Mar
10
“Neither shalt thou steal.”
Obviously, the good pastor heading up Raleigh’s Christian Action League forgot that morsel of divine revelation when he disregarded my publisher’s copyright notice on the bottom of our website and in the pub box of our print edition and copied and pasted my Feb. 20 Editor’s Note from QNotes into his March 9 “Urgent Action Alert.”
For the record, QNotes‘ website states: “Copyright 1986-2010 Pride Publishing & Typesetting, Inc., Charlotte, N.C.”
Our print edition states: “Material in QNotes is copyrighted by Pride Publishing & Typesetting © 2010 and may not be reproduced in any manner without written consent of the editor.”
Poor Creech. His organization is going so broke so quickly he’s resorting to even more picking and choosing from the Bible. It’s a shame really. I never pictured teetotaler Creech as the “Cafeteria Christian” type on matters so simple as theft. Usually, anti-gay fundamentalists reserve their picky eating habits for their gay hating tastes.
Read what Creech has to say below the fold… Get the whole story »
Mar
04
On Feb. 25, I was honored to participate in a forum with North Carolina businessman and Faith in America founder Mitchell Gold and Faith in America executive director Brent Childers at a small gay bar/lounge here in Charlotte. Usually, politics and religion don’t go well with bars, but it was a great and attentive crowd — we couldn’t have asked for better. We were able discuss issues addressed in Gold’s book, “CRISIS: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social, and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay In America,” to which both Brent and I also contributed.
Before that later evening event, Mitchell Gold was a special guest of Campus Pride and local LGBT youth support group Time Out Youth at Myers Park Baptist Church. There, a little more than 100 folks turned out to hear Gold speak about his book, his experience growing up as a gay youth and issues of anti-LGBT, religion-based bigotry and prejudice.
A day before the event, I spoke to Campus Pride executive director Shane Windmeyer and asked if it would be appropriate to invite to the Myers Park lecture the editor of Voice of Revolution, a Charlotte-area online magazine run by anti-LGBT theologian and activist Dr. Michael Brown. (You can read my previous, in-depth Special Report on Brown here.)
Get the whole story »
Feb
23
Back at the beginning of February I became amused by the swirling controversy after the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) accepted a sponsorship and participation from GOProud, a Log Cabin Republicans splinter group for LGBT Republicans and conservatives. Some folks praised CPAC’s inclusion of the group. Others, like Liberty University’s Law School, condemned it. In fact, Liberty Law pulled out of the CPAC event altogether, deciding instead to host their own two day conference/symposium in Lynchburg, Va.
Liberty’s legal symposium — entitled “Homosexual Rights and First Amendment Freedoms: Can They Truly Coexist?” — featured speakers such as ex-gay leader Alan Chambers of Exodus International; Julie Harren-Hamilton, president of the so-called National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuals; rabidly anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” defender Elaine Donnelly and a host of academics and scholars from Liberty University and other right-wing “schools.”
All of this didn’t really surprise me. Liberty’s decision to pull out of the conference was just par for the course. But, I kept thinking as the news rolled out that these gay Republicans, trying so desperately to fit in where they aren’t wanted (dead or alive), was just kind of sad. Get the whole story »
Feb
03
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man it is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity it is the middle ground between light and shadow between science and superstition and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge this is the dimension of imagination it is an area which we call- the Twilight Zone.
And for many, although not all, LGBT Republicans, that’s exactly where they find themselves.
DC Agenda’s Chris Johnson reports today on further developments with GOProud’s sponsorship of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). GOProud, an offshoot of the more LGBT-focused Log Cabin Republicans, has come under fire by conservative activists and organizations for their involvement in and co-sponsorship of the event, which takes place this month in Washington, D.C. When calls for CPAC to rescind the GOProud co-sponsorship were ignored, the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University’s Law School announced it would boycott the conference. Get the whole story »
Jan
09
If the LGBT community ever hopes to win equality on issues such as marriage, we will have to start facing the issue of religion and using to our advantage.
That’s the gist of what I wrote back in November on Bilerico.com, in a post entitled, “For marriage victories, we must face and use religion.”
