Women Born Transsexual

From Raw Story:  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/06/11/sen-hatch-doma-not-motivated-by-animus-towards-gays-and-lesbians/

By Eric W. Dolan
Monday, June 11, 2012

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and ten other Senate Republicans on Monday urged the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

In a friend-of-the-court brief (PDF), Hatch and his colleagues asserted that Congress’s enactment of DOMA was not motivated by “animus” towards gay and lesbian individuals. Rather, the law was intended to prevent costly litigation against federal government.

“Congress sought to mitigate this national confusion by clarifying the definition of marriage for purposes of federal law, while preserving the authority of states to make determinations with regard to their own state laws,” they wrote. “Congress sought to preserve the status quo, not disrupt it.”

In February, Judge Jeffery White of the District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that Section 3 of DOMA violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. Section 3 of the law defined marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman, and prohibited legally married same sex couples from receiving federal benefits.

In his ruling, White noted that a House report on DOMA described it as reflecting the legislators’ “moral disapproval of homosexuality, and a moral conviction that heterosexuality better comports with traditional (especially Judeo- Christian) morality.” Members of Congress also described homosexuality as “immoral,” “depraved,” “unnatural,” “based on perversion,” and “an attack upon God’s principles.”

But Hatch and his colleagues said it was wrong for the judge to make a ruling based on the motivations of individual legislators.

Continue reading at:  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/06/11/sen-hatch-doma-not-motivated-by-animus-towards-gays-and-lesbians/

From The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/opinion/dowd-is-pleasure-a-sin.html

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 5, 2012

It’s hard to say what is weirder:

A Sister of Mercy writing about the Kama Sutra, sexual desire and “our yearnings for pleasure.”

Or the Vatican getting so hot and bothered about the academic treatise on sexuality that the pope censures it, causing it to shoot from obscurity to the top tier of Amazon.com’s best-seller list six years after it was published.

Just the latest chapter in the Vatican’s thuggish crusade to push American nuns — and all Catholic women — back into moldy subservience.

Even for a church that moves glacially, this was classic. “Just Love: a Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” by Sister Margaret Farley — a 77-year-old professor emeritus at Yale’s Divinity School, a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and an award-winning scholar — came out in 2006.

The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, which seems as hostile to women as the Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, spent years pondering it, then censured it on March 30 but didn’t publicly release the statement until Monday.

The denunciation of Sister Farley’s book is based on the fact that she deals with the modern world as it is. She refuses to fall in line with a Vatican rigidly clinging to an inbred, illusory world where men rule with no backtalk from women, gays are deviants, the divorced can’t remarry, men and women can’t use contraception, masturbation is a grave disorder and celibacy is enshrined, even as a global pedophilia scandal rages.

In old-fashioned prose steeped in historical and global perspective, Sister Farley’s main argument is that justice needs to govern relationships. In the interest of justice to oneself, she contends that “self-pleasuring” needs “to be moved out of the realm of taboo morality.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/opinion/dowd-is-pleasure-a-sin.html