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Anderson Cooper: 14-Year Old Bullied To Death “Even In Sadness, Reaching Out To Help Others”

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Anderson Cooper covers the tragic suicide of 14-year old Jamey Rodemeyer, and profiles Jamey’s It Gets Better video, the anti-gay hate comments he received via his Formspring account, and all the professional anti-gay people who are fighting to stop any help for LGBTQ students. Panel discussion focuses on agenda of anti-gay bigots who work to ensure LGBTQ kids are left without any support or resources.

“This is Jamie Rodemeyer, just 14 years old, a freshman at Williamsville North High School in Buffalo, New York. Jamie routinely blogged about his troubles. Just 11 days ago he wrote something online.” So says Anderson Cooper introducing the segment. “He said, ‘I always say how bullied I am, but no one listens. What do I have to do so people will listen?’ One week later, this past Sunday, Jamie committed suicide.” Cooper adds, “Even in his sadness, Jamie was reaching out to help others.”

Via CNN:

WISEMAN: I also think what’s happening is, and you heard it in one of the clips, is that — and I believe it was the politician from Kentucky, which is that he’s saying, if I have this correctly, that the children who are bullying, if they believe that homosexuality is wrong and that’s their value system, then they should be allowed to express that against other students.

And what that means is, is that they are able to be mean and cruel to other students. And that is an extraordinary thing to say. What you’re saying is these values that we think are so important and are Christian, which I know many Christian people who don’t believe this whatsoever, that those values enable children to bully other children and justify and reinforce the notion that it’s to OK to bully other children.

It is unbelievable that that would be the case coming from our leaders and from adults that our children need to be able to depend on to be safe at school.

COOPER: Rachel, to those who say that bullying is just a teenage rite of passage, what do you say?

RACHEL SIMMONS, AUTHOR, “ODD GIRL OUT”: I say that person has never been to a school or certainly is not listening. We live in a — where 60,000 — stay home every day because they’re too afraid to go to school. And anybody who spends time in a school and talks to kids knows that there is a culture both of everyday cruelty but also of protracted campaigns that kids cannot escape.

And when there are no rules at schools, when there’s no consciousness and when there’s a denial of the problem, kids cannot be safe and they cannot study.

COOPER: Rosalind, there are those who say — and we had just heard from some of them on the program — who say, look, you know, this is a way to spread the homosexuality or acceptance of homosexuality in schools throughout the country and some parents are saying, look, I don’t feel comfortable with that.

WISEMAN: Well, I think that’s ridiculous. Because we are not — when we talk about kids being safe from bullying, we are not talking about a pro-homosexual agenda unless a pro-homosexual agenda is that we think all children deserve to be treated with dignity. And if that is the pro-homosexual agenda, then I, as a straight person, are — I am completely for it.

And I would hope that we would all be behind that kind of agenda. So to think that we can in any way be against kids being safe for some kind of so-called agenda besides kids being safe makes absolutely no sense. And I believe that adults in every way when we have kids that we — are important to us or we have relationships with, that we have got to get behind the — beyond the politics of this and look at our children and be able to go where they are and to be useful to them and meaningful to them so they can trust us that we can be safe for them.

Also,

COOPER: But Rosalind, and there is the idea that the school district in Minnesota where they have what they call a neutrality policy.

WISEMAN: Right.

COOPER: Where they’re not using specific words of gay or lesbian. You say that’s not effective.

WISEMAN: Well, it’s not only not effective, it’s actually totally counterproductive to everything that Rachel just said. Because neutrality in the face of the — of an abuse of power is not neutrality. It is siding with the bully. So if you are going to — if you’re going to believe in what’s called neutrality policy, what you’re really believing is a way for kids to go after other kids and do nothing about it.

COOPER: Rachel, do you agree with that, that you have to use these terms, that neutrality doesn’t work or so-called neutrality doesn’t work?

SIMMONS: I do think neutrality doesn’t work. I find the whole thing shocking. I mean we don’t send American workers to their workplaces in this country saying, just do your job and we’re not going to protect you if something happens to you.

Likewise, we can’t send children to school in this country assuming that we’re just going to teach you or we’re not going to protect you if something happens to you. These are not children. We’re not educating part of the child. We have to be mindful of the whole child if we really want to do justice to our education system and to the young citizens of our country.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=qQwdeJuvcPs%3Fversion%3D3%26hl%3Den_US

Our deep thanks to Dave Evans of for this important clip.

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Carville Says There’s Only ‘One Thing’ Trump Is Thinking About on His China Trip

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Democratic strategist and political commentator James Carville is blasting what he says is the “one thing” President Donald Trump is thinking about on his trip to China, and it has nothing to do with diplomacy, the U.S. economy, or the war in Iran.

Carville told Al Hunt on their Politicon podcast that it was “really interesting” that all the people he took to China were essentially the people who were in the “first three rows” from his inaugural address. He “put them on Air Force One, and he took Eric — who handles the business end of his business.”

“You’re going to watch a grift and graft over there, like you can’t imagine,” Carville continued. “That’s all this trip is about, and I got news for you, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sixpack, or whoever you are out there, he doesn’t give a s—— about you, your future, your finances, your retirement, your anything.”

“He just cares about making all the money he can as fast as he can, and people [who] don’t realize that are just, just woefully stupid.”

Hunt reminded Carville that earlier this week Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”

READ MORE: Republicans Are Now Doing to Trump What Few in the GOP Have Ever Dared to Do

“Oh, you don’t, Donald,” Hunt responded. “Well, you know something? I think a lot of Americans think about their financial situation, and I’m sure those billionaire oligarchs you’re traveling with don’t, but a lot of voters do, and, uh, you’re gonna pay, you’re gonna pay a price.”

