Gambling on Anti-Transgender Policy.

Grayson County Superintendent Kelly Wilmore.

Grayson County Superintendent Kelly Wilmore.

The schools in Grayson County, Virginia have a new policy governing their bathrooms and locker rooms, and it’s the exact opposite of what the Obama administration recently recommended in its guidance on accommodating transgender students. School officials credited the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) for both drafting the policy and encouraging them to implement it, but they might someday regret trusting the conservative legal organization.

The “Student Physical Privacy Policy” ADF drafted for Grayson County’s schools is pretty straight-forward. All school bathrooms, locker rooms, and shower rooms must be separated by sex, and “sex” is determined by “anatomy and genetics existing at the time of birth.” It further states that “an individual’s original birth certificate” — emphasis on “original” — can be used as “definitive evidence” of a person’s sex.

If a school wants to accommodate trans students, principals must segregate those students to single-stall restrooms or “controlled use of an employee restroom, locker room, or shower.” They definitely are not allowed to use facilities that match their gender identity.

Superintendent Kelly Wilmore told the conservative outlet LifeSiteNews that his concerns have been “safety and privacy,” not politics. “It’s not that hard to claim that you’re now a transgender student,” he surmised. “All you gotta do is have a note from your parents, go and talk to the principal, and suddenly you’re transgender.”

And Wilmore has a number of reasons he isn’t worried about legal backlash. First, he believes that by segregating and ostracizing trans students, it’s actually protecting them from harassment. Second, he doesn’t think there are any transgender students in the district, so there’s no one to object. But most importantly, he’s convinced that ADF will have his back.

“The policy we adopted was written by the Alliance Defending Freedom organization,” he openly admitted, and they “claim that if we adopt their policy and it is contested,” they will come to the school district’s defense for free.

Oh, the twisted reasoning of banal evil. Segregation and ostracization is now protection. That’s terribly convenient, if you’re a bigot. This really is Civil Rights Movement II. It’s the same language, the same fucked up reasoning, the same dehumanization.

Full Story Here.

Christians, We Are At War.

(MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP/Getty Images)

(MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP/Getty Images)

Seriously suffering a melodrama overdose here. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the rhetoric keeps screeching higher and higher. Now we have Christians, we are at war. Maybe it’s time we accept that fact. It’s a very long screed, replete with bible passages, exhortations, charts, and graphs, all delivered at a fevered pitch over Christianity quavering at the cliff edge of extinction. No more of this Mr. Nice Jesus, no sir. It’s time for I’ll fry your ass and toss you burning into hell Jesus. Yep.

It’s not fun to think about, I realize, but war is not supposed to be fun. Especially not this kind of war. A war where the casualties are lost in the fires of Hell. A war where the enemy plots to rip your soul out of your chest and drag it into the darkness forever. A war that cannot be escaped. A war that conscripts every human on the planet into combat, on one side or the other, whether they like it or not. A war that we must train our children to fight. A war that could claim their souls, too, if we do not train them well. A war that will not be over until the end of the world. A war that God will ultimately win, but many human beings – maybe even including you, personally, and me – will lose if we die fighting for the wrong side.

These are not enjoyable thoughts. They are downright terrifying, in fact. But we cannot make the reality of our situation disappear any more than we could have wished away WWII by closing our eyes and hiding under our bed while the Germans dropped explosives on London. We can think all the nice thoughts and sing all the happy songs we want, but optimism never saves anyone when the bombs start falling. And it won’t save us from Hell. Indeed, it’s much more likely to send us there.

[…]

Christ came to separate us from our sin – a violent, painful process that requires a sword, and leads straight to the cross. And He doesn’t stop there. He enlists all of us to join Him in His ancient war against evil. A war that, even if it does not get us physically killed (although, depending on where you live, it may), it’s a war that will cause deep divisions and strife in our communities and even our families. There is nothing particularly peaceful about that.

