Reading Time: 3 minutes When the government refers to “talking therapies” it is, in effect, referring to prayer. So its exclusion of trans people from a conversion therapy ban it announced last week can only be interpreted as capitulation to pressure from religious groups who have been working flat-out to retain all “pray-away-the-gay” interventions. In announcing the ban in […]
LGBTQ
Posted inEducation
A Christian school had kids write letters persuading a friend to stop being gay
Reading Time: 4 minutes The Christian Academy of Louisville in Kentucky told students to write letters urging a fictional gay friend to renounce homosexuality. The assignment, which was due on Thursday, came to light after a parent of one of the students shared screenshots of the rubric with a friend, who then posted them online. The assignment was apparently […]
Posted inWar and Peace
A horrific ‘gay purge’ in Chechnya shows the limits of our moral attention
Reading Time: 4 minutes In 2019, a brutal ‘gay purge’ took place in the Russian republic of Chechnya. It was not the first. Since 2017, gay men have been hunted, abducted, and tortured by the Chechen authorities. Some have been murdered. The story was briefly covered by Western media. Thinking that the return (yet again) of concentration camps to […]
Posted inEducation
Preacher: Teachers “grooming” kids should be beheaded on live TV
Reading Time: 2 minutes A fundamentalist Christian preacher is calling for LGBTQ-accepting teachers to be shot in the head or beheaded on live television because he believes the conservative lie that they’re “grooming” kids. New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist preacher Jason Graber of Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Spokane, Washington made the comments last week during a weeknight service. It’s […]
Posted inLGBTQ
Should street preaching be considered hate speech?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Should it be so that just because something is in the Bible, it couldn’t or shouldn’t be viewed as hate speech?
Posted inPolitics
Michigan lawmaker blasts GOP colleague’s Christian bigotry in viral speech
Reading Time: 4 minutes In a rousing speech that no politician should ever have to give, Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow denounced an attack against her by a conservative Christian politician who falsely accused her of being a “groomer” because she supports LGBTQ rights and schools teaching a comprehensive version of U.S. history instead of the white-washed, dumbed-down kind […]
Posted inPolitics
Gay lawmaker denounces GOP colleague’s anti-trans bill in viral speech
Reading Time: 3 minutes If you haven’t heard the speech delivered by openly gay Missouri State Rep. Ian Mackey yet, you’re about to, and you’ll be glad you did. Under a new bill designed to change Missouri’s election laws, Republican State Rep. Chuck Basye inserted an amendment that would give local school districts the power to call elections… to […]
Posted inLGBTQ
Oscar Wilde’s ‘Confraternity of the Faithless’
Reading Time: 6 minutes It is sad – one half of the world does not believe in God and the other half does not believe in me. — OSCAR WILDE On the 7th of July in 1896, Anglo-Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde was incarcerated at Reading Prison for “gross indecency”—what would now be simply described as gay sex. He […]
Posted inLGBTQ
Rep. Lauren Boebert: You should be 21 before coming out as LGBTQ
Reading Time: 2 minutes In a statement as bigoted as it is ignorant, conspiracist congresswoman Lauren Boebert suggested that LGBTQ people should be at least 21 before they make any “decisions” about their sexual orientation or gender identity. To state the obvious: Alcohol harms you. Tobacco harms you. Being gay, bi, or trans harms nobody… except, I suppose, those […]
Posted inLGBTQ
Saluting the creator of the rainbow flag on the fifth anniversary of his death
Reading Time: 6 minutes Today, on the fifth anniversary of his death, I will raise a glass in my rainbow-bedecked local bar to Gilbert Baker, described by California State Senator Scott Wiener as a man who “helped define the modern LGBT movement” after the artist’s death in 2017. I first wrote about Baker, whom I’d once had the pleasure […]