to Know Why "Pro-Life" Democrats Are Vanishing Breed? Go See "Spotlight," Fred Clark Advises: On the Catholic Bishops, the Culture Wars, and Mr. Trump

Want to know why the "pro-life" Democrats have vanished, Fred Clark asks? And then he recommends: "Go see 'Spotlight.' " Fred writes,

Two Resources to Recommend to You: On Unpacking Invisible Knapsacks of Male Privilege, Racial Privilege, and Heterosexual Privilege

Two resources to share with you this morning. These are resources recommended at the conference on embracing and affirming LGBTQ diversity in the black church that I attended recently at New Millennium Baptist church in my home city of Little Rock. Many of you may already know of these two items. If not, it occurs to me to share information about them with you, so that you'll be aware of them.

Supremes Hear Zubik All-or-Nothing "Religious Liberty" Arguments: Commentary Worth Noting

The Supreme Court hears arguments this morning in the case of Zubik v. Burwell.  At issue in this case: a number of religious groups including the Little Sisters of the Poor of Denver (i.e., where the current archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput, used to hang out) want to maintain that the accomodation provided by the Obama administration to employers objecting to the Affordable Care Act's requirement that employers include contraceptive coverage in employee healthcare plans burdens their religious freedom. The Little Sisters and others are arguing that even writing a letter stating that they object on grounds of conscience to providing contraceptive coverage to employees, and thereby allowing another entity to provide the coverage, infringes on their religious freedom.

The Little Sisters of the Poor, Kim Davis, and the Challenge of Preserving Real Religious Freedom: Frederick Clarkson's Important New Essay "When Exemption Is the Rule"

As Frederick Clarkson points out in a just-published (and exhaustive and richly-resourced) must-read overview of the religious liberty battles facing us in the U.S. today, the "I believe it, so it must be right" "religious freedom" argument that the Little Sisters of the Poor and the U.S. Catholic bishops want to shove in the face of the American public through the sisters' lawsuit against the Obama administration builds on the claim that the Supreme Court allowed to prevail in the Hobby Lobby lawsuit of 2014. As I noted in my previous posting today, the Little Sisters of the Poor object even to signing paperwork exempting them from responsibility for providing contraceptive coverage to their employees, with the claim that they believe that certain contraceptives are abortifacients, no matter what sound scientific evidence says about these contraceptives.

Kim Davis Does the SOTU — With Little Sisters of the Poor: Anti-Obama "Religious Freedom" Advocates Joined at the Hip

Here's Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis at the #SOTU https://t.co/OhpUpmqIlX pic.twitter.com/XLhBPXqOmT

— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) January 13, 2016

And so last evening, both the Little Sisters of the Poor and Kim Davis were invited by Republican officials* to the State of the Union address. Interestingly enough, the leading Catholic "liberal" publication National Catholic Reporter chose yesterday to highlight the presence of the Little Sisters of the Poor at this event with not one, but two, articles, one a Catholic News Service report indicating that the U.S. Catholic bishops have filed an amicus brief on behalf of the group of nuns in their battle with the Obama administration over the contraceptive mandate, the other an article by reporter Dawn Araujo-Hawkins providing yet more rather glowing publicity for the Little Sisters of the Poor's challenge to the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act.

NY Times Claim That Anti-Gay Laws in Africa Are Blowback for U.S. Intervention: Critical Reflections

I have to admit that I raised my eyebrows a few weeks ago when the New York Times published Norimitsu Onishi's article citing various African commentators claiming that stepped-up anti-gay legislation in a number of African countries is "blowback" for U.S. support of LGBT rights in Africa. I did so because so much that I heard the African voices cited by Onishi saying sounded precisely like what I remember white Southern "liberals" saying during the period of the Civil Rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S.

Who Really Set Up Papal Meeting with Kim Davis? Enlightening Comments at Catholic Blog Site

Yesterday at the National Catholic Reporter site, Tom Gallagher posted an article focusing on something about which I spoke briefly in a posting here on the same day: namely, that in the wake of the Kim Davis-Pope Francis debacle, the mainstream media are finally saying out loud what many of us have known and been saying for some time now — that the outfit giving legal advice to Ms. Davis, Liberty Counsel, is an anti-gay hate group. I find the comments in response to Tom Gallagher's article especially enlightening.

