Category: wingnuts

  Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles photo via BigMap

A right-wing Catholic activist is urging fellow Catholics to join him this week as he pickets an event that he says will feature “pro-gays, women-priest advocates, New Agers, and anti-Pope rebels.”

Who is it that would sponsor such an event? Turns out it’s the Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger Mahony.

Kenneth M. Fisher, who calls himself “chairman” of Concerned Roman Catholics of America, Inc. (CRCOA), an Anaheim website, fired off a press release yesterday calling for pickets at a four-day conference sponsored by Mahony.

The four-day conference, called the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, will be held March 18-21 at the Anaheim (Calif.) Convention Center. It is sponsored by the Office of Religious Education, a department of the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

According to the conference website, its purpose is “to teach more about the Catholic faith as well as to advance personal growth.” It is open to “people of all vocations and different faiths.”

Fisher doesn’t object to the conference as a whole. But plans to picket the event because of a handful of the nearly 200 speakers who have been invited to participate in its three days of conferences and discussions.

More...

In a video supplied by Westboro Baptist Church a young woman dances an Irish jig on the Irish flag via IrishCentral.com

Westboro Baptist Church, the insanely homophobic Topeka, Kan based church group, has launched a dedicated website proclaiming the hatred of its god for the whole country of Ireland, IrishCentral.com has noticed.

Although Ireland gets its own “godhates…” url, there is nothing else unique about the Kansas church’s proclamation of hatred toward the Emerald Isle. The Ireland site is just one chapter in a larger site called “GodHatesTheWorld.com” through which the church offers its brand of “Christian” condemnation for most of the world’s countries, with the others “coming soon”. Although most of the countries don’t get a dedicated url like the one for the Ireland site, each of the 53 countries is condemned in a series of pages using the same format as the Ireland site.

At the site, GodHatesIreland.com, the church proclaims, “Ireland has absolutely failed its duty to God. It has been wholly given over to the idea that it is okay to be a filthy fag. They have allowed their fags to establish themselves at every level of society, especially in the government.”

From that site, Westboro links to its “GodHatesFags.com” site which it calls, “The main web site of the most controversial church in the world – Westboro Baptist Church”.

IrishCentral’s reporter, Cahir O’Doherty, was brave enough to watch one of the videos offered by the church on the Ireland page:

In the video on the website, young church members are pictured jumping up and down on the Irish flag and screaming obscenities about Ireland.

One young woman appears to be dancing an Irish jig on the flag, while another sings about spitting on it.

A map on the main page of the “GodHatesTheWorld” site, leads to dedicated “GodHates” pages for 53 different countries so far, including Haiti. Like fellow nominal Baptist Pat Robertson, Westboro calls calls this month’s earthquake in Haiti, which has killed thousands and displaced millions, a “righteous judgment of God”.

More...

   ::: Even though nothing about the new hate crimes law makes such an action illegal, an ad hoc group of so-called “concerned” clergy planned to rally earlier today in front of the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. in what they claim would be a so-called “test” of the limits to the expanded federal hate crimes law that was signed into law on October 28 by President Barack Obama. According to a so-called “Christian” news service, (which uses the phrase “so-called” frequently) the pastors had planned to “preach short sermons and read passages from the Bible regarding homosexual behavior.” The law now includes sexual orientation along with religion, race, and other categories that will get special attention if a criminal act is judged to have been committed because the victim is a member of the category. The protesting so-called “ministers” are convinced that the bill “will criminalize all criticism of homosexual behavior”, and therefore see their so-called “protest” as civil-disobedience “like Dr. Martin Luther King and the Sixties Civil Rights movement”.

Source: Pastors Will Engage in Civil Disobedience to Protest Inclusion of 'Sexual Orientation' in Hate Crimes Law - Christian Newswire

OK. So it's only interesting because it offers a new method of refusing to answer a question.

Former beauty queen Carrie Prejean appeared on Larry King Live. King asked her why she had settled a suit she had filed against Miss California pageant officials. “You’re being inappropriate,” Prejean told King in response to each question.

King then moved on to a phone call.

Maybe it was a delayed reaction to King’s settlement questioins, but Prejean took off her earpiece and mic only when she (apparently) heard the first part of a caller’s question, “I’m a gay man…”. 

Prejean didn’t move from the set. She didn’t do the usual “storm off the set” routine. She stayed glued to her seat and in the camera’s range, but moved into a cone of silence, talking only to an unseen handler offscreen.

The callers question: “I’m a gay man and I love pageants. I’m sure that you have great gay friends that helped you possibly win. What would you give them as advice if they wanted to get married.”

When photographers Alek and Steph visited the Vatican for Oh La La, they found it teeming with homos homoerotica. And they didn’t even get around to checking out St. Sebastian.

Bishop Janusz Kaleta, left, and helper photo: catholic-kazakhstan.org   St. Sebastian by El Greco

“Love the sinner, but not the sin,” is what Catholics said they were doing in Maine when they led the campaign to strip equal rights from some of the state’s citizens.

Well, at least one Catholic bishop isn’t willing to go that even that far with the “love” thing. Pam’s House Blend uncovers a revealing quote from an Eastern European bishop who doesn’t think gay folk should even be allowed to visit the Vatican to gawk at, say, Michealangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling or other homoerotica in the place.

Bishop Janusz Kaleta, the Apostolic Administrator of Atyrau, Kazakhstan, told ETN—a travel industry newsletter—that  gay travel groups shouldn’t be allowed at the Vatican. “Such demonstrations are just not ethical,” said the bishop when asked “if the Vatican is open to dialogue about welcoming such homosexual groups of tourists in the future.”

When ETN’s questioner clarified that he was asking about “traveling for the purpose of a visit, not as a demonstration”, the Kazakhstan bishop (who was not, apparently, being impersonated by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen) held his ground. “I consider if someone is homosexual, it is a provocation and an abuse of this place,” he said.

Fortunately, the bishop doesn’t have much of a say in Vatican tourism policies, but with comments like that, his name almost certainly rose on Benedict’s list of future cardinal candidates.

Source: Pam's House Blend:: Quote of the day: bishop says no to homo tourism at Vatican

Ex-Gay Watch, the blog that’s always so good about tracking such things, reports today, “Ted Haggard, the evangelical pastor exposed in 2006 as a homosexual and adulterer, has started a regular prayer meeting in his Colorado home.”

But, of course, as with all things involving the ex-“with issues”-gay ex-pastor and ex-leader of the national evangelical movement, the story is ever so much more complicated.

Just as Haggard admitted a short time ago that he’s not really “completely heterosexual”, so too, he now says that he’s not really starting a church.

In a Sept. 30 post in a Colorado Springs Gazette-linked blog called The Pulpit, blogger Mark Barna sent along word from Haggard himself that he – at that moment, at least – had no plans to start a “church”, or even a “home church”.

In the post, Barna quotes Haggard: “We have no plans to start a new church, but (Gail and I) do consider it from time to time. We are regularly asked by people to start one, and that is flattering.”

More...