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Victim Or Victimizer? Catholic Church, Diaz’s Gay Equality Intolerance

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Victim Or Victimizer? Friend or foe?

Hard at work painting itself as the victim in a public debate on marriage equality, The New York State Catholic Conference, along with New York State Senator and Reverend Rubén Díaz, are instead victimizing the gay community.

Guest post by New York City-​based novelist and freelance journalist Scott Rose, who frequently writes about human rights.

The New York State Catholic Conference, which bills itself as “the official public policy voice of the Catholic Church in New York State,” knows absolutely no shame in its efforts to perpetuate sexual orientation apartheid in New York State. Last week the Catholic Conference published a press release titled, “A Note on Intolerance” in which it painted itself and New York State Senator and Reverend Rubén Díaz, Sr. — a Pentecostal minister and sadistic opponent of LGBT civil rights — as victims of hysterical and vulgar attack from the marriage equality movement. In fact, gay rights foes are, indeed, the bullies. Merely consider which group has full, equal, constitutionally-protected civil rights, and which does not.

I sent the author of that press release, Richard E. Barnes — who, coincidentially, was quoted Sunday in an AP article, “Some gay-rights foes claim they now are bullied” – and other leading figures in the Catholic Conference an e-mail, objecting that their presentation of information surrounding the marriage equality movement was calculated to smear gay people. I specifically offered to help to do what Mr. Barnes had not at all done – that is, to present within the press release a well-reasoned, intellectual statement explaining just what about state-sanctioned sexual orientation apartheid in the matter of marriage is so hurtful, backwards and ignorant. I did not receive the courtesy of a reply.

The appearance is that the New York State Catholic Conference, whose web site states it “was founded to translate Catholic teachings into action in the public policy arena” — in clear, direct conflict of the U.S.  Constitution’s separation of church and state – wants to keep attention centered on that handful of LGBTers who in outrage and frustration over being oppressed, do something goofy, like decide to hold an F*!% Ruben Díaz Festival.

The core issues surrounding marriage equality have nothing whatsoever to do with such diversions. For that matter, the arguments involving marriage equality, as a politician like New York State Senator and Reverend Rubén Díaz presents them, also have nothing to do with those core issues. Díaz and his anti-gay co-conspirators in the Catholic Conference have their minds closed shut, like safes with nothing but cobwebs and anti-gay vindictiveness inside. The arguments they present against equality have all been resoundingly debunked.

To cite but one example from the Catholic Conference’s press release, they allege that marriage equality would take away their “religious liberty.” That is absolute hooey. The Catholic Church has a special interest in keeping gay people oppressed. Its noxious set-up in the past has been to persecute gays and lesbians over their sexual orientation as they are growing up, drive them to the utter depths of social despair and then offer to them as the only apparent workable option for living out their lives a sexless enslavement to the Church.

The nuns in particular get hidden away, doing the dirty work and the laundry for the men up through to those towards the top of the hierarchy like the Catholic Conference’s Barnes who exploit them to live cushy privileged existences. Where anti-gay bigotry is eliminated, where gay people’s long-term relationships are validated, where gay youth are shown hope for love and intimacy in their futures, the Catholic Church loses many potential candidates that it otherwise might have been able to terrorize into becoming slavish priests or nuns.

The Catholic Conference’s press release duplicitously alleges that the organization has a “love for all of God’s children, gay or straight.” Exactly what, according to these duplicitous anti-gay bullies, are the gay and lesbian people that these Catholics allegedly love supposed to do upon reaching a marrying age? Force themselves into impossible relationships with heterosexuals? Resign themselves to permanent second-class citizenship with a mate? Part of what caused the bullycide of Tyler Clementi when he jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge last year was Tyler’s knowledge that his society irrationally hated him so strongly for who he was that it would not permit him to marry a man.

What, incidentally, but not insignificantly, is the source of anti-gay bullies in our schools?  Anti-gay bullies do not grow under cabbages, nor do they come from families that teach good strong acceptance values. Anti-gay bullies in the schools come from households where parents teach children fraudulent notions that there is something inherently “wrong” with homosexual human beings. The way the unrelenting anti-gay bully the Pope states it, actually, is that homosexual people are “objectively disordered.” That is rich, coming from a man who maintains his grip on power by alleging belief in a “virgin birth.”

The Catholic Conference’s press release also attempts to make all LGBT people accountable for supposed credible threats made against Diaz. None of those threats, however, have come from any leader of the push for marriage equality, such as Governor Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Michael Bloomberg or Senator Thomas Duane. By contrast, during an anti-gay hate rally Díaz held in the Bronx on May 15, his co-conspirator in anti-gay oppression, the Reverend Ariel Torres Ortega, hollered at an anti-LGBT mob that God says that gay people are “worthy of death.” Not only has Diaz not apologized for that, he and his associates have tried to excuse it away, with any number of repugnantly disingenuous defenses of it.

