Cordileone Opens His Mouth Again, Nonsense Falls Out Again: "The Clear Biological Fact Is That a Human Being Is Born Either Male or Female"

It seems to me sadly predictable that San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, the "father of proposition 8," who took credit for snatching the right of civil marriage from gay couples in California in 2008, would want to weigh in with a loud, media-grabbing statement about the Caitlyn Jenner story. After all, the hard evangelical right, the Catholic bishops' allies in the culture war against the LGBT community, had already been weighing in before Cordileone opened his mouth. The never disappointing (if one is looking for clownish religious-right soundbytes, that is) Rev. Mike Huckabee, for instance, had made ill-informed, pretend-jocular, but base-revving remarks about women's locker rooms and men who pretend to be women in order to lurk in said rooms.

LDS Leaders Hold "Historic" Press Conference to Announce Support for Gay Rights, and Critics Suggest Mormons Are Punking the Media: My Response

As you may have read, this week top leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints issued a statement saying the following:

U.S. Catholic Bishops Continue "Fortnight for Freedom" Events, Call on Catholics to Pray to Uphold DOMA and Prop 8

As the day ends: note the bulletin insert that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has produced under the leadership of San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone to be placed in bulletins of Catholic parishes throughout the U.S. It's entitled "Marriage and the Supreme Court," and asks Catholics to pray, fast, and sacrifice with the intention that the Supreme Court uphold both the Defense of Marriage Act and proposition 8 in California. I say that this insert comes from Cordileone because he heads the USCCB subcommittee on marriage and family, though it's, of course, an initiative with the backing of the entire USCCB.

The Marie Antoinette Syndrome and Gay Unions As Essentially "Different": Engaging Arguments Against Marriage Equality

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Rights for Me and Thee: Howard University Files Amicus Brief Supporting Marriage Equality

Uh-oh. As I just noted, one of the most predictable tactics of the hard right in the U.S. (including not a few U.S. Catholic bishops) is to seek to play the rights of one targeted minority against another targeted minority--to play the ancient politics of divide et impera to control minority groups by setting them one against another. 

Rob Tisanai at Box Turtle Bulletin: "Dear Dr. Regnerus"

And now, in non-"Dancing with the Stars" news as the weekend arrives:

Father Geoff Farrow on Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone's "Meteoric Rise" in American Hierarchy: Aiming for Red Hat as He Targets Gays

More Catholics-in-the-news news:

Knights of Columbus Back in News: $15.8 Million Spent Since 2005 to Strip Gays of Civil Rights

Earlier in the week, I excerpted observations from Joanna Brooks's The Book of Mormon Girl: A Memoir of an American Faith (NY: Free Press, 2012) in which Brooks notes (p. 174) that the fight to snatch the civil right of marriage from gay citizens of California cost $82 million.  Brooks points out that this is the largest amount of money spent to date on a culture-war issue in the U.S.

Weekend News: Regnerus Study Again, More on Sally "Ad Multos Annos" to San Fran!

In the news as the weekend gets underway:

The Regnerus study, which an auditor of the processed used by the journal Social Science Research chose to vet the study calls "bullshit."  Peter Montgomery has a summary of the auditor's report at Religion Dispatches, citing a Chronicle of Higher Education article by Tom Bartlett.

More News Tidbits: Prop 8 Trial, DOJ Files Suit Against Minnesota School District, Gay Catholic Music Teacher Loses Another Job

And more tidbits, these from the area of gay-rights discussions: 

Another video resource I didn't recommend in my first two postings today, but which I do plan to watch, is the recent play "8," which was produced by the American Foundation for Equal Rights and Broadway Impact.  "8" recreates the Perry v. Schwarzenegger trial that resulted in the ruling that California's prop 8 initiative, which stripped the right of civil marriage from gay citizens of the state, was unconstitutional, since it deliberately targets a minority group with the avowed intent of removing a civil right from that group.  Solely because it is a minority group without strong legal protection or standing.

