Revised Format and latest Updates for:
E M P A T H Y - ≠ - 9/11 Terrorist Attacks - Roman Curia & Hierarchy - Nazi Racial Policy - Extreme Homophobia - "unworthy of life”
are found on October 23, 2016 on the link below:
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Update: October 22, 2016
E M P A T H Y
From the
V A T I C A N
Pope: urges Christians to reject envy and conflicts and work for unity - October 21, 2016
…Taking his inspiration from the greeting at Mass “peace be with you,” the Pope focused his homily on what is required to nurture peace and unity and avoid war and conflicts. He said our Lord’s greeting “creates a bond” of peace and unites us to create a unity of spirit and warned that if there’s no peace and if we aren’t able to greet each other in the widest sense of the word, there will never be unity. The Pope explained that this concept applies for unity in the world, unity in the town, in the district and in the family.
The evil spirit sows wars, Christians must avoid conflicts
“The evil spirit always sows wars. Jealousy, envy, conflicts, gossip…. are things that destroy peace and therefore there cannot be unity. And how should a Christian behave to promote unity, to find this unity? Paul tells us clearly: ‘live in a manner worthy, with all humility, gentleness and magnanimity.’ These three attitudes: humility - we cannot sow peace without humility. Where there is arrogance, there is always war and the desire to defeat the other and believing one is superior. Without humility there is no peace and without peace there is no unity.”
Rediscover gentleness and practice mutual support
Pope Francis lamented how nowadays we have lost the ability to speak gently and instead tend to shout at each other or speak badly about other people. He urged Christians to rediscover gentleness, saying by so doing, we are able to put up with each other, give mutual support, “be patient and put up with the faults of others or the things we don’t like.”
Help build unity with the bond of peace
“First: humility, second: gentleness with this mutual support, and third: magnanimity: a big heart, a wide-open heart that can accommodate everybody and that does not condemn, that does not become smaller because of trifling things: ‘who said that,’ ‘I heard that,’ ‘who…’ no, a large heart, there is room for everybody. And this creates the bond of peace; this is the worthy manner in which to behave to create the bond of peace which is the creator of unity. The Holy Spirit is the creator of unity but this encourages and prepares the creation of unity.”
These three attitudes, said the Pope, are the right way to respond to that call to the mystery of the Church that is the mystery of the Body of Christ.
“The mystery of the Church is the mystery of the Body of Christ: ‘one faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all’ and who works ‘through all and in all:’ this is the unity that Jesus asked the Father to grant us and we must help create this unity with the bond of peace. And the bond of peace grows with humility, with gentleness and mutual support and with magnanimity.”
Read more:
Update: October 13, 2016
E M P A T H Y
From the
W h i t e H o u s e
WATCH: Michelle Obama Says Trump Comments Have 'Shaken Me To My Core’ - October 13, 2016
First lady Michelle Obama gave a rousing, lengthy speech Thursday, hammering Donald Trump for vulgar comments he has made about women. Campaigning for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, Obama also addressed new allegations that Trump inappropriately touched women.
"It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn't have predicted," Obama said about Trump's comments, including those made on a 2005 video that surfaced late last week.
Obama added that she felt it would have been "dishonest and disingenuous" for her to ignore the comments and deliver a campaign speech as usual.
"This is not something we can ignore" or sweep under the rug, she said. "This is not normal. This is not politics as usual.
""Now is the time for all of us to stand up and say enough is enough. This has got to stop right now," she continued…
""Now is the time for all of us to stand up and say enough is enough. This has got to stop right now," she continued…
Video: http://www.npr.org/2016/10/13/497817419/michelle-obama-trump-comments-have-shaken-me-to-my-core
Hillary Clinton’s ‘Gay Nephew’ Talks About Their Lifelong Friendship
Hillary Clinton Through The Eyes Of Colin Ebeling
Hillary Clinton Through The Eyes Of Colin Ebeling
October 13, 2016
I’ve known Hillary Clinton since my early childhood. She and my mother have been best friends since they were little girls growing up in Park Ridge, IL. As a child, I knew Hillary not as a powerful attorney, child advocate or the First Lady of Arkansas, but rather as Chelsea’s mom — a warm, funny lady who taught me how copious amounts of hot sauce on your scrambled eggs will keep you healthy.
To see Hillary portrayed as an evil, conniving criminal is baffling to me. Throughout my life, I have only known her as my mom’s most supportive and loving friend. Hillary took me on my first roller coaster ride when I was 12 years old. She spoke at my high school commencement ceremony and took photos with every single one of my classmates. The woman who signs her letters as “Aunt Hillary” congratulated me when I came out of the closet, when I got my pilot’s license, when I married my husband and when we adopted our baby girl. She checked in with my family regularly while my mom underwent surgery and treatment for breast cancer…
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5 Myths About Gay People Debunked
March 25, 2011
March 25, 2011
Gay people have been accused of being unfit parents, more likely to be pedophiles, unable to sustain lasting relationships, and worse. But research shows these and other myths just aren't based in fact…
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Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice - 1/26/12
There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy…
Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.
"Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order," Hodson said, explaining why these beliefs might draw those with low intelligence. "Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice…
People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays…
Read more:
Anti-gays hide their bias behind the Bible
June 2, 2010
…But theology and history aside, it is clear from the lack of consistent reaction to and organization against the litany of other present-day sins that a large number of people who call themselves Christians do not follow the literal interpretation of the Bible either. So, if some of us are picking and choosing which Bible verses to follow, why are so many opting to pick and choose verses that appear to condemn homosexuality and not the one against marrying a woman who isn't a virgin?
If sin is sin, why such Christian angst directed at the GLBT community and not the greedy corporate community, which, quite frankly, has more direct impact on the average person's life?
The answer is simple: Those who are uncomfortable or fearful of someone who is different from them sometimes hide behind religion to gain power, nurture their ignorance and justify their prejudices…
Read more:
Religious Fundamentalism: A Side Effect of Lazy Brains? 9/14/15
Insights from neuroscience suggest that the brain tends to automatically accept rather than reject beliefs, oftentimes independent of how logical they might be.
If there is anything that global news has shown us in the past couple of years, it’s that fundamentalism is on the rise and more pervasive than ever. Fundamentalist beliefs have driven countless beheadings, bombings, and execution-style murders by terrorist groups like ISIS and al Qaeda in the last year alone. At a time when religious extremism is running rampant in large areas of the world, and steadily growing in virtually all others, finding effective ways to fight it at its core is in the interests of all free nations.
Although many complex causes of fanatical fundamentalism have been identified by a wide range of disciplines, a growing body of evidence from the field of neuroscience suggests one major contributing factor: Brains generally accept beliefs because they have to work much harder to reject them as false…
…Early science lessons should present complex ideas in ways that make them as easily digestible as religious teachings—and just as easy on the brain. To many scientists, “dumbing down science” is seen as blasphemous, but given that the battle between scientific and religious explanation is often a winner-takes-all scenario, a negligible loss of accuracy in certain Gen Ed science courses is well worth the gains. Public science advocates like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye, along with many science awareness social media sites, have been very successful in this effort…
Read more:
Homophobic People Often Have Psychological Issues 9/11/15
Homophobic attitudes may say a lot about the person who holds them, new research suggests.
A new study of university students in Italy revealed that people who have strongly negative views of gay people also have higher levels of psychoticism and inappropriate coping mechanisms than those who are accepting of homosexuality.
This doesn't mean that homophobic people are psychotic; rather, psychoticism is a personality trait marked by hostility, anger and aggression toward others. But the study does suggest that people who cling to homophobic views have some psychological issues…
Read more:
Blindfolded, bound and thrown off buildings … inside the ISIS Sharia court’s treatment of homosexuals
2nd December 2015 - Photo
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This entire posting has been previously sent out as a US group mailing prior to posting here on the Thalamus Center.
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Science +
+ Religion = Truth = L O V E
E M P A T H Y - ≠ - 9/11 Terrorist Attacks - Roman Curia & Hierarchy - Nazi Racial Policy - Extreme Homophobia - "unworthy of life"
= Sustains and Perpetuates Global VIOLENCE
= HYPOCRISY (Elite) & IGNORANCE (Science) &
EXPLOITATION (Political)
= HOMOSEXUAL DISSOCIATION - “…severe dissociation -
…any hint of same-sex feelings resides totally out
of conscious awareness.”
= SEXUAL ORIENTATION - Sexual Impulses & Attractions
- functions automatically and continuously
- functions automatically and continuously
throughout life under the control of the
AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM
= IGNORANCE of the SCIENCE of - Sexual Orientation -
Exasperate - Fear & Shame of Inability to
Consciously Control the Continuous
Same Sex Impulses & Attractions
= Political EXPLOITATION - To GAIN World Domination
Societal Ignorance of Homosexual Sexual Orientation
that Maintains Obsessive Guilt, Shame & Fear
Over Impossibility to Consciously Control the
Automatic and Continuous Functioning
of Same Sex Impulses & Attractions
Cardinal Raymond Burke: Gays, remarried Catholics, murderers are all the same
March 27, 2015 - Photo
Homosexual Dissociation
The Closet: Psychological Issues of Being In and Coming Out
Jack Drescher MD - 2004
…In the developmental histories of gay men and women, periods of difficulty in acknowledging their homosexuality, either to themselves or to others, are often reported. Children who grow up to be gay rarely receive family support in dealing with antihomosexual prejudices. On the contrary, beginning in childhood--and distinguishing them from racial and ethnic minorities--gay people are often subjected to the antihomosexual attitudes of their own families and communities (Drescher et al., 2004). Antihomosexual attitudes include homophobia (Weinberg, 1972), heterosexism (Herek, 1984), moral condemnations of homosexuality (Drescher, 1998) and antigay violence (Herek and Berrill, 1992). Hiding activities learned in childhood often persist into young adulthood, middle age and even senescence, leading many gay people to conceal important aspects of themselves.
Closeted individuals frequently cannot acknowledge to themselves, let alone to others, their homoerotic feelings, attractions and fantasies. Their homosexuality is so unacceptable that it must be kept out of conscious awareness and cannot be integrated into their public persona. Consequently, these feelings must be dissociated from the self and hidden from others…
…For example, a religious, homosexually self-aware man may choose a celibate life to avoid what, for him, would be the problematic integration of his religious and sexual identities…
…more severe dissociation--in which any hint of same-sex feelings resides totally out of conscious awareness. More severe forms of dissociation are commonly observed in married men who are homosexually self-aware but cannot permit the thought of themselves as gay (Roughton, 2002)…
…Strong antihomosexual feelings may represent an effort to control perceptions of a gay-basher's own sexual identity. This might translate as, "If I attack gay people, no one will think I am gay." …In other words, it is an effort to strengthen dissociative tendencies…
…Internalized, antihomosexual attitudes are often rigid and disdainful of compromise or "relativism." A patient's dogmatic belief system may not recognize the concept of respectful disagreement…
Read more:
Sexual Orientation
Sexual orientation refers to an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic and/or sexual attractions to men, women or both sexes.
Autonomic nervous system
The autonomic nervous system is a control system that acts largely unconsciously and regulates bodily functions such as the heart rate, digestion, respiratory rate, pupillary response, urination, and sexual arousal…
Sexual orientation
is an interrelated physiological and psychological life sustaining mechanism. It functions automatically and continuously throughout life - as part of the autonomic nervous system - like breathing, or the heart beating. They functions unconsciously - meaning we do not have to think about breathing that we need to take a breath. Their functioning is under the control of the autonomic nervous system, which means that they are not under our conscious control. They function involuntary and reflexively, because their continuous functioning is crucial to keeping us alive. They are our survival mechanisms, because - we cannot live without breathing or our hearts beating or exist without love and any impairment to these functions will shorten our lifespan. Fr. Marty Kurylowicz
The Eyes Have It: Sex and Sexual Orientation Differences in Pupil Dilation Patterns
August 3, 2012
…pupil dilation to stimuli indicates activation of the autonomic nervous system. This system is associated with many automatic processes such as perspiration, digestion, blood pressure, and heart rate. For this reason, pupil dilation has been used as indicator of automatic response, for example, in studies of implicit reaction and cognitive load. Other research suggests that pupil dilation can reflect automatic attention, or attention that is likely not in the conscious control of participants. It is therefore unlikely that participants suppress pupil dilation to stimuli they are sexually attracted to. Pupil dilation patterns could therefore reflect, with high sensitivity, automatic attention related to sexual attraction and sexual orientation…
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President of the Polish Episcopal Conference, Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki of Poznan…warned against "modifying the church's discipline”…urged "people with homosexual tendencies" to undergo therapy and not expect pastoral help… 6/20/15 - - Photo
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Pope at Mass: Be open to the Spirit, Who carries us forward - October 6, 2016
(Vatican Radio) True doctrine is not a rigid attachment to the Law, which bewitches as ideologies do. Rather, it is the revelation of God, which allows itself to be discovered more and more fully each day by those who are open to the Holy Spirit. That was the message of Pope Francis at the morning Mass at the Casa Santa Marta…
Read more:
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Science +
+ Religion = Truth = L O V E
On Gay Priests “Who am I to Judge?”
July 29, 2013
Pope Francis
We have to find a new balance; otherwise
even the moral edifice of the church is likely to
FALL LIKE A HOUSE OF CARDS,
losing the freshness and fragrance
of the Gospel.
Pope Francis
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.
For the truth of the matter is that the Church and the scientific community will inevitably interact; their options
DO NOT include ISOLATION.
Pope John Paul II - 1988
…TRUTH is the light that gives meaning and value to CHARITY. That light is both the light of REASON and the light of FAITH, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as GIFT, acceptance, and communion. WITHOUT truth, charity degenerates into SENTIMENTALITY. Love becomes an EMPTY SHELL, to be filled in an ARBITRARY way. In a CULTURE without truth, this is the FATAL risk facing love. It FALLS prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted,to the point where it comes to MEAN the opposite. Truth FREES charity from the constraints of an EMOTIONALISM that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a FIDEISM that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space. In the truth, charity reflects the personal yet public dimension of faith in the God of the Bible, who is both Agápe and Lógos: Charity and Truth, Love and Word…
REASON always stands in need of being purified by faith: this also holds true for political reason, which must not consider itself OMNIPOTENT. For its part, RELIGION always needs to be purified by reason in order to show its authentically human face. Any breach in this dialogue comes only at an enormous price to human development…
Pope Benedict XVI 2007 2009
Love's many splendors begin with empathy and attachment
by David Cameron
Blanche DuBois’s legendary line in A Streetcar Named Desire, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” is evolutionarily and neurologically true. Empathy and attachment are at the core of human relatedness, and a small section of our prefrontal cortex drives us to find it one way or another. Without it, we’re lost.
“Attachment to others,” says Olds, “is the original reward.” Photo
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E M P A T H Y
This year was the 15th anniversary of the Al-Qaeda terrorist’s attacks of 9/11 when two passenger jet airliners clashed in the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. In documentaries remembering the events of 9/11 - 15 years later - it was striking to note the extreme contrast between the sustaining motivation among those who led the terrorist attacks and those people who immediately responded to aid the victims of the attacks. It was a contrast between empathy and the absence of empathy.
The terrorist attacks were led by disenfranchised young men recruited by al-Qaeda to sacrifice their lives in committing the human atrocities of 9/11.
Immediately following this devastating and unprecedented Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks - TV news anchors stationed in New York City, i.e. NBC Today Show - reported that behind the scenes they were caught off guard and left in a state of shock, disbelief and utter confusion, the same as the rest of the world, especially for native New Yorkers. However, collectively they felt a strong moral obligation as journalists that they had to rise above their overwhelming personal emotional feelings and to report accurately the events.
At the same time, on the ground in New York City - the first responders: firefighters, rescue and recovery workers, other trained volunteers, including near by residents - immediately were rushing to the scene of terrorist attacks, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. These first responders of 9/11 were unconcerned about the what or why these terrorist attacks took place or about their personal safety, nor were they deterred by the overwhelming emotional feelings of the unfolding situation - their first and only concern was to focus on helping to save people’s lives.
It is extraordinary to observe the contrast between the Al-Qaeda terrorists who flew the jet airlines into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center killing thousands of people, including themselves and the first responders on the ground risking their lives to help save the lives of thousands of people - is the direct opposite. The sacrificing one’s life to indiscriminately kill people and the sacrificing one’s life in the attempt to save people.
The Development of Empathy: How, When, and Why
Nicole M. McDonald & Daniel S. Messinger - 2011
Empathy is a potential psychological motivator for helping others in distress. Empathy can be defined as the ability to feel or imagine another person’s emotional experience. The ability to empathize is an important part of social and emotional development, affecting an individual’s behavior toward others and the quality of social relationships…
…The ability to empathize begins at an early age, with infants as young as 18 hours showing some responsiveness to other infants’ distress. During the second year of life, toddlers responses to others’ distress typically transform from an overwhelming personal distress reaction to a more other oriented empathic reaction. At the same time, toddlers become capable of rather sophisticated helping behaviors. As children reach the preschool years, significant developments occur in cognitive empathy, or theory of mind abilities. There is evidence to suggest that these early dispositions toward empathy and prosocial behavior may be consistent and stable over time.
The ability to empathize develops with contributions from various biologically and environmentally based factors. These factors include genetics, facial mimicry and imitation, subserving areas of the brain such as the mirror neuron system and the limbic system, child temperament, parenting factors such as warmth, parent-child synchrony, and other qualities of the parent-child relationship. If one or more of these factors function atypically, they may contribute to empathy deficits…while the empathy deficits in psychopathy may be more indicative of impairments in responsiveness to others’ emotions.
These “disorders of empathy” further highlight the importance of the ability to empathize by illustrating some of the consequences to disrupted empathy development.
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John Paul II - b.1920 Poland
Benedict XVI - b.1927 Germany
Nazi Racial Policy 1933-1945
Pseudoscience and Pseudo-religion
Researching the how and when empathy develops in peoples lives that significantly improves life for all and what prevents empathy from developing in peoples lives that is destructive to all - is layered and complex. It all follows along lines of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI combined writings on the importance of maintaining a continuous dialogue between science and religion, reason and faith that is how truth is found. Pope Benedict XVI adds to this formula for finding truth - by stating that without truth there is no love and by emphatically stressing that any disruption is this dialogue between science and religion - reason and faith “comes only at an enormous price to human development.” John Paul and Benedict are writing from their personal experiences living through the Nazi Racial Policy - composed of pseudoscience and pseudo religion.
…The Catholic Church in Germany was systematically repressed by the Nazis and persecution was at its most severe in Nazi occupied Poland, where churches, seminaries, monasteries and convents were systematically closed and thousands of priests and nuns were either murdered, imprisoned or deported…
Nazi persecutions
Germany
The Catholic Church had been a leading opponent of the rise of the National Socialist German Workers Party [Nazi Party] through the 1920s and early 1930s. Upon taking power in 1933, and despite the Concordat it signed with the church promising the contrary, the Nazi Government of Adolf Hitler began suppressing the Catholic Church as part of an overall policy of to eliminate competing sources of authority. The Nazis arrested thousands of members of the German Catholic Centre Party, as well as Catholic clergymen and closed Catholic schools and institutions. As the Third Reich expanded, thousands more Catholic priests were imprisoned or killed and Catholic institutions disbanded by the Nazis…
Nuremberg Laws of 1935 employed a pseudo-scientific basis for racial discrimination against Jews Photo
Racial policy of Nazi Germany
The racial policy of Nazi Germany included policies and laws implemented in Nazi Germany (1933–45) based on a specific racist doctrine asserting the superiority of the Aryan race, which claimed scientific legitimacy. This was combined with a eugenics programme that aimed for racial hygiene by compulsory sterilization and extermination of the Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), which eventually culminated in the Holocaust. Nazi policies labeled Jews, Romani people, Slavs (Poles, Serbs etc.) and persons of color as inferior non-Aryan subhumans in a racial hierarchy that placed the Herrenvolk ("master race") of the Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community") at the top. Jews were at the bottom of the hierarchy, considered inhuman and thus unworthy of life…
Read more:
Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism
Ian Kershaw - 2004
…The quest for national rebirth lay, of course, at the heart of all fascist movements. But only in Germany did the striving for national renewal adopt such strongly pseudo-religious tones…
…They could find rationality in irrationality; could turn into practical reality the goals associated with Hitler, needing no further legitimitation than recourse to the ‘wish of the Führer’. This was no ‘banality of evil’. This was the working of an ideologically-motivated élite coldly prepared to plan for the eradication of 11 million Jews (the figure laid down at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942), and for the ‘resettlement’ to the Siberian wastes, plainly genocidal in intent, of over 30 million, mainly Slavs, over the following 25 years. That, in such a system, they would find countless ‘willing executioners’ prepared to do their bit, whatever the individual motivation of those involved, goes without saying. This was, however, not on account of national character, or some long-existent, specifically German desire to eliminate the Jews. Rather, it was that the idea of racial cleansing, the core of the notion of national salvation, had become, via Hitler’s leadership position, institutionalized in all aspects of organized life in the nazi state. That was decisive.
Unquestionably, Hitler was a unique historical personality. But the uniqueness of the nazi dictatorship cannot be reduced to that. It is explained less by Hitler’s character, extraordinary as it was, than by the specific form of rule which he embodied and its corrupting effect on the instruments and mechanisms of the most advanced state in Europe. Both the broad acceptance of the ‘project’ of ‘national salvation’, seen as personified in Hitler, and the internalization of the ideological goals by a new, modern power-élite, operating along- side weakened old élites through the bureaucratic sophistication of a modern state, were necessary prerequisites for the world-historical catastrophe of the Third Reich.
