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Christian College Bans Homosexuality After Two Gay Athletes Come Out

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A private Christian college in South Carolina, after two gay athletes came out in the media, has very publicly banned homosexuality, and issued a threatening statement.

Last year volleyball players Drew Davis and Juan Varona, both openly gay at Erskine, a rural South Carolina private Christian college founded in 1839, were featured in a very intimate Outsports article. The piece detailed how Davis was inadvertently outed by his ex-boyfriend, how his father disowned him and his mother told him he’d be unemployed for the rest of his life, and how he attempted suicide. It also told of the strong support Davis and Varona have received from their fellow teammates.

This year, under the leadership of Dr. Paul Kooistra (photo), the school’s new president, Erskine has just released a damning policy statement that bans homosexuality, labeling it “sin and contrary to the will of the Creator.”

Under a section titled “In Action,” the Erskine policy notes, “We believe the Bible teaches that all sexual activity outside the covenant of marriage is sinful and therefore ultimately destructive to the parties involved.”

The policy statement is also foreboding and threatening, commanding, “members of the Erskine community are expected to follow the teachings of scripture concerning matters of human sexuality and institutional decisions will be made in light of this position.”

How are Erskine’s two openly-gay students expected to interpret that statement, that “institutional decisions will be made in light of this position,” and how are the students who are LGBTQ expected to feel safe in that environment?

That’s not an extreme question.

Hidden at the bottom of a financial report to the college’s trustees, a statement on the school’s website reads, “the Student Services and Athletic Committee submitted and the full board approved a Statement on Human Sexuality. The administration will add the statement to its official manuals and determine how it will be integrated into campus culture and procedures.”

Doesn’t that sound like the school is targeting its two gay players?

Varona told Outsports’ Cyd Zeigler he is “disappointed” by his school’s statement, “sad and worried for other gay people,” and added it took him “by surprise.” He says, “the school took several steps back instead of progressing towards a future where everyone can be treated as an equal.”

“I understand the religious stand on adultery, which is part of the Ten Commandments in the Bible, and that would apply to heterosexual and homosexual people.”

Zeigler has a few thoughts for Erskine College’s leadership.

It’s insightful that Varona would mention the Ten Commandments. There’s another Commandment among the 10 that’s given higher priority in all versions of the Bible: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.”

We’re assuming this means that Erskine College will also ban all of its athletic teams from practicing or competing on Sundays. That’s unfortunate, because on Sunday, April 19, the men’s volleyball, men’s golf and women’s golf teams have tournament games scheduled. The following Sunday four teams – softball, women’s lacrosse, women’s tennis and men’s tennis – have matches scheduled.

For the school to ban homosexuality but not ban these competitions on the sabbath would be the highest form of hypocrisy.

 

Editor’s note – 03.01.15: Links to Erskine’s anti-LGBT statement have been updated after the college moved it in an apparent attempt to hide it from media reports.

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News

Republicans Moving to Give Trump Something He’s Wanted Since 2019

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Claiming President Donald Trump was “wrongfully accused” when he was impeached, twice, based on “withheld” and “false” information, U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is leading a move to have both impeachments expunged.

“The fact is that the Constitution doesn’t spell out what to do when you’ve wrongfully indicted somebody,” Issa told Fox News. “An impeachment is basically an indictment and it’s an indictment that you can’t really be acquitted from. If you are impeached by the House, famously where do you go to get your reputation back, is the question.”

Not only does Rep. Issa want to alter the historical record of Trump’s impeachments, it appears he wants to allege “misconduct” on the part of those who were part of the process of impeaching him. Issa added, “the very people who brought it knew was wrong.”

“More importantly,” Issa said, the process of expunging the record will “make sure that the facts and the reality that there was misconduct in the process gets a hearing.”

READ MORE: Ex-National Security Official Is Already Warning About the Next ‘Trump Pandemic’

Issa is sponsoring a resolution to expunge the record of the impeachments, and he already has more than 20 co-sponsors.

Fox News reports that Issa’s resolution “argues that the 2021 impeachment was rushed and procedurally flawed, noting that the House moved from introduction to passage in two days and did not conduct a full evidentiary process.”

“They impeached him for essentially an insurrection, a true high crime, and it’s false,” Issa said. Many have called the events surrounding the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol an “insurrection.”

In January, the Trump White House launched a website claiming, “it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters, all while Pelosi’s own security lapses invited the chaos they later exploited to seize and consolidate power.”

Fox News notes that some legal scholars say impeachments cannot be expunged. The House can pass a resolution expressing disapproval with the impeachments, it can “annotate its records,” but “it cannot erase the historical fact of an impeachment or undo the constitutional process once it has occurred.”

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Ex-National Security Official Is Already Warning About the Next ‘Trump Pandemic’

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By many accounts, during his first term, President Donald Trump botched the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the latest hantavirus outbreak has some worrying the same thing could happen again if there is another Trump pandemic.