Some Bullet Point Observations As Synod on Family Opens in Light of Kim Davis-Pope Francis Story: Continuing Claim That Symbol Counts for Substance in Catholic Community

• Well, at least the debacle of Kim Davis and the Pope has gotten the mainstream media finally to say clearly, unambiguously what the rest of us have long known, but the media refused to say: that Liberty Counsel is an anti-gay hate group. I suppose that's a good thing.

• Claire Galofaro's AP article noting that Liberty Counsel is a hate group, which came out this weekend, is now all over news sites on the Internet, including CBS News. It's echoed by Brandon Ambrosino today at Daily Beast, who claims to have connections inside the Vatican (who knew?).

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: Kenyan Catholic Bishops Oppose Polio Vaccination for Children

One minute, the Catholic bishops of Kenya are up in arms about the fact that the U.S. president dares to defend the human rights of a criminalized minority group in their country — the LGBT citizens of Kenya. As the right-wing Catholic media outlet Catholic News Agency (whose newsfeed directly links to the official website of the Kenyan Catholic conference) reported after Mr. Obama's remarks in Kenya, African bishops are depicting his statements defending gay rights as a form of "ideological colonization" of Africa by the West.

A Year Ago Today We Married: Continuing to Give Witness

On this day a year ago, Steve and I married in my home state of Arkansas — our home state, after we returned here in 1997 when we were providing care for my mother in the final years of her life. Readers who have followed this blog for some time now will know of our marriage last May. My point in remembering it today is not so much to announce it (in retrospect, as an anniversary, I mean), as to continue giving witness about what it means for many gay people in the U.S. to live our ordinary, everyday lives in parts of the country determined to complexify those lives.

Controversy Over Choice of Wealthy Gay NYC Businessmen to Host Benefit for Ted Cruz: Miles to Go Before We Sleep in Movement for Human Rights

No matter what happens with the deliberations about marriage equality at the Supreme Court today (and in the weeks following), we who are LGBT in the U.S. and those supporting our rights have miles to go before we sleep. This is one of the lessons I draw from the choice of wealthy gay businessmen Ian Reisner and Mati Weiderpass to host a benefit recently for Ted Cruz. Two pieces of commentary (among many I've read) that leap out for me, as descriptions of the miles we still have to go in this human rights journey:

Quote for Day: Odd That No One Ever Asks Rubio and Others Employing a States'-Rights Argument about Marriage Equality, Was Loving v. Virginia Wrongly Decided?

In several postings in the past several days, I've zeroed in on the, well, odd tendency of many centrist religious commentators about religious freedom and gay rights to draw a sharp dividing line around the issue of gay rights, and treat it as entirely separate from other struggles of marginalized minority groups for rights. As I stated last week, for instance, though you can find many centrist Catholic commentators arguing that denying goods and services to LGBT folks under the rubric of religion is thinkable and should remain discussable, you don't find these same people defending the practice of denying goods and services to people on racial grounds, while claiming religious warrant for the discrimination.

End-of-Week Items: Utah, Arkansas, Religious Freedom and Anti-Gay Laws, and Fixations of Conservotrad Catholics

A miscellany of end-of-week news items or blog postings I've read, thought were good, and want to pass on to you as the week ends:

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "Most Men with Homosexual Tendencies Enjoy Denigrating and Ridiculing Women"

Two days ago, I noted,

Comments threads at Catholic blog sites are, to put the point bluntly, all too often used to attack LGBT people and fellow Catholics who are LGBT. Under the guise of "discussing" the issue of homosexuality and the church, some users who delight in trying to inflict wounds on members of the gay community hammer home over and over and over rhetorical points that are full of disinformation or even outright lies about those who are gay.

Women's Rights, Gay Rights: Snapshot of an Ongoing Conversation

We've been having a conversation here of late about recent much-ballyhooed statements of performers Patricia Arquette and Madonna that gay rights are more "advanced" than women's rights, and that gays (in particular, gay men, it's implied) need to step up and support women's rights. I recently wrote,