Every week I end up with about a dozen or so links I wanted to write a post around but I never got to it.  And I don’t know how widely most of the folks who stop by here travel the web, since most of you don’t write or comment.  I’m not complaining or trolling for comments…I do the same on most web sites I visit.  So if you’ve already seen any of the following just skim over it.  But I want to at least run this stuff by you in case you haven’t…

• Parental rejection of gay teens worsens health

  Oh…you think?  I’ve been waiting for the usual suspects to start bellyaching about this study and its results but they’ve been conspicuously quiet about it.  I wouldn’t have thought it would be all that terribly hard for the hate pews to step up and assert that brutalizing gay kids doesn’t really hurt them at all and even if it did they’re better off dead then homosexual.

• Latter Day Protest? Proposition 8 and Sports

  Once upon a time the Mormon Church faced a furious backlash over its racist religious beliefs.  Did you know that the reason some folks have black skin is because in their spirit life they rebelled against god?  From the article…

  As tennis great Arthur Ashe wrote in his book, Hard Road to Glory, "In October 1969, fourteen black [football] players at the University of Wyoming publicly criticized the Mormon Church and appealed to their coach, Lloyd Eaton, to support their right not to play against Brigham Young University. . . . The Mormon religion at the time taught that blacks could not attain to the priesthood, and that they were tainted by the curse of Ham, a biblical figure. Eaton, however, summarily dropped all fourteen players from the squad."

  The players, though, didn’t take their expulsion lying down. They called themselves the Black 14 and sued for damages with the support of the NAACP. In an October 25th game against San Jose State, the entire San Jose team wore black armbands to support the 14.

  One aftershock of this episode was in November 1969, when Stanford University President Kenneth Pitzer suspended athletic relations with BYU, announcing that Stanford would honor what he called an athlete’s "Right of Conscience." The "Right of Conscience" allowed athletes to boycott an event which he or she deemed "personally repugnant." As the Associated Press wrote, "Waves of black protest roll toward BYU, assaulting Mormon belief and leaving BYU officials and students, perplexed, hurt, and maybe a little angry."

  On June 6th, 1978, as teams were refusing road trips to Utah with greater frequency, and the IRS started to make noises about revoking the church’s holy tax-free status, a new revelation came to the Book of Mormon.

  Whether a cynical ploy to avoid the taxman or a coincidence touched by God, the results were the same: Black people were now human in the eyes of the Church. African Americans were no longer, as Brigham Young himself once put it, "uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable, and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind."

  Nice.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.  "Waves of black protest roll toward BYU, assaulting Mormon belief and leaving BYU officials and students, perplexed, hurt, and maybe a little angry."  Maybe if you jackasses would stop sticking knives into your neighbor’s hopes and dreams it might come to pass that we could all just…you know…get along.

• A New Year’s dinner for one watched by millions

  Every New Year’s Eve tens of thousands of Germans are delighted to gather around the TV set to watch the umpteenth annual repeat of an old ten minute British slapstick sketch that most people in Britain have never seen and don’t even know exists.  But they adore it in Germany, and apparently consider it quintessential British humor.  I can sympathize.  Most Americans have absolutely no idea what it is the French see in Jerry Lewis.

• Teacher terminated over marriage

  If you think it’s only the hopes and dreams of gay folks the Catholic Church wants to bury think again.  This is a story of a heterosexual teacher in a Catholic school who was fired for marrying a man she loved.  Her crime against the baby Jesus and his was that he was a divorcee.  Clearly, there is too much love in this world.  But don’t worry, Pope Ratzinger is on the case…

• George Bush and Sarah Palin make Michael Tomasky’s worst people of 2008 list…
  

  3 George Bush. There were years when he would have been higher – 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. I’ll give him a slight pass for 2001, what with the attacks and all that. In those previous years, he stole an election, started an unnecessary war, lied about it, approved torture, let a great US city drown and so on. This year he merely presided over the bankruptcy of the global economy. Twenty days and counting.

  2 Sarah Palin. Does she really deserve to be this high? Never in my adult lifetime has one politician so perfectly embodied everything that is malign about my country: the proto-fascist nativism, the know-nothingism, the utterly cavalier lack of knowledge about the actual principles on which the country was founded. So, heck, you betcha she does!

  Palin doesn’t have Bush’s spoiled rich boy sense of entitlement, she has Nixon’s class resentments.  But she’s not as stupid as Bush.  She just seems that way in part because she has Bush’s utter disinterest in the world beyond her own nativistic tribe.  Nixon wanted the presidency because he wanted to be a world leader.  He wanted to shine on the world stage, be glorified by it.  Bush and Palin figure giving the world the finger is all it takes to make them great leaders.

• This has got to be the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.  On the other hand, it’s nice to know there are people who are more desperate for companionship then I am by light years.

• Why there is still a need for Gay Youth centers, forty years after Stonewall.
  

  Maybe they do not need the escape as much as their predecessors did in 1983, when the door first opened. But a smattering of teens were spread across the couch in the TV room. They are comfortable here, the boys free to dish about cute guys if they choose, the girls relaxed enough to throw an affectionate arm around one another.

  In some neighborhoods, being gay is not a big deal, and that is what the anniversary celebration was about. In other places, even now, boys liking boys or girls holding hands still provokes sneers or even a shove. That is why, 25 years after it opened, Gay and Lesbian Youth Services’s drop-in center still serves a purpose.

  The article closes with "…dozens of gay teens come in every week, looking for something they do not find anywhere else. Until the day comes when they do not walk through the door, we will hold off on the final celebration"  My life could have been so different had I access to a resource like theirs.  Maybe I wouldn’t be so lonely now, had I been able to just be myself then.  It is wonderful, absolutely wonderful, that at least some gay teens can find places like this.  But let us pray for the day when gay teenagers no longer need a place where they can just be themselves.  It shouldn’t have to be like that.