Saturday, January 1, 2011

THE GAY TIPPING POINT – by Kenji Yoshino, UCLA Law Review Vol. 57, Issue 5 (June 2010) | “PREJUDICE AGAINST DISCRETE AND INSULAR MINORITIES”





THE GAY TIPPING POINT
Kenji Yoshino

INTRODUCTION

In a 1999 assessment, New York Times journalists Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney stated that “it seems likely that the movement for gay identity and gay rights has come further and faster, in terms of change, than any other that has gone before it in this nation.”1 The evidence supports their claim. The Encyclopedia of Associations, for instance, shows that the number of organizations devoted to gay causes has skyrocketed in recent decades. In 1970, there were no gay or lesbian associations listed; in 1980, there were 14; in 1990, there were 234; and in 2000, there were 327.2 A “gay tipping point” occurred in the United States in the latter decades of the twentieth century.

The gay tipping point raises the question of whether gay individuals are still a politically powerless minority deserving of judicial protection in this country. Under its equal protection jurisprudence, the United States Supreme Court has extended judicial solicitude to five classifications—race,3 national origin, 4 alienage,5 sex,6 and nonmarital parentage.7 In both granting and withholding such protection, the Court has often fixated on political powerlessness as a precondition for heightened scrutiny.8 Although the Court has articulated more than one test for such political powerlessness, the canonical one lies in Footnote 4 of United States v. Carolene Products Co.9

I.               CAROLENE PRODUCTS

Like Marbury v. Madison,10 the 1938 case of Carolene Products is a“masterwork of indirection.”11 At the time Carolene Products was decided, the Court had just been chastened for overzealous judicial activism, and badlyneeded to engage in a show of obeisance to the political branches.12 Justice Harlan Fiske Stone’s majority opinion seemingly does so, deferring in the text of the opinion to congressional legislation that regulated adulterated milk.13 Yet the opinion buries a timebomb in Footnote 4, which has become the most famous footnote in Constitutional Law.

In that footnote, Justice Stone leaves open the possibility that “prejudice against discrete and insular minorities” might be a “special condition” that would justify more aggressive judicial review.14 The influence of the footnote cannot be overstated. John Hart Ely’s celebrated theory of political process failure15 was but one of many scholarly efforts that flowed out of this note.16 More to the point, the footnote has influenced the Court. Constitutional scholar Gerald Gunther attributed the tiered structure of judicial review under the Equal Protection Clause to this note’s “pervasive influence.”17 The idea of the “discrete and insular” minority has become a mantra to describe groups that deserve the Court’s concern.18

II.             BEYOND CAROLENE PRODUCTS

In 1985, Bruce Ackerman forcefully critiqued the Carolene Products formulation. 19 In his essay, Ackerman maintains that the “discrete and insular” minority formulation is a poor proxy for a politically powerless group.20 To the contrary, Ackerman contends, “anonymous and diffuse”21 minorities may be more worthy of the Court’s concern.22

Ackerman understands a minority to be “discrete” if “its members are marked out in ways that make it relatively easy for others to identify them.”23 Drawing on Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,24 Ackerman points out that when groups are burdened, they generally entertain two options: exercising voice against the discrimination or exiting the group. For members of “discrete” groups, however, exit is generally impossible—“If you are a black in America today, you know there is no way you can avoid the impact of the larger public’s views about the significance of blackness.”25 In contrast, individuals with invisible characteristics can exit the group by passing—“As a member of an anonymous group, each homosexual can seek to minimize the personal harm due to prejudice by keeping his or her sexual preference a tightly held secret.”26 The availability of exit lessens the necessity of voice, meaning gays will have less of an incentive to fight discrimination…
Read complete paper:



INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM ISSUE
SEXUALITY AND GENDER LAW:
THE DIFFERENCE A FIELD MAKES
Nan D. Hunter
UCLA Law Review Vol. 57, Issue 5 (June 2010)


For a very long time, issues of sexuality and gender remained outside the boundaries of what was considered important legal scholarship. Indeed, the very presence in the legal academy of the concepts of sexuality and gender was viewed as barely legitimate, certainly not respectable, and, in intellectual terms, at best facetious1—or, to let Justice White rest in peace, at best frivolous.

One result of this now dying worldview was a series of categorical exclusions 


and erasures—exemplified by the exclusion of sexual speech from the First Amendment, the exclusion of nonreproductive kinship networks from the definition of family, the exclusion of gender performance from the category of protected expression, and the erasure of culturally legible same-sex desire through the mechanism of criminalization. Although instances of erasure and exclusion continue today, the period of a hegemonic paradigm of occlusion has ended.


