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New Pope In Rome, Same Old Anti-Gay Focus From The Catholic Church In America

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Pope Francis gave hope to millions of progressives worldwide, including the LGBT community and our allies, that the Roman Catholic Church would change into the religious institution it is supposed to be: one focused on helping the poor, the needy, the sick, and the elderly, and spreading the message of God’s love across the world; in short, what America’s Catholics expect of their Church. But in reality, little has changed, at least here at home in the U.S.

The vast majority of America’s Catholics support same-sex marriage and the civil rights of LGBT people — even at a rate higher than the average American. They also do not see same-sex relations as sin.

Yet Cardinal Timothy Dolan (image, top,) who is the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and the Archbishop of New York — making him the highest-ranking Catholic in America — has worked to distance himself from the LGBT community, and made it clear how incredibly uncomfortable he is with LGBT people and embracing us as part of his flock.

Dolan yesterday appeared on his weekly Tuesday Sirius radio show, telling tales and stories, laughing, and joking with comedian Jim Gaffigan. It was certainly a heartwarming show.

But the Cardinal knew he had to say something about the dramatic increase in anti-LGBT hate crimes in New York City — his home — this month and this year.

Why?

Because he had said absolutely nothing, even after the hate crime murder of Mark Carson, a gay man shot to death literally for being gay.

The New Civil Rights Movement and other LGBT activists, including Scott Wooledge of Memeographs and Joseph Amodeo via the Huffington Post, have been asking why the nation’s number one Catholic had been uninterested in denouncing the violence against LGBT people.

So yesterday, at the very end of his radio show, Cardinal Dolan mustered the courage to make mention of the violence.

“You look at even the violence in our own city with some homosexuals who have recently been beaten and killed,” Dolan said. “I mean that’s just awful, that flies in the face of divine justice. Every human life deserves dignity and respect, right? Anytime life is attacked we all suffer.”

LOOK: Cardinal Dolan Spends A Few Seconds Mentioning Violence Against ‘Some Homosexuals’

Dolan said the very least he could have, just so he could be on the record as “denouncing” anti-gay violence given the nine incidents of anti-gay violence in NYC this month alone.

Hardly a denunciation. It took up all of 19 seconds.

And then the Cardinal launched into comments about Memorial Day.

Compare Cardinal Dolan’s “that’s just awful” that “some homosexuals…have recently been beaten and killed” comment with that of one of the nation’s leading anti-gay professionals.

“We condemn in the strongest possible way the murder of a gay man in New York by a killer who apparently hurled anti-gay insults at him moments before the killing,” National Organization For Marriage president Brain Brown’s statement last week reads, posted to NOM’s blog days after the shooting-death murder of Mark Carson. Brown added:

This senseless act cannot be condoned in America or anywhere, and we urge that the perpetrator be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Our heart goes out to the family of the victim, and we hold them in our prayers. While this killing appears to have no connection to the current debate about redefining marriage, there is no room for violence toward any American — whether they support traditional marriage or not. No person should be subjected to violence because they are gay or lesbian or because they believe that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. There is no place for violence, period.

Last summer, when the Family Research Council was attacked by a lone gunman who put a bullet in the arm of the FRC’s security guard, within hours more than two dozen LGBT organizations rushed to condemn publicly, and in writing, the violence.

So, Cardinal Dolan’s tepid and offhand remarks, as much as they are appreciated as an important first step, and far from sufficient.

If Dolan truly wishes to condemn hate-motivated violence against the LGBT members of his church, and against all LGBT people, he will have to say more than “that’s just awful,” and he’ll have to stop issuing directives to his Bishops telling them to preach against same-sex marriage and LGBT relationships too.

LOOK: Cardinal Dolan Calls For Anti-LGBT Sermons In Shadow Of Violent Anti-Gay Hate Crime Wave

Earlier this month, Dolan through his USCCB issued a directive to be shared with all Catholics, calling the Prop 8 and DOMA same-sex marriage cases before the Supreme Court the “’Roe v. Wade’ of marriage.”

And he called on all Catholics to “pray, fast, and sacrifice” so the Court would not grant civil rights to loving same-sex couples.

Dolan cares about the family, and families, but not those of same-sex couples. He is a supporter of immigration reform, but not of including protections for families headed by LGBT people.

In fact, in his directive, Dolan stated that “redefining marriage serves no one’s rights, least of all those of children.”

If there’s one thing most people can agree upon, it is that marriage strengthens families and provides safety and security for children — regardless of their parents’ gender(s).

