Demonstration

OK, i did it.  My first demonstration.

Last Sunday i quickly lettered a sign reading "You Must Be So Proud", segwayed down to the Noe Valley Ministry, which is that Presbyterian church there on Sanchez between Elizabeth and 23rd, and stood holding the sign with a pleasant smile as the last of the congregation arrived before their 10:30 service.

For those who asked "For what?", I replied, "For convicting Reverend Jane Spahr."

Most did seem to be aware that a few days earlier the reverend had been convicted of heresy (or whatever their church court called it) for marrying several same-sex couples during the few months in 2008 when this was legal in California.  Here's the New York Times article.

Few seemed at all ashamed although one woman did feel the need to point out that this particular congregation was quite accepting of gays.

To my credit, i refrained from asking why in the world any gay person would have the slightest inclination to enter a church whose official policy toward gays was hatred, or for that matter, to worship the god supposedly represented by that church.

If there were a god, it would like me the way it made me.

Consistency

One of the arguments used over and over by the Christian opponents of same-sex marriage is that all the benefits of marriage are available to same sex couples in domestic partnerships, and there is a shred of truth in this.  Yes, many of the benefits of marriage are now available to domestic partners.  Actually, it is probably true that most benefits of marriage are available to domestic partners.  However it is patently false that all the benefits accrue in domestic partnerships.

Just for starters, take a look at all the federal benefits like social security survivorship that are not available to domestic partners.

But what i'm getting at here is not to point out yet another blatant lie uttered by our enemies but rather to identify another case of shameless hypocrisy.

In an Open Forum column in the San Francisco Chronicle on 11 August, a man named John Eastman who identified himself as a professor at Chapman University  (which is in Orange County and we know what that means) argued that Judge Walker should have recused himself from the Prop 8 trial because as a homosexual in a long term relationship he stood to reap financial benefits if same-sex marriage were legalized.  Here's his column.

So out of one side of their mouths, the vicious scum tell the lie that we don't need marriage because we can get all the benefits from domestic partnerships, and out of the other side they say that a gay judge could not be unbiased because he had a financial stake in getting married.

Scientific American

I still subscribe to Scientific American, the oldest magazine in America.  Fairly often it has articles covering the war on science that has been conducted by religions, especially Christianity, since their inception since religious explanations of natural phenomena are invariably refuted by empirical data as the data are revealed by scientific study.

Hardly anyone is now so stupid as to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but Galileo was taken into the holy dungeons of the Roman Catholic Church and shown the blessed instruments of torture that would used on him if he failed to recant his heretical belief that that the earth revolved around the sun, in direct conflict with the Holy Bible.

Most Christian denominations have given up on this front, but many are still very active in fighting against evolution.  Scientific American has devoted numerous articles and most of an entire issue to demolishing the Intelligent Design attack on evolution, and the churches have given up in their attempts to force the teaching of Intelligent Design instead of evolution in our public schools, but they have fallen back on an approach of trying to get ID taught in the schools as an equal alternative to evolution.

They'll never give up.  Think not?  Well, until the Spring of 2010 the Texas School Board was led by a Young Earth Creationist, which would be laughable if it weren't so tragic.  And there are plenty of Christians who still argue that their infallible Bible makes it clear that the Earth is the center of the universe.

In the September 2010 issue of Scientific American Lawrence Krauss discusses the misuse of quantum mechanics by the religious, which i will not try to summarize, but i do have to quote one line.  He writes:  "I expect organized religion to continue to be a part of the cultural landscape, too, largely unaffected by the ongoing march of human knowledge, as it has been for centuries."

Upstairs Lounge

I just read an interesting article in the Summer 2010 issue of Equality magazine, a publication of the Human Rights Campaign.

The article tells the story of the 1973 fire that swept a New Orleans' gay bar called the Upstairs Lounge, killing 32 patrons and injuring dozens, the worst fire in New Orleans history.

But since it killed only occupants of a gay bar, the Roman Catholic archdiocese banned memorial services for the Catholic victims, and only one church of any denomination in the entire city allowed services.

This is called Christian love.