Today, few voices would contest that sexuality and gender law is intellectually both mature and sophisticated. Moreover, the themes and tensions that have emerged about and within the field increasingly dominate broad swaths of public law.

The authors represented in this issue were brought together to assess the current state and future prospects of the field of sexuality and gender law, in a symposium cosponsored by the UCLA Law Review and the Williams Institute. The resulting articles present a vivid snapshot taken at the beginning of the twenty-first century of a field that did not exist until a few decades earlier. They also provocatively sketch complexities that lie ahead.

Like the reach of these articles, the field itself evades containment. Its premise, Bill Eskridge asserts, is “that legal rules and standards pervasively reflect, regulate, and are undermined by the diversity of gender roles, sexual practices, and gender or sexual identities . . . .”2 As every author points out, in different voices and from multiple perspectives, the impact of sex- and genderinflected law circulates throughout the body politic, shaping and reshaping our understandings of self, family, community, and nation-state. This is a not inconsiderable accomplishment for a body of law that only recently was overshadowed by the state’s prerogative to criminalize the sexual practices at the core of its social meaning3 and to officially prefer and reinforce a genderspecified model of citizenship.4...
Read complete address:
Selected Works of Nan Hunter

Georgetown Law  - Nan Hunter

Hunter of Justice  - a blog about sexuality, gender, law and culture

UCLA Law Review Vol. 57, Issue 5 (June 2010)
Concurring Opinions


Kenji Yoshino: 
World News, Tweets, Pictures and Videos - Liquida


Kenji Yoshino
chief justice earl
warren professor of
constitutional law
when kenji yoshino started teaching at Yale Law School, he recalls a well-meaning colleague who offered him this advice: “You’ll have an easier chance at getting tenure if you’re  a homosexual professional than if you’re a professional homosexual.” In other words, it was okay to be gay; just 
don’t flaunt it.

That counsel, which Yoshino eventually rejected, helped inspire his award-winning work. Covering: The Hidden Assault On Our Civil Rights (Random House, 2006) is a memoir that blends his personal identity struggles as a gay, Japanese American with legal arguments in order to question whether assimilation is always beneficial. “We have a deep-seated belief as Americans that we all should melt into the pot,” says Yoshino, a visiting professor for two years who joined NYU Law in July. “But if the demand for conformity is itself illegitimate, then assimilation is a symptom of discrimination rather than an escape from it.”

In Covering, Yoshino discusses three stages of coming out: “conversion,” “passing” and “covering.” The latter two terms are adopted from the work of sociologist Erving Goffman. Conversion is the period in which a gay individual longs to become straight. Passing is the phase in which a gay individual has accepted his homosexuality, but hides it from society. And covering is a more subtle demand for assimilation, in which the individual is openly gay but feels pressured not to “flaunt.” Covering is as much an assault on a gay individual’s civil rights as the 1981 case in which an African-American woman was fired by American Airlines for wearing her hair in cornrows, Yoshino says. “His work gave us new categories for thinking about the types of discrimination that are relatively invisible to most people,” says David Golove, Hiller Family Foundation Professor of Law. “He’s had a major impact within constitutional and discrimination law.”…
Read complete article: 
Autumn 2008 - page 45


covering
The Hidden Assault on
Our Civil Rights

Covering received the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Non-Fiction from the Publishing Triangle (2007), a Stonewall Honor Book Award from the American Library Association (2007), and a Myers Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights (2006). The first serial of the book, published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, received the GLAAD Media Award for "Outstanding Article" in 2007.

In this remarkable and elegant work, acclaimed NYU law professor Kenji Yoshino fuses legal manifesto and poetic memoir to call for a redefinition of civil rights in our law and culture.