Mormons in the Public Square: Romney's Candidacy and Controversy about LDS Baptism of Anne Frank

One of the interesting religion-and-politics stories of the past week: due to Mitt Romney's prominence in the Republican campaign for the presidential nomination, a longstanding controversy about the LDS church's practice of baptizing Holocaust victims has come back into the news.  In this case, what's being discussed is the revelation that, after the Mormon church has stated that it no longer baptizes Holocaust victims, it has nonetheless recently baptized Anne Frank.

1967 or 2012? John Aravosis on NOM Response to Prop 8 Ruling in California

I like John Aravosis's take on the National Organization for Marriage's denunciation of the recent California court ruling finding proposition 8 unconstitutional.  Aravosis's headline reads, "Could Have Been Written in 1967."

Prop 8 Declared Unconstitutional: Sole Purpose to Lessen Status and Human Dignity of Gays

"The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice"--M.L. King

As I just noted, the toxic lies spread by the religious right in the U.S. to assist a particular political party have real-life consequences: they inflict real pain and real misery on some human beings, in the name of God.  And so, in other news this morning, it's interesting to note that the 9th U.S. circuit court of appeals in California yesterday struck down the state's proposition 8 law removing the right of civil marriage from same-sex couples.  Candace Chellew-Hodge reports on this today at Religion Dispatches, noting that the court ruling states, 

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Mormons Join Catholic Bishops' Discrimination Party in Minnesota

Guess who's coming to dinner?  The dinner being the discrimination-gala the Catholic bishops of Minnesota have been throwing the past few years, as they make combating the gays and the human rights of gay citizens their major priority.

Minnesota Catholic Bishops: Every Catholic Parish to Form Teams Attacking Marriage Equality

A moment ago, I wrote, 

To many of us in many different faith traditions, it often appears that our religious leaders have actively betrayed our religious traditions, in their core significance . . . .  [T]hey focus obsessively on issues that appear peripheral to the most pressing moral problems of our period of history, while they ignore those pressing problems--as the American Catholic bishops continue to do, in the perception of many American Catholics, with their unrelenting attention to issues of sexual morality, while they remain almost totally silent about matters of economic and social justice.

Brian Cones at U.S. Catholic on Prop 8 Decision: Catholic Silence Is Disturbing

Because I've been pushing against the homophobic silence of the American Catholic center--of its opinion-making mavens, in particular--about the implications of Judge Walker's recent prop 8 decision for gay persons struggling for human rights, it's incumbent on me to note one humane voice that did speak out amidst the din of deafening silence of centrist U.S. Catholic publications after Judge Walker issued his ruling.

Prop 8 Decision: Homophobia on Trial, Engaging Irrational "Arguments" on Which It Rests

Imagine, for a moment, that we are now down the road of history, and the dust of the journey has begun to settle with Judge Walker’s recent prop 8 decision.  (We’re not there yet: as yesterday’s decision to continue the stay on same-sex marriage in California indicates, the prop 8 ruling is, at most, a penultimate answer to the vexed cultural question with which we’ve been dealing on our journey—the question of where, in our cultural interstices, to place the particular demeaned minority of human beings who happen to be gay).  But for the sake of argumentation here, let’s pretend: we’ve now arrived.

And so, looking back, as people inevitably do, we ask: what was it all about, in the final analysis?  What was it about, this long, protracted, pain-filled journey that consumed so much of people’s valuable energy in the last half of the 20th century and the start of the next, the journey to grudging acceptance of the humanity of their gay and lesbian fellow citizens?

End-of-Week News Round-Up: Prop 8 Commentary

A few articles about the prop 8 decision that have struck me as thought-provoking in the past week:

At San Francisco Chronicle, Mark Morford comments on the prop 8 decision from a global perspective—America’s really big deal is an almost yawningly obvious non-issue in much of the civilized world, which sails by us as we haggle about according even minimal rights to gay and lesbian citizens:

This is what we are learning: The U.S. matters less and less in the grand public debate, the global shift, the Great Understanding. In the past few decades we've seen nation after nation fly right by us in many a happy category, from humanitarianism to education, health care to drugs, sexuality to the arts, prison systems to pollution, transportation to spiritual awareness. What a sad, strange trip it's been. 

