There really is a gay agenda

I spent a good chunk of today in a recording studio with my community handbell ensemble. It went pretty well. We have another session at the end of May with the CD likely ready by September. It will make a great Christmas gift, even though there will be only a little bit of Christmas music on it.



The American Family Association is annoyed that the Southern Poverty Law Center won't back down from their declaration of the AFA as a hate group for the vile things they say about gay people. So the AFA has come up with a "Bigotry Map" showing all the organizations across America that promote the homosexual agenda, atheism, humanism, and are in other ways anti-Christian. Yeah, there is a lot of confusion about the difference between not believing in a god and actively working to stir up hate and discrimination against Christians.



Think Progress discusses the ways in which the GOP is chipping away at abortion rights by throwing up all sorts of restrictions. The consequence is that poor women face additional costs and frequently by the time they can raise the money the pregnancy has passed the gestation limits. The only women who are stopped from getting an abortion are poor women, which puts us back to the question of how is America better when it forces only its poor women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term?



Randy Berry has been appointed by the US State Department to be a special envoy to promote LGBT rights around the world. An important step.



The Ethics and Religious Liberty Comission of the Southern Baptist Convention released its Legislative Agenda for 2015. Brandon Robertson of Pantheos looked at the item on same-sex marriage. He sees that it isn't really about fidelity to the Bible (actually, a strange interpretation of it), it's really about discrimination.



Rev. John Pavlovitz has done some careful observation of gay people in his congregation and has determined there really is a Gay Agenda. Yup. He feels it is his responsibility to warn us. He has found that gay people want to: work, buy stuff, eat, go to church and worship God (or not), have families, create, and to have the full complement of human emotions. That's the evil Christians are up against.



Terrence Heath does a weekly Wingnut in Review in his personal blog. It can be tough to wade through all the nonsense conservatives spew in a week, though I suppose somebody has to do it. This week's edition has a bit of fun. The Conservative Political Action Conference is going on now and organizers invited anyone to use Twitter to ask questions of any of the speakers. Liberals jumped at the opportunity to ask questions that probably won't be addressed by anyone at CPAC. Such as: While Ben Carson was bashing people who need gov't aid, why didn't anyone question his past need of gov't aid? The list of aid he received is long.



A couple weeks ago a train derailed in West Virginia. Somewhere around 570,000 gallons of crude oil caught fire and exploded. Similar accidents over the last year prompted Obama to start talking about tanker car upgrades, including thicker tank walls, electronic breaks, and devices o prevent crumpling and rollover. Yes, these upgrades would cost the oil companies billions of dollars. So they are contributing heavily to members of Congress to prevent any of these safety measures from taking effect. Which means the West Virginia Bomb Train was brought to us by the GOP. The group Forest Ethics has created a map of potential bomb train blast zones. There are two such routes through Michigan, one through Detroit and one through Flint, though my home and my parents' home are both outside the 1 mile impact zone.