Everyone covers. To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life. Against that conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights. Though we have come to some consensus against penalizing people for differences based on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and disability, we still routinely deny equal treatment to people who refuse to downplay differences along these lines. Racial minorities are pressed to “act white” by changing their names, languages, or cultural practices. Women are told to “play like men” at work. Gays are asked not to engage in public displays of same-sex affection. The devout are instructed to minimize expressions of faith, and individuals with disabilities are urged to conceal the paraphernalia that permit them to function. In a wide-ranging analysis, Yoshino demonstrates that American civil rights law has generally ignored the threat posed by these covering demands. With passion and rigor, he shows that the work of civil rights will not be complete until it attends to the harms of coerced conformity…
Read complete review:

About the Author

Kenji Yoshino is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at the NYU School of Law.  Prior to moving to NYU, he was the inaugural Guido Calabresi Professor of Law and Deputy Dean of Intellectual Life at Yale Law School, where he taught from 1998 to 2008.  He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College, took a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, and earned his law degree at Yale Law School.   A specialist in constitutional law, antidiscrimination law, and law and literature, Yoshino has published in major academic journals, such as the Columbia Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal.
Read more:

"Covering: The Hidden Assault on our Civil Rights" 
A conversation with author Kenji Yoshino about Yoshino's book.
April 20, 2006 – Charlie Rose
View video:


Gay marriage -> Restoring 
"Hope of Love" 
To Children In Early Childhood -> Marriage Equality
March 23, 2010 – by Fr. Marty Kurylowicz
Marriage Equality, like Galileo, is the truth about the facts of growing up gay. Marriage Equality will not become a reality until people learn that its most vital purpose is that it restores the “hope of love” to children in early childhood – essential to their development and well-being for life. Without Marriage Equality we teach children how to hate love and how to be mean and indifferent to people as adults. With all due respect, without Marriage Equality we would teach them in much the same way as has been shown by Benedict XVI and the hierarchy, especially in their lack of care and protection of children for decades.


Homosexuality in Sodom and Gomorrah 
by The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson 
December 8, 2010 – The Washington Post


Galileo 
facing the Roman Inquisition - Read more
  

 Biblical quotes used to Condemn Galileo

Ecclesiastes 1:5 (New International Version)
5 The sun rises and the sun sets, anhurries back to where it rises.
Ecclesiastes 1:5 (New American Standard Bible)
5 Also, the sun rises and the sun sets; And hastening to its place it rises there again. 

1 Chronicles 16:30 (New International Version)
30 Tremble before him, all the earth! 
The world is firmly established; icannot be moved.
1 Chronicles 16:30 (New American Standard Bible)

30 Tremble before Him, all the earth; Indeed, the world is firmly established, it will not be moved

Psalm 93:1 (New International Version)
1 The LORD reigns, he is robed in majesty; 
 the LORD is robed in majesty 
 and is armed with strength. The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.
Psalm 93:1 (New American Standard Bible)
1 The LORD reigns, He is clothed with majesty; The LORD has clothed and girded Himself with strength; Indeed, the world is firmly established, it will not be moved

Psalm 96:10 (New International Version)
10 Say among the nations, "The LORD reigns." 
 The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved; 
 he will judge the peoples with equity.
Psalm 96:10 (New American Standard Bible)
10 Say among the nations, "The LORD reigns; Indeed, the world is firmly established, it will not be movedHe will judge the peoples with equity." 

Psalm 104:5 (New International Version)
5 He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.
Psalm 104:5 (New American Standard Bible)
5 He established the earth upon its foundations, So that it will not totter forever and ever.
Read more:




Groundbreaking Study Finds 
Family Acceptance of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Adolescents Protects Against Depression, Substance Abuse and Suicidal Behavior in Early Adulthood 
by Caitlin Ryan, PhD,
December 6, 2010 - FAMILY ACCEPTANCE PROJECT.

San Francisco, CA –– For the first time, researchers have established a clear link between accepting family attitudes and behaviors towards their lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) children and significantly decreased risk and better overall health in adulthood. The study shows that specific parental and caregiver behaviors -- such as advocating for their children when they are mistreated because of their LGBT identity or supporting their gender expression -- protect against depression, substance abuse, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts in early adulthood. In addition, LGBT youth with highly accepting families have significantly higher levels of self-esteem and social support in young adulthood. The study is published in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, a journal of the International Society of Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurses, in a peer-reviewed article titled “Family Acceptance in Adolescence and the Health of LGBT Young Adults.”


Despite all the recent attention to health risks and disparities for lesbian, gay and bisexual youth, prior to this study, little was known about how families express acceptance and support for their LGBT children. Moreover, no prior research had examined the relationship between family acceptance of LGBT adolescents and health and mental health concerns in emerging adulthood.