The peace comes later, and only to his good and faithful soldiers. Those who will not take up their cross – that is, embrace the suffering and sacrifice required to gain holiness – will be deemed unworthy of Him in the end. Whoever finds his life and his peace and his happiness in worldly pursuits and worldly pleasures will lose it eternally. But whoever is willing to lay down his life – not a peaceful process, by any means – will be given life in Heaven.

Christ is not calling us to an earthly existence of endless fun and decadent luxury. He is calling us to die. And in the meantime, He is cordially inviting us to be despised by the whole world. “You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved” (Matthew 10:22).

[…]

Therefore, despite my valued reader’s claims, I am not trying to “bring us back to the days of Christian holy wars.” We never left those days. I cannot “bring us back” to conditions that have already existed since the dawn of time. All I can do, all anyone can do, is acknowledge that the war is on, and then choose a side. But no matter what we choose, the holy war is happening. God and the Devil and angels and demons are fighting, right now, as we speak, and the battlefield is the heart of man, to paraphrase Dostoevsky.

And so to the first statement – that “militant Christianity” is “driving people away from the church” – I say, good. The church is by its nature a militant organization of faithful soldiers waging a never-ending assault against the powers of darkness. The more it takes on that tone and that appearance, the better. And the more we weed out the bored, insincere and feckless, the better. If a person is “driven away” because the truth scares them, let them leave. Better they join the enemy outright than stay as infiltrators in our ranks, attempting to entice more believers into their cowardly, wicked way of thinking.

[…]

There is no room anymore to try and appease and cajole and compromise with the world. The Devil has cut great, wide roads through our culture, and for decades he has encountered almost no resistance. The signs of his enormous success are all around us. I don’t need to provide examples, but here are a few anyway:

  • There’s an abortion clinic in nearly every city, murdering children and selling their parts.
  • The vast majority of women who get abortions are Christian.
  • Gay marriage is now enshrined as a “human right.”
  • A majority of American Christians reject the Bible’s teachings on sexuality and abortion.
  • A majority of American Christians can’t be bothered to go to church once a month, let alone once a week.
  • Atheism is surging.
  • Cohabitation is becoming more popular than marriage.
  • Porn is one of the most profitable industries in America, especially in the Bible Belt.
  • All of our most powerful institutions – government, media, Hollywood, academia – are propagators of far-left ideology.
  • What should be our most powerful institution, the family, is crumbling. At least 43 percent of kids in the United States live without fathers in the home.
  • Half of my generation believes women can have penises and men can have vaginas.
  • This election season.

And so on.

And so on indeed. The dramatic glurge continues here, from a self-titled professional truth sayer. Seems to me that someone in such dire need of being seen as persecuted, there are plenty of places in this world they could go where that would actually happen. It’s interesting how they never manage to do that, but they do find plenty of time to wax dramatic over how all people having basic human rights is going to affect them so terribly, oh yes, when the truth of the matter is that it won’t affect them in the least.

Eleven States Sue in the Name of Bigotry.

11

AUSTIN, Tex. — The Obama administration on Wednesday faced its first major challenge to its directive this month about the civil rights of transgender students in public schools, as officials in 11 states filed a lawsuit that tested the federal government’s interpretation of the statute forbidding sexual discrimination.

The states, including Alabama, Georgia, Texas and Wisconsin, brought the case in a Federal District Court in North Texas and said that the Obama administration had “conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process and running roughshod over common sense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights.”

[…]

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, repeating a pledge from the days of Texas independence, called the issue a “come-and-take-it moment.” He said that the state was prepared to vigorously defy the directive and that it would not be cowed by the administration’s pledge to withhold federal funding for non-compliance.

“He says he’s going to withhold funding if schools do not follow the policy,” Mr. Patrick told reporters. “Well, in Texas, he can keep his 30 pieces of silver. We will not yield to blackmail from the President of the United States.”