Read more:
NAZI MEDICAL ETHICS: ORDINARY DOCTORS?
ROBERT N. PROCTOR, PHD
…Let me simply note in conclusion four points. First, it is important to appreciate not just the ex- tent to which the Nazis were able to draw upon the imagery and authority of medicine, but also the ex- tent to which Nazi ideology informed the practice of medical science. Secondly, physicians were not bystanders, or even pawns; many (not all, but not a few) helped to construct the racial policies of the Nazi state. It is probably as fair to say that Nazi racial policy emerged from within the scientific community, as to say that it was imposed upon that community. Thirdly, it is commonly said that the Nazis “politicized” science, and that much of what went wrong under the Nazis can be traced to this politicization. The argument I’ve made here is that one can’t consider the experience of the medical profession in terms of a simple “use and abuse” model of science. Among physicians, there were as many volunteers as victims; no one had to force physicians to support the regime. Hans Hefelmann testified to this effect in the euthanasia trial at Limburg in 1964: “[N]o doctor was ever ordered to participate in the euthanasia program; they came of their own volition.”7(p193)
The Nazis did not have to politicize science; in fact, it is probably fair to say that the Nazis “de- politicized science”—in the sense that they destroyed the political diversity that had made Weimar medicine and public health the envy of the world (with its local outpatient clinics, self-help networks, single-payer reimbursement, and similarly progressive programs). Nazism itself was supposed to transcend politics. The German state was to be a Volksstaat, not a Parteistaat; National Socialism was to be counted a “movement,” not a “party.” The Nazis medicalized politics as much as they politicized medicine; racial minorities were ostracized and then exterminated, and problems of sexual or social deviance (or both) were transformed into “surgical problems” in need of surgical solutions.
Finally, I do not want to leave the impression that the horrors of this period can be attributed to anything inherent in science or in medicine, or even in “technocracy” or the rule of professional elites. It took a powerful state to concentrate and unleash the destructive forces within German medicine, and without that state, science would have remained impotent in this sphere. In the midst of a war engineered by an aggressive, expansionist state, Nazi ideologues were able to turn to doctors to carry out acts that have come to be regarded as the embodiment of evil…
Read more:
John Paul II was 19 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland in December 1939. He experienced the national terror of thousands of Polish people of the enactment of the irrational pseudoscience of the Nazi racial ideology - labeling all Poles, along with Jews and many others - as subhuman. Photo
A 19-year old Karol Wojtyla, during the construction of a military camp building in July 1939 in Western Ukraine, then eastern Poland. Photo
Benedict XVI was born in Marktl, Bavaria, Germany 1927, into the midst of the rising emotional frenzy of Hitler’s staged propaganda just 60 miles from Munich the birthplace and headquarters of the Nazi Party. Benedict was 6 years old when Hitler and the Nazi Party finally rose to power in 1933. His father was a policeman who strongly opposed the rise of Nazism and his attempts to rein in the brutality of Hitler's Brown Shirts forced the family to have to move several times (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Pope_Benedict_XVI) before he retired in 1937, when Benedict was 10 years old.
John Paul experienced, as a young adult growing up in Poland, the atrocities caused by the irrational pseudoscience of the Nazi racial ideology. Benedict experienced the same for the first 18 years of his life growing up in Nazi Germany. Hitler particularly focused on the education of young age school children - to indoctrinate children with Nazi ideology propaganda - the irrational pseudoscience of the Master Race and the need for “racial cleansing” or as Robert Proctor termed as the “use and abuse” model of science (https://ke.army.mil/bordeninstitute/published_volumes/ethicsVol2/Ethics-ch-14.pdf). It was not only Nazi indoctrination that infiltrated the Germany Schools, but - “Childhood in Nazi Germany was cast in the mythic illusion of a super race...
Hitler's Unwanted Children
Sally M. Rogow - 2002
Childhood in Nazi Germany was cast in the mythic illusion of a super race. Children who did not meet the social or biological criteria of " perfect" children were removed from their homes and communities, isolated in institutions, hospitals, work and concentration camps, and many thousands were murdered (Aly, 1993; Burleigh, 1994; Friedlander, 1994; Peukert, 1987). It is a myth that only children with severe disabilities were killed or that the killings stopped in 1941; the last child was killed almost a month after the war was over. Unwanted children were orphans, children in care because of emotional or behavior problems, adolescent non-conformists as well as children with physical disabilities or mental handicaps (in addition to Jewish, Gypsy and non-white children). The campaign to remove unwanted children from the community was not only the result of Nazi racial biology and eugenics, it was part and parcel of the effort to impose control and conformity on the entire German population…
It was a social environment that evolved into an arbitrary form of racial hygiene encased in secrecy and disguised euphemisms that embodied the Nazi destruction of “lives not worth living.” It terrorized the German people by exterminating all those including children and infants who did not fit the ideal prototype of the Arian race. “The total infiltration of educational and social institutions [by Nazi policies] made total social control possible. No child or family was safe from intrusion. Leadership of educational institutions was placed in the hands of ambitious fanatics, Nazi bureaucrats, chosen for their faithfulness to the party line, rather than their competence as educators (http://www.holocaust-trc.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/unwanted.pdf).” Benedict’s family had
…encountered the Nazi regime's euthanasia program for the handicapped. John Allen, a Ratzinger biographer, reports a revelation made by Cardinal Ratzinger at a conference in the Vatican on 28 November 1996: "Ratzinger had a cousin with Down's Syndrome who in 1941 was 14 years old. This cousin was just a few months younger than Ratzinger and was taken away by the Nazi authorities for "therapy". Not long afterwards, the family received word that he was dead, presumably one of the 'undesirables' eliminated during that time…(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Pope_Benedict_XVI)
1939–1945: Medicalized Mass Murder, Children first
“Eugenic Extermination”
“Children’s euthanasia” a murderous program, unique in the history of mankind, that targeted infants, children, and young adults as the means for actualizing a social Darwinist vision of society. By systematically murdering children, scientists sought to eradicate pathological phenotype — “eugenic extermination.” Not until 2000 did historians document 30 killing stations, misleadingly labeled Kinderfachabteilungen (“special children’s wards”) which were established in existing medical or other care facilities. The first victims of secret, systematic medical mass murder were handicapped German children who were murdered by physicians and nurses. “Physicians’ participation was always both voluntary and deliberate, they retained ultimate authority to order or decline a killing once authorized from Berlin.” (Lutz Kaelber. Child Murder in Nazi Germany: The Memory of Nazi Medical Crimes and Commemoration of Children’s Euthanasia Victims at Two Facilities (Eichberg, Kalmenhof), Societies, 2012 - http://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/2/3/157/htm).
The mass murder of handicapped German children and adults was planned, organized, and implemented by the secret Reich Committee under the Office of the Führer which was the preeminent body dealing with racial hygiene and population policy in Nazi Germany. Its members belonged to the elite within the medical establishment. The SS had no part in the T4 so called “euthanasia” action. It was entirely carried out by health care professionals who facilitated the conditions for medical murder and heinous experiments; health care professionals implemented and actively took part in every phase of medical mass murder. The selection phase began with a State decree ordering doctors and midwives to fill out a questionnaire reporting all newborn infants and young children under age 3, who showed signs of specific mental or physical abnormalities or handicaps.
The questionnaire, couched in language using euphemisms to create the impression that the objective was a scientific survey to aid children with serious medical conditions, was essentially used as a death warrant. The children were selected on the basis of those questionnaires by three “medical experts” (psychiatrists) — Dr. Hans Heinze, Dr. Ernst Wentzer, and Dr. Werner Catel — who decided which children to kill. The program was expanded to include children under age 17. They were secretly transported to one of 22 killing wards where 27 doctors murdered the children. (Friedlander. Origins of Nazi Genocide, Table 3-4 - http://www.uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=12) [review - http://courses.washington.edu/intro2ds/Readings/23_Friedlander-review.pdf ]…
Read more:
Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP)
Medicalized Murder: Mentally or Physically Disabled Adults
The adult killing program, coded Aktion T4, (named for the address of the “Reich Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care” headquarters at 4 Teirgartensstrasse in Berlin) targeted handicapped German adults living in mental institutions and nursing homes.
The entire German healthcare system — public health officials, public and private hospitals, mental institutions and nursing homes — were mobilized. Questionnaires were distributed to elicit diagnostic, prognostic and genetic information which prominent “medical experts” used to select patients diagnosed with incurable mental or physical handicaps — they were deemed “worthless eaters” — “life unworthy of living.”…
Read more:
Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP)
It is psychological conceivable that both men may have experienced some long lasting traumatic memories of the irrational insanity of the pseudoscience of the Nazi ideology and spent a considerable amount time attempting to analyze, make sense of what went wrong. They would have been especially, as religious leaders, understandably fixated, if not devoted their lives, to make every attempt possible - to prevent these atrocities from ever happening again in the future. This is exactly what they did do from the combined perspectives of science and religion, faith and reason, to undo their past experiences of a time of the complete void of human empathy. They did this by being key participants at the Council of Vatican II and in their papacies.
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“CUMULATIVE RADICALIZATION”
Pope Pius XII (1939–1958)
Papal Nuncio to Germany 1917–1929
Cardinal Secretary of State 1930-1935
John Paul and Benedict were not the only two men who experienced the ever increasing overwhelming inhuman brutality of the Nazi regime spearheaded by Hitler’s irrational and lethal madness of racial purity. Pius XII prior to his election to the papacy in 1939, as the papal nuncio to Germany from 1917 to–1929, he was heavily involved in the evolving social chaos beginning at the start of World War I.
Pope Pius XII
...Before his election to the papacy, Pacelli served as secretary of the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, papal nuncio to Germany (1917–1929), and Cardinal Secretary of State, in which capacity he worked to conclude treaties with European and Latin American nations, most notably the Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany, with which most historians believe the Vatican sought to protect the Church in Germany while Adolf Hitler sought the destruction of "political Catholicism". A pre-war critic of Nazism, Pius XII lobbied world leaders to avoid war and, as Pope at the outbreak of war, issued Summi Pontificatus, expressing dismay at the invasion of Poland, reiterating Church teaching against racial persecution and calling for love, compassion and charity to prevail over war.
While the Vatican was officially neutral during the war, Pius XII maintained links to the German Resistance, used diplomacy to aid the victims of the war and lobby for peace and spoke out against race-based murders and other atrocities…
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Pius_XII
Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust
…Two Popes served through the Nazi period: Pope Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pope Pius XII (1939–1958). The Holy See strongly criticized Nazism through the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, with Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) being a particularly outspoken critic. In 1933, Vatican signed a Concordat with Germany, hoping to protect the rights of Catholics under the Nazi government. The terms of the Treaty were not kept by Hitler…
…As Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli, made some 55 protests against Nazi policies, including its "ideology of race." Pacelli also assisted Pius XI draft the 1937 Mit brennender Sorge (http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_14031937_mit-brennender-sorge.html) critique of Nazi ideology. Written partly in response to the Nuremberg Laws, the document did not refer to Hitler or the Nazis by name, but condemned racial theories and the mistreatment of people based on race. In 1938, Cardinal Pacelli publicly restated the words of Pius XI on the incompatibility of Christianity and antisemitism: "It is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is inadmissible; spiritually we are all Semites.”…
…The Nazi regime disapproved of Pacelli's election as Pope. Historian of the Holocaust Martin Gilbert wrote: "So outspoken were Pacelli’s criticisms that Hitler’s regime lobbied against him, trying to prevent his becoming the successor to Pius XI. When he did become Pope, as Pius XII, in March 1939, Nazi Germany was the only government not to send a representative to his coronation." Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary on 4 March 1939 that Hitler was considering whether to abrogate the Concordat with Rome in light of Pacelli's election as Pope, adding, "This will surely happen when Pacelli undertakes his first hostile act.”… Photo
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'Less Than Human': The Psychology Of Cruelty - 2011 - NPR
…I’ll briefly discuss the role that dehumanization played in what is rightfully considered the single most destructive event in human history: the Second World War. More than seventy million people died in the war, most of them civilians. Millions died in combat. Many were burned alive by incendiary bombs and, in the end, nuclear weapons. Millions more were victims of systematic genocide. Dehumanization made much of this carnage possible…
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The Nazi "cumulative radicalization” effect is explained by Ian Kershaw who “...is regarded by many as one of the world's leading experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and is particularly noted for his monumental biography of Hitler...
…In Kershaw's view, what happened in Germany after 1933 was the imposition of Hitler's charismatic authority on top of the "legal-rational" authority system that had existed prior to 1933, leading to a gradual breakdown of any system of ordered authority in Germany. Kershaw argues that by 1938 the German state had been reduced to a hopeless, polycratic shambles of rival agencies all competing with each other to win Hitler's favour, which by that time had become the only source of political legitimacy. Kershaw sees this rivalry as causing the "cumulative radicalization" of Germany, and argues that though Hitler always favoured the most radical solution to any problem, it was German officials themselves who for the most part, in attempting to win the Führer's approval, carried out on their own initiative increasingly "radical" solutions to perceived problems like the "Jewish Question", as opposed to being ordered to do so by Hitler...
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Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism
Ian Kershaw- 2004
…So the ‘cumulative radicalization’ so central to nazism is left needing an explanation.
Linked to this is the capacity for destruction — again extraordinary even for dictatorships. This destructive capacity, though present from the outset, developed over time and in phases; against internal political, then increasingly, ‘racial’ enemies in spring 1933, across the spring and summer of 1935, and during the summer and autumn of 1938; following this, the qualitative leap in its extension to the Poles from autumn 1939 onwards; and the unleashing of its full might in the wake of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The unceasing radicalization of the regime, and the different stages in the unfolding of its destructive capacity cannot, however, as has come to be generally recognized, be explained by Hitler’s commands and actions alone. Rather, they followed countless initiatives from below, at many different levels of the regime. Invariably, these occurred within a broad ideological framework associated with Hitler’s wishes and intentions. But those initiating the actions were seldom — except in the realms of foreign policy and war strategy — following direct orders from Hitler and were by no means always ideologically motivated. A whole panoply of motives was involved. What motivated the individual — ideological conviction, career advancement, power-lust, sadism and other factors — is, in fact, of secondary importance. Of primary significance is that, whatever the motivation, the actions had the function of working towards the accomplishment of the visionary goals of the regime, embodied in the person of the Führer...
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People got caught up in this staged delusion that was grounded in this “use and abuse” model of science striving for the ultimate need of “racial purity” presented as essential in order to make Germany great again that involved removing all the inferior - less than human elements in Germany society. It was staged and disguised behind a spectacular “use and abuse” model of religion pageantry (http://time.com/3490218/a-brutal-pageantry-the-third-reichs-myth-making-machinery-in-color/). Sounds shockingly similar to a national presidential convention not unlike on the order of the political chant “Lock her up!!!” or “Lock them out!!!” to make America Great Again (https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/22/the-republican-lock-her-up-chants-were-disturbing-they-were-also-inevitable/?utm_term=.1c520c3232c6) ! The mesmerizing effects of Nazi’s propaganda machinery beneath the “gargantuan Nazi banners, towering above a sea of human faces that fade into insignificance” - is a constant theme that Ian Kershaw points out in his
…writing on Hitler and National Socialism has been to suggest that they are best grasped through Max Weber’s quasi-religious concept of ‘charismatic authority’, in which irrational hopes and expectations of salvation are projected onto an individual, who is thereby invested with heroic qualities. Hitler’s ‘charismatic leadership’ offered the prospect of national salvation — redemption brought about by purging the impure and pernicious evil within — to rapidly expanding numbers of Germans experiencing a comprehensive crisis of social and cultural values as well as a total crisis of state and economy. Of course, manifestations of ‘charismatic leadership’ were far from confined to Germany in the interwar period. But Hitler’s was both different in character and more far-reaching in impact than the charismatic forms seen anywhere else…
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Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism - 2004
Due to Germany’s dire economic situation, following the consequences of their defeat and as the instigators of World War I, i.e. TREATY OF VERSAILLES, 1919 (https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005425) and THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 1919-1933 (https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008222) - made Germany fertile ground to be susceptible to the mesmerizing effects of Nazi’s propaganda making Hitler appear as the national messianic leader to economic salvation. The Weimar Republic was Germany’s first attempt at forming a democracy. The complexities of this situation are extensive on multiple levels as researched by Kershaw:
…the extraordinarily strong fears of a threat to German culture, a profound cultural pessimism in Germany’s unusually broad-based intelligentsia, widespread already before the first world war, formed one of the roots of such susceptibility. Oswald Spengler’s…tract on the downfall of western culture…published a month before the end of the war in 1918, embodied feelings which, in cruder form, had been spread by a multiplicity of patriotic organizations long before the nazis appeared on the scene. In the polarized society of the Weimar Republic, the antagonism of the perceived threat of modernity to what were portrayed as traditional and true German values — a threat focused on socialism, capitalism and, not least, the representative scapegoat figure for both: the Jew — spread both at élite and popular levels. Shored up by the trauma of a lost war, a trauma arguably greater in Germany than in any other land — in a country where the hated socialism had come to power through revolution and where established religion seemed to be losing its hold — an appeal to hopes of national salvation held substantial political potential. Though other countries were also traumatized by the war, the cultural crisis, even in Italy, ran nowhere near so deep as in Germany…
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given to the German government between the end of the Imperial period (1918) and the beginning of Nazi Germany (1933).
The Weimar Republic (and period) draws its name from the town of Weimar in central Germany where the constitutional assembly met. Political turmoil and violence, economic hardship, and also new social freedoms and vibrant artistic movements characterized the complex Weimar period. Many of the challenges of this era set the stage for Hitler's rise to power, but it is only with hindsight that some say the Weimar Republic was doomed from the start…
End of the Second Reich
World War I left Germany a shattered nation. Two million young men had been killed and a further 4.2 million had been wounded; in all, 19% of the male population were casualties of the war. At home, the civilian population suffered from malnutrition as a result of the Allied blockade, with starvation a serious and often fatal outcome. Workers went on strike in attempts to gain better working conditions; in 1917 alone, there were 562 separate strikes. In short, Germany was coming apart. The government, centered on an ineffective Emperor, devolved into a military dictatorship incapable of reforming the system…
Thus, the Weimar Republic came to bear for many the humiliation of World War I and the blame for all its accompanying hardships. In many ways, it never shook this association, particularly from the clauses of the Versailles Treaty that reduced the once proud German military to practically nothing and placed all blame for the war on Germany…
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UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
TREATY OF VERSAILLES, 1919
…The burdensome reparations, coupled with a general inflationary period in Europe in the 1920s, caused spiraling hyperinflation of the German Reichsmark by 1923. This hyperinflationary period combined with the effects of the Great Depression (beginning in 1929) seriously to undermine the stability of the German economy, wiping out the personal savings of the middle class and spurring massive unemployment. Such economic chaos did much to increase social unrest, destabilizing the fragile Weimar Republic…
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Besides the crises related to the Weimar Republic, at the same time it was a “vibrant democracy” offering a great number of liberal freedoms that in its short existence burst forth an enormous growth of creativity in many fields i.e. science and art. The 1920s Berlin became the third largest municipality in the world. “It was known for its leadership roles in science, the humanities, music, film, higher education, government, diplomacy, industries and military affairs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920s_Berlin#Science).”
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.
For the truth of the matter is that the Church and the scientific community will inevitably interact; their options
DO NOT include ISOLATION.
Pope John Paul II - 1988
In the newly found Weimar Republic, 1918, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was able to open the world’s first - Institute for Sexual Research and year later founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. “The group aimed to undertake research to defend the rights of homosexuals and to repeal Paragraph 175, the section of the German penal code that since 1871 had criminalized homosexuality. They argued that the law encouraged blackmail. The motto of the Committee, ‘Justice through science’, reflected Hirschfeld's belief that a better scientific understanding of homosexuality would eliminate social hostility toward homosexuals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Hirschfeld).” The Committee issued a petition to overturn Paragraph 175 and succeeded in obtaining the signatures of over 5000 prominent German citizens. “Signatories included Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Käthe Kollwitz, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, August Bebel, Max Brod, Karl Kautsky, Stefan Zweig, Gerhart Hauptmann, Martin Buber, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Eduard Bernstein.”
The University of Berlin from 1914 - 1933 was a major center of some the leading scientists in the world. There were 9 recipients awarded the Nobel Prize during the Weimar Republic years, including Albert Einstein, who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. However, in 1933 with Hitler and the Nazi Party rise to power a drastic change occurred that rendered scientific research meaningless in Germany - due the Nazi ideology of racial purity. Einstein along with over 1,700 other scientists left Germany, many to seek safety - others because they objected to the Nazi’s abandonment of the - empirical search for truth.