“At a time when the media and families are becoming acutely aware of the risk that many LGBT youth experience, our findings that family acceptance protects against suicidal thoughts and behaviors, depression and substance abuse offer a gateway to hope for LGBT youth and families that struggle with how to balance deeply held religious and personal values with love for their LGBT children,” said Caitlin Ryan, PhD, Director of the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University. “I have worked on LGBT health and mental health for 35 years and putting our research into practice by developing a new model to help diverse families support their LGBT children is the most hopeful work I’ve ever done.”

Ann P. Haas, Ph.D., Director of Prevention Projects for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, noted, “With this new groundbreaking study, Ryan and her colleagues have provided the strongest evidence to date that acceptance and support from parents and caregivers promote well-being among LGBT youth and help protect them from depression and
suicidal behavior. These findings open the door to a whole new focus on how families can be helped to more fully engage in the kind of behaviors that reduce suicide risk in LGBT adolescents and young adults.”

“Times have changed,” said Stephen Russell, PhD, President Elect of the Society for Research on Adolescence and a consultant to the Family Acceptance Project. “More and more families want to be accepting of their children. Yet, many families still struggle when a child comes out as LGBT. It’s essential to have research like this to deeply understand the ways that families show their acceptance, so that we can identify how to support families.”

The study, authored by Dr. Caitlin Ryan and her team from the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University, which shows that accepting behaviors of parents and caregivers towards their LGBT children are protective against mental health risks -- including suicidal behaviors -- has critical implications for changing how families relate to their LGBT children and how LGBT youth are served by a wide range of providers across disciplines and systems of care, including custodial care systems such as foster care. The study was funded by The California Endowment, a health foundation dedicated to expanding access to affordable, quality health care for underserved individuals and communities…
Read complete report & more
found on the Family Acceptance Project™ website:


FAP Family Video Series
Helping diverse families understand how to support their LGBT children takes resources that touch the heart – like the sample video you see on this page. We are working to produce a series of 8 of these short documentary videos that show the journey from struggle to support of ethnically and religiously diverse families with LGBT children.
view video
Funding is needed to help complete this protect – together with your help the Family Acceptance Project™ will make a difference for the better for LGBT children, youth and families. Your generosity at this time in the lives of LGBT children and youth will be lasting throughout their lives including all the lives that will be touched by them.  Dr. Caitlin Ryan explains on the Family Acceptance Project™ website the many ways that these videos will be used.  Thank you for your kind consideration about making a donation to this life giving project for LGBT children and youth.

All Donations can be made directly on
Family Acceptance Project™ website:

You Can Make a Difference
The Family Acceptance Project™ is a multi-year project to study the experiences of LGBT youth and families. We will use our findings to help strengthen families and to develop training materials and interventions for health and mental health, and school-based providers, child welfare workers and family service workers. Photo

We're very resourceful in finding volunteers and donated services to make the best use of our limited resources. However, your individual or organizational contribution can make a significant difference in helping us carry out the project.


School Victimization of Gender-Nonconforming LGBT Youth Linked with Depression and Quality Of Life In Adulthood


Youth Development Current Trends 
Dr. Caitlin Ryan and The Family Acceptance Projects’ Study of LGBT Youth 
December 13, 2010 
National Association of Social Workers








Related links:

Gay Covering - "Covering: The Hidden Assault on our Civil Rights" - by Kenji Yoshino

"Covering: The Hidden Assault on our Civil Rights"
A conversation with author Kenji Yoshino about Yoshino's book.
April 20, 2006 – Charlie Rose
View video:



July 2010 

President of the United States
United States Congress
United States Supreme Court
50 United States Governors 

Dear -- --------, 

My name is Fr. Marty Kurylowicz, a Roman Catholic priest from the Diocese of Grand Rapids, Michigan ordained June 16, 1979. 

In March 1997, after attending a National Symposium of the New Ways Ministry that was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I learned that children as young as 4 and 5 years of age know that they are different. This feeling "different" is only identified in their adult years as being gay. However, the harmful influence of antigay social and religious norms -- in particular, for Catholics, the Vatican’s unsubstantiated antigay teachings -- are severe and last throughout a child’s lifetime. The harmful effects are not isolated only to these children who grow up to be gay, but also affect their families, siblings, friends and anyone whom they might consider special in their lives. They are a prescribed societal sentence of implicit isolation, which place at risk of suicide so many innocent adolescents and young adults. They stifle an enormous amount of human potential in the world that otherwise could be put to use for finding cures for diseases, offering better ways of maintaining peace among people and improving the quality of life for everyone in the world.
Gay Marriage - “SEPARATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE” Does Not Give Churches Or Benedict XVI - The Freedom To Abuse Children or Adults. July 2010 - By Fr. Marty Kurylowicz




