Something I posted over at Truth Wins Out…

What Lord’s Work?

Willa Sibert Cather said “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” So I’m reading a story in Today’s Deutsche Welle which, after another round of Vatican pronouncements on how defending marriage from same-sex couples is the moral equivalent of protecting the environment, and weeks of reading about American fundamentalism’s disturbing, sickening willingness to incite anti-gay violence in Africa, that reminds me how the more time change the more they stay the same…

Nazi-era churches helped classify Jews, say historians

For years, a tight lid has been kept on the activities of Germany’s Catholic and Protestant churches during the Holocaust. But now, historians have shown that many clergy actively contributed to the persecution of Jews.

The article gives me a piece of the puzzle I hadn’t fully understood before: that at the beginning Nazi rule, Churches in Germany performed a service for the fascists that nobody else could: identify who had Jewish blood in them.

Read the rest over at Truth Wins Out…

Posted on Truth Wins Out…

“Against The Public Policy Of The State”

Here in my home state of Maryland, state delegate Emmett Burns Jr. (D – Baltimore County), known among activists here as a reliable opponent of equality for gay citizens, went on the offensive right out of the gate this year.   The legislative session had hardly begun when he introduced House Bill 90, to invalidate same-sex marriages performed in other states…

But it isn’t just marriage Burns, and his anti-gay cohorts in the Maryland legislature want to deny gay Marylanders…it’s acknowledgment of the basic humanity we share with our heterosexual neighbors…and support in our time of grief.

Support such as that the Maryland Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, which gives money to victims of violent crime to help with medical and legal expenses. Along with the news of Burn’s latest attack on same sex couples, came news in the Baltimore Sun of a gay man shot and killed, apparently at random by a young man who had been overheard to say “I’m going to kill myself a gay tonight”.   The killer left in his wake one dead man, and a grieving companion of 13 years.   Burns, a longtime foe of same sex marriage will, if he has his way, insure that no grieving gay spouse will ever see a cent of help from the Board, even if they avail themselves of marriage outside the state.

What you need to understand about situations like this is they’re not a bug, they’re a feature.   The message must be that the state does not care one whit what happens to gay people.   But more then that, gay people must suffer, simply for existing.   And what better time to drive the knife into our hearts then when we are burying our dead.   Because if we don’t bleed, if our hearts don’t ache, then men like Burns, who says he is a Baptist minister, just aren’t being righteous enough.

You can read the rest of my TWO post Here.

Over at Truth Wins Out I wrote…

The Romans Had Lions, We Have Marching Bands…

On the ChristianNewsWire site I see that something called “The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission” has released a list of what it’s pleased to call “the top ten incidents of anti-Christian defamation, bigotry and discrimination in the US from last year.”   According to its own press release, the list was “…selected by the subscribers to CADC’s e-mail list and was selected from a list of twenty of CADC’s top stories from 2009.”

Read the rest over at TWO…