…TRUTH is the light that gives meaning and value to CHARITY. That light is both the light of REASON and the light of FAITH, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as GIFT, acceptance, and communion. WITHOUT truth, charity degenerates into SENTIMENTALITY. Love becomes an EMPTY SHELL, to be filled in an ARBITRARY way. In a CULTURE without truth, this is the FATAL risk facing love. It FALLS prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted,to the point where it comes to MEAN the opposite. Truth FREES charity from the constraints of an EMOTIONALISM that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a FIDEISM that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space. In the truth, charity reflects the personal yet public dimension of faith in the God of the Bible, who is both Agápe and Lógos: Charity and Truth, Love and Word…
REASON always stands in need of being purified by faith: this also holds true for political reason, which must not consider itself OMNIPOTENT. For its part, RELIGION always needs to be purified by reason in order to show its authentically human face. Any breach in this dialogue comes only at an enormous price to human development…
Pope Benedict XVI 2007 2009
Without T R U T H There Is No L O V E
E M P A T H Y
G O N E
M U R D E R E D
W O R L D W A R II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_deaths
The Rejection of Modern Science:
the Nazi Dismissal Policy of 1933
Colleen Harris - Jacksonville University
…Many of the scientists who left objected to Nazi-enforced methods of science. The Nazis’ “new science” was not objective; it was certainly not the “common property of mankind;” and the party used it to serve its own purposes. In June 1936, Dr. Bernhard Rust, German Minister of Science, Education, and People’s Education and loyal Nazi, declared that Nazism and official ideology were more important than was empirical, objective science. Turning the notion of empirical truth on its head, he argued that “Science which is not in accord with it [German ideology] is not objective.” For Rust, the changes made in German science were only to “enrich itself.” The Nazis maintained that they were basing science on observing nature and its reactions. Non-Aryan, theoretical science, on the other hand, did not expect one clear, definitive answer and considered each partially proven assumption to be a milestone. In Germany, as the New York Times reported, not even “a laboratory worker [could] decide for himself what the philosophy of science [should] be,” implying that science was a merely a tool of the dictatorship to be manipulated by the Führer and his party. Prominent scientists willingly gave themselves and their study to the regime…
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Weimar culture
…Germany, and Berlin in particular, was fertile ground for intellectuals, artists, and innovators from many fields during the Weimar Republic years. The social environment was chaotic, and politics were passionate. German university faculties became universally open to Jewish scholars in 1918. Leading Jewish intellectuals on university faculties included physicist Albert Einstein; sociologists Karl Mannheim, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse; philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Edmund Husserl; political theorists Arthur Rosenberg and Gustav Meyer; and many others. Nine German citizens were awarded Nobel prizes during the Weimar Republic, five of whom were Jewish scientists, including two in medicine. Jewish intellectuals and creative professionals were among the leading figures in many areas of Weimar culture.
With the rise of Nazism and the ascent to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, many German intellectuals and cultural figures, both Jewish and non-Jewish, fled Germany for the United States, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world. The intellectuals associated with the Institute for Social Research (also known as the Frankfurt School) fled to the United States and reestablished the Institute at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In the words of Marcus Bullock, Emeritus Professor of English at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, "Remarkable for the way it emerged from a catastrophe, more remarkable for the way it vanished into a still greater catastrophe, the world of Weimar represents modernism in its most vivid manifestation." The culture of the Weimar year was later reprised by the left-wing intellectuals of the 1960s,[4] especially in France. Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault reprised Wilhelm Reich; Derrida reprised Husserl and Heidegger; Guy Debord and the Situationist International reprised the subversive-revolutionary culture…
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_culture
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NAZI PERSECUTION OF HOMOSEXUALS
How E M P A T H Y Is Mutilated
E a r l y C h i l d h o o d
E a r l y C h i l d h o o d
Repressed Homosexuals - Threat to Humanity
In this next section we will explore through history - how it is not the homosexuals who is able to express empathy for others - courageously persevering even against all odds - for the right to live happily in love and to feel one with another human being that are a threat to humanity. Instead, historical evidence will show that the threat to humanity - is the repressed homosexuals who expresses a void of human empathy.
Repressed homosexuals are those people who vehemently deny the fact that they are homosexual or bisexual, they are mentally dissociated from the reality of their sexual orientation. However, their observable outward irrational antigay behavior is the validating proof of what they inwardly and endlessly 24/7 struggle viciously to keep completely suppressed out of their conscious awareness that is the constant bombardment throughout life of their homosexual tendencies: erotic impulses, sexual arousal, sexual thoughts or fantasies.
Their antigay behavior is irrational on two counts. First, they cannot give any authoritative explanation for their dehumanizing disrespect, often violent behavior towards gay people that is substantiated from the combined perspective of science and religion, as described by both John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The explanation that they give most emphatically is the same distorted and arbitrary explanation of science and religion that the Nazi gave for exterminate homosexuals, encased in "superstition and fanaticism.” Second, their ignorance of the authoritative scientific research on sexual orientation, prevents them from realizing that it is impossible, even life-threatening to attempt to control the interrelated physiological and psychological functioning of their God given gay sexual orientation. Because it is a life sustaining mechanism that functions automatically and continuously throughout life - as it is part of the autonomic nervous system - like breathing, or the heart beating. They functions unconsciously - meaning we do not have to think about breathing that we need to take a breath. Their functioning is under the control of the autonomic nervous system, which means that they are not under our conscious control. They function involuntary and reflexively, because their continuous functioning is crucial to keeping us alive. They are our survival mechanisms, because - we cannot live without breathing or our hearts beating or exist without love and any impairment to these functions will shorten our lifespan.
In brief, their frantic need to repress what is impossible to repress, which is the continuous autonomic functioning of their sexual orientation - most assuredly stems back to their early childhood years. First, because no child of 3, 4, 5 years of age has developed the capacity of understanding the adult concept of human sexuality, even what it means to be gay. A child’s intense negative reaction is induced - by the expressions of the parent’s adult negative understanding of the meaning of gay - that tends to be a traumatic situation for the child. Yes, it is an unidentified form of child abuse having lifelong harmful effects for the child.
Childhood Trauma, Neurobiology...
Development of the Brain:
Infant Mental Health Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4, Winter 1995
…Adults interpret the actions, words, and expressions of children through the distorting fitter of their own beliefs. In the lives of most infants and children, these common adult misinterpretations are relatively benign. In many cases, however, these misinterpretations can be destructive. The most dramatic example occurs when the impact of traumatic events on infants and young children is minimized. It is an ultimate irony that at the time when the human is most vulnerable to the effects of trauma— during infancy and childhood— adults generally presume the most resilience...
...Deprivation of critical experiences during development may be the most destructive yet least understood area of child maltreatment. Unlike broken bones, irreversible maldevelopment of brain areas mediating empathy resulting from emotional neglect in infancy and childhood is not readily observable...
...Some of the most powerful clinical examples of this phenomenon are related to lack of attachment experiences early in life. The child who has been emotionally neglected early in life will exhibit profound attachment problems which are extremely insensitive to any replacement experiences later, including therapy. Examples of this include feral children, children in orphanages observed by Spitz and Wolf (1945) and, often, the remorseless, violent child...
...Profound sociocultural and public policy implications arise from understanding the critical role of early experience in determining the functional capacity of the mature adult — and therefore our society. Persistence of the destructive myth that "children are resilient" will prevent millions of children, and our society, from meeting their true potential. Persistence of the pervasive maltreatment of children in the face of decreasing global and national resources will lead, inevitably, to sociocultural devolution.
It need not be so.
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A child at that this young age only wants to be loved and to reach out to love another and to feel as one with another human being. It is a parent’s disproval at this crucial developmental stage of a child learning to express love and interact with another - that prevents a child from fully experiencing and learning the meaning of empathy. This is why, the child as an adult, will instantly emotionally overreact negatively to any expression of gay love, such as gay marriage, or like the immediate hostile emotional outburst among the members of the curia and hierarchy at the release of the 2014 Synod on Family midterm report - regarding "welcoming gay people and valuing gay loving and committed relationships" and yet be unable to give any coherent reasoning for their emotional outburst. This is because the early childhood memory of the traumatic situation has been separated from the emotional outburst it caused. And it is not until the traumatic situation is once again reconnected to the emotional outburst will the obsessive irrational antigay rantings and ravings cease. But like with so many members of the curia and hierarchy this can easily be observed as to how their intense and irrational antigay emotional rantings and ravings persist endlessly throughout old age. A lot of hot air with absolutely no substantiating data from science and religion to support their emotional outrage. Again as stated above, what is key here is the complete absence of any rational explanation for their emotional outrage. There is no story or explanation - to match their intense emotional reaction regarding the 2014 topic of "welcoming gay people and valuing gay loving and committed relationships.” Such intense emotional reactions without a clear explanation why - tends to point to something traumatic happened in early childhood that has been repressed. This is in contrast to an event that happens in adulthood - like someone refusing to ride in the front seat of a car, because that person was in a severe car accident and got thrown through the windshield ( Henry Krystal - PDF http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ibrarian.net%2Fnavon%2Fpaper%2FChapter_8__Psychoanalytic_Approaches_to_Trauma__A.pdf%3Fpaperid%3D16436404&ei=GF21VNXKA9SqyASwnoDYBA&usg=AFQjCNHw0P8nuU0GEYdZs0ItaQKDfe2GLA&bvm=bv.83339334,d.aWw).
Meet the Cards:
otherwise even
the moral edifice of the church is likely to
losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel
Bagnasco, as well as, the majority of the members of the curia and hierarchy - is an excellent example of this fact - we can observe how he projects his confusion onto all gay people. Exactly, how many gay people does he actually know, that is gay people who are open about being gay?
Has Bagnasco read and studied any science on gay sexual orientation?
Or has Bagnasco studied any biblical exegesis on the topic homosexuality?
Could Bagnasco pass any graduate level comprehensive exam in these two academic fields of study on the topic of homosexual sexual orientation, including on the history of the Holocaust of World War II?
Now whose confused and void of empathy???
Bagnasco's arbitrary appraisal is no different than the way the Nazi “use and abuse” science (Robert Proctor) that formed the basis of the Nazi ideology of “racial cleansing” that soon led to the murder of 70 million people by the end of World War II (https://ke.army.mil/bordeninstitute/published_volumes/ethicsVol2/Ethics-ch-14.pdf). And Bagnasco was elected to be the head of the Italian Bishops Conference, which says a lot about the mental stability of the men who chose him - void of science, void of scripture, void of truth and therefore void of empathy.
homosexuals “confuse people”
Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco
head of the Italian Bishops Conference
Repressed homosexuals are inordinately obsessive - distorting the truth of science and religion on the sexual ordination of homosexuality, - in order to rationalize their irrational attempts to dehumanize gay people, and therefore justify their relentless use of violence and lethal means to destroy them. These repressed homosexuals choose to remain isolated by adamantly refusing to enter into any open discussion with authoritative professionals in the fields of science and theology (religion) on the topic of homosexuality - in order to avoid being challenged. They are thus able to maintain their deadly delusional concepts, as well as, their torturous lifestyle, at the expense of their lifetime, their emotional and physical well-being and not have to face the truth about their homosexual or bisexual sexual orientation.
Science +
+ Religion = Truth = L O V E
It is this absence of empathy (i.e. Bagnasco, Burke, Gadecki, Muller, Chaput, Cordileone, Sarah, Vigneron, - to name a few) that threatens all humanity and that is perpetuated through generations - because it remains largely unidentified. Until which time, if ever that through the continuous dialogue between science and religion on the topic of homosexual sexual orientation a combined perspective is formed - as described by both John Paul II (THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FAITH AND REASON) and Benedict XVI. Only then will the much needed human empathy be restored to humanity that then society as a whole will more fully be able empathize with the people suffering the most due to climate change. Only then - will we as society together be able to empathizes with the dehumanizing effects of globalization and we will together begin valuing human life more than profit.
Pope Francis has already shown us the way - when less than four months after his election to the papacy - he announced on his air flight from Brazil back to Rome after being questioned about gay priests he emphatically answered with great empathy “Who am I to Judge?”July 29, 2013 (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/world/europe/pope-francis-gay-priests.html?_r=0 ). His poll rating soared - it was heard instantly around the world and like the devastating tragedy of 9/11 that is never forgotten - it is the first time such kindness coming the Vatican is even more deeply remembered. There is psychological research, as well as, biblical exegesis that will together explain the reasoning why goodness, kindness, and love are forever lasting.
The global reaction to Pope Francis's words about gay people on, July 29, 2013 - is a statement about the nature and the prevalence of the sexual orientation of homosexuality among the people around the world. This was an extraordinary phenomenon - a simple expression of empathy, the first time ever, specifically addressed to those - who by many are not considered worthy to be even considered as the least among us - immediately in lightning speed caught the attention of people globally.
It is a statement that should be well scrutinized by professionals from both academic fields of study science and religion, as to whether or not - fully addressing the issues of valuing gay loving and committed relationships - is a prerequisite to begin instilling empathy individually in people around the world - for us all to be able to hear the cries and be able to feel the pain of - those most in need of our help.
Homosexuality and the Holocaust
"superstition and fanaticism"
…In 1791 the Constituent Assembly in France adopted a new penal code that omitted all laws motivated by "superstition and fanaticism" — including those against sodomy. Napoleon Bonaparte, who had emancipated the Jews under his rule in 1806, did not restore the laws against sodomy in his penal code of 1810. Wherever the Code Napoleon was adopted, as it was in many states during the nineteenth century, as it was in most of Catholic Europe and in the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch colonies abroad, homosexual acts between consenting adults in private ceased to interest the police power of the state…
Read more:
Robert Biedroń, Nazism’s Pink Hell
Germany’s Golden Years The nineteenth century was the first period when voices openly defending homosexuality and refusing to condemn it were heard on a broad scale. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 served as the model for this kind of progress. Under the influence of the French Revolution, Bavaria repealed in 1813 the law that imposed penalties on homosexual unions…
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Pope Francis
meets with, hugs same-sex couple
meets with, hugs same-sex couple
Cardinal-designate Tobin Will Focus on Dialogue, Discernment - October 18, 2016
Comfort level with dialogue a U.S. gift to the universal Church -October 19, 2016
…Presumably, however, he had other reasons that were more decisive in terms of why these three - because if that’s all he was looking for, virtually any churchman in the United States would have done the trick.
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With Pope’s cardinal picks, Bernardin’s ‘seamless garment’ is back - October 9, 2016
By naming Blase Cupich of Chicago, Joseph Tobin of Indianapolis and Kevin Farrell, formerly of Dallas, as cardinals, Pope Francis has moved the senior leadership of the American Catholic Church to a centrist, non-cultural warrior stance reminiscent of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's "seamless garment.”…
…Cupich was well known at Francis’s two Synods of Bishops on the family for parting company to some extent with the more traditionalist bloc, signaling openness on issues such as finding new pastoral approaches for LGBT believers and also opening the door to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to potentially receive Communion.
Tobin is a former superior general of the worldwide Redemptorist religious order, who served from 2010 to 2012 as the number two official at the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, better known as the “Congregation for Religious,” during the time when the Vatican was conducting two separate investigations of American nuns.
Tobin was publicly critical of those probes, suggesting they had been launched without dialogue or consultation with the women religious, and behind the scenes that didn’t always sit well with some of the prelates who had pushed for them in the first place…
…As for Farrell, over his years in Dallas he’s tried to steer the University of Dallas into a more centrist, mainstream position, at times running afoul of the sentiments of more conservative forces at the university. He’s also emerged as a leader in favor of gun control, something of a bold stance in the context of Texas, and also on immigration issues…
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Pope Francis’ cardinal choices bring surprises, especially for the US church - October 10, 2016
“A glance at the biographies of the new cardinals reveals that Francis has clearly chosen pastors who are humble men, not aspiring to be princes; men of dialogue, not culture warriors; men who know how to show mercy in their ministry,” wrote Gerry O’Connell, Vatican correspondent for America magazine, a New York-based Jesuit weekly…
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New Cardinals Signal a Shift Away from the U.S. Culture Wars - October 9. 2016
The pope’s decision to make two American archbishops cardinals is a message to other U.S. prelates that the church needs leaders less concerned with culture war issues and who are instead focused on building bridges and making the church a more welcoming place…
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To be continued:
Fr. Marty Kurylowicz
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9/11 In Our Own Words, Part 1 MSNBC
NBC anchors and correspondents recall their memories of reporting on the morning of 9/11/01. Weaving together live footage with present-day interviews, the special covers the first several hours as the terrorist attacks on America unfolded. With Tom Brokaw, Matt Lauer, Jim Miklaszewski, David Gregory, and Andrea Mitchell. Part 1 of 6.
Brief excerpt:
…BROKAW (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): There has never been an event to match the magnitude of this one in which everything has been shut down in terms of air traffic, the national capital has been immobilized. The Pentagon has been attacked, the financial markets have been shut down. There is an untold loss of life here in Manhattan, the nerve center of America, say nothing of what’s going on at the Pentagon
LAUER: throughout the early course of that morning, we were getting, people were handing us pieces of paper, wire copy, stories that were breaking-- you know-- eyewitness accounts from people that we couldn't actually find out if-- if-- if they-- they knew what they were talking about.
LAUER (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): Can you tell me about the injuries you’re seeing and the--and the numbers of people you’ve been treating?
WOMAN (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): We’ve seen a steady stream of people for approximately an hour and a half.
BROKAW: That day, we were skiing in an avalanche. I mean that's the only way to describe it. We were just trying to keep our heads above this--this cascade of information, keeping stable, trying to keep the information in a coherent form…
LAUER: throughout the early course of that morning, we were getting, people were handing us pieces of paper, wire copy, stories that were breaking-- you know-- eyewitness accounts from people that we couldn't actually find out if-- if-- if they-- they knew what they were talking about.
LAUER (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): Can you tell me about the injuries you’re seeing and the--and the numbers of people you’ve been treating?
WOMAN (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): We’ve seen a steady stream of people for approximately an hour and a half.
BROKAW: That day, we were skiing in an avalanche. I mean that's the only way to describe it. We were just trying to keep our heads above this--this cascade of information, keeping stable, trying to keep the information in a coherent form…
LAUER: When we first heard that another plane had crashed, there clearly was no way to definitively connect what happened to that plane to what had already happened in New York City and Washington at that moment.
LAUER (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): We do not know whether that crash of that plane is related to what has become an obvious terrorist attack.
LAUER: But I think, it would be fair to say, that none of us believed in ridiculous coincidences. And we all assumed at that point that-- that it would be too great a coincidence for a fourth commercial airliner to be involved in a catastrophic event on that same morning and have it not connected. But we didn't know the story. We didn't know what turned out to be maybe one of the most dramatic stories of that entire day
LAUER (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): We do not know whether that crash of that plane is related to what has become an obvious terrorist attack.
LAUER: But I think, it would be fair to say, that none of us believed in ridiculous coincidences. And we all assumed at that point that-- that it would be too great a coincidence for a fourth commercial airliner to be involved in a catastrophic event on that same morning and have it not connected. But we didn't know the story. We didn't know what turned out to be maybe one of the most dramatic stories of that entire day
MITCHELL: At the time we didn't know clearly about the heroism of the passengers and how they had prevented that attack from taking place. We later learned that the plane, the hijackers were heading to the nation’s capital.
BROKAW: Think of how catastrophic that would have been if they had been able to pull off the White House or the Capitol. Thank god for all those brave people on United 93 that they were able to-- rush the cockpit. And the way that they got together-- and a lot of 'em were kind of jockey guys, you know, who were weekend athletes-- at the back of the plane, and decided-- this is what they had to do-- and got the beverage cart to rush the cockpit. And-- give their lives willingly, heroically. And my guess is, in utter rage. My guess is that, when they hit that cockpit, they thought, "I'm going to die, but so are you, and you're going to die on my terms, not on your terms."
LAUER: it was a short time after the buildings collapsed that we first started seeing some of our colleagues joining us in Studio 1A in Rockefeller Center. And the first thing I remember is Ron Insana walking in our studio covered in dust I mean, in a way that it looks as if someone had just taken a bucket of the dust and dumped it over his head.All you had to do was see that image of Ron and you knew what he had been through and what he had just witnessed.
RON INSANA (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): As we were cutting across in a--in a-- in a-- quarantined zone, actually, the building began to disintegrate. And we heard it and looked up and started to see elements of the building come down, and we ran. And honestly, it was like a scene out of “Independence Day.”
BROKAW: When Ron Insana walked into the studio, it was-- it was stunning to me. I-- I-- I was close to him personally. And he was so shaken.
INSANA (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): Everything began to rain down. It was pitch black around us as though the winds were whipping through the corridors in lower Manhattan.
LAUER: There was the smell. It was just a combination of odors that I had not smelled on any human being.
BROKAW (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): Ron, we’re00we’re happy to see you, and must say it’s...
INSANA (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): Thank you. You have no idea how happy I am to be here.
BROKAW: Think of how catastrophic that would have been if they had been able to pull off the White House or the Capitol. Thank god for all those brave people on United 93 that they were able to-- rush the cockpit. And the way that they got together-- and a lot of 'em were kind of jockey guys, you know, who were weekend athletes-- at the back of the plane, and decided-- this is what they had to do-- and got the beverage cart to rush the cockpit. And-- give their lives willingly, heroically. And my guess is, in utter rage. My guess is that, when they hit that cockpit, they thought, "I'm going to die, but so are you, and you're going to die on my terms, not on your terms."
LAUER: it was a short time after the buildings collapsed that we first started seeing some of our colleagues joining us in Studio 1A in Rockefeller Center. And the first thing I remember is Ron Insana walking in our studio covered in dust I mean, in a way that it looks as if someone had just taken a bucket of the dust and dumped it over his head.All you had to do was see that image of Ron and you knew what he had been through and what he had just witnessed.
RON INSANA (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): As we were cutting across in a--in a-- in a-- quarantined zone, actually, the building began to disintegrate. And we heard it and looked up and started to see elements of the building come down, and we ran. And honestly, it was like a scene out of “Independence Day.”