SEXUAL ORIENTATION is less about sex and more about LOVE, being one with another human being - ATTACHMENT THEORY 
 “Auschwitz – Benedict XVI - Christmas 2008 - Brokeback Mountain” (NP) 
Photo
Nothing in life is more precious than the intimate relationships we have with love ones. Healthy love relationships delight us give us confidence to take on challenges and support us in difficult times. Photo



Difference Between Life & Death
Being “In” And Living “Out” Of The Closet
"Why, It Is A 'Gift' From God!!!" - Monastic Wisdom - Absolute Fright For Benedict XVI
March 1997 “Coming Out”
"$126,000.00 as reported by Bishop Walter Hurley, May 27, 2006 – The Grand Rapids Press"
By Fr. Marty Kurylowicz



I thought that love
was just a word
They sang about in songs I heard
It took your kisses to reveal
That I was wrong,
and
 love is real
La Vie En Rose
Edith Piaf





 Kenji Yoshino discusses California same-sex marriage ruling 
on
Charlie Rose, August 5, 2010
A discussion about Prop 8 which was overturned this week with Kenji Yoshino Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of law, Jesse Mckinley San Francisco bureau chief of "The New York Times" and Jeff Zeleny of "The New York Times"
View video interview:
Related links:


California Prop 8 
The Best Argument Against Gay Marriage - And why it fails. 
By Kenji Yoshino, 
December 13, 2010 – Slate Magazine

In last week's arguments in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the California same-sex marriage case, it was clear that the main secular argument for limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples is the "common procreation" rationale. The idea is that marriage is properly limited to opposite-sex couples because they, and only they, can engage in procreation within their union. The lawyers defending California's gay marriage ban, Proposition 8, did not fully elaborate the argument—the New York Times editorial page called it a "tired, and thoroughly specious, assertion."

Now conservative blogs are celebrating—as "one of the best arguments" and "outstanding work"—the more fulsome defense of the common procreation argument made in a forthcoming article by Sherif Girgis, Robert P. George, and Ryan T. Anderson. Yet the article's more comprehensive elaboration of the argument reveals why the Proposition 8 defenders were right not to shine too bright a light on it. Closely examined, the common-procreation argument denigrates not only same-sex couples but several kinds of married opposite-sex couples…
Read complete report:
[Unsubstantiated] --- RELIGIOUS BELIEFS that gay and lesbian relationships are SINFUL or INFERIOR to heterosexual relationships HARM gays and lesbians.
Judge Vaughn Walker Ruling
California Prop 8. August 4, 2010

NO EVIDENCE SUPPORTS THESE [homosexual] STEREOTYPES
Judge Vaughn Walker Ruling
California Prop 8. August 4, 2010
Related Links:

Critical Study Finds Direct Link - Between School Victimization Of Gender-Nonconforming Lgbt Youth With - Depression And Quality Of Life In Adulthood - by Dr. Caitlin Ryan – October 4, 2010 - Family Acceptance Project™ - San Francisco State University

GAY YOUTH SUICIDE | BENEDICT XVI & BISHOPS Child Sexual Abuse Cover-ups – Negligence Protecting (1) Children & (2) LGBT Children | Family of Rutgers suicide victim lends name to bill – November 19, 2010 – CNN

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee - unyielding force supporting - DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL Repeal Act of 2010 – ENDS discriminatory policy that “forces young men and women to lie,” – to lie – “about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.”



"Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well-considered, and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit."





“KNOW YOURSELF” 
JOHN PAUL II

ENCYCLICAL LETTER 
FIDES ET RATIO 
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF 
JOHN PAUL II 
TO THE BISHOPS 
OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
ON THE RELATIONSHIP 
BETWEEN FAITH AND REASON – September 15, 1998 
Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves (cf. Ex 33:18; Ps 27:8-9; 63:2-3; Jn 14:8; 1 Jn 3:2). 

INTRODUCTION 
“KNOW YOURSELF” 

1. In both East and West, we may trace a journey which has led humanity down the centuries to meet and engage truth more and more deeply. It is a journey which has unfolded—as it must—within the horizon of personal self-consciousness: the more human beings know reality and the world, the more they know themselves in their uniqueness, with the question of the meaning of things and of their very existence becoming ever more pressing. This is why all that is the object of our knowledge becomes a part of our life. The admonition Know yourself was carved on the temple portal at Delphi, as testimony to a basic truth to be adopted as a minimal norm by those who seek to set themselves apart from the rest of creation as “human beings”, that is as those who “know themselves”. 