Just a few weeks ago, Cardinal Dolan, or his representatives, used the NYPD to prohibit from Sunday worship services gay Catholics by barring their entry into NYC’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the iconic home of the Roman Catholic Church in New York.

Why?

Their hands were dirty.

Cardinal Dolan had written a blog post demanding LGBT Catholics wash their hands — presumably of our bad behaviors, like entering into loving same-sex relationships and marriages — and Dolan refused to allow a small group of LGBT Catholics and their allies entrance into St. pats with their “dirty hands,” unless they washed them first.

In March, Cardinal Dolan said the Catholic Church wants “happiness” for same-sex couples but same-sex married couples are entitled only to “friendship” and not “sexual love.”

Last year, Dolan attacked same-sex marriage equality and abortion in his closing prayer while an invited guest at the Democratic National Convention.

Cardinal Dolan has been actively engaged in opposing the civil rights of LGBT people. It’s time for him to see us as human beings, and God’s children first.

Michelangelo Signorile invited me to speak on his SiriusXM OutQ radio show this afternoon, and he wondered why with a change at the top — with Pope Francis focusing publicly on the more traditional role of the Church as a savior for the sick, the poor, the needy, the elderly — if Cardinal Dolan is “freelancing” and acting on his own.

Signorile, a veteran journalist who has served the LGBT community for years, wondered why Dolan issued the directive to “pray, fast, and sacrifice” in the hopes of a Supreme Court upholding Prop 8 and DOMA.

Who knows what the Catholic Church is thinking. But we do know what the vast majority of America’s Catholics are thinking, and it looks nothing like what Cardinal Dolan is.

 

Related:

Gay Catholic Leaders Weigh In On Use Of NYPD To Bar Gay Catholics From St. Pat’s Cathedral

Cardinal Dolan Uses NYPD To Bar Gay Catholics From Sunday Worship In St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Cardinal Dolan: Same-Sex Couples Entitled To ‘Friendship’ But Not ‘Sexual Love’ (Video)

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Jeffries Vows Democrats Will Ensure Ukraine Aid Passes as Johnson Defectors Grow

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April 19, 2024

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Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries vowed Friday the majority of Democrats will support Republicans’ Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and Gaza foreign aid legislation as Republican Speaker Mike Johnson lost support of another member of his conference to a faction determined to oust him.

“Democrats will provide a majority of our majority as it relates to funding Israel, humanitarian assistance, Ukraine, and our allies in the Indo Pacific,” Minority Leader Jeffries said. “It remains to be seen what Republicans will do in terms of meeting the national security needs of the American people, but it was important for House Democrats to ensure that the national security bills are going to be considered.”

Despite Republicans having a one-vote majority, more Democrats on Friday voted to move the critical and long-awaited foreign aid bills forward than did Republicans.

READ MORE: ‘Stop Bringing Up Nazis and Hitler’: Marjorie Taylor Greene Smacked Down by Democrats

The 316-94 vote included 165 Democrats and 151 Republicans voting yes, and 55 Republicans and 39 Democrats voting no.

Axios’ Juliegrace Brufke posted the list of Republicans voting against their party’s legislation.

Calling it a “rare” moment in modern congressional history to have to rely on opposition party votes to pass legislation, BBC News reports Speaker Johnson’s “hold on power is tenuous, and the legislators who oppose him – and his bid to provide aid to Ukraine – occupy some key positions within the House’s power structure.”

Amid the procedural vote to move the foreign aid funding bills forward, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, a far-right Republican of Arizona, announced he is joining Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and Congressman Tim Massie (R-KY) in formally announcing their will vote to oust Speaker Johnson.

Gosar, like Greene, is reportedly a Christian nationalist. In 2022 CNN reported his “lengthy ties to White nationalists, [a] pro-Nazi blogger and far-right fringe received little pushback for years.”

RELATED: ‘Repercussions’: Democrats and Republicans Stand Against ‘Pro-Putin’ House GOP Faction

“We’ve been very honest in our assessment of the situation from the beginning,” Jeffries on Friday also declared. “At the appropriate time as House Democrats, we will have a conversation about how to deal with any hypothetical motion to vacate.”

“Moscow Marjorie Taylor Greene, Massie, and Gosar are quite a group. But central to our conversation is to make sure that the national security legislation in totality is passed by the House of Representatives.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

 

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Biden Amps Up Field Offices, Trump to Mobilize Thousands of Lawyers to Monitor Vote Counts

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April 19, 2024

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With less than seven months before Election Day the Biden campaign and the Trump campaign are taking shape, and like their politics they could not be more different.

