Bloodless Persecution and Transgender Depravity.

(Knights of Columbus website) Baltimore Archbishop William Lori says institutions protecting religious freedom and morality are 'under assault.'

(Knights of Columbus website)
Baltimore Archbishop William Lori says institutions protecting religious freedom and morality are ‘under assault.’

Oh my! First up, bloodless persecution.

A Roman Catholic archbishop, however, warned that there is such a thing as “bloodless” persecution, and it is happening in the nation that is supposed to be one of the freest in the world, the United States.

During his address at the opening of the Divine Mercy University in Virginia, Baltimore Archbishop William Lori said Catholic institutions in America are “experiencing the severest threats to their religious liberty” at present.

[…]

“The institutions that are under challenge are places of mercy that seek to bring the healing balm of truth, love, and human skill to the spiritual, emotional, and physical wounds of human existence, to be indeed the ‘field hospital’ amid a culture where many are wounded daily,” the archbishop said, as quoted by LifeSiteNews.

To illustrate his point, the Roman Catholic official cited the legalisation of same-sex marriage and U.S. President Barack Obama’s contraceptive mandate as particular threats to religious freedom.

“We have only to think about the arbitrary redefinition of marriage and family or anti-family welfare and relief policies. As these intermediate structures either disappear or come under the direct control of the government, our society becomes less merciful and more impersonal, less apt to be a setting for human flourishing,” Lori said.

[…]

The prelate urged the faithful and all Christian groups to be steadfast in promoting values, especially during this year, called the Holy Year of Mercy by Catholics.

This year “presents us with a graced opportunity to see the most fundamental of our freedoms, religious freedom, through the prism of God’s mercy and compassion,” he said.

Mercy? Christians have a damn odd notion of mercy. Oh so merciful to force people to submit to your psychopathic figment of a god, unable to live life in a manner they wish, and meddlesome priests and parishioners to go poking their noses where they don’t belong. Merciful. Right. Well, I guess you don’t get to torture and crispy critter people anymore. That’s something, I suppose.

Jack Englehard.

Jack Engelhard.

Time for Transgender Depravity with Jack Engelhard.

Transgenders, some 700,000 of them nationwide, are less than one percent of the population, but they rule. Progressives want you to know that you are a bigot if you have a problem with men and women side by side in the same privy. What do we say about this? Nothing. Have we no shame? My cat won’t use the litter box until we leave the room. My cat knows dignity.

That’s nice, Jack. You have a sensitive kitty cat. What about all those people with distinctly undignified cats? The ones who don’t mind digging in the litter box, spraying sand all over the place while you are in the room? Do they need to die? Go to Ex-Undignified Cat Therapy? Sent to church? Rounded up and shipped off somewhere? There are even cats who go outside the box! *Gasp* Perhaps we best not talk about them.

Thanks to the depravity forced upon us by degenerate Liberals, the rest of us have been plunged down to the lowest rung of the animal kingdom. Your daughter is not safe in any school throughout the United States.

How sweet. Jack, like most all the other bigots, is terribly concerned with daughters.  All those sons can just take care of themselves, I guess. Back to daughters. The word choice is an interesting one. Not girls. Not young women. Not women. Daughters. Written with the heavy hand of patriarchy, and the weight of ownership. The concern over potentially damaged property.

I raised the alarm here on May 3 and again here on May 22 in a piece titled, “How Bruce Jenner changed the life of every American.”

The stats for that article reveal that it was read by about 25,000 Americans, which means I failed. I needed to reach all 320 million Americans to let them know that when Big Brother forbids you the rights for your most intimate acts and denies you your most hushed moments, all is lost.

Big Brother has forbidden me the rights for my most intimate acts and hushed moments? Hmmm. Okay, I’ll admit to being lost on the hushed moments bit, no idea. (It’s not like everyone can’t hear you tinkling away). Generally speaking, my most intimate acts don’t take place in public, but even if they did, I’d be with Mrs. Campbell, and as long as no one was in the street scaring the horses, who cares? I don’t really consider pissing to be an act of intimacy. It’s a necessary bodily function, and yes, if I have a choice, I prefer privacy, such as it is in a public lav. I was in a public lav last week. I went into a stall, and peed. End of story. No rights violated in any way.

I failed again now that we read this: “The international association of Conservative rabbis passed a resolution declaring its embrace of transgender people, and called on Jewish institutions and government agencies to ensure their full equality.” What is this?

This is not equality. This is not civil rights. This is an abomination – or so it was back in the days when decency meant something. This is not Jewish. This is not Christian. This is not American. This is an enormous sell-out against our Judeo/Christian ethics.