(29) “[Galileo] declared explicitly that the two truths, of faith and of science, can never contradict each other, 'Sacred Scripture and the natural world proceeding equally from the divine Word, the first as dictated by the Holy Spirit, the second as a very faithful executor of the commands of God', as he wrote in his letter to Father Benedetto Castelli on 21 December 1613. The Second Vatican Council says the same thing, even adopting similar language in its teaching: 'Methodical research, in all realms of knowledge, if it respects... moral norms, will never be genuinely opposed to faith: the reality of the world and of faith have their origin in the same God' (Gaudium et Spes, 36). Galileo sensed in his scientific research the presence of the Creator who, stirring in the depths of his spirit, stimulated him, anticipating and assisting his intuitions”: John Paul II, Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (10 November 1979): Insegnamenti, II, 2 (1979), 1111-1112.

Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

Faith can never conflict with reason The 'Galileo case' teaches us that different branches of knowledge call for different methods, each of which brings out various aspects of reality. http://www.its.caltech.edu/~nmcenter/sci-cp/sci-9211.html   


“There are no irreconcilable differences 
between science and faith” 
PopeJohn Paul II


Know thyself – Plato  John Paul II

This above all: to thine own self be true, 
 And it must follow, as the night the day, 
Thou canst not then be false to any man. - William Shakespeare

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,' when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye. - Luke 6:40-42

Ricky Martin on Coming out and Coming Into His Own 
- By Nekesa Mumbi Moody AP, 
November 3, 2010 – ABC News


"What, am I gonna teach them how to lie?”
Ricky Martin

Ricky Martin reveals he ‘cried like a baby’ after coming out
– November 2, 2010 – PinkNews.co.uk

Ricky Martin has told Oprah Winfrey about the moment he decided to announce he was gay.

The Puerto Rican star posted a message on his website declaring himself to be a “fortunate gay man” but says he broke down in tears afterwards.

He said: “When I realised, okay, I just pressed send, whoo… I was alone.

“I was in my studio alone for a minute. My assistant walked in and I just started crying like a little baby. I started crying.”

The 38-year-old said he decided to be open about his sexuality to set a good example to his twin sons, Valentine and Matteo, two.

He said: “I couldn’t take it anymore, it was too painful.

“But I guess the most important thing is my children… When I was holding them in my arms I was like, ‘What, am I gonna teach them how to lie?’ Whoa, that is my blessing right there. Then, when I was holding my children I said, ‘Okay, it’s time to tell the world’.”
Read more:

Ricky Martin cried 'like a baby' after revealing his sexuality
– November 2, 2010
CNN.com


Pope Benedict to Beatify a 
Gay Saint?
 A Conservative Icon? Maybe Both
by David Gibson – September 18, 2010
Politics Daily

…"It is not good for a Pope to live 20 years," Newman once wrote of the long-lived Pius IX. "It is an anomaly and bears no good fruit; he becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it."

Such frank talk about the failings of the hierarchy tended to make Newman a champion of liberal Catholics -- a courageous man who wrote about the "development of doctrine" in the church at a time when the Vatican was projecting an image of unceasing continuity. He also disagreed strongly with the church's adoption of the doctrine of papal infallibility, and famously wrote that if pressed, he would drink "to Conscience first and the Pope afterwards." Photo 

…Complicating all the interpretations is the fact that Newman had an extraordinarily close relationship with another English Catholic, Father Ambrose St. John, who had died in 1875, leaving Newman bereft -- and giving today's gay Christians an icon of their own.

"I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine," Newman wrote at the time of his friend's death. "From the first he loved me with an intensity of love which was unaccountable." And elsewhere: "As far as this world was concerned I was his first and last."



What you cannot do is accept injustice.
From Hitler – or anyone.
You must make the injustice visible – be prepared to die like a soldier to do so.
Mahatma Gandhi


Kids Are Being Hurt!!!






Gay Marriage - WITCH HUNTS ->The Crucible (1996) -> McCarthyism 1940’s -1950’s, -> Benedict XVI 2005

30 years of Ratzinger/Benedict XVI’s - Directives To Hierarchy – To make - THREATS, SILENCE, HARM AND DISPOSAL of Catholic Personnel Supportive of LGBT Adults and Children




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