President Biden is “scooping up record-making donations,” “flush with cash,” “building a behemoth of a campaign,” and “plowing the money into an expanding campaign operation in battleground states that appears to surpass what Donald Trump has built,” NBC News reported earlier this month.

Ex-President Donald Trump, struggling with donations, has “raised $75 million less for his presidential bid than Joe Biden and has 270,000 fewer unique donors now than at the same stage of his run for the White House four years ago,” the Financial Times reported Wednesday.

Now, as the Biden campaign invests in a massive ground game, Trump’s strategy is emerging, and it appears to be built on his “Big Lie,” the false and debunked conspiracy theory that there was and is tremendous election fraud.

READ MORE: ‘Repercussions’: Democrats and Republicans Stand Against ‘Pro-Putin’ House GOP Faction

Politico reports the Trump campaign plans to dispatch “more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers across battleground states to monitor — and potentially challenge — vote counting in November.”

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are calling their plan “the most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history.” The RNC is chaired by Trump’s hand-picked elections specialist who worked on the Bush 2000 election Florida recount team, and co-chaired by Trump’s daughter-in-law.

Despite Trump’s claims of a stolen election in 2020, his own Attorney General, Bill Barr, his own FBI Director, Chris Wray, his own Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Chris Krebs, all concluded there was no widespread election fraud and none that would have changed any election results. An independent federal agency, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, came to the same conclusion, all as The Brennan Center for Justice reported more than a month after the 2020 election.

Politico warns, “should Trump once again attempt to overturn the election, he will already have in place tens of thousands of workers who could help with that effort.”

“Having the right people to count the ballots is just as important as turning out voters on Election Day,” Trump said in a statement.

The Trump campaign “plans to deploy lawyers to monitor voter machine testing, early voting, election day voting, mail ballot processing and post-election canvassing, auditing and recounts. The campaign also plans to station lawyers at mail-in voting processing centers and set up a hotline that poll watchers and voters can use to report problems,” Politico adds. “The RNC also stated that attorneys will be stationed at ‘every single target processing center where mail ballots are tabulated.'”

READ MORE: ‘Big Journalism Fail’: Mainstream Media Blasted Over Coverage of Historic Trump Trial

The announcement of that massive operation comes on the heels of a convention this week hosted by the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association that “drew a parade of felons, disgraced politicians, election deniers, conspiracy theorists and, in the end, a few sheriffs,” NBC News reports. Also among attendees were “MAGA celebrities.”

“The group sees sheriffs as the highest authority in the U.S., more powerful than the federal government, and it wants these county officers to form posses to patrol polling places, seize voting machines and investigate the Democrats and foreign nations behind what they claim is a criminal effort to rig the vote by flooding the country with immigrants who vote illegally.”

David Gilbert at Wired reported: “Far-Right Sheriffs Want a Citizen Army to Stop ‘Illegal Immigrant’ Voters.”

Their plan perfectly dovetails with Donald Trump’s campaign push.

Gilbert writes, “election deniers and conspiracists have coalesced around a narrative they plan to push ahead of November: Blame the immigrants.”

Richard Mack, founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association told Wired that immigrants “have already disrupted the election because they are getting registered to vote.”

“That is election fraud,” Mack added, “these people are not qualified to vote. They are going to vote for whoever got them here and gave them a bunch of free stuff to get here, and of course that’s the Democrat Party, who are complicit in all of this.”

There are no reports of undocumented immigrants registering to vote in any substantial number. NBC News last week reported, “noncitizen voting” is “already illegal and very rare.”

READ MORE: ‘They Want Russia to Win So Badly’: GOP Congressman Blasts Far-Right House Republicans

Those claims, however, echo some made by the Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson one week ago in his joint press conference with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

“We only want U.S. citizens to vote in U.S. elections,” Johnson said, standing next to Trump, “but there are some Democrats who don’t want to do that. We believe that one of their designs, one of the reasons for this open border, which everybody asked all around the country, why would they do this? Why would they allow all this chaos? Why the violence? Because they want to turn these people into voters.”

“Right now the administration is encouraging illegals to go to their local welfare office to sign up for benefits,” Johnson, one of the top election deniers in the country, claimed as he explained his conspiracy theory. He did not state how the Biden Administration is communicating with undocumented immigrants, nor did he offer proof of these communications. He also did not state that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants are ineligible for any government welfare program.