The arguments that Ruben Díaz and Richard Barnes would make against Cuomo, Bloomberg and Duane in their defenses of equality do not bear intellectual scrutiny. The intellectual bankruptcy of Díaz’s and Barnes’s anti-gay bigotry, furthermore, is thrown into heightened relief against all the religious leaders today — not to mention, Whole churches! Whole branches of Judaism! – that favor marriage equality.  It bears repeating here that in 2009, Saqib Ali, the first Muslim Delegate in the Maryland General Assembly, explained why he voted for marriage equality. “I recognize that I represent people of all faiths and no faith at all. If I tried to enforce religion by law – as in a theocracy – I would be doing a disservice both to my constituents and to my religion.”

Díaz is to be condemned for more than just endorsing the idea that God says gays are “worthy of death.”  He calculatingly scheduled his May 15 anti-gay hate rally on the same day as this year’s annual New York Aids Walk, so people would not be available to protest at his anti-gay hate rally — forcing some to choose between their love of their brand of religion and their love of a loved one. More heterosexual than lesbian women are living with HIV or AIDS, yet lesbians of course give priority to participating in the AIDS walk over protesting Díaz’s anti-gay hate rally. The New York State Catholic Conference should be ashamed of its attacks on LGBT New Yorkers and equally ashamed of its preposterous presentation of the maliciously anti-gay Reverend-Senator Díaz as a victim.

Diaz and the Church are not the victims. Indeed, they are the victimizers.

(Image, top: Catholics at the Capitol, buttons from a March, 2011 religious lobbying effort by the New York State Catholic Conference.)

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Trump Declares War on ‘Woke Leftist Ideologues’ as He Moves to Reshape Entire US Military

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President Donald Trump has made clear he intends to remake the culture of the entire U.S. Military, starting at the very beginning.

“Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years. I have ordered the immediate dismissal of the Board of Visitors for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard,” the Commander-in-Chief announced Monday afternoon.  The Boards ensure accountability and civilian oversight at institutions like West Point. “We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”

“Trump campaigned on a promise to purge the U.S. military of officers he deemed ‘woke’ and has used the start of his second term to try and rid the Pentagon of diversity initiatives by executive order,” Politico reported. “The purge has begun to extend to the nation’s service academies, where Republican lawmakers have long complained that so-called ‘woke’ literature is seeping into the curriculum. The Washington Post reported on Friday that the U.S. Defense Department had begun restricting access to some books in its school systems. The service academies themselves had already begun disbanding student clubs focused on diversity in response to Trump’s executive orders, with West Point getting rid of a dozen such organizations last week, including the Asian-Pacific Forum Club and the National Society of Black Engineers Club.”

It is unclear if the President can fire members of the Boards of Visitors, who are appointed by the President to serve a term of three years.

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As President Trump’s newly sworn-in national security cabinet members get to work in their new roles, they are making clear their priorities will be his: getting rid of “woke.”

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Now, Hegseth is again engaging in “culture war” attacks, this time attacking transgender service members, another attempt to purge “woke” from the Trump administration.

In a memo on Monday titled, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” (the exact same title as a Trump executive order,) the Defense Secretary announced a “pause” for all medical treatments of transgender service members, and a pause on accepting any new transgender service members into the U.S. Military.

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Rieckhoff has been sounding the alarm bells about Trump’s apparent takeover of the military.

“He’s daring the world to stop him, just like he has his entire life, and they’re not stopping him,” Rieckhoff said Friday night about Trump in a panel discussion on MSNBC.

He also talked about Trump’s “radical extreme agenda of taking over the government and snatching the levers of power,” and warned: “we should be really watching when he says, ‘I’m going for the military.'”

“He went with Hegseth first, he’s going for the Pentagon first because when you break into a house and take it over, you go for the gun closet first,” Rieckhoff remarked. “He knows the military is the most powerful, he knows it’s the most influential. It’s the biggest biggest employer. It’s got the biggest budget, and it’s got the guns, so that’s where he’s going first and he’s leading his entire strategy with and at the Pentagon.”

Before the 2024 election, the liberal political action committee VoteVets, posted video (below) showing how Trump, using the Project 2025 playbook, could take over the U.S. Military and turn it “into his own MAGA military.”

Almost all the suggestions have begun to be implemented.

Watch that video below or at this link.

