Anti-LGBT Groups Launch Movement Against Federal Equality Act

February 19, 2019 — Suzan

From The Southern Poverty Law Center:  https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/02/08/anti-lgbt-groups-launch-movement-against-federal-equality-act

Hatewatch Staff
February 08, 2019

Anti-LGBT hate group leaders and activists recently launched a new project, the #Gone2Far movement (GTFM), to oppose H.R. 2282, the federal Equality Act, which seeks to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include protections for the categories of a person’s sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.

The GTFM officially debuted at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 5, where participants decried the Equality Act, which has been introduced in Congress in one form or another since 1974 but has never passed. It has renewed support in 2019 from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is committed to passing it.

The GTFM attempts to link LGBT people to pedophilia and refers to the Equality Act as “The Pedophilia Act.” The movement’s website is filled with false assertions that LGBT people are attempting to recruit or assault children.

The site includes a “Proclamation for Morality” and claims that “the consumption of fecal matter” is a common sexual practice among gay men, and homosexuality is a behavioral choice caused by childhood sexual abuse, a common myth among anti-LGBT activists. Visitors to the site are invited to sign their name in support.

The following people spoke at the press conference:

  • Scott Lively, best-known for being sued for violating human rights in Uganda and for the pseudohistorical book The Pink Swastika, which claimed gay men were responsible for the Nazi party and the Holocaust
  • Peter LaBarbera, director of anti-LGBT hate group Americans for Truth about Homosexuality (AFTAH), who believes that pedophilia “is a subset of the larger deviance of homosexuality”
  • Randy Short, an advocate of anti-LGBT and anti-Soros conspiracy theories
  • Stephen Broden, senior pastor of Fair Park Bible Fellowship, Dallas, Texas, and a Texas Republican congressional candidate with Tea Party ties who peddles conspiracy theories and rails against the “New World Order”
  • Stephen Black, executive director of Oklahoma’s ex-gay ministry First Stone Ministries
  • Dan Fisher, pastor and former Oklahoma state representative who introduced an anti-trans bathroom bill into the state legislature

Each speaker expressed a litany of grievances against LGBT people and the Equality Act during the over 90-minute event, with a focus on homosexuality and “transgenderism” as behaviors that are not immutable characteristics and therefore are ineligible for protection under the Civil Rights Act.

Randy Short, the first speaker, set the tone of the event, proclaiming, “Today is the day that we declare war on those who are ungodly, unbiblical and wicked.” Short went on to say that “we are sick and tired of all the deviants, all the eugenicists, all the homophiles coming out of the closet to destroy this country.” “We have a group,” Short said, in reference to LGBT people, “that nobody wants, that has decided like a parasite to hook itself to the history and legacy of the African American people.”

Other speakers offered warnings about the “homosexual and pedophile agendas.” Stephen Black claimed bans on pseudoscientific and harmful conversion (ex-gay) therapy are a way to “take our sexually confused youth and bind them into LGBTQ chaos.” Scott Lively warned of nondiscrimination policies including LGBT people that are “the seed that contains the entire tree of the LGBT agenda and all of its poisonous fruit.” According to Lively, LGBT people are introducing the pedophilia agenda through the “transgenderization of the children” while Peter LaBarbera said that nondiscrimination means discrimination against Christians.

GTFM is currently promoting the upcoming “God’s Voice: A Biblical Response to the Queering of the Church” conference, slated for Oklahoma City on Feb. 22 and 23. LaBarbera and Black, members of the GTFM organizing committee, will also be spreading their message there.

Posted in Uncategorized. 2 Comments »

Izzy Young, Who Presided Over the Folk Revival, Is Dead at 90

February 8, 2019 — Suzan

I always say I’m an old hippie, but before I was a hippie I was and in many ways still am a Folknik, a term coined by the late Izzy Young.

The very first thing I did on my very first visit to New York City in 1966 was make a pilgrimage to Izzy Young’s Folklore Center.  It was on Sixth Avenue then.  Third floor if I recall correctly, right above Fretted Instruments.

From The New York Times:  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/obituaries/izzy-young-dead.html

By Margalit Fox
Feb. 5, 2019

Izzy Young, whose Greenwich Village shop, the Folklore Center, was the beating heart of the midcentury folk music revival — and who in 1961 presented the first New York concert by a young Bob Dylan — died on Monday at his home in Stockholm. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Philomène Grandin.

Anyone wanting to capture the essence of the times could do far worse than head to the Folklore Center, at 110 Macdougal Street, between Bleecker and West Third Streets. Established in 1957, it was nominally a music store, selling records, books, instruments, sheet music and fan magazines, most sprung from sweat and mimeograph machines, like Sing Out!, Caravan and Gardyloo.