For a lot of LGBT folks, religion is sticky issue. We’ve spent years of our own lives reconciling ourselves with the faith of our childhoods. Many of our churches, synogogues, and other spaces of worship have rejected us and hurt us deeply. Our relationships with the divine have been repeatedly torn to shreds, and we have been the ones left to patch the quilt back up.
As a movement, we’ve spent years insisting on a separation of church and state. We’ve repeated time-and-time again that personal religious views should not be used to keep us from equality.
We’ve lost 31 times in a row. Get the whole story »
Dec
12
Dr. Michael Brown, founder of several Charlotte-area ministries including the activist Coalition of Conscience, says he has “serious concerns” about the anti-gay Ugandan law that would punish homosexuality by death.
His statement was emailed to me as I was writing an article on the subject for Q-Notes. Despite his “concern,” his statement falls far short of a outright condemnation of the law. More below the fold…
Get the whole story »
Dec
07
Sing with me… It’s that time of year, when I sit at my desk and research the year, sifting through… o-old stories of important ga-ay news!
I was in the office late last night putting our Dec. 12 print issue of Q-Notes to bed. I wanted to get in the office and start work on our last issue of the year. Our Dec. 26 print issue will include a run-down of the LGBT Carolinas’ most important news and happenings over the past year, as well as a profile on Q-Notes‘ Person of the Year 2009.
This will be my third “retrospective,” year-end issue since joining the staff in the fall of 2007. As with the previous two years, I’m looking forward to and will enjoy sifting through each of the preceding 25 issues of this year’s papers.
Get the whole story »
Nov
30
There’s a lot of talk here recently over a proposed anti-gay death penalty law in Uganda. Activists and news organizations have linked the legislation’s Ugandan proponents to several high-profile American religious leaders and politicians.
The law, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009, would make gay sex a crime punishable by death. The legislation has been endorsed by Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa, a man invited to speak at Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church and “embraced warmly” by Warren and his wife.
Jeff Sharlet, author of an exposé on the secretive American group, “The Family,” has linked the Ugandan legislation’s mastermind, David Bahati, back to the ultra-conservative group.
Get the whole story »
Nov
27
For the past few weeks I’ve been on an activism-through-journalism swing over at my day job. In a two-part, pre- and post-election opinion column, I ranted and raved over the lack of LGBT equality and recognition in Charlotte, North Carolina’s largest city.
In the column prior to Election Day, I wrote:
I’ve lived in North Carolina my entire life and I’ve visited all of its largest cities. I’d been to Chapel Hill numerous times, but the IGLTA Fam Tour was the first time I’d experienced the town as an adult and outside of the university bubble. While there, I felt completely comfortable, warmly embraced and unconditionally welcomed and accepted. In Charlotte, I work for a gay-owned company and most of my time is spent traveling in LGBT political or social circles. Yet, the warm feeling I had in Chapel Hill is found rarely in the Queen City. Even in my primarily LGBT-involved life, a sense of coldness, rejection and conservative, anti-gay moralism invades my time in Charlotte.
The facts, unfortunately, support my experiences.
Elected officials in other cities across the state uniformly welcome and embrace their LGBT communities. Other cities offer domestic partner benefits. All major cities in North Carolina, excluding Charlotte, include at least sexual orientation in their employment non-discrimination policies and some include gender-identity.
The truth of the matter is that, while Charlotte leads the state in population and business, we’re dead last when it comes to diversity, inclusion and LGBT recognition.
Get the whole story »
Nov
24
Fears that the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution could be used to further LGBT equality have been the lynchpin of anti-gay advocates’ efforts to pass, first, statutory “Defense of Marriage” laws and, later, state constitutional amendments prohibiting relationship recognition for same-sex couples.
It seems LGBT advocates’ dreams and opponents’ fears have come true in Virginia.
Leonard Link, the blog of New York Law School Professor Arthur S. Leonard, reports the Virginia Court of Appeals ruled Nov. 24 in favor of a gay couple seeking to uphold an adoption originally decided upon by a court in Gaston County, N.C.
Although the entire sordid affair, with its twists and turns, is interesting in and of itself, it is the Virginia court’s decision that is most intriguing. Get the whole story »