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The 27 Words the NSA Is Scrubbing From Its Websites: Report

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The National Security Agency (NSA), a largely clandestine global intelligence-gathering and counterintelligence organization that “prevents and eradicates threats to U.S. national security systems,” is reportedly undergoing a massive “purge” on its public and private websites and internal network, eliminating any site that contains any of a list of 27 words — despite possibly including mission-related work. The operation is an effort to comply with President Donald Trump’s order to eliminate any so-called “DEI” programs or language.

Trump has called DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — “illegal,” and in his January 21 executive order alleged that DEI “policies not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system. Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex.”

According to Popular Information, on Monday the NSA, which is under the U.S. Department of Defense, “is planning a ‘Big Delete’ of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including ‘privilege,’ ‘bias,’ and ‘inclusion.’ The ‘Big Delete,’ according to an NSA source and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, is creating unintended consequences.

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Popular Information’s Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby report that “the dragnet is taking down ‘mission-related’ work. According to the NSA source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, the process is ‘very chaotic,’ but is plowing ahead anyway.”

A memo announcing the 27 banned words “acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term ‘privilege is used by the NSA in the context of ‘privilege escalation.’ In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to ‘techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.'”

Efforts to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI orders are not limited to the NSA.

“Since Trump took office, thousands of web pages across various federal agencies have been altered or removed entirely. Federal agencies have taken down or edited resources about HIV, contraceptives, LGBTQ+ health, abortion, and climate change. Some web pages have later come back online ‘without clarity on what had been changed or removed.” Popular Information also reported.

“An analysis by the Washington Post of 8,000 federal web pages ‘found 662 examples of deletions and additions’ since Trump took office. The analysis found that words like diversity, equity, and inclusion were removed at least 231 times from the websites of federal agencies, including the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Transportation.”

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A quick search of the NSA’s public website for the word “transgender” came up with only one hit, a page titled, “50 Years of Pride: Celebrating NSA’s Committment {sic] to Promoting Respect, Individuality, Diversity, and Equality.” That link led to an error page that stated: “The page you are looking for might have been moved, renamed, or may be temporarily unavailable.”

But a search for pages with the words “Diversity,” “Privilege,” and “Pronouns” resulted in numerous positive hits.

Legum posted the list of 27 banned words to social media. They include, Anti-Racism, Racism, Allyship, Bias, DEI, Diversity, Confirmation Bias, Equity, Feminism, Gender, Gender Identity Inclusion, Inclusive, and All-Inclusive, among others.

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‘Stomach Turning’: Trump Defends His J6 Pardons as ‘Great for Humanity’

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President Donald Trump aboard Air Force One on Sunday announced that the nearly 1600 people he pardoned after they had been convicted of January 6-related crimes did not assault anyone but had been assaulted by the U.S. government, and his granting those pardons on his first day back in office was “a great thing for humanity.”

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Reminded by a reporter that he had planned to honor first responders at the Super Bowl, President Trump was asked why he would pardon people who had assaulted first responders.

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“I pardoned people that were assaulted themselves. They were assaulted by our government,” Trump insisted, despite countless hours of footage of people he pardoned attacking the U.S. Capitol, and some of them attacking law enforcement officers.

“I pardoned J6 people who were assaulted by our government. That’s who assaulted — and they were treated unfairly, there’s never been a group of people in this country outside of maybe one instance that I can think of, but I won’t get into it, that were treated more horribly than the people of J6,” Trump insisted.

“I didn’t assault, they didn’t assault. They were assaulted, and what I did was a great thing for humanity.”

Just days after Trump handed down the pardons, The New York Times reported that even some of his close allies “opposed granting clemency to those rioters found guilty of violent crimes, especially the more than 600 who were convicted of assaulting or resisting police officers. Of those defendants, nearly 175 used a dangerous or deadly weapon, prosecutors say.”

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Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, called the pardons “an attempt to rewrite history and erase an attack on the Constitution and the country.”

Critics are blasting President Trump’s remarks on Sunday, including his claim the people he pardoned had been assaulted by “our government.”

“This administration & the GOP are completely rewriting the events of January 6. The president is doing it here. They pretend all the evidence, footage, confessions, & documents just don’t exist, that we didn’t see it happen. It’s an authoritarian move, & it should terrify us all,” observed T. Kenny Fountain, an associate professor whose bio says he researches extremism, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and disinformation.

Noted political scientist and professor of politics Larry Sabato called Trump’s remarks “Absolutely stomach-turning.”

Journalist Jim Acosta wrote simply, “Disgraceful.”

Award-winning investigative reporter Phil Williams posted video from January 6 and wrote, “These people were all pardoned.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

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