I do not care how many rabbis or ministers or priests support the transgender mythology, common sense tells us that this is wrong. Let’s be honest and call it sinful.

Oh, how about if we don’t, Jack. By the way, there’s no such thing as transgender mythology. Well, at least not as far as I know. I don’t think transgender people have all gotten together to create gods just yet. A sell-out of Judeo-Christian ethics sounds good to me, we could finally start living by actual ethics, which don’t harm people, and aren’t based on hatred, fear, and judgment.

To live in a time when any man can call himself a woman and any woman can call herself a man puts us outside the laws of civilization and into the lawlessness of the jungle. Together as a nation we have been declawed. We have been neutered. We have been dehumanized.

SIGH. Jungles! What in the fuck do you know about jungles, Jack? My bet would be nothing at all. Neutered. Declawed. Dehumanized. Are people being neutered and declawed somewhere? I certainly haven’t heard anything like that. As for you, Jack, well, you have your little claws out, don’t you? Scratching and scraping away at any move towards a more compassionate, caring and humane society. I haven’t been dehumanized in the least by anyone under the GLBT umbrella. No one has tried to declaw or neuter me, either. That last one would be a tad difficult where I’m concerned, but it’s not women you care about, is it, Jack? Nope, it’s all about the men. Manly men, howling the losses of patriarchy. Tsk.

To live in a place where the rules are upside down and where each man is his own judge is to live in a wilderness of moral decay.

There’s this men only thing again. I’m quite good with being my own judge of how to live my life. I’m not terribly interested in telling other people how to live their lives, and I’m too busy for that kind of thing anyway. Instead, I’m very good with all people having basic human rights, and being left in peace to judge what’s good for themselves.

The Black Woman Is God.

Copy+of+Nicole+Dixon_Sentinel

Copy+of+Nicole+Dixon_Tehuti's+Conquest

© Nicole Dixon.

The Black Woman Is God art exhibition tells and shows you the story of black women’s divinity through the lens of black women reclaiming their ancestry, culture, history and future. The brainchild of Karen Seneferu, this project is in it’s second incarnation in 2016 and will be featuring dozens of artists in at least three separate exhibitions at different locations throughout the summer and fall. The curatorial project is lead by a team that includes karen, Sasha Kelley, Zakiya Harris, Idris Hassan and many others including volunteers from the exhibited artists. As the team prepared for the first exhibit at the Oakland Museum, they held a series of meetings to help the participants get to know one another and to help plan and prepare for the exhibit.

This series is a documentation of these gatherings in an effort to recall and retain the importance of community and sisterhood in collaboration for social justice, ideology shifts, art, and, of course, love.

The Black Woman Is God: Reprogramming the God Code.

The show will be at SOMArts, July 7th through August 18th, 2016.

Sunday Facepalm

NOM-NOM-NOM_640x345_acf_cropped

Thousands of couples have married across all 50 US states since last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell V Hodges, which brought equality to all 50 states.

But the National Organization for Marriage is still not happy – and plans to march on DC later this month to protest the decision in a ‘March for Marriage’.

A release confirmed: “This year’s March will protest the outrageous, anti-constitutional and illegitimate decision of the US Supreme Court redefining marriage.

“This was a decision wholly unsupported by the law and lacking any legal foundation. The majority simply legislated from the bench, imposing their own values on the country.

“In the process, they stripped over 50 million voters and countless legislators in states across America of their sovereign right to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.”.

They did? How did they do this? Wait, I have sovereign rights? Okay…I have a sovereign right to define marriage as the union of adult people who love one another! Hey look, that works. No idea what their problem is, perhaps they aren’t proclaiming correctly or something.

It adds: “The 2016 March for Marriage… will send a powerful message to the elite, including those in Congress and on the federal judiciary, that the American people continue to believe that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, and that we reject the dangerous gender-bending ideology that has been the inevitable aftermath of redefining marriage.

Gosh, I have sovereign rights and I’m elite now. That seems about right, since going by the above, I’m not an American person, as I do not believe in that one man/one woman shite, nor do I reject gender-bending of any kind, even when it is wicked…fun.

“We must focus our elected officials and the American people on reversing these developments, and the March is a tremendous opportunity to do so.”

And I will do everything in my power to see that you keep being reduced to irrelevant cranks on the sidelines of life.

PinkNews has the story.