And here’s Marcus Baram at Huffington Post parsing President Obama’s opposition to gay marriage: genuine, or a political calculation?  I’m strongly inclined to agree with the conclusion of Freedom to Marry’s Evan Wolfson, who argues that the cynical, values-absent political homophobia of key Democratic leaders comes with an increasing political price, as more and more Americans recognize the damage that discrimination does to their gay family members and friends:

If they are making a political calculation, it's a very costly one for them and the country because it's not appeasing any of their opponents and it's disappointing and impeding the strength of their base.  People may respect people they disagree with but not inauthenticity and pure political calculation—that doesn't ring true... I don't think there's a single voter that Obama would lose because he openly embraced freedom to marry instead of everything but marriage.

As millions of Catholics seek to remind our church’s pastoral leaders today, leadership depends on integrity.  Without that indispensible foundation, a leader simply cannot expect to lead effectively.

And finally, a stellar piece of commentary by Rabbi Michael Learner about why Jews should rejoice at the overturning of prop 8: as he notes, not only have gays and lesbians endured historic oppression alongside Jews and were murdered at Auschwitz with Jews, the core values of Judaism call Jews to solidarity with their LGBT brothers and sisters:

That support is not only based on a memory of shared victimhood, but also on the core values of our own Jewish tradition. The Torah's command to "love our neighbor" and "love the Other [or 'stranger,' Hebrew ger]" are intrinsic to how most American Jews understand our Jewish obligations today.

And rabbinic interpretation of the scriptures has long recognized the pitfalls of literal interpretation of  biblical texts such as the injunction to fathers to stone their rebellious sons to death:

The claim by some fundamentalists that gay love is forbidden by the Bible is itself an interpretation and a selective reading of Biblical text. Few of those fundamentalists demand that their society take literally the command to forgive all loans every seventh year (the Sabbatical Year) or to redistribute the land every fiftieth year (the Jubilee) or to not light a fire in their homes on the Sabbath, or for that matter, the command to not destroy the trees of your enemy when engaged in warfare, but they selectively choose this command for special attention.

Finally, a reminder of the 1000+ marital benefits denied to gay couples but permitted to straight ones under federal law, according to U.S. government reports.  I link to this report specifically to remind my brothers and sisters in my own faith community that the oppression of gay and lesbian persons in our society is not something the gay community merely imagines: legally enshrined prejudice produces serious, harmful socioeconomic (and other) consequences in the lives of LGBT persons.  Silence in the face of such harmful discrimination is not—as Rabbi Lerner argues eloquently—a viable option.

Timothy Kincaid on NOM's Summer of Hate: Bald-Faced Bigotry Betraying Core Religious Values

A good article by Timothy Kincaid today at Box Turtle Bulletin, putting the rank homophobia of groups like the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) in historical perspective.  In particular, Kincaid notes the inexorable, if slow and spasmodic, movement of democracy, with its belief in the inherent worth and rights of every human being, towards rights for everyone.  Not merely for select, privileged elite groups.

End of Week News Roundup: Prop 8, Supremes, and the Pro-Life Movement

A news roundup as the week ends:

Rick Jacobs of Courage Campaign reports at Huffington Post this week about the massive internet coverage of the prop 8 trial.  As he notes, though the Supreme Court blocked televised coverage (on YouTube and at select federal courthouses) after presiding Judge Vaughn Walker gave the green light for it, there’s intense online coverage of the trial.

As I’ve noted previously here, Courage Campaign itself is doing daily live-blogging to make up for the lack of televised coverage.  And Los Angeles film producers John Ainsworth and John Ireland have had the very clever idea of filming re-enactments of key moments of the trial.  Their re-enactments are now up and running at YouTube.