Carville added that Trump also said that he doesn’t even think of Iran.

“I think there’s only one thing that he’s thinking about in his trip to China. And that is a big grift,” Carville said. “Look at who he’s taking with him.”

Carville said there would be “economic exchanges” and “investment opportunities” during the China trip.

“You can see, this is where this is going,” he continued. “They just buy him off. He does not care.”

“He doesn’t care if he, as long as he can go there and make as much money, as fast as he can make it, that’s all what he cares about.”

READ MORE: ‘Rededicating the Country to God’: Trump White House Hosts Evangelical Christian Festival

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Christian Content Creator Fighting Sin Is Teaching Others How to Eat Biblically: NYT

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27-year-old Michigan-raised Kayla Bundy is a Christian content creator who turned to the Bible for ways to eat healthy — but her lifestyle is also part of a “higher calling,” The New York Times reports, explaining that she is “a biblical eater, someone who consumes mostly foods mentioned in the Bible.”

“Sin entered into the world through food,” Bundy told the Times, “and Satan doesn’t stop there. Food, for me, is really like a weapon of how I can fight back.”

According to the Times, a “diet inspired by the Bible has found new audiences online in the Make America Healthy Again era.”

Bundy, who has over 500,000 followers on TikTok, and has been eating biblically for eight years, “claims that her diet ‘fixed’ her skin, her hair and her depression, and she sells coaching sessions to help others with their diets,” The Times reports. She “is open about not having nutrition credentials, but she sells a $28 digital guide to biblical superfoods, as well as coaching sessions that start around $700 for a month, she said.”

READ MORE: Republicans Are Now Doing to Trump What Few in the GOP Have Ever Dared to Do

She buys raw milk, eats sardines and authentic sourdough bread without commercial yeast, and tries to cook with locally sourced foods.

“I had never really thought to look to the Bible for a recipe book,” said Bundy, who now lives in Bali. Cutting out refined sugar made her feel good, and she started “studying scripture from that lens of noticing what they are eating.”

32-year old Georgia stay-at-home mom Annalies Xaviera “posts biblical eating tips,” and “said her Facebook following had jumped from scant thousands to over 300,000 in just a few weeks this spring. She sells a digital cookbook.”

“The Bible says that God appreciates and celebrates small steps of obedience,” Xaviera told the Times.

“When you’re in a craving,” she said, “have you ever thought to stop and pray?”

READ MORE: ‘Rededicating the Country to God’: Trump White House Hosts Evangelical Christian Festival

 

Image via Shutterstock

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‘Rededicating the Country to God’: Trump White House Hosts Evangelical Christian Festival

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The Trump White House is hosting an unprecedented Christian prayer festival Sunday on the National Mall — a nine-hour event that a Trump advisor describes as “rededicating the country to God.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and House Speaker Mike Johnson are all expected to appear.

The funding for “Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” comes in part from taxpayer dollars earmarked for America’s 250th birthday celebration, organizers say, according to The Washington Post.

The speakers are almost all Christian, and expected to largely be evangelical Protestant leaders and members of the Trump administration, “many of whom have embraced the message that America’s founders wanted the country to be explicitly Christian,” the Post reports. The event will have a “focus on American identity as aligned with a specific slice of conservative Protestantism.”

Pastor Paula White-Cain, Senior Advisor to the White House Faith Office who delivered the invocation at President Donald Trump’s first inauguration, said the Jubilee “is about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible.”

“This is really truly rededicating the country to God,” she added.

READ MORE: Republicans Are Now Doing to Trump What Few in the GOP Have Ever Dared to Do

According to The Guardian, the invited speakers include those who experts have been “characterized as Christian nationalist or extremist.”

Among them, a pastor who has called the Democratic platform “demonic,” the Guardian says, along with “a rabbi who has defended the use of torture,” and “a Christian author and radio host who said in 2020 he would die in the fight to keep Joe Biden out of the White House and was later named in a defamation suit over 2020 election fraud claims.”

Scholars have deemed the event unprecedented in the modern era.

“I’m unaware of anything like this, with this involvement of senior government officials, on this scale, trying to paint this false picture of the United States as a quote unquote Christian nation,” Amanda Tyler told the Post. Tyler is executive director of BJC, a Baptist group that promotes religious liberty through church-state separation. “Trump’s rhetoric in the past 18 months is how he’s ‘going to make America Christian again,’ that it’s his job to push religion. This is all part of that piece.”

Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse told the Post, “There’s a difference between saying America is a nation with many Christians in it and that America is a nation dedicated to Christianity and defined by it.”

“Those are very different things,” he said.

Kruse also noted that the only rules about religion that the framers of the Constitution wrote “were ones that keep religion at arm’s length. No establishment, no limits on free exercise, no religious test for office.”

But the Trump White House defended the event, its focus, and its list of speakers.

Brittany Baldwin, executive director of the White House’s 250 Task Force, in an April webinar, said: “We worked very hard with the faith leaders we trust … to ensure that we hear their concerns and we have the right focus for our community of believers, across the country. So I think if you do see another religion represented, it would probably be in a modest way.”

Paula White-Cain went even further, saying that the jubilee would not include leaders “praying to all these different Gods.”

READ MORE: Republicans Are Using a Secret Super PAC to Pour $1 Million Into Democratic Primaries

 

Image via Reuters 

 

 

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