BROKAW: When Ron Insana walked into the studio, it was-- it was stunning to me. I-- I-- I was close to him personally. And he was so shaken.
INSANA (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): Everything began to rain down. It was pitch black around us as though the winds were whipping through the corridors in lower Manhattan.
LAUER: There was the smell. It was just a combination of odors that I had not smelled on any human being.
BROKAW (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): Ron, we’re00we’re happy to see you, and must say it’s...
INSANA (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): Thank you. You have no idea how happy I am to be here.
BROKAW (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): Yeah, it’s a relief. But then you think about the experiences of thousands of other people...
INSANA (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): Yeah...
BROKAW (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): Who are down in the epicenter of all that, and were there when it occurred. Our hearts go out to them. We don’t know what the numbers are yet.
INSANA (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): Yeah...
BROKAW (TODAY show, September 11, 2001, file): Who are down in the epicenter of all that, and were there when it occurred. Our hearts go out to them. We don’t know what the numbers are yet.
BROKAW: he was down there doing his job. That had not occurred to me about how much collateral damage there may be-- on the ground with people who could-- could have gotten caught in all that…
View more:
ARLINGTON, Va. – Arlington County Fire Department Battalion Chief James Bonzano was attending a leadership seminar about a mile from the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, when he heard a blast and felt the ground tremble. It was 9:37 a.m. Monitors in the room carried news of planes striking the World Trade Center in New York. Now an American Airlines Boeing 757 carrying 64 people had slammed into the Pentagon. As fighter jets circled above, Bonzano soon boarded a bus filled with other firefighters and headed toward the crash scene…
Read more:
(CNN)Not long ago, retired New York City firefighter James Hanlon and his five-year-old daughter were hanging out in the family garage.
The girl spotted an unfamiliar box containing Hanlon's dusty, banged up old firefighter's helmet.
"Dada, what's that?" she asked.
Hanlon's mind raced back 15 years when he and hundreds of other first responders rushed inside the World Trade Center after terrorists flew hijacked airliners into the North and South Towers…
Read more:
9/11 First Responders Battle Toxic Exposures 15 Years Later - September 11, 2016
It has been 15 years since Ray Pfeifer saw news about a plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. A two-decade veteran of the New York Fire Department, Pfeifer was on his way to enjoy a round of golf when he immediately got back in his car and headed into the city.
A member of FDNY Engine 40 and Ladder 35 station on the city’s Upper West Side of Manhattan, Pfeifer showed up to the site in the afternoon after the two towers had fallen. Thousands of victims were lost in the rubble, including 12 members from Pfeifer’s fire company.
“It was hell on earth, it was horrible. The odors and the task alone,” Pfeifer said of searching for survivors and then later remains…
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15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks
CNN Photos - 9/12/16
Why Victims of Child Abuse Blame Themselves?
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Gay Men Testify to UN Security Council About Horrors of ISIS Regime
Meeting was first time UN Security Council met to discuss gay rights, U.S. ambassador says.
Reuters - Aug 24, 2015
Syrian refugee Subhi Nahas watched in fear as the al Qaeda-linked group Nusra Front took over his home town of Idlib and began torturing and executing men suspected of being gay. Then, with the rise of Islamic State, came videos of gay men being hurled from buildings.
If the victims did not die from the fall, they were stoned to death.
"This was to be my fate, too," Nahas told a closed-door informal meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Monday. The meeting was organized by the United States and Chile to draw attention to "brutal attacks" by the militants.
"I was terrified to go out. Nor was my home safe, as my father, who suspiciously monitored my every move, had learned I was gay. I bear a scar on my chin as a token of his rage," said Nahas, according to a text of his prepared remarks.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said this was the first time the UN Security Council had discussed lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues.
"It is impossible not to take up the struggle for their rights as our own as we have other great human rights struggles," she told the meeting, according to her prepared remarks. "Today, we take a small but important step in assuming that work. It must not be our last step.”…
Read more:
Gay Men Testify to UN Security Council About Horrors of ISIS Regime
Polish bishops oppose Catholic group's support of gay rights campaign — September 22, 2016
WARSAW, POLAND When a group of Polish Catholics declared support for a gay rights campaign, their involvement was quickly condemned by the country's bishops conference. Having raised the issue in the church, however, the group is determined to press on and ensure the atmosphere of understanding engendered by Pope Francis finds a louder echo in Poland.
"The bishops' reaction is only a first step -- what matters is that they've now felt it necessary to take up a position on LGBT issues," explained Dominika Kozlowska, editor of the Catholic monthly Znak (The Sign). "The Catholics who've engaged in this campaign will also continue to talk about these issues in publications and discussions. Though the bishops have accused us of infringing Gospel injunctions, they've also said things in the process which haven't been said in the church here before."
The campaign, "Let's exchange a sign of peace," was launched in early September with nationwide billboards depicting clasped hands -- one with a rainbow bracelet and the other with a Catholic rosary…
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Conservative dissent is brewing inside the Vatican -September 7, 2015
VATICAN CITY — On a sunny morning earlier this year, a camera crew entered a well-appointed apartment just outside the 9th-century gates of Vatican City. Pristinely dressed in the black robes and scarlet sash of the princes of the Roman Catholic Church, Wisconsin-born Cardinal Raymond Burke sat in his elaborately upholstered armchair and appeared to issue a warning to Pope Francis.
A staunch conservative and Vatican bureaucrat, Burke had been demoted by the pope a few months earlier, but it did not take the fight out of him. Francis had been backing a more inclusive era, giving space to progressive voices on divorced Catholics as well as gays and lesbians. In front of the camera, Burke said he would “resist” liberal changes — and seemed to caution Francis about the limits of his authority. “One must be very attentive regarding the power of the pope,” Burke told the French news crew.
Papal power, Burke warned, “is not absolute.” He added, “The pope does not have the power to change teaching [or] doctrine.”
Burke’s words belied a growing sense of alarm among strict conservatives, exposing what is fast emerging as a culture war over Francis’s papacy and the powerful hierarchy that governs the Roman Catholic Church…
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WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2016
Cardinal Burke - - On the Payroll? - - Making Nice-Nice to Pope Francis to Boost Sales for his New Book - Attempting Revive 1950s McCarthyism “Antigay Demagoguery” 30 Year Old “Wedge Issues” - Curran and Hunthausen 1980s - - Promoting Political Agenda - Back Home In Wisconsin, Campaigning Again, During - US Presidential Elections
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TUESDAY, AUGUST 9, 2016
Update: Oct. 2, 2016
Francis: Sexual morality determined case-by-case, even for transgender
Oct 2, 2016
ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE FROM AZERBAIJAN Pope Francis has said that Catholics must discern difficult situations of sexual morality on a case-by-case basis, even when presented with a person who is considering or has had gender reassignment surgery.
In a lengthy press conference aboard the papal flight back to Rome Oct. 2 after a weekend visit to Georgia and Azerbaijan, the pope said "you must take things as they come" and give time to accompany and discern individually with the various situations people are facing.
Francis recounted a meeting at the Vatican he had last year with a Spanish transgender man who had written to the pontiff to describe his own case and had asked for a personal encounter together.
"She is a young woman who suffered much because she felt like a young man," the pope explained. "She felt like a young man, but she was physically a young woman."
The woman, Francis said, had undergone gender reassignment surgery and had then married a woman. "He wrote me a letter saying that, for him, it would be a consolation to come [see me] with his wife," the pope said, clarifying: "He that was her but is he."
The pope said that during the meeting the transgender man spoke of his experience in his parish in Spain, where a younger priest had recently replaced his former pastor, who had turned 80.
"When the new pastor would see him, he would shout to him from the sidewalk: 'You will go to Hell.'" Francis said. "But when the old pastor would come find him, he asked: 'How long has it been since you confessed? Come and confess so you can have communion.' "
"Do you understand?" the pope asked the journalists aboard the flight. "Life is life and you must take things as they come."
"We must be attentive, not saying all are the same," he continued. "Every case: Welcome it, accompany it, study it, discerning and integrating."
"This is what Jesus would do today," said the pope….
Read more:
https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/francis-sexual-morality-determined-case-case-even-transgender
Pope says respect gays and transsexuals, questions gender theory
October 2, 2016
"IDEOLOGICAL COLONIZATION"
He said gender theory being taught in schools "is against natural things."
"It is one thing for a person to have this tendency, this option, and even change sex," he said. "But it is another thing to teach it, gender theory, in schools along these lines in order to change mentality. I call this ideological colonization."
The pope has used the phrase "ideological colonization" in the past to denounce what he says are attempts by rich countries to link development aid to the acceptance of social policies such as allowing gay marriage and contraception…
Update: Aug. 17, 2016
Pope Francis sets up new Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life - 17/08/2016
(Vatican Radio) With a Moto Proprio, Pope Francis announced on Wednesday the establishment of a Dicastery for Laity, the Family and Life. The Prefect of the new Dicastery will be the Irish-born Bishop Kevin Joseph Farrell, currently serving as Bishop of Dallas.
In his Apostolic Letter the Pope wrote that the new Dicastery will be "governed by special Statues" and all the responsibilities and functions held by the current Pontifical Councils for the Laity and for the Family will be transferred to the new Dicastery from September 1st. After that date the two Councils in question will cease to exist…
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Prime Minister of Canada
Justin Trudeau to apologize for historic persecution of gay Canadians - August 12, 2016 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/justin-trudeau-to-apologize-for-historic-persecution-of-gay-canadians/article31376155/
Justin Pierre James Trudeau PC MP - (born December 25, 1971) is a Canadian politician who is the 23rd Prime Minister of Canada, and the leader of the Liberal Party… Roman Catholic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Trudeau
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau marches with his family in Vancouver pride parade - July 31, 2016 http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/prime-minister-justin-trudeau-marches-with-his-family-in-vancouver-pride-parade
Vancouver Pride Parade: Trudeau Becomes First Sitting PM To Take Part - July 31, 2016 http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/07/31/vancouver-pride-parade_n_11284982.html
Justin Trudeau steals the show at the Vancouver Pride Parade - July 31, 2016 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/justin-trudeau-vancouver-pride-parade-1.3702613
Canada Is Apologizing to Its Gay Citizens — Will America Follow Suit? - August 12, 2016 http://www.advocate.com/world/2016/8/12/canada-apologizing-its-gay-citizens-should-america-follow-suit
Pope Francis
Pope says Christians should apologize to gay people - June 26, 2016 Photo http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/26/world/pope-apologize-gays/
Church Should Apologize To Gays, Pope Francis Says- NPR - SYLVIA POGGIOLI - June 27, 2016 http://www.npr.org/2016/06/27/483665206/church-should-apologize-to-gays-pope-francis-says
SYDNEY’S CATHOLICS APOLOGISE TO LGBTI PEOPLE
Newtown's church becomes one of the first in the
world to apologise to LGBTI people - August 15, 2016
NEWTOWN’S Catholic Church has become one of the world’s first churches to apologise to LGBTI people for the hurt caused by the action and inaction of Catholic and Christian people and churches.
In June, Pope Francis called for an apology to gay and lesbian people and St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Newtown become one of the first to respond holding a Liturgy of Apology organised by the Rainbow Catholic Interagency for Ministry on Friday
“It was difficult to choose which personal stories to share during the liturgy; each individual’s story is so powerful, unique and precious,” Francis Voon, a Catholic organiser said.
“As organisers we wanted to make sure the event was ethical, respectful and safe for all. There are so many heartbreaking stories of our LGBTIQ siblings.
“Some have been badly hurt by us as a church community. Others we have failed completely, to the point of suicide, because of prejudice, ignorance and fear, and worse still, in God’s name.
“Tonight, with Pope Francis’ encouragement, in the name of God, we apologise for religious LGBTIQ-phobia, and we pledge to work towards healing and reconciliation in this Year of Mercy.”
One of the stories shared at the liturgy of apology was of a gay man who attempted suicided after he was forced to undergo gay conversion programs promoted by the church…
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Who is advising - Whom on gender theory? And Why? Check credentials, background and political biases. Is there a connection between Pope Benedict XVI (Dec. 2008) and Pope Francis being advised by the same?
Separating the ongoing dialogue between - Science and Religion does not equal truth and without truth there is no love! “Any breach in this dialogue comes only at an enormous price to human development…”
Pope Benedict XVI - wrote 2007 - curia published 2009 http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html
Separating the ongoing dialogue between - Science and Religion does not equal truth and without truth there is no love! “Any breach in this dialogue comes only at an enormous price to human development…”
Pope Benedict XVI - wrote 2007 - curia published 2009 http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html
Pediatricians back Pope Francis on ‘gender theory’ - August 9, 2016
…A paper released this past week by the American College of Pediatricians on gender dysphoria (GD) in children-a psychological condition in which children experience a marked incongruence between their experienced gender and their biological sex-suggests that Pope Francis was fundamentally correct in his criticism of gender theory...
…A paper released this past week by the American College of Pediatricians on gender dysphoria (GD) in children-a psychological condition in which children experience a marked incongruence between their experienced gender and their biological sex-suggests that Pope Francis was fundamentally correct in his criticism of gender theory...
Pedia-trick-cians - May 20, 2016
It was an official-sounding but fringe group of politically motivated pediatricians who issued a statement on gender, NOT the respected American Academy of Pediatrics.
On 16 May 2016, talk show host Glenn Beck published the tweet reproduced above, reporting that a pediatricians' group had said that promoting or tolerating gender dysphoria (i.e., the condition of feeling one's emotional and psychological identity as male or female to be opposite of one's biological sex) in children constitutes "child abuse." Beck's tweet led many viewers to believe that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) had taken that stance on childhood gender dysphoria, but the tweet linked to an article containing quotes from the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) NOT the AAP:..
The APA's position is that gender dysphoria is "not in itself a mental disorder," and that children are a demographic group at risk for compromised clinical care. A part of ACPeds' citation that bordered on deceptive was the fact that the American Psychiatric Association's fact sheet discussed changes to diagnostic criteria implemented around 2013, but ACPeds went on to cite studies that were typically more than a decade old and in direct conflict with medical science directives issued several years (and several studies) later.
A September 2015 presentation from the American Academy of Pediatrics notes that treatment recommendations are based on the best available evidence. Their guidance defined three approaches to gender dysphoria in children: "corrective," "supporting," and "affirming," with the AAP advising the "affirming" approach to gender dysphoria in children:
Read more: http://www.snopes.com/americas-pediatricians-gender-kids/
On 16 May 2016, talk show host Glenn Beck published the tweet reproduced above, reporting that a pediatricians' group had said that promoting or tolerating gender dysphoria (i.e., the condition of feeling one's emotional and psychological identity as male or female to be opposite of one's biological sex) in children constitutes "child abuse." Beck's tweet led many viewers to believe that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) had taken that stance on childhood gender dysphoria, but the tweet linked to an article containing quotes from the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) NOT the AAP:..
The APA's position is that gender dysphoria is "not in itself a mental disorder," and that children are a demographic group at risk for compromised clinical care. A part of ACPeds' citation that bordered on deceptive was the fact that the American Psychiatric Association's fact sheet discussed changes to diagnostic criteria implemented around 2013, but ACPeds went on to cite studies that were typically more than a decade old and in direct conflict with medical science directives issued several years (and several studies) later.
A September 2015 presentation from the American Academy of Pediatrics notes that treatment recommendations are based on the best available evidence. Their guidance defined three approaches to gender dysphoria in children: "corrective," "supporting," and "affirming," with the AAP advising the "affirming" approach to gender dysphoria in children:
Read more: http://www.snopes.com/americas-pediatricians-gender-kids/
Meet the Anti-LGBT Hate Group that Filed an Amicus Brief with the Alabama Supreme Court - November 13, 2015
The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) is an anti-LGBT h a t e group founded in 2002. It bills itself as “a national organization of pediatricians and other healthcare professionals dedicated to the health and well-being of children.”
Like other organizations, ACPeds involves itself in judicial matters, and files amicus briefs with various courts in support of or in opposition to various cases.
What its website will not tell you is that this fringe organization, under the veneer of its professional-sounding name and claims, works to defame and discredit LGBT people, often by distorting legitimate research. It consists of around 200 members and started because a small group of anti-LGBT physicians and other healthcare professionals broke away from the 60,000 member American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), composed of leaders in the professional field, to form its own group after the AAP issued a new policy statement in 2002 in support of adoption and foster parenting by same-sex couples.
ACPeds has a history of propagating damaging falsehoods about LGBT people, including linking homosexuality to pedophilia, and claiming that LGBT people are more promiscuous than heterosexuals, and that LGBT people are a danger to children.
In 2010, for example, ACPeds mailed a letter to over 14,000 school district superintendents pushing so-called “ex-gay” therapy and making other false claims about LGBT people in its “Facts About Youth” campaign, which brought a scathing response from a researcher whose work the group had distorted. That wasn’t the first time ACPeds had been called out for distorting legitimate research, but clearly, if the brief they filed is any indication, the lesson didn’t take…
Read more: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/11/13/meet-anti-lgbt-hate-group-filed-amicus-brief-alabama-supreme-cour
The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) is an anti-LGBT h a t e group founded in 2002. It bills itself as “a national organization of pediatricians and other healthcare professionals dedicated to the health and well-being of children.”
Like other organizations, ACPeds involves itself in judicial matters, and files amicus briefs with various courts in support of or in opposition to various cases.
What its website will not tell you is that this fringe organization, under the veneer of its professional-sounding name and claims, works to defame and discredit LGBT people, often by distorting legitimate research. It consists of around 200 members and started because a small group of anti-LGBT physicians and other healthcare professionals broke away from the 60,000 member American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), composed of leaders in the professional field, to form its own group after the AAP issued a new policy statement in 2002 in support of adoption and foster parenting by same-sex couples.
ACPeds has a history of propagating damaging falsehoods about LGBT people, including linking homosexuality to pedophilia, and claiming that LGBT people are more promiscuous than heterosexuals, and that LGBT people are a danger to children.
In 2010, for example, ACPeds mailed a letter to over 14,000 school district superintendents pushing so-called “ex-gay” therapy and making other false claims about LGBT people in its “Facts About Youth” campaign, which brought a scathing response from a researcher whose work the group had distorted. That wasn’t the first time ACPeds had been called out for distorting legitimate research, but clearly, if the brief they filed is any indication, the lesson didn’t take…
Read more: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/11/13/meet-anti-lgbt-hate-group-filed-amicus-brief-alabama-supreme-cour
Letter to Father George V. Coyne, Director of the Vatican Observatory (June 1, 1988) | John Paul II
…By encouraging openness between the Church and the scientific communities, we are N O T envisioning a disciplinary unity between theology and science like that which exists within a given scientific field or within theology proper. As dialogue and common searching continue, there will be grow towards mutual understanding and a gradual uncovering of common concerns which will provide the basis for further research and discussion. Exactly what form that will take must be left to the future. What is important, as we have already stressed, is that the dialogue should continue and grow in depth and scope. In the process we must overcome every regressive tendency to a unilateral reductionism, to fear, and to self-imposed isolation. What is critically important is that each discipline should continue to enrich, nourish and challenge the other to be more fully what it can be and to contribute to our vision of who we are and who we are becoming…
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.
For the truth of the matter is that the Church and the scientific community will inevitably interact; their options do not include isolation.
https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/letters/1988/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_19880601_padre-coyne.html
…By encouraging openness between the Church and the scientific communities, we are N O T envisioning a disciplinary unity between theology and science like that which exists within a given scientific field or within theology proper. As dialogue and common searching continue, there will be grow towards mutual understanding and a gradual uncovering of common concerns which will provide the basis for further research and discussion. Exactly what form that will take must be left to the future. What is important, as we have already stressed, is that the dialogue should continue and grow in depth and scope. In the process we must overcome every regressive tendency to a unilateral reductionism, to fear, and to self-imposed isolation. What is critically important is that each discipline should continue to enrich, nourish and challenge the other to be more fully what it can be and to contribute to our vision of who we are and who we are becoming…
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.
For the truth of the matter is that the Church and the scientific community will inevitably interact; their options do not include isolation.
https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/letters/1988/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_19880601_padre-coyne.html
BENEDICT XVI - 2009
3. Through this close link with truth, charity can be recognized as an authentic expression of humanity and as an element of fundamental importance in human relations, including those of a public nature. Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity. That light is both the light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion. Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite. Truth frees charity from the constraints of an emotionalism that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a fideism that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space. In the truth, charity reflects the personal yet public dimension of faith in the God of the Bible, who is both Agápe and Lógos: Charity and Truth, Love and Word.