Full Story Here. UPDATE: The ACLU has weighed in on this bit of mass hysteria.

However, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that is impossible because they will lack standing in court.

“The Supreme Court has made clear that one cannot sue an agency just because they disagree with the agency’s guidance,” the ACLU said in a press release Wednesday. “If these attorneys general disagree with the agency’s interpretation of what the federal ban on sex discrimination means, they can make that argument to the court when it arises in a real case.”

Instead, the ACLU said that this is nothing more than a “political stunt” from conservative states.

James Esseks, director of the ACLU’s LGBT Project said the Texas-based lawsuit is “an attack… on transgender Americans, plain and simple.” He also believes “the real targets here are vulnerable young people and adults who simply seek to live their lives free from discrimination when they go to school, work or the restroom.”

Full Story Here.

Mary Lou Bruner, Loser.

Texas State Board of Education District 9 candidate Mary Lou Bruner (WFAA/screen grab)

Texas State Board of Education District 9 candidate Mary Lou Bruner (WFAA/screen grab)

Remember Ms. It’s A Theory, Theories Are Unproven Bruner?   Well, she’s not going to be sitting on the Texas Board of Education this year. All I can say is that I’m grateful for the outbreak of sanity (no doubt temporary, but still) that ousted her.

Texas voters on Tuesday decided the state’s school board should not include a retired teacher who claimed President Barack Obama was a gay prostitute and said dinosaurs might still be around if Noah had more room on his biblical ark.

Mary Lou Bruner, 69, an arch-conservative with a penchant for conspiracy theories, lost by 18 percent to fellow Republican Keven Ellis in a primary race for the board that sets policies for the nation’s second-largest school system, unofficial Office of the Secretary of State results showed.

[…]

Bruner has blamed U.S. school shootings on the teaching of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in classrooms and said Noah loaded dinosaurs on the ark to escape the biblical flood. “The dinosaurs on the ark may have been babies and not able to reproduce.

It might make sense to take the small dinosaurs onto the ark instead of the ones bigger than a bus,” she said on Facebook.

“Texas escaped an education train wreck tonight,” said Kathy Miller, president of the government watchdog group Texas Freedom Network, in a statement.

While the comments brought her ridicule in some parts of the country, in East Texas they also vaulted her to the top in a March primary, where she won 48 percent of the vote.

Bruner, who taught elementary school and special education for 36 years, had toned down the rhetoric recently and had been commenting only on her platform for the seat on the 15-member state school board that oversees the educational system and approves textbooks for some 5 million public school children.

Full Story Here.

San Francisco 49ers Call for a Repeal of N.C.’s Anti-LGBT Law

Jed York, The CEO of the 49ers called HB 2 "bad for our employees, bad for our fans, and bad for business."

Jed York, The CEO of the 49ers called HB 2 “bad for our employees, bad for our fans, and bad for business.”

Jed York, the CEO of the San Francisco 49ers, is calling for a repeal of North Carolina’s anti-LGBT House Bill 2.

The National Football League hosted meetings in Charlotte, N.C., this week. Chris Sgro, the executive direcctor of Equality N.C. and the only openly LGBT person in the North Carolina legislature, says it was during this time that York chose to meet with LGBT advocates and transgender North Carolinians to learn about the impact of the anti-LGBT law. Sgro announced that the 49ers were contributing a gift of $75,000 to the Equality North Carolina Foundation to support the work of the organization.

In a statement published Tuesday, York said the San Francisco 49ers are “deeply concerned” about HB 2 because the team believes that “discriminatory laws” are “bad for our employees, bad for our fans, and bad for business.”

[…]

HB 2 will “make it far more challenging for businesses across the state to recruit and retain the nation’s best and brightest workers and attract the most talented students from across the country,” said York, the CEO of the 49ers. York echoed a fear many North Carolinians have expressed, which is that HB 2 has and will continue to create loss in business for the state. The law will “diminish the state’s draw as a destination for sporting events, tourism and conventions, and new business activity,” the CEO said. York added that his team “prides” itself on inclusivity and will “strongly urge” Gov. Pat McCrory and the North Carolina legislature to repeal HB 2.