And, an infuriating Sunday Facepalm:

Alex Radita on his 15th birthday. He weighed 37 pounds due to untreated Type 1 diabetes (Court exhibit/CBC)

Alex Radita on his 15th birthday. He weighed 37 pounds due to untreated Type 1 diabetes (Court exhibit/CBC)

A 15-year-old Canadian boy suffering from severe effects of insulin-dependent diabetes died because his religious parents refused to seek proper medical care, the CBC reports.

Emil and Rodica Radita are on trial for first-degree murder after their son, Alex, died in 2013 from what prosecutors say were the effects of his parents’ refusal to seek medical care and rely on prayer and home treatment instead.

Alex was diagnosed with diabetes as a 3 year old. The condition can be controlled by monitoring blood glucose levels and giving insulin. But his parents believed that doctors caused the condition by treating him for it and left his diabetes untreated.

[…]

Soon after his diagnosis, Alex had been seized by child services for a year after he had been hospitalized three times because his parents refused to treat his condition. But he was returned to them. They complied with a court order to treat his condition with the help of a doctor — until they failed to show up for an appointment, the CBC reports.

The family could not be located, until they were discovered to have moved to a different province — but there was no communication between the two social service departments.

When in the hell is this going to stop, allowing parents to willfully murder their child, just because it’s in the name of a religion? Not only murder, but torture. This poor child’s life, from the time of diagnosis, had to be such misery. This could have been a happy, healthy child, but apparently, not one person cared enough to stop this in time to save Alex’s life.

Via Raw Story and CBC.

Aaaaaaaaaaand, one more. This one is brief:

God paid him [Muhammad Ali] back with Parkinson’s disease.

Christians. You can all go fuck yourself.

Arachnid Nursery

While waiting for birds to show this morning, I noticed a web on a dead plant, and shot it to check the light. After a while, I got to wondering, what was that? So, I did the time-honoured ape thing, and poked, very gently, with a stick. Baby spiders! They are incredibly tiny, much smaller than they look in the photos. All photos are 1500 x 996, click for full size.

Anur1

Anur2

Anur3

Anur4

Anur5

© C. Ford. All rights reserved.

Pink. Amazing, Miraculous Pink.

Saad sent this fine example of everyday patriarchy, and the Power of Pink™:

JCAsXLu

Okay, the only actual difference I see here is the pill colour. Orange in the standard package, pink in the special Pink Power package. Oh, wait, the Pink Power states it’s for sensitive stomachs. Going by the handy dandy coding, this means only women have sensitive stomachs. Sorry men, you can’t have one of those. There’s a bit more interesting coding, too. The standard package: Gentle, predictable overnight relief. The Pink Power package: Gentle, dependable relief for sensitive stomachs. Women aren’t interested in predictable, no. They want dependable. Got to have that specifically coded assurance of stability and security, a pat on the hand, a pink promise you’ll be taken care of, sensitively.

Jesus, what a load of shit. A bright pink load of shit.

Simon Stalenhag.

Simon Stålenhag has an amazing body of work, paintings which are sci-fi, dystopian, poignant, a little bit sweet, a little bit horror. It was really difficult to choose some to post here, they are all fabulous. Have a visit at Simon’s gallery, it’s well worth it.  Click for full size.

astronomen

bio_cargrab

by_crossing

by_gathering

invasive1

bio_hatched

vagrant_crow

All art by Simon Stålenhag. Simon Stålenhag Art Gallery. The prices for prints is very reasonable, I think I’m going to have to indulge once. Or seven times.

Muhammad Ali has walked on.

It’s a sad day. Growing up, Muhammad Ali was one of my first windows into thinking outside the white, Catholic box I had been stuffed in, and was being raised in. I owe him a great deal of thanks.

Statement from President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama on the Passing of Muhammad Ali.

Muhammad Ali was The Greatest. Period. If you just asked him, he’d tell you. He’d tell you he was the double greatest; that he’d “handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder into jail.”

But what made The Champ the greatest – what truly separated him from everyone else – is that everyone else would tell you pretty much the same thing.

Like everyone else on the planet, Michelle and I mourn his passing. But we’re also grateful to God for how fortunate we are to have known him, if just for a while; for how fortunate we all are that The Greatest chose to grace our time.

In my private study, just off the Oval Office, I keep a pair of his gloves on display, just under that iconic photograph of him – the young champ, just 22 years old, roaring like a lion over a fallen Sonny Liston. I was too young when it was taken to understand who he was – still Cassius Clay, already an Olympic Gold Medal winner, yet to set out on a spiritual journey that would lead him to his Muslim faith, exile him at the peak of his power, and set the stage for his return to greatness with a name as familiar to the downtrodden in the slums of Southeast Asia and the villages of Africa as it was to cheering crowds in Madison Square Garden.

