So the Black Mass went ahead in Oklahoma City yesterday. Apparently about 50 people took part in the ceremony inside the downtown Oklahoma Civic Center Music Hall, and those numbers were easily dwarfed by the number of Catholics who prayed, took part in services, and marched around the city center. You can see photographs of the event here.
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Today at 7:00 pm is when the Black Mass by the group Dakhma of Angra Mainyu is scheduled to take place in a small basement theater in the downtown Oklahoma Civic Center Music Hall. The theater seats less than 100 people and the event has been sold out for weeks.
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The brazen demands of religious extremists never cease to amaze me. In the London borough of Hackney we have the case of members of a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) community putting up posters in Hebrew and English telling women which side of the street they should walk on.
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The young people behind the vicious beating of a gay couple on the streets of Philadelphia seem to be all former students of a Catholic school who had been having a get together of some sort in a restaurant prior to accosting the two men on the street. The group was identified by people using social media.
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As a result of the fuss about the person who was not allowed to re-enlist in the Air Force because he struck out the words ‘so help me God’ in the oath, the Air Force has reversed course and said that saying those words are no longer required, thus bringing it into line with the other military branches. The American Humanist Association had vowed to sue if the policy was not changed.
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The Hobby Lobby case, where the US Supreme court ruled that under some vaguely defined circumstances, owners of companies had right to impose their religious views as company policies as if the companies were individuals under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), was widely predicted to open up a Pandora’s box with others seeking similar exemptions from following the law because of their ‘sincerely held religious beliefs’.
And lo, what the prophets foretold has come to pass.
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The Advocate published a list of the 50 most influential LGBT people in the media, limiting themselves only to those who have been open about their sexual orientation. These lists are brazen attempts at getting hits but I clicked anyway.
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A Catholic girls school has fired two teachers after being tipped off that they were a lesbian couple.
[Olivia] Reichert said she and [Christina] Gambaro were asked to resign after the school said in late July it received a copy of a mortgage application with the couple’s names. The couple had married in New York over the summer and the school said they had violated the moral contract faculty are required to sign as part of employment.
Note that these teachers were not publicizing the fact that they were lesbians. Some busybody had sent the school authorities the mortgage document. The firings have caused anger among students and alumnae of the school.
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I decided to wander, as I periodically do, over to The Thinking Housewife to see what that homage site to the mores of the early twentieth century was up to, and found that they are very upset with Pope Francis, using language that is surprisingly harsh for such a genteel site. He is referred to as the ‘Argentine Bomber’, not a true pope (which they reinforce by putting “pope” in scare quotes), and even a ‘scandalous heretic’ because he did not use his trip to the Middle East to try and convert Jews and Muslims. The author has a truly novel view of religious freedom, saying “Religious freedom is no more a human right than walking down a street in the face of ongoing traffic is a human right. No one has the right to be wrong.”
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It is quite absurd the fuss that is made about swearing to god. An airman who crossed out the phrase “so help me God” prior to signing the oath in re-enlisting in the Air Force was told that he must sign the entire thing or leave the force. This seems to be a violation of Article VI of the US constitution where it says in the third paragraph:
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