4. Because it is filled with truth, charity can be understood in the abundance of its values, it can be shared and communicated. Truth, in fact, is lógos which creates diá-logos, and hence communication and communion. Truth, by enabling men and women to let go of their subjective opinions and impressions, allows them to move beyond cultural and historical limitations and to come together in the assessment of the value and substance of things. Truth opens and unites our minds in the lógos of love: this is the Christian proclamation and testimony of charity. In the present social and cultural context, where there is a widespread tendency to relativize truth, practising charity in truth helps people to understand that adhering to the values of Christianity is not merely useful but essential for building a good society and for true integral human development. A Christianity of charity without truth would be more or less interchangeable with a pool of good sentiments, helpful for social cohesion, but of little relevance. In other words, there would no longer be any real place for God in the world. Without truth, charity is confined to a narrow field devoid of relations. It is excluded from the plans and processes of promoting human development of universal range, in dialogue between knowledge and praxis…
Reason always stands in need of being purified by faith: this also holds true for political reason, which must not consider itself omnipotent. For its part, religion always needs to be purified by reason in order to show its authentically human face. Any breach in this dialogue comes only at an enormous price to human development…
American Academy of Pediatrics Opposes Legislation that Discriminates Against Transgender Children
North Carolina's HB2 and similar bills across the country harm transgender youth https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/Pages/AAPOpposesLegislationAgainstTransgenderChildren.aspx?nfstatus=401&nftoken=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&nfstatusdescription=ERROR:+No+local+token
Why the American Academy of Pediatrics opposes North Carolina’s transgender “bathroom law”
Claire McCarthy, MD, Faculty Editor, Harvard Health Publications - April 26, 2016
We’ve been hearing a lot about the North Carolina law that says that transgender people who haven’t taken surgical or legal steps to change the gender on their birth certificate can’t use the public restroom of the gender with which they identify. It has caused a firestorm — and has even led to companies like PayPal and Deutsche Bank cancelling plans for expansion in the state, and many entertainers cancelling appearances there.
One group that has come out squarely against the law is the American Academy of Pediatrics, a nonprofit organization representing 64,000 pediatricians across the United States. Their reason is very simple: discrimination against transgender youth can cause real harm.
No matter what anyone believes or feels about being transgender, the fact is that there are many adolescents who clearly identify as transgender — that is, they feel very strongly that the gender on their birth certificate is the wrong one. For these adolescents, and for their families, this is as true about them as the color of their eyes or skin — and just as unchangeable.
It’s also a fact that for any adolescent, being bullied and feeling unsupported leads to mental health problems. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) adolescents are not only often bullied or unsupported, they are often victims of violence. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), studies show that as many as a quarter of LGBT adolescents have been threatened or hurt with a weapon on school property. These adolescents have a high risk of depression and suicide, about twice that of their heterosexual peers; among transgender adolescents, in particular, the risk of depression and suicide appears to be even higher. LGBT adolescents, when rejected by their family, often find themselves homeless; a 2012 study found that 40% of homeless adolescents were LGBT…
Read more: http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/american-academy-pediatrics-opposes-north-carolinas-transgender-bathroom-law-201604269607
Claire McCarthy, MD, Faculty Editor, Harvard Health Publications - April 26, 2016
We’ve been hearing a lot about the North Carolina law that says that transgender people who haven’t taken surgical or legal steps to change the gender on their birth certificate can’t use the public restroom of the gender with which they identify. It has caused a firestorm — and has even led to companies like PayPal and Deutsche Bank cancelling plans for expansion in the state, and many entertainers cancelling appearances there.
One group that has come out squarely against the law is the American Academy of Pediatrics, a nonprofit organization representing 64,000 pediatricians across the United States. Their reason is very simple: discrimination against transgender youth can cause real harm.
No matter what anyone believes or feels about being transgender, the fact is that there are many adolescents who clearly identify as transgender — that is, they feel very strongly that the gender on their birth certificate is the wrong one. For these adolescents, and for their families, this is as true about them as the color of their eyes or skin — and just as unchangeable.
It’s also a fact that for any adolescent, being bullied and feeling unsupported leads to mental health problems. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) adolescents are not only often bullied or unsupported, they are often victims of violence. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), studies show that as many as a quarter of LGBT adolescents have been threatened or hurt with a weapon on school property. These adolescents have a high risk of depression and suicide, about twice that of their heterosexual peers; among transgender adolescents, in particular, the risk of depression and suicide appears to be even higher. LGBT adolescents, when rejected by their family, often find themselves homeless; a 2012 study found that 40% of homeless adolescents were LGBT…
Read more: http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/american-academy-pediatrics-opposes-north-carolinas-transgender-bathroom-law-201604269607
American College of Pediatricians
The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) is a small, socially conservative advocacy group of pediatricians and other healthcare professionals in the United States.
The group was founded in 2002 by a group of pediatricians, including Joseph Zanga, a past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), as a protest against the AAP's support for adoption by gay couples. The group's membership has been estimated at between 60 and 200 members, in contrast to the AAP's over 60,000 members…
Criticism
The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) is a small, socially conservative advocacy group of pediatricians and other healthcare professionals in the United States.
The group was founded in 2002 by a group of pediatricians, including Joseph Zanga, a past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), as a protest against the AAP's support for adoption by gay couples. The group's membership has been estimated at between 60 and 200 members, in contrast to the AAP's over 60,000 members…
Criticism
Some scientists have voiced concerns that ACPeds mischaracterized or misused their work to advance its political agenda. Gary Remafedi, a pediatrician at the University of Minnesota, wrote ACPeds a public letter accusing them of fundamentally mischaracterizing his research in their publications to argue that schools should deny support to gay teenagers. Francis Collins, a geneticist and director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), issued a statement through the NIH accusing the ACPeds of misleading children and parents on its Facts About Youth website. Warren Throckmorton, a therapist who specializes in sexual orientation issues, similarly stated that his research had been misused, saying of ACPeds: "They say they're impartial and not motivated by political or religious concerns, but if you look at who they're affiliated with and how they're using the research, that's just obviously not true.”
In an amicus brief regarding the removal of a child from the foster home of a same sex couple (Kutil and Hess v West Virginia) the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) described ACPeds as a "small and marginal group" which was "out of step with the research-based position of the AAP and other medical and child welfare authorities.” The LGBT advocacy organization, PFLAG, categorizes the ACPeds as an anti-equality organization, describing the group as a "small splinter group of medical professionals who do not support the mainstream view of the American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP) that homosexuality is a normal aspect of human diversity."
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has said that ACPeds is a "hate group" that closely collaborates with the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), and described ACPeds as a "fringe group" with "a history of propagating damaging falsehoods about LGBT people, including linking homosexuality to pedophilia".[10][11] In response to an ACPeds brief, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote that ACPeds is a fringe group that has acted to promote "unscientific and harmful 'reparative therapies' for LGBTQ students.”…
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_College_of_Pediatricians
In an amicus brief regarding the removal of a child from the foster home of a same sex couple (Kutil and Hess v West Virginia) the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) described ACPeds as a "small and marginal group" which was "out of step with the research-based position of the AAP and other medical and child welfare authorities.” The LGBT advocacy organization, PFLAG, categorizes the ACPeds as an anti-equality organization, describing the group as a "small splinter group of medical professionals who do not support the mainstream view of the American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP) that homosexuality is a normal aspect of human diversity."
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has said that ACPeds is a "hate group" that closely collaborates with the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), and described ACPeds as a "fringe group" with "a history of propagating damaging falsehoods about LGBT people, including linking homosexuality to pedophilia".[10][11] In response to an ACPeds brief, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote that ACPeds is a fringe group that has acted to promote "unscientific and harmful 'reparative therapies' for LGBTQ students.”…
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_College_of_Pediatricians
…While it originally focused on damages done by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, given the decline in such groups, over the years the SPLC has become involved in other civil rights causes, among them, cases concerned with institutional racial segregation and discrimination, discrimination based on sexual orientation, the mistreatment of illegal immigrants, and the separation of church and state… Read more: Photo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Poverty_Law_Center
THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER
History
The SPLC was founded in 1971 to ensure that the promise of the civil rights movement became a reality for all.
By the late 1960s, the civil rights movement had ushered in the promise of racial equality as new federal laws and decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court ended Jim Crow segregation. But resistance was strong, and these laws had not yet brought the fundamental changes needed in the South.
African Americans were still excluded from good jobs, decent housing, public office, a quality education and a range of other opportunities. There were few places for the disenfranchised and the poor to turn for justice. Enthusiasm for the civil rights movement had waned, and few lawyers in the South were willing to take controversial cases to test new civil rights laws.
Alabama lawyer and businessman Morris Dees sympathized with the plight of the poor and the powerless. The son of an Alabama farmer, he had witnessed firsthand the devastating consequences of bigotry and racial injustice. Dees decided to sell his successful book publishing business to start a civil rights law practice that would provide a voice for the disenfranchised.
“I had made up my mind,” Dees wrote in his autobiography, A Season for Justice. “I would sell the company as soon as possible and specialize in civil rights law. All the things in my life that had brought me to this point, all the pulls and tugs of my conscience, found a singular peace. It did not matter what my neighbors would think, or the judges, the bankers, or even my relatives.”
His decision led to the founding of the Southern Poverty Law Center…
Read more: https://www.splcenter.org/our-history
History
The SPLC was founded in 1971 to ensure that the promise of the civil rights movement became a reality for all.
By the late 1960s, the civil rights movement had ushered in the promise of racial equality as new federal laws and decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court ended Jim Crow segregation. But resistance was strong, and these laws had not yet brought the fundamental changes needed in the South.
African Americans were still excluded from good jobs, decent housing, public office, a quality education and a range of other opportunities. There were few places for the disenfranchised and the poor to turn for justice. Enthusiasm for the civil rights movement had waned, and few lawyers in the South were willing to take controversial cases to test new civil rights laws.
Alabama lawyer and businessman Morris Dees sympathized with the plight of the poor and the powerless. The son of an Alabama farmer, he had witnessed firsthand the devastating consequences of bigotry and racial injustice. Dees decided to sell his successful book publishing business to start a civil rights law practice that would provide a voice for the disenfranchised.
“I had made up my mind,” Dees wrote in his autobiography, A Season for Justice. “I would sell the company as soon as possible and specialize in civil rights law. All the things in my life that had brought me to this point, all the pulls and tugs of my conscience, found a singular peace. It did not matter what my neighbors would think, or the judges, the bankers, or even my relatives.”
His decision led to the founding of the Southern Poverty Law Center…
Read more: https://www.splcenter.org/our-history
March 1, 2012
Along with NARTH, a deceptively named pediatricians’ group is a second primary source used vilify gay people.
The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) is not the only game in town when it comes to providing “scientific” support for anti-gay groups. The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) has done as much to defame gays and lesbians, all in the name of protecting children.
A professional organization for socially conservative pediatricians and healthcare professionals, the group has taken a number of hard-line positions when it comes to LGBT rights, advocating for a prohibition against adoption rights for same-sex couples and also offering high praise for reparative therapy.
Like NARTH, ACPeds was born from an ideological split within a profession. It was founded in 2002 as a protest against the much larger American Academy of Pediatrics’ support for LGBT adoption rights — and that opposition remains central to the group’s identity.
ACPeds is believed to have no more than 200 members, a tiny fraction of the nearly 60,000 professionals who belong to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
But thanks to its deceptive name — which makes it sound as if it is the mainstream professional organization for pediatricians — ACPeds often serves as a supposedly scientific source for groups pushing utter falsehoods about LGBT people.
A prime example of that came on Nov. 29, 2010, when Family Research Council President Tony Perkins cited it on MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Matthews” to “prove” that “the research is overwhelming that homosexuality poses a danger to children.” Perkins, who was debating Intelligence Report Editor Mark Potok at the time, was referring to bogus claims that gay men molest children at far higher rates than others. The truth, as the American Psychological Association says in an official statement, is that “homosexual men are not more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual men are.”… Photo
Read more:
THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2012/american-college-pediatricians-defames-gays-and-lesbians-name-protecting-children
American Psychiatric Association
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the largest psychiatric organization in the world. Its some 36,000 members are mainly American but some are international. The association publishes various journals and pamphlets, as well as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The DSM codifies psychiatric conditions and is used worldwide as a guide for diagnosing disorders…
Read more:
American Psychiatric Association
What is Gender Dysphoria
Gender dysphoria involves a conflict between a person's physical or assigned gender and the gender with which he/she/they identify. People with gender dysphoria may be very uncomfortable with the gender they were assigned, sometimes described as being uncomfortable with their body (particularly developments during puberty) or being uncomfortable with the expected roles of their assigned gender.
People with gender dysphoria may often experience significant distress and/or problems functioning associated with this conflict between the way they feel and think of themselves (referred to as experienced or expressed gender) and their physical or assigned gender.
The gender conflict affects people in different ways. It can change the way a person wants to express their gender and can influence behavior, dress and self-image. Some people may cross-dress, some may want to socially transition, others may want to medically transition with sex-change surgery and/or hormone treatment. Socially transitioning primarily involves transitioning into the affirmed gender’s pronouns and bathrooms.
People with gender dysphoria may allow themselves to express their true selves and may openly want to be affirmed in their gender identity. They may use clothes and hairstyles and adopt a new first name of their experienced gender. Similarly children with gender dysphoria may express the wish to be of the opposite gender and may assert they are (or will grow up to be) of the opposite gender. They prefer, or demand, clothing, hairstyles and to be called a name of the opposite gender. (Medical transition is only relevant at and after the onset of puberty.)
Gender dysphoria is not the same as gender nonconformity, which refers to behaviors not matching the gender norms or stereotypes of the gender assigned at birth. Examples of gender nonconformity (also referred to as gender expansiveness or gender creativity) include “tomboyism” in girls or occasional cross-dressing in adult men. Gender nonconformity is not a mental disorder. Gender dysphoria is also not the same being gay/lesbian…
Read more:
Help With Gender Dysphoria
American Psychiatric Association
Hate Group Masquerading As Pediatricians Attacks Transgender Youth - March 22, 2016
The American College of Pediatricians (ACP), which utilizes the totally convincing slogan “Best for Children,” has issued a new position statement claiming that respecting transgender children’s identities causes them harm and conservative groups are already latching onto it.
If the claim sounds peculiar, it’s because it’s a claim completely refuted by all available scientific evidence. It’s also because the ACP is not a legitimate medical organization; its name is designed to be mistaken for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is a national organization with some 60,000 members. The ACP, by contrast, is estimated to have no more than 200 members, and it has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its anti-LGBT positions.
“The American College of Pediatricians urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex,” the statement reads. “Facts — not ideology — determine reality.” The “facts” that follow actually reflect a social conservative ideology that rejects the very reality of what transgender children experience.
For example, the statement not-so-subtly concludes that all transgender people must be mentally ill. “A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking,” the statement reads. “When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such.”
The 36,000-member American Psychiatric Association, which defines mental illnesses through its Diagnostics and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), says the exact opposite, explaining, “It is important to note that gender nonconformity is NOT in itself a mental disorder.” It is only distress associated with such an identity that should be treated — and treated with affirmation.
The statement also relies on several myths about transgender people that have been debunked. For example, it reiterates the desistance myth, the claim that most “gender confused” children “eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.” This is a claim based on research that conflated children with some gender-variant behavior with children who actually asserted a different gender. The children in those studies who “desisted” in their identities were the kids who weren’t actually transgender to begin with. A recent study found that trans kids whose parents embrace their identities are as happy and healthy as their peers…
Read more:
American Academy of Pediatrics
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Health and Wellness
Caring for LGBT children and youth - AAP resources
Caring for children of LGBT parents - AAP resources
Read more:
employed a male prostitute - Rentboy.com
Family Research Council
National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH)
Conversion therapy
Conversion therapy is psychological treatment or spiritual counseling designed to change a person's sexual orientation from homosexual or bisexual to heterosexual. Such treatments are controversial and have been criticized as a form of pseudoscience. Medical, scientific, and government organizations in the United States and Britain have expressed concern over conversion therapy and consider it potentially harmful.The American Psychiatric Association opposes psychiatric treatment "based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or based upon the a priori assumption that a patient should change his/her sexual homosexual orientation"[8] and describes attempts to change sexual orientation by practitioners as unethical.[6] It also states that debates over the integration of gay and lesbian people have obscured science "by calling into question the motives and even the character of individuals on both sides of the issue" and that the advancement of conversion therapy may cause social harm by disseminating unscientific views about sexual orientation. United States Surgeon General David Satcher in 2001 issued a report stating that "there is no valid scientific evidence that sexual orientation can be changed".The highest-profile advocates of conversion therapy today tend to be fundamentalist Christian groups and other organizations which use a religious justification for the therapy rather than speaking of homosexuality as "a disease".[4] The main organization advocating secular forms of conversion therapy is the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), which often partners with religious groups.….
Techniques used in conversion therapy prior to 1981 in the United States and Western Europe included ice-pick lobotomies and chemical castration with hormonal treatment, aversive treatments, such as "the application of electric shock to the hands and/or genitals," and "nausea-inducing drugs...administered simultaneously with the presentation of homoerotic stimuli," and masturbatory reconditioning. More recent clinical techniques used in the United States have been limited to counseling, visualization, social skills training, psychoanalytic therapy, and spiritual interventions such as "prayer and group support and pressure," though there are some reports of aversive treatments through unlicensed practice as late as the 1990s. The term reparative therapy has been used as a synonym for conversion therapy in general, but it has been argued that strictly speaking it refers to a specific kind of therapy associated with Elizabeth Moberly and Joseph Nicolosi…
Read more:
Kirk Andrew Murphy
What Are Little Boys Made Of?
An investigation of an experimental program to train boys to be boys. - June 7, 2011
Kirk Andrew Murphy - childhood gender issues - George Alan Rekers therapist - beatings - suicide
Reporters find tragic story amid embarrassing scandal - June 10, 2011
New York (CNN) -- The story about Kirk Murphy's suicide began to come to light last year with an anonymous tip: Anti-gay rights activist George Alan Rekers was traveling to Europe with a male escort.
The tip came from one of the escort's acquaintances. We were skeptical, and the tipster answered our skepticism with screenshots of the e-mails Rekers had exchanged with his 20-year-old companion, whom he'd met at Rentboy.com. We used the screenshots to deduce the approximate time of the pair's return to the United States, and set off to take a picture…
Read more: Photo
Therapy to change 'feminine' boy created a troubled man, family says - June 10, 2011
Los Angeles (CNN) -- Kirk Andrew Murphy seemed to have everything to live for.
He put himself through school. He had a successful 8-year career in the Air Force. After the service, he landed a high profile position with an American finance company in India.
But in 2003 at age 38, Kirk Murphy took his own life.
A co-worker found him hanging from the fan of his apartment in New Delhi. His family has struggled for years to understand what happened…
Wanting a 'normal life'
Kirk Murphy was a bright 5-year-old boy, growing up near Los Angeles in the 1970s. He was the middle child, with big brother Mark, 8, and little sister Maris, just a baby at 9 months. Their mother, Kaytee Murphy, remembers Kirk's kind nature, "He was just very intelligent, and a sweet, sweet, child." But she was also worried.
"Well, I was becoming a little concerned, I guess, when he was playing with dolls and stuff," she said. "Playing with the girls' toys, and probably picking up little effeminate, well, like stroking the hair, the long hair and stuff. It just bothered me that maybe he was picking up maybe too many feminine traits." She said it bothered her because she wanted Kirk to grow up and have "a normal life.”…
…Kaytee Murphy took Kirk to UCLA, where he was treated largely by George A. Rekers, a doctoral student at the time.
In Rekers' study documenting his experimental therapy (PDF), he writes about a boy he calls "Kraig." Another UCLA gender researcher confirmed that "Kraig" was a pseudonym for Kirk.
The study, later published in an academic journal, concludes that after therapy, "Kraig's" feminine behavior was gone and he became "indistinguishable from any other boy."
"Kraig, I think, certainly was Rekers' poster boy for what Rekers was espousing for young children," said Jim Burroway, a writer and researcher who has studied Rekers' work…
According to the case study, Kaytee Murphy was told to ignore her son when he played with feminine toys and compliment him when he played with masculine toys.
"They pretty much told him he wasn't right the way that he was, but they never really explained it to him what the issue was. They did it through play," Maris said…
…At home, the punishment for feminine behavior would become more severe. The therapists instructed Kirk's parents to use poker chips as a system of rewards and punishments.
According to Rekers' case study, blue chips were given for masculine behavior and would bring rewards, such as candy. But the red chips, given for effeminate behavior, resulted in "physical punishment by spanking from the father."
Mark said he was told to participate in the chip reward-and-punishment system as a way to make Kirk feel like the system was OK.
The family said the spankings were severe. Maris remembers "lots of belt incidents." She escaped the screaming by going to her bed to "lay in the room with my pillow on my head." Later, she would go to Kirk's bedroom and "lay down and hug him and we would just lay there, and the thing that I remember is that he never even showed anger. He was just numb.”…
Read more:
The ‘Sissy Boy’ Experiment: Why Gender-Related Cases Call for Scientists’ Humility - June 6, 2011
Some of the most harrowing cases of psychological and medical malpractice involve attempts to change a child’s gender or sexual identity. Not only have such misguided “therapies” often resulted in patients’ suicides, but they also repeatedly appear to foster scientific misconduct.
In back-to-back shows on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper is exploring the tragic case history of Kirk Andrew Murphy. His story has been cited as evidence that the use of punitive behavioral therapy can prevent “sissy boys” from growing up gay. But Murphy’s family believes such “therapy” ultimately led to his suicide.
As a child, Murphy preferred playing with dolls and engaging in other stereotypically “girly” activities. Concerned that he was not “normal,” his mother took him to a young doctoral student at University of California-Los Angeles named George Rekers, who claimed to be able to prevent such boys from becoming gay.
Read more:
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Science + Faith = Truth = L O V E
“Coming Out” - March 1997 - Gay Catholic Priest/Pastor
For Protection of Children From
Lifelong Harmful Effects
Caused by Lethally Inhuman Influence
of
U n s u b s t a n t i a t e d
Antigay Social and Religious Norms
Complete Void of Ongoing Dialogue With Science Searching for Truth (per: John Paul II & Benedict XVI)
Forcing Children
Complete Void of Ongoing Dialogue With Science Searching for Truth (per: John Paul II & Benedict XVI)
Forcing Children
To Never Ever Fall In
L O V E
- - - Ella Fitzgerald - But Not For Me - - -
As
Displayed and Promoted
by
The Antigay Fundamentalists - Who Are The Majority of The Members of
The Antigay Fundamentalists - Who Are The Majority of The Members of
The Curia and Hierarchy
i.e.