“I am America,” he once declared. “I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me – black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me.”

That’s the Ali I came to know as I came of age – not just as skilled a poet on the mic as he was a fighter in the ring, but a man who fought for what was right. A man who fought for us. He stood with King and Mandela; stood up when it was hard; spoke out when others wouldn’t. His fight outside the ring would cost him his title and his public standing. It would earn him enemies on the left and the right, make him reviled, and nearly send him to jail. But Ali stood his ground. And his victory helped us get used to the America we recognize today.

He wasn’t perfect, of course. For all his magic in the ring, he could be careless with his words, and full of contradictions as his faith evolved. But his wonderful, infectious, even innocent spirit ultimately won him more fans than foes – maybe because in him, we hoped to see something of ourselves. Later, as his physical powers ebbed, he became an even more powerful force for peace and reconciliation around the world. We saw a man who said he was so mean he’d make medicine sick reveal a soft spot, visiting children with illness and disability around the world, telling them they, too, could become the greatest. We watched a hero light a torch, and fight his greatest fight of all on the world stage once again; a battle against the disease that ravaged his body, but couldn’t take the spark from his eyes.

Muhammad Ali shook up the world. And the world is better for it. We are all better for it. Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to his family, and we pray that the greatest fighter of them all finally rests in peace.

DC Comics Reboot: Rebirth

8d53080e3077e40c34dfde6fe727ae36

DC Comics, once known as Detective Comics, slowly came to life and prosperity in the late 1930s and early 1940s. While moderately successful in its early days, it wasn’t until the rises of Batman and Superman that the company really took off. Skip ahead over 75 years, and DC Comics is one of the “big two,” along with Marvel. Now, they’re about to completely reboot their entire line of comics… again.

After the marginal success of their last reboot, the company aims to refocus on the core of what makes their characters so special. This reboot’s called Rebirth, and as DC Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns explained in an announcement trailer, “The whole point of Rebirth for all of us is to get back to the essence of the characters.” Because sweeps like this don’t happen very often, this week we’re looking at Batman, Superman, Green Arrow, and Green Lantern. Do they mark a bold new direction for the company? Or should readers steer clear?

Giaco Furino at The Creators Project has the low down on all the new rebirths – Batman, Superman, Green Lantern and Green Arrow.

McCrory: I’ll Stand Firm.

Andrew Dye/Journal.

Andrew Dye/Journal.

Gov. Pat McCrory said he will continue to fight for a “respect for privacy” in the face of a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit over the state’s controversial “bathroom bill.”

McCrory was speaking at North Carolinians for Home Education’s annual conference, being held this week at the Benton Convention Center.

McCrory praised the several hundred families in the crowd for their choice to home school their children. He said it’s important for families to have choices about educating their children and for leaders to respect all of those choices.

[…]

“One other advantage of home schooling is you aren’t going to have the president, the attorney general or the mayor of Charlotte telling you what bathroom (to use),” he said, to a standing ovation.

[…]

McCrory said he would support unisex bathrooms for transgender students, saying that we should give kids with “special needs and unique needs” an option.

“But don’t change the norms that have been working for generations,” he said.

“Special needs and unique needs”? FFS, how dense can McCrory get here? This is as simple as it gets: transgender woman = woman. Transgender man = man. Transgender girl = girl. Transgender boy = boy. It’s quite interesting how McCrory thinks that unisex lavs are great…for those weird people. Not so great for actual people, eh, Pat? I have a question about these wonderful, unisex, transgender persons only lavs, Pat – who is going to police them to keep all the cis people out? Perhaps all cis people should be made to go through years of red tape to get a special identification, and absolutely must be karyotyped!

McCrory blamed the kerfuffle on Democrats, saying there were no issues with bathroom rules until the Charlotte City Council passed a nondiscrimination ordinance to provide legal protections for gay, lesbian and transgender people that included language would allow transgender individuals to use the bathroom corresponding to the gender with which they identify. HB2 was passed in a one-day special session to reverse Charlotte’s ordinance.

Tsk. You’d think those ‘norms’ that had been working great for generations wouldn’t have gotten knocked down by a bit of non-discrimination. Also, this is a “kerfuffle”? People’s lives. Legislation of hatred, fear, and bigotry. Inciting hatred and harm. Kerfuffle. Fuck you, McCrory. I hope you go down in a blaze of shame, a sad footnote on the rigid, atrophied thinking of a conservative bigot.

Via Winston-Salem Journal.