Perhaps the threat of no more new NC sports stars will get through to McCrory. Nothing else has worked so far. I am not remotely into sports, but a big Yay! for Jed York and the 49ers.

Full Story Here.

Transgendered Orders from White House.

donald-trump-claims-accommodating-transgender-people-is-too-expensivex750_0

Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump had a nice little chat about that whole transgender business, which didn’t take long to devolve into the same old, same old. “Eh, this bathroom thing isn’t necessary”, “this isn’t human rights”, and “shockingly expensive”. I’ve run right out of eyerolls, they need new lines.

Trump told the Fox News host that he supports leaving the issue of transgender rights up to the states. “You know Obama’s getting into a very tricky territory,” he said, referencing the guidance issued by the Obama administration. “The amazing thing is so many people are talking about this now and we have to protect everybody even if it’s one person… but this is such a tiny part of our population.”

O’Reilly asked Trump if he provided gender-neutral facilities in his properties. “No, we don’t have that,” replied Trump. “I hope not. Because frankly it would be unbelievably expensive nationwide. It would be hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Trump did not elaborate on how he arrived at this estimate, nor did he acknowlege that in many cases, gender-neutral bathrooms could be established simply by removing gender-specific signs from doors. Additionally, allowing transgender people access to the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity, as Trump previously advocated, costs nothing.

[…]

Trump said he wasn’t sure about whether trans rights are “human rights,” but providing gender-neutral restrooms would be “an unbelievably expensive thing to do,” he told O’Reilly. Instead, the country should be “spending money on other things,” said Trump. “Frankly, the number of people we’re talking about is really a small number. Again protect them — but it’s a very very small number,” said Trump.

Full Story Here. Watch Trump discuss transgender rights, begining at 4:09.

https://youtu.be/IUq70p-PnV0

Trump’s Christian Liaison is…

Frank Amedia, an extremist asshole of the worst kind. Calling him a flaming doucheweasel would be a compliment.

Frank Amedia.

Frank Amedia.

Donald Trump has appointed a “liaison for Christian policy” — a minister who has said AIDS is caused by “unnatural sex” and threatened to withhold relief from Haitian earthquake surviviors if they continued to practice voodoo.

Frank Amedia, pastor of Touch Heaven Ministries, arranged a meeting earlier this month between Trump and several other ministers, Time reports. They discussed the “erosion of religious liberty,” the magazine notes, along with Israel and immigration — the latter being a focus of Trump’s presidential campaign, with his call to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and his plan to deport all undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

Catering to the religious right, on the other hand, has not been a priority for the presumptive Republican nominee, and he has made some missteps in his references to the Bible. But now with Amedia, he’s joined up with a representative of the conservative Christian fringe.

[…]

In 2010, Amedia was in Haiti distributing food to earthquake survivors, but said he might make further aid contingent on Haitians giving up the practice of voodoo. “We would give food to the needy in the short term, but if they refused to give up voodoo, I’m not sure we would continue to support them in the long term because we wouldn’t want to perpetuate that practice,” he told the Associated Press in a story quoted by Right Wing Watch. “We equate it with witchcraft, which is contrary to the Gospel.” He later tried to walk back the comments, saying AP had not told “the full story,” but still appeared willing to cut off aid if Haitians did not embrace Christianity, according to Christianity Today magazine.

[…]

Go to Right Wing Watch for more on Amedia, including his role in the bribery case; he was never charged, but admitted to attempted bribery in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

Some other ministers who met with Trump have similarly extremist views. Rick Joyner of Morning Star Ministries has blamed gay people for Hurricane Katrina and likened Trump to Christ. Sid Roth has said homosexuality will cause a nation to “vomit out” its people. Mario Bramnick, pastor of New Wine Ministries Church in Florida and a representative of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, last year hosted a meeting that called for the “mobilization” of Christians in response to the “demonic shift” brought to the nation by the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling.