Miles Taylor, the Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff during the first Trump administration is out with a stern warning, offering three reasons why Americans “won’t survive another Trump pandemic.”

Under President Trump, the U.S. response to COVID resulted in far higher infection rates and rates of death than many other high-income nations. The Guardian in 2021 reported that the U.S. could have avoided 40 percent of COVID deaths.

“Trump won’t just mishandle the next global health crisis,” he’s “prepared to weaponize it,” Taylor warns.

The “worst thing” about Trump’s “first turn at pandemic management isn’t just that Trump failed. Rather, it’s that he failed so spectacularly that he learned all the wrong lessons.”

“Trump broke the pandemic response system,” says Taylor. “And it remains broken.”

Trump threw out existing pandemic response plans, and instead convened “a hastily assembled White House ‘task force,’ made the HHS secretary chair it, then handed it to the vice president, then handed shadow control to his son-in-law.”

READ MORE: Taxpayers to Pick Up Massive Cost Overrun of Another Trump Project

Congressional investigations “found that the result was chaos and structural collapse, as agencies scrambled to reinvent pandemic response on the fly,” says Taylor, who relays one example from his time at DHS.

“I remember the phone calls at the time. My friend Olivia Troye, who was helping Vice President Mike Pence run the task force from the inside, would call with a tone of contained terror,” he writes.

“It’s so broken, Miles. You have no idea. He’s getting people killed,” she told him.

The interagency structure remains broken to this day, and the people who were “supposed to save our lives” have been purged from the government workforce.

Calling the situation “dire,” Taylor explains the bodycount.

“Last year, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced cuts of 10,000 employees on top of probationary firings that hit pandemic preparedness offices directly,” he writes. “The CDC lost roughly 2,400 staff — about 18 percent of its workforce. The FDA lost 3,500. The NIH lost 1,200. Entire offices that investigate disease outbreaks, manage infectious disease response, and collect surveillance data were then eliminated in a Friday-night massacre during the government shutdown.”

Going forward, those who are being replaced are political hires with less experience.

“So when the next pathogen emerges and the president asks for advice,” Taylor says, “the room probably won’t contain Tony Faucis and Deb Birxs, however imperfect they were. More likely, it will contain podcasters and quacks and vaccine skeptics — and maybe a few terrified careerists.”

It gets worse.

During the next pandemic, “Trump will be motivated by ‘revenge’ rather than ‘response,'” Taylor writes, noting that FEMA has become part of Trump’s “revenge machine.”

If you live in a blue state, you are three times less likely to receive federal disaster assistance than if you live in a red state. Citing analysis, Taylor says that out of 106 federal disaster relief requests, Republican-leaning states received 101 approvals, Democratic-leaning states only five.

Taylor warns that Trump “is always hunting for leverage. What better leverage to hold over a Democratic governor than the lives of his or her constituents?”

“Vaccines, antivirals, ventilators, federal medical teams, surge capacity — all of it can be released quickly… or held back indefinitely,” he writes. “You want help for your people? Play ball, he might say. Agree to join my mass-deportation plan or hand over your voter rolls.”

“The cost would be mass graves. And that would give Trump a lot of leverage, indeed.”

Which brings Taylor to his very specific warning to blue states: prepare for the next pandemic now, and prepare as if there will be no help from the federal government.

“Plan for it like the feds will be a foe,” he warns.

READ MORE: ‘Bracing for Higher Prices’: Economy Looks Bleak for Lower-Earning Americans Report Says

 

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Taxpayers to Pick Up Massive Cost Overrun of Another Trump Project

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President Donald Trump promised work to resurface the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, painting it American flag blue, would cost taxpayers $1.8 million in a no-bid contract to a company that hadn’t worked on a pool at one of the president’s golf courses.

That figure has ballooned more than seven times, to $13.1 million, The New York Times reports. The Interior Department, which awarded the contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, said $6.2 million of that was from doubling the size of the contract.

According to the Trump administration, the work is being done as a no-bid contract because not doing the work would cause “serious injury” to the federal government. The Times notes that the federal government has not specified what that injury would be, but President Trump reportedly wants the pool ready for the nation’s 250th birthday celebration on July 4.

The Times adds that Interior Department spokesperson Katie Martin said the higher price “reflects the effort necessary to expedite the timeline of completing the leak prevention coating project — more people, more materials, more equipment and longer hours ahead of our 250th.”

The Reflecting Pool cost increase mirrors another Trump project, his White House ballroom. Originally slated to cost $200 million, the price tag now appears to be over $400 million in donated funds plus one billion in taxpayer funds for security enhancements.

Critics blasted the Reflecting Pool cost increases.

“Trump is robbing American taxpayers blind,” wrote political commentator Tara Setmayer, the CEO of the Seneca Project.

Journalist Matthew Yglesias wrote: “No money for Medicaid.”

READ MORE: ‘Bracing for Higher Prices’: Economy Looks Bleak for Lower-Earning Americans Report Says

 

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