Burke, Gądecki, Chaput, Sarah, Muller, etc., etc., etc.,
i.e.
Burke, Gądecki, Chaput, Sarah, Muller, etc., etc., etc.,
Holy Family Parish, Sparta, Michigan, USA
Fr. Marty Kurylowicz
No Highway In the Sky
James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, Glynis Johns,
No Highway In the Sky
I will explain, as I have written to many US politicians, how I handled this situation:
WELL-INFORMED CONSCIENCE
Protect Religious Freedom - but not
Tyranny in Religion
June 20, 2011
The way to begin for us all, not only the NY State Senators, to protect Religious Freedom and not Tyranny in Religion is by obtaining a well-informed conscience. We start by individually approaching and studying in great detail, because it involves the lives of children, from the best and the brightest (1) scripture scholars regarding the references related to homosexuality and (2) scientists in the field of study of human sexuality, in particular, but [not] limited to, the onset of sexual orientation. The prerequisite to the formation of a well-informed conscience is making a thorough study of all sides of the issue from all available authoritative data and research, including opposing views. Then in this way we are better equipped to decide who and what needs government protection in regards to the gay marriage bill. This exhaustive procedure follows to the letter the Gospel quotation about the “plank” and the” speck.”
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 6:42
The “plank” for us is ignorance. If we satisfactorily resolve this ignorance, then together we will be able to see more clearly, whether or not, as NY State Senators (government officials) and as citizens we are colluding with the Catholic Hierarchy and are harming children, as was found to be the case in the Ireland Murphy Report.
…This piece of legislation the gay marriage bill is not like any other in that it involves the well-being of children, at its very root…
How I resolved this situation was through hours upon hours of continuous prayer. Afterwards, I came to the realization that my life had already been altered – changed forever. Because there was no way I could pretend I did not know what I knew, how severely children are harmed for life by the Vatican unsubstantiated antigay teachings and antigay social norms. I decided that I could not live with the regret knowing that I had a chance to make a profound difference for the better for others, most especially children and that I did nothing. My life would be nothing. I took the bungee jump and I came out to my parishioners. It definitely was not easy, but one thing that happened to me is - I gained a real sense of peace and well-being that has remained constant and unshaken. The scripture passages that kept repeating over and over in my head were:
For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.
Matthew 16:25
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What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit their very self?
Luke 9:25
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Anyone who loves their FATHER or mother more than me is not worthy of me;… Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
Matthew 10:36-38
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…whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.
Matthew 18:6
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Written by
Fr Marty Kurylowicz
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Read more:
"FRUIT BOWL" - Vatican City - - - Synod 2015 - Burke’s Violence Against Gay People - “You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” - - - Apostolic Exhortation — KIDS ARE BEING HURT!!! THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2015
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Except for a small "untouchable" group of scientists and members of the hierarchy commissioned by Pope John Paul II who studied the science and theology on homosexuality during his papacy, until his death in 2005: the Roman curia or hierarchy has had absolutely - no dialogue with science regarding homosexuality - since 1957, when Dr. Evelyn Hooker’s empirical groundbreaking research was completed - dispelling the widespread belief that homosexuality was a mental illness, as fiercely promoted by US Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. McCarthy's national terrorizing witch-hunt for homosexuals in the US government - needlessly was destroying 10s of 1000s careers and lives of innocent people (http://abcnews.go.com/Health/lavender-scare-us-fired-thousands-gays-infamous-chapter/story?id=15848947). Dr. Hooker’s research found “…that homosexuality is N O T a mental disorder, as there was no detectable difference between homosexual and heterosexual men in terms of mental adjustment…(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Hooker).” Instead, for the past 6 decades - the curia and hierarchy have obsessively and ruthlessly silenced and removed anyone who openly discussed the emerging science homosexuality - - - that was until Pope Francis emphatically insisted on continuous open dialogue at the Synod on Family 2014.
Synod draft furthers ‘welcoming’ tone towards gay people from Pope Francis - October 14, 2014
A year ago, Pope Francis stunned the world by talking about gay men and lesbians and their relationships with the church with unheard-of compassion, respect and openness. But those were just the musings of a new pontiff in a magazine interview. Not the stuff of church policy. That’s why what was said about gay people in the first draft of the document on family by the Synod of Bishops gathering in Rome is being called “an earthquake.”
One sentence — “Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community” — sets the tone from a church hierarchy known for its harsh and negative judgment of gay men and lesbians. There were nods to unions between committed same-sex couples and the children in families with same-sex parents, even though they make a point of saying such unions “cannot be considered on the same footing as matrimony between man and woman.” I found interesting the use of “sexual orientation” instead of the sneering “sexual preference” favored by many of faith who firmly and falsely believe that being gay is a choice. What was more startling about the Synod draft was the word not used at all in relation to homosexuals or homosexuality: sin.
Welcoming homosexual persons
50. Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community: are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a fraternal space in our communities? Often they wish to encounter a Church that offers them a welcoming home. Are our communities capable of providing that, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?
51. The question of homosexuality leads to a serious reflection on how to elaborate realistic paths of affective growth and human and evangelical maturity integrating the sexual dimension: it appears therefore as an important educative challenge. The Church furthermore affirms that unions between people of the same sex cannot be considered on the same footing as matrimony between man and woman. Nor is it acceptable that pressure be brought to bear on pastors or that international bodies make financial aid dependent on the introduction of regulations inspired by gender ideology.
52. Without denying the moral problems connected to homosexual unions it has to be noted that there are cases in which mutual aid to the point of sacrifice constitutes a precious support in the life of the partners. Furthermore, the Church pays special attention to the children who live with couples of the same sex, emphasizing that the needs and rights of the little ones must always be given priority…
Read more
Prime Minister of Canada
Justin Trudeau to apologize for historic persecution of gay Canadians - August 12, 2016
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Pope Francis
Pope says Christians should apologize to gay people - June 26, 2016 Photo http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/26/world/pope-apologize-gays/
Church Should Apologize To Gays, Pope Francis Says- NPR - SYLVIA POGGIOLI - June 27, 2016 http://www.npr.org/2016/06/27/483665206/church-should-apologize-to-gays-pope-francis-says
Pope Francis - “f u n d a m e n t a l i s m
is an illness that is in all religions” November 30, 2015
is an illness that is in all religions” November 30, 2015
We are all children of God, we have the same father. And in this sense one must make a politics of unity, or reconciliation, and – though I do not like the word, but I must use it –tolerance. So, fundamentalism is an illness that is in all religions.
We Catholics have them, not a few but many, who think they have the absolute truth, and they go ahead throwing mud on others with calumny, defamation, and they do harm. I can say this because it is my church: also we, and we all. One must fight, because religious fundamentalism is not religious. Why? Because it lacks God. It is idolatry, just as money is idolatry. To do politics in the sense of convincing the people that have this tendency is a politics that we religious leaders must do. But fundamentalism that always ends in a tragedy or in crimes is a bad thing, but a piece of it comes in all religions…
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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,
‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’
when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?
You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye,
and then you will see clearly
to remove the speck from
your brother’s eye.
Matthew 7:3-5
ANTIGAY FUNDAMENTALISTS and
GAY PORNOGRAPHY
WHAT P L A N K ?
IN WHOSE E Y E ?
Is Homophobia Associated With Homosexual Arousal? 1996
…The results of this study indicate that individuals who score in the homophobic range and admit negative affect toward homosexuality demonstrate significant sexual arousal to male homosexual erotic stimuli…
PARENTING AND HOMOPHOBIA
Parental Autonomy Support and Discrepancies Between Implicit and Explicit Sexual Identities: Dynamics of Self-Acceptance and Defense - 2012
When individuals grow up with autonomy-thwarting parents, they may be prevented from exploring internally endorsed values and identities and as a result shut out aspects of the self perceived to be unacceptable. Given the stigmatization of homosexuality, individuals perceiving low autonomy support from parents may be especially motivated to conceal same-sex sexual attraction, leading to defensive processes such as reaction formation…
…Psychodynamic traditions hold that people have a preferred view of themselves, which may not reflect reality. When this idealized view is threatened by contradictory thoughts or feelings, people engage in one or more unconscious processes to defend against the threat to self. Among defensive processes that have been recognized as having some empirical support is reaction formation, a process indicated in the modern body of research on self-esteem preservation (e.g., Baumeister, Dale, & Sommer, 1998).
Reaction formation refers to the process of adopting values or beliefs, or engaging in behaviors, that are in opposition to feelings or impulses experienced within oneself that are deemed unacceptable. Empirical work has shown reaction formation processes with respect to sexism (Sherman & Garkin, 1980), sex guilt (Morokoff, 1985), and prejudice (Dutton & Lake, 1973), indicating that individuals sometimes defend against self-relevant, threatening information by engaging in opposing behaviors…
Read more: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cody_DeHaan/publication/221790068_Parental_Autonomy_Support_and_Discrepancies_Between_Implicit_and_Explicit_Sexual_Identities_Dynamics_of_Self-Acceptance_and_Defense/links/0f31752d7447a6e150000000.pdf?
The Eyes Have It: Sex and Sexual Orientation Differences in Pupil Dilation Patterns - August 3. 2012
…pupil dilation to stimuli indicates activation of the autonomic nervous system. This system is associated with many automatic processes such as perspiration, digestion, blood pressure, and heart rate. For this reason, pupil dilation has been used as indicator of automatic response, for example, in studies of implicit reaction and cognitive load. Other research suggests that pupil dilation can reflect automatic attention, or attention that is likely not in the conscious control of participants. It is therefore unlikely that participants suppress pupil dilation to stimuli they are sexually attracted to. Pupil dilation patterns could therefore reflect, with high sensitivity, automatic attention related to sexual attraction and sexual orientation… Photo
17 Antigay Leaders Exposed as Gay or Bi - January 27, 2016
The internet was buzzing in January when an editor at a gay website in Virginia wrote that he'd encountered an antigay Republican lawmaker while on Grindr, without naming the person. Not every antigay crackpot is actually gay, but there's no shortage of those who actually are. Here are some hypocrites who just couldn't practice what they preached…
Read more:
Given Uganda's homophobia, why does it lead the way in Googling gay porn? - 10 January 2014 - Is there a connection, then, between homophobia and suppressed homosexuality, along the lines of "me thinks he protesteth too much"? Is it that homosexual desires, when shut out because of some sense of shame, can easily express themselves as a form of homophobia? When the US conservative evangelical pastor Ted Haggard, well known for his anti-gay preaching, was discovered to have been paying a masseur for gay sex, he explained that "I think I was partially so vehement because of my own war". Freud coined the description "reaction-formation", in which anxiety-generating feelings are masked by an exaggerated reaction in the opposite direction. There is some experimental evidence to back this up, with one study showing that 20% of those who self-described as "highly straight" indicated some level of same-sex attraction. This discrepancy is often put down to highly controlling parents who do not allow their children room to explore their sexual identity.
Yes, of course, there are many people who do not experience same-sex attraction who are anti-gay. But one of the features of reaction-formation is its paranoia and lack of proportion. And this is precisely what the scaremongering nonsense about gay people being out to get our children – a common line in the Ugandan debate – clearly demonstrates. In conservative religious environments where God is depicted as a powerful all-controlling parent, it makes sense to me that this reaction-formation will be particularly strong… Photo
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/jan/10/uganda-homophobic-googling-gay-porn
GAY ADULT PORNOGRAPHY - and - SEXUAL REPRESSED HOMOSEXUALS & BISEXUALS
- | - RC’s Curia and Hierarchy Violent Reaction Formation - “The Machine of The Slime” and Antigay Crusade Continues - Exploiting Pope Benedict XVI - - - - KIDS ARE BEING HURT!!! - FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2016
Web Porn Searches Mock Anti-Gay Laws in Muslim World and Africa - March 28, 2013
Web users are defying legal bans on homosexuality to enjoy an array of gay pornography on their computers in countries where same-sex relations are prohibited.
Sex searches compiled by country reveal appetites for gay activity in African countries where homosexuals are stigmatised and hounded by the law.
In Iran, gay porn searches litter the top of the XXX search charts.
Porn searches in some countries revealed startling gaps between public social attitudes and private tastes, according to figures by PornMD.
In Kenya, homosexuality is a crime and an overwhelming 96 percent of Kenyans think it is unacceptable. Yet the second most popular search in the country was "gay monster cock".
Nigeria has similar homophobic attitudes woven in to its criminal justice system. However, web users there sought out "gay South African" on their computers and made it the fourth most popular search…
Read more:
Pakistan internet users top Google searches for gay sex despite being one of the world's most homophobic countries - 5 June 2013
Pakistan has the highest volume of internet searches for gay pornography despite being one of the least tolerant countries when it comes to homosexuality.
The most searches for terms related to same-sex acts came from a conservative stronghold, the city of Peshawar, rather than major cosmopolitan cities such as Lahore and Karachi, according to analysis of Google trends by Mother Jones…
Read more:
Above excerpts taken from:
FRIDAY, JUNE 3, 2016
M O R A L - R E A L I S M - - D é j à _V u -
V i o l e n c e Disguised As T R U T H - 1986 - 1997 - 2012 - 2014 - 2015
- Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived - Benedict XVI
- Welcoming gay people - Synod 2014 & 2015 - Where was the truth??? Where was the dialogue??? There was no love!!!
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Below excerpts taken from:
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2016
POPE FRANCIS - WE Christians must
A P O L O G I Z E to GAY PEOPLE for marginalizing them - June 26, 2016
ANTIGAY FUNDAMENTALISM - ISIS & Curia-Hierarchy - Gay Massacre Orlando ISIS - Deadliest Mass Shooting U.S. History - June 12, 2016
New Hope -> Cardinal Reinhard Marx - Church M U S T apologise to GAY PEOPLE, pope’s adviser declares - June 24, 2016
Cardinal Marx: Wants the Church to do M O R E than apologize to GAY people - - - Society must create structures to respect gay rights
June 28, 2016
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Pulse nightclub massacre - June 12, 2016
Officially, 49 people were killed by Mateen in the massacre that began around 2 a.m. Sunday. Another 53 were wounded. Six remained in critical condition Tuesday. Officials say some of the gravely wounded may die...
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Christians should apologize for helping to marginalize gays, pope says - June 26, 2016
…Spending close to an hour answering questions from reporters traveling with him, Pope Francis was asked to comment on remarks reportedly made a few days previously by Cardinal Reinhard Marx, president of the German bishops' conference, that the Catholic Church must apologize to gay people for contributing to their marginalization.
At the mention of the massacre in early June at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Pope Francis closed his eyes as if in pain and shook his head in dismay.
"The church must say it is sorry for not having behaved as it should many times, many times -- when I say the 'church,' I mean we Christians because the church is holy; we are the sinners," the pope said. "We Christians must say we are sorry."
Changing what he had said in the past to the plural "we," Pope Francis said that a gay person, "who has good will and is seeking God, who are we to judge him?"
The Catechism of the Catholic Church is clear, he said. "They must not be discriminated against. They must be respected, pastorally accompanied.”… Photo
Read more:
Pope says Christians should apologize to gay people - June 26, 2016
Pope Francis said Sunday that Christians should apologize to people who have been offended or exploited by the church, including gays and lesbians, in remarks that have quickly been hailed as historic.
"I repeat what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: that they must not be discriminated against, that they must be respected and accompanied pastorally,”…
…”I believe that the church not only should apologize to the person who is gay whom it has offended," he added, "but has to apologize to the poor, to exploited women, to children exploited for labor; it has to ask forgiveness for having blessed many weapons."
The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large of America magazine, called the Pope's apology to gays and lesbians "a groundbreaking moment."
"While St. John Paul II apologized to several groups in 2000 -- the Jewish people, indigenous peoples, immigrants and women, among them -- no pope has ever come close to apologizing to the LGBT community. And the Pope is correct of course. First, because forgiveness is an essential part of the Christian life. And second, because no group feels more marginalized in the church today than LGBT people."
The Pope's comments came in response to a question about a German Cardinal [Cardinal Reinhard Marx] who said the Catholic Church should apologize for being "very negative" about gays. The Pope was also asked, by the same journalist, whether Christians bear some blame for hatred toward the LGBT community, as horrifically demonstrated in the Orlando massacre at a gay night club that killed 49 people on June 12…
Cindy Wooden - Rome Bureau Chief, Catholic News Service - stated that -
Read more:
Deep Appreciation - for your honesty and healing words - Pope Francis - MSK
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Church must apologise to gay people, pope’s adviser declares - June 24, 2016
Cardinal Reinhard Marx: ‘We’ve done a lot to marginalise homosexuals’
A leading cardinal has said the Catholic Church should apologise to the gay community for its scandalous and terrible treatment of them, which had not changed until “very recently”.
Speaking in Dublin, Cardinal Reinhard Marx said: “The history of homosexuals in our societies is very bad because we’ve done a lot to marginalise [them].”
As church and society “we’ve also to say ‘sorry, sorry’ ”.
The German cardinal is a member of the council of nine cardinals chosen by Pope Francis to advise him.
Until “very recently”, the church, but also society at large, had been “very negative about gay people . . . it was the whole society. It was a scandal and terrible,” he told The Irish Times after speaking at a conference held in Trinity College.
He said he had “shocked” people at the October 2014 extraordinary synod of bishops in Rome when he asked how it was possible to dismiss as worthless a same-sex relationship of years duration where both men had been faithful.
“We have to respect the decisions of people. We have to respect also, as I said in the first synod on the family, some were shocked but I think it’s normal, you cannot say that a relationship between a man and a man and they are faithful [that] that is nothing, that has no worth,” he said…
Read more:
Amid criticism, Cardinal Marx supports synod's midterm report - October 17, 2014
…Cardinal Marx added that “the Church’s Magisterium is not a static collection of sentences, it is a development. Doctrine is in d i a l o g u e with pastoral care. Doctrine is evident, it does not depend on the signs of the times, but it can nevertheless be developed. We cannot change the Gospel. But we have not understood everything yet.”… http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/amid-criticism-cardinal-marx-supports-synods-midterm-report-26962/
Thank you very much - Cardinal Reinhard Marx - MSK
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June 19, 2016. It's been one week since the Pulse shootings claimed 50 lives. ...Orlando residents paused throughout the day — at a bar in the early morning hours, at morning church services and at an evening candlelight vigil in the heart of downtown — to remember the victims of the worse mass shooting in modern U.S. history, exactly a week later.
"We are hurting. We are exhausted, confused, and there is so much grief," said Larry Watchorn, a ministerial intern, during a sermon at Joy Metropolitan Community Church in Orlando, whose congregants are predominantly gay. "We come to have our tears wiped away and our strength renewed."
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'Angels' blocked anti-gay protesters from Orlando shooting victim's burial - June 19, 2016
Funerals for two of the 49 Orlando massacre victims took place amid anti-gay protesters and an impatient driver who cut through a funeral procession, injuring two deputies.
The four anti-gay protesters were from the homophobic Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church. They raised signs with anti-gay slogans outside the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, where services took place for Christopher Leinonen, who was one of those killed in the attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
Police formed a line between the Westboro protesters and the hundreds of funeral attendees, who included members of the LGBTQ community, priests, bikers, and locals.
The crowd cheered when members of Orlando's Shakespeare Theater wearing huge "angel wings" showed up to block out the Westboro protesters.
The wings, which measured eight feet across and rose three feet above their shoulders, were made of white cloth and plastic piping. Reuters reported that the wings first surfaced at the 1998 funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay student who was brutally murdered in Wyoming…
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Florida Catholic bishop: ‘It is religion, including our own,’ that targets LGBT people - June 13, 2016
Today I write with a heavy heart arising from the tragedy that occurred in the early morning hours of Sunday at a gay nightclub in Orlando, the neighbor to the east of my Diocese of St. Petersburg.
Yesterday, the best I could muster was to send these words by text message to my brother, Bishop John Noonan, bishop of Orlando: “John, I am so sorry. With love to and for all.” Today, with a new dawn, I again have some thoughts that I wish to share…
…Second, sadly it is religion, including our own, that targets, mostly verbally, and often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgender people. Attacks today on LGBT men and women often plant the seed of contempt, then hatred, which can ultimately lead to violence.
Those women and men who were mowed down Sunday were all made in the image and likeness of God. We teach that. We should believe that. We must stand for that.
Even before I knew who perpetrated the mass murders at Pulse, I knew that somewhere in the story there would be a search for religion as motivation. While deranged people do senseless things, all of us observe and judge and act from some kind of religious background. Singling out people for victimization because of their religion, their sexual orientation, their nationality must be offensive to God’s ears. It has to stop, too…
Will we ever learn? I hope so. But until the above three points are taken seriously by society, sadly, tragically, we can expect more Orlandos. May the souls of those faithful departed who met their God early Sunday rest in peace and those recovering from deep wounds heal, help and hope.
Robert Lynch is the bishop of St. Petersburg. This piece was originally published on his blog.
Read more:
Thank you - Bishop Robert Lynch - MSK
A letter from Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich expressing solidarity with the Catholic gay and lesbian community in that city, following the mass shooting in Orlando, was read prior to a Sunday night mass for the lay organization AGLO (Archdiocesan Gay and Lesbian Outreach).