 

Image via Shutterstock

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‘Repercussions’: Democrats and Republicans Stand Against ‘Pro-Putin’ House GOP Faction

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April 18, 2024

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Some House Democrats and House Republicans are coming together toward a common opponent: far-right “pro-Putin” hardliners in the House Republican conference, who appear to be led by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

Congresswoman Greene has been threatening to oust the Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Last month she filed a “motion to vacate the chair.” If she chooses to call it up she could force a vote on the House floor to try to remove Speaker Johnson.

House Democrats say they are willing to vote against ousting Johnson, as long as the Speaker puts on the floor desperately needed and long-awaited legislation to fund aid to Ukraine and Israel. Johnson has refused to put the Ukraine aid bill on the floor for months, but after Iran attacked Israel Johnson switched gears. Almost all Democrats and a seemingly large number of Republicans want to pass the Ukraine and Israel aid packages.

RELATED: Marjorie Taylor Greene, ‘Putin’s Envoy’? Democrat’s Bills Mock Republican’s Actions

Forgoing the possibility of installing Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker, which is conceivable given Johnson’s now one-vote majority, Democrats say if Johnson does the right thing, they will throw him their support.

“I think he’ll be in good shape,” to get Democrats to support him, if he puts the Ukraine aid bill on the floor, U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) told CNN Thursday. “I would say that there’s a lot of support for the underlying bills. I think those are vital.”

“If these bills were delivered favorably, and the aid was favorably voted upon, and Marjorie Taylor Greene went up there with a motion to remove him, for instance, I think there’s gonna be a lot of Democrats that move to kill that motion,” Congressman Krishnamoorthi said. “They don’t want to see him getting punished for doing the right thing.”

“I think it is a very bad policy of the House to allow one individual such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is an arsonist to this House of Representatives,” U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) told CBS News’ Scott MacFarlane, when asked about intervening to save Johnson. He added he doesn’t want her “to have so much influence.”

U.S. Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, one of several Republicans who won their New York districts in 2022, districts that were previously held by Democrats, opposes Greene’s motion to vacate – although he praised the Georgia GOP congresswoman.

CNN’s Manu Raju reports Republicans “say it’s time to marginalize hardliners blocking [their] agenda.”

D’Esposito, speaking to Raju, called for “repercussions for those who completely alienate the will of the conference. The people gave us the majority because they wanted Republicans to govern.”

U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, like D’Esposito is another New York Republican who won a previously Democratic seat in 2022. Lawler spoke out against the co-sponsor of Greene’s motion to vacate, U.S. Rep. Tim Massie (R-KY), along with two other House Republicans who are working to block the Ukraine aid bill via their powerful seats on the Rules Committee.

U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), a former Navy pilot, blasted Congresswoman Greene.

RELATED: ‘They Want Russia to Win So Badly’: GOP Congressman Blasts Far-Right House Republicans

“Time is of the essence” for Ukraine, Rep. Sherrill told CNN Wednesday night. “The least we can do is support our Democratic allies, especially given what we know Putin to do. To watch a report and to think there are people like Marjorie Taylor Greene on the right that are pro-Putin? That are pro-Russia? It is really shocking.”

U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), as NCRM reported Thursday, had denounced Greene.

“I guess their reasoning is they want Russia to win so badly that they want to oust the Speaker over it,” he said, referring to the Ukraine aid bill Greene and her cohorts want to tank. “I mean that’s a strange position to take.”

The far-right hardliners are also causing chaos in the House.

“Things just got very heated on the House floor,” NBC News’ Julie Tsirkin reported earlier Thursday. “Group of hardliners were trying to pressure Johnson to only put Israel aid on the floor and hold Ukraine aid until the Senate passed HR2.”

HR2 is the House Republicans’ extremist anti-immigrant legislation that has n o chance of passage in the Senate nor would it be signed into law by President Biden.

“Johnson said he couldn’t do it, and [U.S. Rep. Derrick] Van Orden,” a far-right Republican from Wisconsin “called him ‘tubby’ and vowed to bring on the MTV [Motion to Vacate.]”

“No one in the group (Gaetz, Boebert, Burchett, Higgins, Donalds et al.) were threatening Johnson with an MTV,” Tsirkin added. “Van Orden seemed to escalate things dramatically…”

Despite Greene’s pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine positions, her falsehoods about “Ukrainian Nazis,” and Russians not slaughtering Ukrainian clergy, reporters continue to “swarm”:

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Afraid and Intimidated’: Trump Trial Juror Targeted by Fox News Dismissed

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