The Full Story is Here. Here’s a sample of Mr. Amedia:

There’s a Little Kid’s Bathroom Now?

I could not manage all four minutes of this douche weasel’s ranting, but I listened to enough to hear him yell about men in dresses / pedophiles being allowed into the little kid’s bathrooms. Little [cisgender] kids have their own public lavs now?

He was ultimately escorted out by police while shouting, “Jesus Christ was not friends with any homos! I’m sorry to tell you guys that!”

I’d use Ken Ham’s gotcha here: “Were you there?”

Full Story Here.

Kidnapped, Gagged, Surgically Altered Jesus.

(REUTERS/Anton Meres (SPAIN))

(REUTERS/Anton Meres (SPAIN))

There have been a number of articles written recently [by Christians], making the case for Jesus being transgender, what with taking flesh from Mary, missing a chromosome, all that. I can’t say I find any of it particularly interesting, because there’s no Jesus. It is upsetting a whole lot of other Christians.

When Christian ministers in the Civil Rights Movement appealed to the character of Jesus Christ for the wisdom and strength to pursue equality, they did so knowing that they were following His lead. They were advocating for His will and supported by the Christ of Scripture. Jesus, you might say, was a willing participant in the push for equality.

Now, however, as the push to redefine humanity in the sexual revolution is underway and the effort to seek “equal rights” for transgenders is the cause célèbre, Jesus has to be bound with chains, gagged with duct tape, kidnapped and surgically altered to serve as the champion of that movement’s ideal for equality. He has to be dragged kicking and screaming to a place His creation was never intended to go.

Emphasis mine. There sure are a whole lot of people bullying God these days. I do find it interesting that Christians manage to cry “Persecution, you are bullying God!” while at the same time, able to wax poetic about the all powerfulness of said god.

[…]

This is, of course, utter nonsense and not akin to any interpretive paradigm for the incarnation ever offered by any theologian, at any time, in any era, on any continent, for any purpose. It is a fabrication of minds clouded by the scars of sexual rebellion.

[…]

Jesus was circumcised on the eighth day, preached in a synagogue (which only males could do), was referred to as the “son” of Mary (and Joseph, though erroneously so), referred to exclusively by the Greek pronouns “his” and “him,” and was referred to as “King of the Jews” – not “Queen of the Jews.” Nowhere is it recorded that Mary dressed poor female Jesus in male clothes to ease his transition into patriarchal society. Nowhere is Jesus said to be screaming internally for his inner female self to break the chains of restrictive, theocratic society to have a coming out party.

These patently obvious cues in Scripture, however, will likely not dissuade armchair theologians on the Left from validating Hall’s thesis.

I, therefore, turn to church history. In the entire corpus of writings on the church fathers, there is not a single writer who claims Jesus was anything other than anatomically and psychologically male in his humanity. The church does not depict him as schizophrenic, bi-polar, bi-sexual, homosexual, questioning, or transgender.

[…]

He is a new creation, indeed – just not one to be used to bolster a new, tired old argument about Jesus’s sexuality to make transgenders feel better about their gender dysphoria or the fact that they are prohibited from using the opposite sex’s restrooms.

I’d rather they just admit that they’re looking for a different Savior than the one given to us in the Christ of the Bible.

The full rant is here.

Stay #BraveEnough!

@YouTube

@YouTube

South Africa’s gay population numbers close to 5 million people, and the Anova Health Institute along with the Elton John Aids Foundation have released a video to educate around and destigmatize homosexual relationships as part of their initiative We The Brave.

In the clip, two men of differing races stand up at the dinner table and kiss in slow motion, while an older man, presumably one of their fathers, looks on in shock. The next shot is a closeup of a condom wrapper being ripped open, with a slogan declaring “We’re definitely brave enough to cover up.”