Addressing the group as “Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,” Cupich wrote: “For you here today and throughout the whole lesbian and gay community, who are particularly touched by the heinous crimes committed in Orlando, motivated by hate, driven perhaps by mental instability and certainly empowered by a culture of violence, know this: the Archdiocese of Chicago stands with you. I stand with you.
“Let our shared grief and our common faith in Jesus, who called the persecuted blessed, unite us so that hatred and intolerance are not allowed to flourish, so that those who suffer mental illness know the support of a compassionate society, so that we find the courage to face forthrightly the falsehood that weapons of combat belong anywhere in the civilian population.”
According to a statement on the organization’s website, AGLOChicago was founded in 1988 “through the efforts of several members of Chicago LGBT community working together” with the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin “to provide a ministry of outreach.”
Cupich’s letter to the gay and lesbian community gathered for mass was separate from an earlier statement the archbishop released decrying the violence against gays and lesbians in Orlando, as well as the ongoing gun violence in the United States. “The people of the Archdiocese of Chicago stand with the victims and their loved ones and reaffirm our commitment, with Pope Francis, to address the causes of such tragedy, including easy access to deadly weapons," Cupich said. "We can no longer stand by and do nothing.”…
Read more: Photo
Thank you - Archbishop Blase Cupich - MSK
Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi
LGBT Community Mourns Orlando Attack, Boosts Security At Pride Events - June 12, 2016
With sorrow, anger and expressions of unity, the LGBT community across the world is mourning Sunday's deadly attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando. Meanwhile, security has been increased at LGBT landmarks and events in cities across America.
The attack — in which a gunman killed 50 people, making it the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, and injured 53 — struck during Pride Month, which commemorates the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the gay rights movement more broadly…
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Hundreds line up to donate blood to gay nightclub shooting victims - June 12, 2016
Officials at OneBlood say they have received such an overwhelming response that they are now asking donors to come back over the next several days.
More than 50 people were injured and 50 were killed when a gunman opened fire inside a gay nightclub in Orlando overnight.
In the hours after the worst mass shooting in US history, officials urged people to donate blood to help the victims…
Read more: https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/world/hundreds-line-up-donate-blood-gay-nightclub-shooting-victims
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I s l a m i c f u n d a m e n t a l i s m
Islamic fundamentalism (Arabic: الأصولية الإسلامية, al-oṣooleyyah al-eslaameyyah) has been defined variously as a movement of Muslims who harken back to earlier times and seek to return to the fundamentals of the religion and live similarly to how the prophet Muhammad and his companions lived. Islamic fundamentalists favor "a literal and originalist interpretation" of the primary sources of Islam (the Quran and Sunnah), and seek to eliminate (what they perceive to be) "corrupting" non-Islamic influences from every part of their lives,[3] and see "Islamic fundamentalism" as a pejorative term used by outsiders for Islamic revivalism and Islamic activism…
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Pope Francis - “f u n d a m e n t a l i s m is an illness that is in all religions” November 30, 2015
We are all children of God, we have the same father. And in this sense one must make a politics of unity, or reconciliation, and – though I do not like the word, but I must use it –tolerance. So, fundamentalism is an illness that is in all religions.
We Catholics have them, not a few but many, who think they have the absolute truth, and they go ahead throwing mud on others with calumny, defamation, and they do harm. I can say this because it is my church: also we, and we all. One must fight, because religious fundamentalism is not religious. Why? Because it lacks God. It is idolatry, just as money is idolatry. To do politics in the sense of convincing the people that have this tendency is a politics that we religious leaders must do. But fundamentalism that always ends in a tragedy or in crimes is a bad thing, but a piece of it comes in all religions…
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C h r i s t i a n f u n d a m e n t a l i s m
Christian fundamentalism began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries among British and American Protestants as a reaction to theological liberalism and cultural modernism. Fundamentalists argued that 19th-century modernist theologians had misinterpreted or rejected certain doctrines, especially biblical inerrancy, that they viewed as the fundamentals of Christian faith. A few scholars regard Catholics who reject modern theology in favor of more traditional doctrines as fundamentalists. Scholars debate how much the terms "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" are synonymous…
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F u n d a m e n t a l i s m
Fundamentalism usually has a religious connotation that indicates unwavering attachment to a set of irreducible beliefs. However, fundamentalism has come to apply to a tendency among certain groups—mainly, though not exclusively, in religion—that is characterized by a markedly strict literalism as applied to certain specific scriptures, dogmas, or ideologies, and a strong sense of the importance of maintaining ingroup and outgroup distinctions, leading to an emphasis on purity and the desire to return to a previous ideal from which advocates believe members have strayed. Rejection of diversity of opinion as applied to these established "fundamentals" and their accepted interpretation within the group is often the result of this tendency.
Depending upon the context, fundamentalism can be a pejorative rather than neutral characterization, similar to the ways that calling political perspectives "right-wing" or "left-wing" can, for some, have negative connotations…
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Pope Francis decries Orlando massacre and prays for victims - June 12, 2016
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis is shaken and saddened by the ‘homicidal folly and senseless hatred’ that has left at least 50 people dead in an attack on a nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
A statement released by the Holy See Press Office Director, Father Federico Lombardi SJ, on the Orlando massacre which has been described as the worst mass shooting in American history…
The terrible massacre that has taken place in Orlando, with its dreadfully high number of innocent victims, has caused in Pope Francis, and in all of us, the deepest feelings of horror and condemnation, of pain and turmoil before this new manifestation of homicidal folly and senseless hatred. Pope Francis joins the families of the victims and all of the injured in prayer and in compassion. Sharing in their indescribable suffering he entrusts them to the Lord so they may find comfort. We all hope that ways may be found, as soon as possible, to effectively identify and contrast the causes of such terrible and absurd violence which so deeply upsets the desire for peace of the American people and of the whole of humanity…
VaticanTerror in Orlando: 50 killed in shooting rampage at gay club; gunman pledged allegiance to ISIS - June 12, 2016
ORLANDO — The gunman who opened fire inside a crowded nightclub here early Sunday morning, launching a rampage that killed 50 people and injured 53 others in the deadliest shooting spree in the country’s history, had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State before the attack, according to U.S. law enforcement officials.
In a rampage that President Obama said the FBI was investigating as an act of terrorism, this gunman fired a barrage of bullets inside Pulse, a popular gay bar and dance club, forcing people to drop to the floor and rush out through a back entrance…
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50 killed in Florida nightclub, shooter pledged ISIS allegiance - June 12, 2016
CBS News: ISIS Claims Responsibility For Orlando Nightclub Attack That Left 50 Dead - June 12, 2106
ORLANDO, Fla. (CBSNewYork/AP) — A gunman wielding an assault-type rifle and a handgun opened fire inside a crowded Florida gay nightclub early Sunday before dying in a gunfight with SWAT officers, police said. The attack left at least 50 people dead, making it the worst mass shooting in American history.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has claimed responsibility for the shooting, CBS News reports. The terror group’s news organization, Aamaq Agency, said the attack was “carried out by an Islamic State fighter.”…
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ISIS Claims Responsibility for Attack at Orlando Gay Club, the Deadliest Mass Shooting in U.S. History - June 12, 2016
The Latest: American Muslim Leaders Condemn Nightclub Attack - June 12, 2016
American Muslim leaders are condemning the attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando that killed 50 people and wounded more than 50 others.
Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called the killings a hate crime and said the group has no tolerance for extremism of any kind.
A law enforcement official has said the gunman, Omar Mateen, called 911 from the nightclub and expressed allegiance to an Islamic State leader.
Awad says members of the LGBT community have stood with Muslims in the past and today they stand that community…
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Pulse DJ Saved Lives Behind His Booth as Gunfire Tore Into Club - June 12, 2016
Ray Rivera went from spinning records to saving lives in an instant.
Rivera, a.k.a. DJ Infinite, was the performer at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando where Omar Mateen shot more than 100 people, killing 50, in the worst mass shooting in American history. Just before 2 a.m. Riviera started playing reggae music to mellow out the crowd when he heard the first gunshots ring out.
“I thought it was someone lighting firecrackers,” Rivera told The Daily Beast. “So I turned the music down, and heard some more. I turned the music off.”
Mateen had opened fire with an AR-15-style assault rifle…
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The Toronto sign in front of city hall is lit up in honour of the victims of the Orlando attack. - June 12, 2016
Orlando shooting victims remembered in vigils across city, nation and world - June 12, 2016
Mourners across Orlando - as well as the nation and world - paused Sunday night to remember the 50 people killed and 53 injured in the Pulse nightclub shooting, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
So far, seven of the victims of gunman Omar Mateen's spree have been identifed: Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34 years old; Stanley Almodovar III, 23; Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, 20; Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22; Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36; Peter O. Gonzalez-Cruz, 22; Luis S. Vielma, 22; and Kimberly Morris, 37…
Braden Cowell, 27, of Orlando, also came to Ember for the vigil, bringing rainbow banners in a gesture of defiance against terror.
“If we don’t come out today and support our community, they win,” he said.
At Jones High School, just a few miles from Pulse, a vigil organized by the Experience Christian Center brought together seven pastors, “all sharing in prayer, different denominations all coming together for a common cause,” said Experience Senior Pastor Derrick McCrae.
“What prayer does is give direction,” McCrae said. “People find inner strength through a conversation with God. We want to see no division, and only see unity. We want to be mindful of what could happen to us at any point in life, but also be confident in who is keeping us.”…
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President Barack Obama called Sunday’s mass shooting at a gay club in Orlando, Florida, an “act of terror and an act of hate.” He added that while authorities have not reached a definitive judgement as to the shooter’s motivation, the FBI would be investigating the matter as an act of terrorism.
“What is clear, he was a person filled with hatred,” Obama said of the shooter, who was an American citizen. “Over the coming days we will uncover how and why this happened.”
“This could have been any one of our communities,” he said. “As a country, we will be there for the people of Orlando, today, tomorrow and for all the days to come.”
The president noted the shooting took place at an “especially heartbreaking” time during LGBT pride month. He said the place where it happened was more than a nightclub, but a “place of solidarity and empowerment” where people went to “raise awareness, to speak their minds and to advocate for their civil rights.”
“This is a sobering reminder that attacks on any American, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation, is an attack on all of us, and the fundamental values of equality and dignity that define us as a country,” he said. “No act of terror will change who we are or the values that make us Americans.”…
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President Obama calls Orlando shooting — deadliest in U.S. history — 'an act of terror and an act of hate' - June 12, 2016
President Obama delivered a sobering address Sunday afternoon in the aftermath of the horrific Orlando nightclub shooting — the worst in U.S. history — calling the brazen attack "an act of terror and an act of hate."
"As Americans we are united in our grief and our outrage and in our resolve to defend our people," he said in a brief and solemn statement from the White House.
"This is sobering reminder that attacks on any Americans, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation, is an attack on all of us and on the fundamental values of equality and dignity that define us as a country.”…
"As Americans we grieve the brutal murder, the horrific massacre of dozens of innocent people," Obama said during his address.
"We pray for their families, who are grasping for answers with broken hearts," he added. "We stand with the people of Orlando, who have endured a terrible attack on their city.”…
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Orlando Nightclub Shooting: Mass Casualties After Gunman Opens Fire in Gay Club - June 12, 2016
…Police initially said about 20 people were dead, but Orlando Police Chief John Mina said that once authorities were able to get into the club, many more victims were discovered. Mina called the attack "one of the worst tragedies we've seen."
Mina said a uniformed officer working extra duty initially traded gunfire with the shooter, who officials say was armed with at least two firearms.
"The officer engaged in a gun battle with that suspect. The suspect at some point went back inside the club, and more shots were fired. This did turn into a hostage situation," Mina said.
Officials decided "to go in on a rescue" just after 5 a.m. Mina said, adding that an officer was injured after being shot in the head.
"It appears his helmet saved his life," he said. "So he has an injury to his eye, but it looks like the bullet did hit his helmet."
Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings said the incident "could definitely be classified as domestic terrorism."
Florida Gov. Rick Scott traveled to Orlando on Sunday morning and declared a state of emergency in the city.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, families and all those affected by this horrific tragedy. We are a strong and resilient state and we will devote every resource available to assist with the shooting in Orlando," Scott said in a statement….
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‘Hamilton’ Star Pays Tribute to Orlando Victims at Tony Awards: ‘Love Cannot Be Killed’ (VIDEO) - June 12, 2016
Eiffel Tower
to light up for Orlando
The French capital will pay tribute to the massacre victims.
World pays tribute to Orlando shooting victims with vigils and rainbow flags - June 13, 2016
Vigils have been held around the world in solidarity with the victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting.
In London, venues along Old Compton Street, the heart of the capital’s gay community, stopped serving at 7pm on Monday and people were invited into the street. Heads were bowed for a minute before defiant cheers and applause greeted the release of dozens of balloons into the skies above Soho…
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Orlando gay club shooting: World pays tribute to victims with vigils and rainbow flags - June 14, 2016
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Hindu Family Shows Love for Gay Son with Amazing Wedding - 2016-06-01
Rishi Agarwal’s story is nothing especially new, but his happy ending is one that's spreading a message of tolerance and acceptance within a community that desperately needs it.
Agarwal was raised in a devout Hindu home in suburban Toronto by his parents Vijay and Sushma, who both emigrated there from India over 30 years ago. When Rishi came out to them in 2004, they were initially shocked and devastated.
But after opening themselves up and doing some research, the parents changed their opinion.
“There is a cultural kind of a stigma,” Vijay told The Toronto Star. "This is strictly our baggage, what we bring from India," said Rishi's mother Sushma. When their son asked them if he should move out of the house after coming out of the closet, they told him absolutely not, and that they still loved him…
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H o m o s e x u a l
S E L E C T I V E I N A T T E N T I O N
D i s s o c i a t i o n
Orlando shooter Omar Mateen was g a y, former classmate says - June 14, 2016
The FBI is investigating reports that Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen used gay dating apps and regularly visited Pulse before he shot more than 100 people inside, killing 49.
At least five people have come forward saying they saw Mateen at gay clubs, painting a complicated portrait of the American-born Muslim whom the FBI believes was radicalized by terrorist groups.
One former classmate of Omar Mateen’s 2006 police academy class told The Palm Beach Post that he believed Mateen was gay, saying Mateen once tried to pick him up at a bar.
The classmate said that he, Mateen and other classmates would hang out, sometimes going to gay nightclubs, after classes at Indian River Community College police academy. One night, he said Mateen asked him if he was gay. He said no, because he wasn’t telling people he was gay at the time…
…“He said, ‘Well if you were gay, you would be my type.’ I said OK and just went on with the night,” he said. “It was not anything too crazy, but I take that as a pick-up line.”
He believed Mateen was gay, but not open about it. Mateen was awkward, and for a while the classmate and the rest in the group of friends felt sorry for him…
Jim Van Horn, 71, told The Associated Press that Mateen was a regular at the club. “He was trying to pick up people. Men,” he said.
While acknowledging he didn’t know Mateen well, Van Horn said: “I think it’s possible that he was trying to deal with his inner demons, of trying to get rid of his anger of homosexuality.”…
...The Los Angeles Times reported that Mateen attended the Pulse nightclub possibly as many as a dozen times before the rampage. Kevin West said he had messaged Mateen back and forth over a year’s time on the gay dating app Jack’d but never met him until he saw Mateen crossing the street about 1 a.m. Sunday...
...The Los Angeles Times reported that Mateen attended the Pulse nightclub possibly as many as a dozen times before the rampage. Kevin West said he had messaged Mateen back and forth over a year’s time on the gay dating app Jack’d but never met him until he saw Mateen crossing the street about 1 a.m. Sunday...
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D i s s o c i a t i o n
S e l e c t i v e I n a t t e n t i o n
Jack Drescher, MD, 2004
What psychological mechanisms facilitate separating one's sexual identity from the rest of one's persona? Sullivan's (1956) concept of dissociation may be illuminating, particularly its most common aspect: selective inattention. A ubiquitous, nonpathological process, selective inattention makes life more manageable, like tuning out the background noise on a busy street. However, through dissociation of anxiety-provoking knowledge about the self, a whole double life can be lived and yet, in some ways, not be known. Clinical presentations of closeted gay people may lie somewhere in s e v e r i t y between selective inattention--most commonly seen in the case of homosexually self-aware patients thinking about "the possibility" that they might be gay--to more severe dissociation--in which any hint of same-sex feelings resides totally out of conscious awareness. More severe forms of dissociation are commonly observed in married men who are homosexually self-aware but cannot permit the thought of themselves as gay (Roughton, 2002)…
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17 Antigay Leaders Exposed as Gay or Bi - January 27, 2016
The internet was buzzing in January when an editor at a gay website in Virginia wrote that he'd encountered an antigay Republican lawmaker while on Grindr, without naming the person. Not every antigay crackpot is actually gay, but there's no shortage of those who actually are. Here are some hypocrites who just couldn't practice what they preached…
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Given Uganda's homophobia, why does it lead the way in Googling gay porn? - 10 January 2014
Is there a connection, then, between homophobia and suppressed homosexuality, along the lines of "me thinks he protesteth too much"? Is it that homosexual desires, when shut out because of some sense of shame, can easily express themselves as a form of homophobia? When the US conservative evangelical pastor Ted Haggard, well known for his anti-gay preaching, was discovered to have been paying a masseur for gay sex, he explained that "I think I was partially so vehement because of my own war". Freud coined the description "reaction-formation", in which anxiety-generating feelings are masked by an exaggerated reaction in the opposite direction. There is some experimental evidence to back this up, with one study showing that 20% of those who self-described as "highly straight" indicated some level of same-sex attraction. This discrepancy is often put down to highly controlling parents who do not allow their children room to explore their sexual identity.
Yes, of course, there are many people who do not experience same-sex attraction who are anti-gay. But one of the features of reaction-formation is its paranoia and lack of proportion. And this is precisely what the scaremongering nonsense about gay people being out to get our children – a common line in the Ugandan debate – clearly demonstrates. In conservative religious environments where God is depicted as a powerful all-controlling parent, it makes sense to me that this reaction-formation will be particularly strong…
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/jan/10/uganda-homophobic-googling-gay-porn
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ISIS, many of their enemies share a homicidal hatred of gays - CBS/AP - June 13, 2016
REYHANLI, Turkey - The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has frequently used the Islamic holy month of Ramadan - which is supposed to be for fasting and prayer - as an excuse to step up its slaughter of people it considers heretics.
Last year, ISIS supporters bombed a Shiite mosque in Kuwait and attacked tourists at a Tunisian beach resort, among other atrocities, during the holy month.
Last month, an ISIS leader put out a call for "a month of hurt" in the United States as well as Europe during Ramadan.
On Monday, the group called the Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen "one of the soldiers of the caliphate in America," and Mateen pledged allegiance to the group in a 911 call during the shooting. However there has been no evidence uncovered so far of a direct link between the shooter and the group's Mideast leaders.
Still, the Orlando nightclub massacre would fall in line with ISIS' goals, as the group has a history of targeting gays with brutal public killings…
The most recent, self-reported execution the terrorists undertook happened around May 7 of this year, according to OutRight. A "blindfolded young boy" can be seen in photos getting tossed off a roof and then pelted with stones after landing, with an audience of men and children taking part.
ISIS frequently reserves one of its most gruesome methods of killing for suspected gays -- throwing them to their death from building rooftops…
…Videos ISIS has released show masked militants dangling men over the precipices of buildings by their legs to drop them head-first or tossing them over the edge. At least 36 men in Syria and Iraq have been killed by ISIS militants on charges of sodomy, according to OutRight Action International, though its Middle East and North Africa coordinator, Hossein Alizadeh, said it was not possible to confirm the sexual orientation of the victims…
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ISIS stone 'gay' man to death after he survived being thrown off a roof - May 5, 2015
ISIS militants have released harrowing photographs of a gay man being stoned to death after he survived their first attempt at killing him.
Eleven men, one of them holding an Islamic State flag, held the blindfolded man at the top of a tall building, taking pictures on mobile phones before throwing their victim off the roof.
The killing, which supposedly took place in Raqqua, Syria – although other sources say it happened somewhere in Iraq – was watched by a large crowd.
A picture showing the man half way to earth circulated on Twitter over the weekend, with images of the injured man lying on the ground following soon.
The victim survived the fall but, badly injured and unable to defend himself, was killed by men, some of them armed, from the crowd who were queueing up to throw rocks’, according to the Daily Mail.
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ISIS throw 4 more gay men to their deaths - 5 October 2015
Executions were carried out in two Iraqi cities over the weekend
Islamic State (ISIS) militants executed four more gay men in Iraq over the weekend.
Two young men were thrown off the roof a building in Mosul under the pretext they were a gay couple.
‘On Sunday afternoon, Daesh called on the people of Mosul to gather in the square of Bab al-Toub in order to witness the execution of the two allegedly men,’ an eyewitness told ARA News.
‘The victims were taken to the top of a building and were brutally thrown off the roof.’
Also on Sunday, the Terror Monitor group tweeted photos of a separate execution of two ‘gay’ men, who were thrown from a building in Ninevah into a pile of cement blocks.