While the video might seem just a bit heavy-handed, it is under fire from various South African sources, including a number of broadcasters who have refused to air the spot. Twitter users have targeted the commercial, calling it “inappropriate” and even “disgusting.” It marks the first time a gay kiss has aired locally in South Africa.

[…]

We say, let the haters tweet. The message behind the commercial is obviously too important to let that rhetoric win out. Stay #BraveEnough!

Via Out.

WaPo’s new Redsk*ns survey: Faulty data and missing the point.

AP_207887703562-1024x693

CREDIT: Carolyn Kaster, AP

This morning I woke up to phone notifications. Blinking awake, I clicked over to twitter on my phone, and was greeted with the news: “New poll finds 9 in 10 Native Americans aren’t offended by Redskins name.” I sat up, let the phone fall in my lap, and said some choice words that I won’t print here.

The Washington Post has apparently devoted a lot of time and resources to conducting a “nationally representative” poll of “Native Americans” to find out whether or not they find the Redsk*ns name offensive. In their survey of 504 “Native Americans,” they found that 90% did not find the name offensive. They published a follow up  that gives the details on the survey and answers some FAQ.

Before I dive in, a note: This is not something I should have to do. For the last 7 years I’ve been writing this blog we’ve made huge gains in the way the public thinks about Native peoples and Native mascots. It’s been the hard, hard work of a huge community of activists and community members for decades, and I just don’t understand why WaPo felt the need to do this poll. More on this in a minute, but we’ve got psychological studies, tribal council votes, thousands of Native voices, and common decency and respect on our side, yet that was not enough. The Washington Post needed their OWN survey. The perspectives of Native peoples, who this effects directly, apparently aren’t enough.

So the poll. WaPo has generously provided (that’s not sarcasm) the actual questions, the breakdown by demographics for each, so feel free to explore. Look here.

This is where I want to focus my attention: 56 percent of this “nationally representative sample of Native Americans” was non-Native. I need you to understand this. 56% of the sample has no tribal affiliation.

Dr. Adrienne Keene’s Full Article Here.

No Birth Certificate, No School.

Tim Damos / News Republic.

Tim Damos / News Republic.

Like many educational institutions, St. John’s Lutheran School in Baraboo uses federal tax dollars to pay for certain programs, such as free and reduced-price lunches for disadvantaged students.

The funds for those programs are taken from all U.S. taxpayers, without discrimination. And federal civil rights protections say that any student who legally qualifies for the programs can participate, regardless of race, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation.

But taxpayers whose children are homosexual or transgender may not be able to take advantage of those programs, at least not at St. John’s. That’s because officials at the private religious school say they have the right to discipline students for making what they refer to as “sinful choices.”

[…]

In the letter, Breitkreutz outlined new rules that required parents to provide a birth certificate and sign a parent handbook agreement prior to enrollment.

The birth certificate allows the school to know the child’s born gender, and the handbook agreement — which apparently was recommended by the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod — lists discretions for which a student can be disciplined and expelled, including homosexuality.

[…]

“If we cannot legally refuse students who are struggling with homosexuality or gender identification, we must maintain our right to hold to the truths of God’s Word,” Breitkreutz wrote. “In other words, although we do not have the right to refuse admittance to people choosing an outwardly sinful lifestyle, we do maintain the right to discipline and dismiss students for these choices.”

Full Story Here. St. John’s Principal Letter. St. John’s Parent Handbook. Freedom From Religion Foundation Complaint.

So, they’ll accept any child, until they decide to toss that child out. They claim this isn’t discriminatory, as they aren’t looking to ‘weed’ anyone out, no. They just really need those birth certificates. You might want to avoid the comments section on the main article. “Being Christian [as opposed to be any flavour of queer] isn’t a sin.” No, it isn’t, but perhaps it should be.