The photos show an imam reading out their sentence and large crowd of spectators:
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Islamic State group targets gays with brutal public killings - June 13, 2016
The Associated Press is reproducing an article on IS treatment of gays that initially ran on Dec. 2 and was part of a 2015 AP series of stories, “Inside the Caliphate,” which explored life under Islamic State rule…
Read more: http://wtop.com/middle-east/2016/06/islamic-state-group-targets-gays-with-brutal-public-killings-2/
In this picture posted on a social media account affiliated with the Islamic State group on June 14, 2015, IS militants stone a man accused of violating the extremists' ban on homosexuality after they threw him from a roof in the city of Homs, Syria. One witness of such a killing in Syria described to The Associated Press how the victim pleaded with militants to shoot him in the head rather than drop him from a nearby four-story building. (militant photo via AP) Photo
Islamic State group publicly killing gays in Syria and Iraq to show its 'ideological purity’ - December 2, 2015
REYHANLI, Turkey (AP) — Before a crowd of men on a street in the Syrian city of Palmyra, the masked Islamic State group judge read out the sentence against the two men convicted of homosexuality: They would be thrown to their deaths from the roof of the nearby Wael Hotel.
He asked one of the men if he was satisfied with the sentence. Death, the judge told him, would help cleanse him of his sin.
"I'd prefer it if you shoot me in the head," 32-year-old Hawas Mallah replied helplessly. The second man, 21-year-old Mohammed Salameh, pleaded for a chance to repent, promising never to have sex with a man again, according to a witness among the onlookers that sunny July morning who gave The Associated Press a rare first-hand account.
"Take them and throw them off," the judge ordered. Other masked extremists tied the men's hands behind their backs and blindfolded them. They led them to the roof of the four-story hotel, according to the witness, who spoke in the Turkish city of Reyhanli on condition he be identified only by his first name, Omar, for fear of reprisals.
Notorious for their gruesome methods of killing, the Islamic State group reserves one of its most brutal for suspected homosexuals. Videos it has released show masked militants dangling men over the precipices of buildings by their legs to drop them head-first or tossing them over the edge. At least 36 men in Syria and Iraq have been killed by IS militants on charges of sodomy, according to the New York-based OutRight Action International, though its Middle East and North Africa coordinator, Hossein Alizadeh, said it was not possible to confirm the sexual orientation of the victims.
The fear of a horrific death among gay men under Islamic State rule is further compounded by their isolation in a deeply conservative society that largely shuns them…
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Blindfolded, bound and thrown off buildings … inside the ISIS Sharia court’s treatment of homosexuals - 2nd December 2015
…“They are violating God’s laws and doing something that is forbidden in Islam, so this is a legitimate punishment,” said Hajji Mohammed, a resident of the
IS-held northern Iraqi city of Mosul. There the group has thrown men suspected of being gay off the Insurance Building, a landmark about 10 stories high.
…By employing the grisly method of execution, the Islamic State group aims to show to radicals that it is unflinchingly carrying out the most extreme strains in Islam — a sort of “ideological purity” which the group boasts distinguishes it even from other militants. The punishment “will protect the Muslims from treading the same rotten course that the West has chosen to pursue,” IS proclaimed in its online English-language magazine Dabiq…
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Isis has killed at least 25 men in Syria suspected of being gay, group claims - Tuesday 5 January 2016
Figures revealed as reports emerged of a teenager in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor was thrown to his death
At least 25 people have been murdered in Syria by the so-called Islamic State for being gay, a UK-based monitoring group has told the Independent.
Amid reports of a 15-year-old boy being thrown from the rooftop of a high-rise building in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor - seemingly the latest victim of the Islamist group's brutal crackdown - the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told The Independent that dozens of men had been killed by Isis jihadists.
Six have been stoned to death, three killed from direct shooting to the head and 16 thrown from high-rise buildings. Those that survived the fall, the group added, were then stoned on the streets below by scores of bystanders. Two of those killed were under 18.
It is alleged that the man who raped the 15-year-old, a senior Isis officer called Abu Zaid al-Jazrawi, was spared execution.
Instead, he faced a demotion and was forced to leave Syria and join the fighting fronts in north-western Iraq.
“The horrific execution took place in front of large crowd,” said Sarai al-Din, a local media activist who witnessed the murder, told Syrian news agency ARA.
Speaking to the news agency, civil rights activist Rawd Ahmed, said: “Daesh (another name for Isis) accuses people of being gay only on the basis of some superficial information without any investigation. Although the Islamic law bans homosexuality, the brutal punishment by Daesh has never been witnessed throughout history.”
Footage of terrified men in blindfolds being escorted to the rooftops of high-rise buildings and then being thrown to their death has become commonplace. It has led human rights groups to become increasingly concerned that this extreme violence is inspiring other militias in the war-torn region to attack men they suspect of being gay…
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Study: Islamic fundamentalism is not a marginal phenomenon in Europe - January 16, 2015
Last week's attacks in Paris, committed in the name of a god, reopen a badly-healed scar in Europe. The world once again turns towards religious fundamentalism. A new study shows that hostility towards other out-groups is not an isolated phenomenon among Muslims living in Europe; but nor is it a synonym of violence. According to the author of the study, Ruud Koopmans, director of the WZB Berlín Social Science Centre (Germany), "Islam is not the problem”…
…Although violence does not necessarily form part of this ideology, hostility towards other out-groups including homosexuals, Jews, and Westerners (in the case of Muslims) or Muslims (in the case of Christians) is evident. As a whole, Muslims are shown to be more hostile towards the three out-groups mentioned above, with between 25% and 30% rejecting these groups. Christian hostility is not as much as 5%.
However, independently, Christian fundamentalists show greater hostility towards Muslims (more than 50%) and towards Jews (between 30 and 35% of Christian fundamentalists were revealed to be hostile). In the case of Islamic fundamentalists, more than 70% of followers feel hostility towards homosexuals, Jews and Westerners.
Religious fundamentalism is closely linked to hostility towards other out-groups," says Koopmans. But social and economic levels also have a bearing. Individuals with a high social and economic status are more tolerant and less xenophobic…
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Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, IPA /ˈaɪsᵻl/), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria[note 1] (ISIS, /ˈaɪsᵻs/),[31] and by its Arabic language acronym Daesh (داعش dāʿish, IPA: [ˈdaːʕiʃ]), is a Salafi jihadist militant group that follows an Islamic fundamentalist, Wahhabi doctrine of Sunni Islam…
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ISIS stands for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and is an extremist militant group that rules by Wahhabi/Salafi law. In Arabic, the group is also known as Daesh. An example of ISIS is the terrorist group that is known for kidnapping western journalists and aid workers as part of their tactics.
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Pope Francis blasts religious fundamentalism - September 14, 2015
As news of Muslim fundamentalists killing Christians continues to come out of Syria and Iraq - and Christian extremists murdering Muslims in the Central African Republic - Pope Francis has come out to decry the killings, saying that no religion is immune to extremism.
“In any confession, there’s a small group of fundamentalists whose job is to destroy for the sake of an idea, not a reality,” Francis said in an interview with the Argentinian radio station Milenium.
“God in Judaism, in Christianity, in Islam, accompanies his people,” he said. “God is a God who comes close to us. [But] fundamentalists take God away from his people, disembodying him. In the name of that ideologist God, they kill, attack, destroy, slander.”…
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Pope Francis urges world religions to fight extremism, fundamentalism - October 28, 2015
Catholicism can and must change, Francis forcefully tells Italian church gathering - November 10, 2015
FLORENCE, ITALY Pope Francis has strongly outlined anew a comprehensive vision for the future of the Catholic church, forcefully telling an emblematic meeting of the entire Italian church community here that our times require a deeply merciful Catholicism that is unafraid of change…
Francis said Catholics must realize: "We are not living an era of change but a change of era."
"Before the problems of the church it is not useful to search for solutions in conservatism or fundamentalism in the restoration of obsolete conduct and forms that no longer have the capacity of being significant culturally," the pontiff said at one point during his remarks.
"Christian doctrine is not a closed system incapable of generating questions, doubts, interrogatives -- but is alive, knows being unsettled, enlivened," said the pope. "It has a face that is not rigid, it has a body that moves and grows, it has a soft flesh: it is called Jesus Christ."
"The reform of the church then, and the church is semper reformanda ... does not end in the umpteenth plan to change structures," he continued. "It means instead grafting yourself to and rooting yourself in Christ, leaving yourself to be guided by the Spirit -- so that all will be possible with genius and creativity.”…
Read more:
Pope Francis continues his critique of religious fundamentalism - Dec. 3, 2015
…”In the Catholic church we have some -- many -- who believe they possess the absolute truth and they go on sullying others through slander and defamation and this is wrong. Religious fundamentalism must be combated. It is not religious, God is lacking, it is idolatrous.” http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/pope-francis-continues-his-critique-religious-fundamentalism
Pope’s Press Conference on Flight from Bangui to Rome (Unofficial Transcript) - Nov. 30, 2015
…We are all children of God, we have the same father. And in this sense one must make a politics of unity, or reconciliation, and – though I do not like the word, but I must use it –tolerance. So, fundamentalism is an illness that is in all religions.
We Catholics have them, not a few but many, who think they have the absolute truth, and they go ahead throwing mud on others with calumny, defamation, and they do harm. I can say this because it is my church: also we, and we all. One must fight, because religious fundamentalism is not religious. Why? Because it lacks God. It is idolatry, just as money is idolatry. To do politics in the sense of convincing the people that have this tendency is a politics that we religious leaders must do. But fundamentalism that always ends in a tragedy or in crimes is a bad thing, but a piece of it comes in all religions…
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Pope: Those who say “this or nothing” are heretics not Catholics - 09/06/2016
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis warned on Thursday against an excessive rigidity, saying those within the Church who tell us “it’s this or nothing” are heretics and not Catholics. His remarks came during the morning Mass on Thursday celebrated at the Santa Marta residence.
In his homily the Pope reflected on the harm caused by Churchmen who do the opposite of what they preach and urged them to free themselves from a rigid idealism that prevents reconciliation between each other.
Taking his cue from Jesus’ warning to his disciples that unless their righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees they will not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, Pope Francis stressed the importance of Christian realism. Jesus, he said, asks us to go beyond the laws and love God and neighbour, stressing that whoever is angry with their brother will be liable to judgement…
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Pope: Avoid 'heresy' of rigid faith & settle differences - 10 June, 2016
ROME (Christian Examiner) – In another dialogue that is sure to infuriate his conservative critics, Pope Francis warned Thursday that Catholics must avoid a rigid faith and disputes over doctrine or personal issues, Vatican Radio has reported.
Francis said in the address that Catholics should consider how Jesus looked beyond a rigid faith to generosity and holiness to care for others. Such a practice, the leader of Catholics worldwide said, frees Christians from the "idealism" that harms relationships.
"This (is the) healthy realism of the Catholic Church: the Church never teaches us 'this or that.' That is not Catholic," Francis said. "The Church says to us: 'this and that.' 'Strive for perfectionism; reconcile with your brother. Do not insult him. Love him. And if there is a problem, at the very least settle your differences so that war doesn't break out.' This [is] the healthy realism of Catholicism.”...
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Pope Francis: A ‘my-way-or-the-highway’ faith is heretical - June 9, 2016
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Francis has called on Catholics to adopt a “healthy realism” in their approach to their faith, and he decried rigid idealists as heretics.
Speaking during morning Mass on Thursday (June 9), Francis told congregants at the chapel in the Vatican guesthouse to try their best to seek reconciliation with others rather than pushing strict rules and a “take-it-or-leave-it” style of evangelism…
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FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2016
CURIA’S & HIERARCHY’S Heteronomous Morality | Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived - Benedict XVI - - Welcoming gay people - Synod 2014 & 2015 - Where was the truth??? Where was the dialogue??? There was no love!!! - 1st Posted - APRIL 7, 2016 | Revised & Updated 4/30/16
Excerpts:
Moral realism is associated with "objective responsibility", which is valuing
the letter of the law above
the purpose of the law.
Jean Piaget
Oct 14, 2014 - Excerpt:
Welcoming homosexual persons
Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community...
...homosexual unions it has to be noted that there are cases in which mutual aid to the point of sacrifice constitutes a precious support in the life of the partners. Furthermore, the Church pays special attention to the children who live with couples of the same sex, emphasizing that the needs and rights of the little ones must always be given priority...
H e t e r o n o m o u s P h a s e
Secret Letter Allegedly Sent To Pope Francis By Conservative Cardinals Fuels Speculations At Vatican Synod - 10/12/15
…In the letter, the senior churchmen said that if the reformers succeeded in changing the church’s approach to modern families it could send the Catholic Church down the path of Protestant denominations that abandoned “key elements of Christian belief and practice in the name of pastoral adaptation.”
…The mystery also fueled intrigue about the three-week meeting, called a synod. It also spotlighted increasingly bold efforts by traditionalists to thwart any changes to church doctrine or practices, in particular proposals to allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion.
…as well as efforts to make the church more open to cohabiting couples and gays and lesbians — has become a focus and flashpoint for the wide-ranging synod of 270 bishops from around the world.
…This fall’s gathering follows a previous synod that Francis convened here last October as part of his effort to foster dialogue within the hierarchy and to discuss possible reforms to pastoral practices (though not necessarily doctrines) that could make the church more welcoming and inclusive.
Yet raising the specter of any change set off alarm bells for conservatives who have been lobbying fiercely, in public and behind the scenes, to ensure that the synod acts to remove any doubts about the possibility of changing church teachings or policies…
Read more:
Opposition to Pope Francis Comes Out of the Closet - December 4, 2015
…First up is Cardinal Raymond Burke’s recent op-ed in the National Catholic Register. The flamboyant cardinal uses the old trick of attacking someone close to the pope, rather than the pope directly, in this instance, Father Antonio Spadaro, S.J. Fr. Spadaro had written that the synod opened a door toward the divorced and remarried. +Burke replies: “The fact is that the synod could not open a door which does not exist and cannot exist, namely, a discernment in conscience which contradicts the truth about the supreme sanctity of the Most Holy Eucharist and the indissolubility of the marriage bond.” Who said anything about “contradicting” the truth? The contradiction – and it is only an apparent one to us poor humans who have more theological work to do – is between “the truth” about marriage and the Eucharist and “the truth” about God’s mercy and, relatedly, “the truth” about the practice of our sister Churches of the East. But, Cardinal Burke expects everyone to use his lens, his weighting of the issues, his sense of what is, and is not, possible. Someone needs to tell him that he was not elected pope in 2013…
Above excerpts taken from:
FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2016
CURIA’S & HIERARCHY’S Heteronomous Morality | Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived - Benedict XVI - - Welcoming gay people - Synod 2014 & 2015 - Where was the truth??? Where was the dialogue??? There was no love!!! - 1st Posted - APRIL 7, 2016 | Revised & Updated 4/30/16
WHAT P L A N K ?
IN WHOSE E Y E ?
IN WHOSE E Y E ?
C U R I A & H I E R A R C H Y
Collective Homosexual D i s s o c i a t i o n
S E L E C T I V E I N A T T E N T I O N
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, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?
You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye,
and then you will see clearly
to remove the speck from
your brother’s eye.
Matthew 7:3-5
H o m o s e x u a l
S E L E C T I V E I N A T T E N T I O N
D i s s o c i a t i o n
D i s s o c i a t i o n
Archbishop Chaput blasts Vatican debate on family, says 'confusion is of the devil’ - October 21, 2014
NEW YORK Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput says he was "very disturbed" by the debate over church teachings on gays and remarried Catholics at this month's Vatican summit, saying it sent a confusing message, and "confusion is of the devil.”…
Francis convened the synod as part of a two-year discussion on the Catholic church's response to rapid changes in modern family dynamics. Media attention focused on proposals that would push the church to be more welcoming to gay Catholics, and to cohabiting couples and the divorced and remarried, who are currently barred from receiving Communion.
An interim report on the closed-door discussions included calls for the church to reject an all-or-nothing approach to families in "irregular" situations, such as those who are divorced or living together without being married.
The midpoint report also said there were "positive elements" in those relationships, as well as in the love between gay couples, and it said gay Catholics have "gifts and qualities" to offer the church and should be welcomed.
Such language, even if not final or official, was unprecedented for church leaders, and it prompted a media tsunami. It also upset conservative churchmen at the synod, and they spent the second week engaged in a concerted effort to water down that language for the final report.
They largely succeeded, though Francis said the church's approach to gays and lesbians, and to divorced and remarried Catholics, should continue to be debated…
Read more:
Burke: Church under Francis is a 'ship without a rudder’ - October 31, 2014
VATICAN CITY American Cardinal Raymond Burke, the feisty former archbishop of St. Louis who has emerged as the face of the opposition to Pope Francis' reformist agenda, likened the Roman Catholic church to "a ship without a rudder" in a fresh attack on the pope's leadership…
When the synod signaled a more welcoming tone to gay and lesbian Catholics, Burke publicly accused the global gathering of bias and was among those who pushed for a less conciliatory approach in the final report.
Burke had previously said that Catholic families should not expose children to the "evil" of homosexuality by inviting a gay son home for Christmas with his partner.
In his latest interview, Burke said the church was "the pillar of marriage" and challenged the pope's revolutionary "Who am I to judge?" remark on gay people…
Read more:
Cardinal Burke: Gays, remarried Catholics, and murderers are all the same - March 27, 2015
...The cardinal also blamed gay clergy for the church's sexual abuse crisis, saying priests "who were feminized and confused about their own sexual identity" were the ones who molested children...
Cardinal Raymond Burke: ‘Feminized’ church and altar girls caused priest shortage - January 7, 2015
...In the interview, Burke also blamed gay clergy for the church’s sexual abuse crisis, saying priests “who were feminized and confused about their own sexual identity” were the ones who molested children.
Researchers have disputed that claim, and experts note that the reported rise in the number of gay men entering the priesthood since the 1980s coincided with a sharp drop-off in abuse cases…
Read more:
European church gears up for battle at Vatican's family synod - Gadecki - Ignorance & Lack of Charity - June 20, 2015
…The president of the Polish Episcopal Conference, Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki of Poznan, chaired the meeting and used his keynote speech to denounce a litany of modern-day ills, including same-sex unions, divorce and contraception.
He warned against "modifying the church's discipline" for those in unmarried relationships, and urged "people with homosexual tendencies" to undergo therapy and not expect pastoral help…
Part 2 - OBEDIENT to WHOM??? - Fr. Marty Kurylowicz’s 1997-2015 Protecting Gay Children - vs. - Burke’s Hysterical Antigay Demagoguery - JULY 7, 2015
Orlando victims named as tributes flow around the world - June 13, 2016
The city of Orlando on Monday released the names of some of those killed in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
More names were added throughout the day to the list once their next of kin were notified. Those identified are:
• Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34 years old
• Stanley Almodovar III, 23 years old
• Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, 20 years old
• Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22 years old
• Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36 years old
• Peter O. Gonzalez-Cruz, 22 years old
• Luis S. Vielma, 22 years old
• Kimberly Morris, 37 years old
• Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30 years old
• Darryl Roman Burt II, 29 years old
• Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32 years old
• Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21 years old
• Anthony Luis Laureanodisla, 25 years old
• Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35 years old
• Franky Jimmy Dejesus Velazquez, 50 years old
• Amanda Alvear, 25 years old
• Martin Benitez Torres, 33 years old
• Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37 years old
• Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26 years old
• Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, 35 years old
• Gilberto Ramon Silva Menendez, 25 years old
• Simon Adrian Carrillo Fernandez, 31 years old
• Oscar A. Aracena-Montero, 26 years old
• Enrique L. Rios Jr., 25 years old
• Miguel Angel Honorato, 30 years old
• Javier Jorge-Reyes, 40 years old
• Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32 years old
• Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19 years old
• Cory James Connell, 21 years old
• Juan P. Rivera Velazquez, 37 years old
• Luis Daniel Conde, 39 years old
• Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33 years old
• Juan Chevez-Martinez, 25 years old
• Jerald Arthur Wright, 31 years old
• Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25 years old
• Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25 years old
• Jonathan Antonio Camuy Vega, 24 years old
• Jean C. Nives Rodriguez, 27 years old
• Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala, 33 years old
• Brenda Lee Marquez McCool, 49 years old
• Yilmary Rodriguez Sulivan, 24 years old
• Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32 years old
• Angel L. Candelario-Padro, 28 years old
• Frank Hernandez, 27 years old
• Paul Terrell Henry, 41 years old
• Antonio Davon Brown, 29 years old
• Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz 24 years old
• Akyra Monet Murray, 18 years old
“We will not be defined by the act of a cowardly hater,” Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said at a Monday morning press conference.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott called Orlando a “melting pot” of 20 million people who will take care of their family members…
Meanwhile, tributes to the victims poured in from cities in the U.S. to Berlin, Germany, and Seoul, South Korea.
June is LGBT Pride Month, and some pre-planned events turned to remembrances for the Pulse nightclub attendees. Thousands gathered in Miami Beach; Chicago; New York; Austin, Texas, and elsewhere.
“Love is stronger than hate,” said the Rev. Amanda Henderson, director of the Interfaith Alliance at a vigil in Denver. “The voices that seek to divide us will not work.”…
Read more:
Above excerpts taken from:
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2016
http://fathermartykurylowicz.blogspot.com/2016/06/cardinal-marx-society-must-create_29.html
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Injustice anywhere is a
threat to
Justice everywhere
Martin Luther King
The Nobel Peace Prize 1964
Martin Luther King Jr.
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!!!
“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.”
Important note: No disrespect meant to Pope Benedict XVI or the hierarchy, the one and only concern is the safety and well-being of children.
Kids Are Being Hurt!!!
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