In actual practice, the center was also equal parts hiring hall; Schwab’s Pharmacy, where young hopefuls awaited discovery; matchbox recital space for organized performances and impromptu jam sessions; nerve center for gossip on a par with any small-town barbershop; and forum for continuing, crackling debate on the all-consuming subject of folk music, which thanks in no small part to Mr. Young was enjoying wide, renewed attention.

“I began hanging out at the Folklore Center, the citadel of Americana folk music,” Mr. Dylan wrote in his memoir “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), recalling his arrival in New York in 1961. “The small store was up a flight of stairs and the place had an antique grace. It was like an ancient chapel, like a shoebox sized institute.”

Crackling loudest above the din was Mr. Young, who, with his horn-rimmed glasses, prodigious vocal capacity and bottomless cornucopia of opinion, was the platonic, genially abrasive New York nebbish from Central Casting.

“His voice was like a bulldozer and always seemed too loud for the little room,” Mr. Dylan wrote. “Izzy was always a little rattled over something or other. He was sloppily good-natured. In reality a romantic. To him, folk music glittered like a mound of gold. It did for me, too.”

Until he closed the shop in 1973 to move to Stockholm and start a similar center, Mr. Young reigned supreme as a handicapper (“The first few times I met Dylan, I wasn’t that impressed,” he said. “But as he began writing those great songs, I realized he was really something”); an impresario (he organized hundreds of concerts throughout the city, including Mr. Dylan’s first formal appearance, at the Carnegie Hall complex, as well as performances by the New Lost City Ramblers, Dave Van Ronk, Jean Ritchie and Phil Ochs); and an evangelist who almost single-handedly put the “Folk” in Folk City, the storied Village nightclub.

He was also a writer, with a regular column in Sing Out!; a broadcaster, with a folk music show on WBAI in New York; an agitator (in 1961, he helped organize successful public protests after the city banned folk music from Washington Square Park); a ferocious keeper of the castle (“He was even known to throw people out of his store,” Dick Weissman, a former member of the folk group the Journeymen, wrote, “simply because they irritated him”); and an equally ferocious defender of the faith. (Mr. Young repudiated Mr. Dylan after he began wielding an electric guitar in the mid-’60s.)

If, at the end of the day, the Folklore Center was a less-than-successful capitalist enterprise — who, after all, goes into folk music to get rich? — it scarcely mattered. Joni Mitchell was discovered there. Peter found Mary there, after seeing her photo on a wall. (Paul joined them soon afterward.) Mr. Van Ronk, then the more established musician, met the newly arrived Mr. Dylan there and invited him to take the stage at the nearby Gaslight Cafe.

Continue reading at:  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/obituaries/izzy-young-dead.html

Posted in Uncategorized. Comments Off on Izzy Young, Who Presided Over the Folk Revival, Is Dead at 90

Advancing the Rabbinic Prescription for Transgender Health Care

February 7, 2019 — Suzan

From Hadassah Brandeis:  https://blogs.brandeis.edu/freshideasfromhbi/advancing-the-rabbinic-prescription-for-transgender-health-care/

By Rabbi Mike Moskowitz and Joshua D. Safer, MD, FACP
January 31, 2019

Doctors and Rabbis are asked a lot of questions; it’s a big part of the job. We certainly don’t have all of the answers and so we continue to listen, research, and expand our understanding of the issues.  And, we have our own questions to help us get closer to the information that shapes our responses to the people who are asking for guidance. There can be no contradiction between science and religion when they both manifest the truth of the Divine intention. The struggle for that knowledge, and its application, is an ongoing and humbling process.

However, there are still many in both the medical and the Jewish communities who don’t yet understand gender identity and transgender experiences. They insist: “It can’t be that G-d put someone in the wrong body. G-d doesn’t make mistakes. It’s sacrilegious to change the body that G-d gave you,” and so on. No one would say this about a heart defect, deviated septum, or inflamed appendix – in part because the Torah teaches us in this week’s portion: “ורפא ירפא ” and be healed. The Talmud explains that this is the scriptural permission given to physicians offering treatment to change something that G-d has created.

Similarly, the wicked Turnus Rufus asked of Rabbi Akiva: If your G-d is a lover of the poor, why then does G-d not provide for them? R’ Akiva argues that the inequality experienced by many in this world doesn’t exist for us to sustain, but rather for us to change. G-d presents inequality as an opportunity for us to be in partnership, to heal the divide and emulate the Divine by supporting others.

Turnus Rufus replies that by changing the differential that G-d constructed, we are going against the Divine will and angering G-d. In response, R’ Akivah shares an interesting parable: To what is this similar? It is analogous to a king who, angry with his child, confines them to prison and orders that no one give them anything to eat or drink. Someone then disobeys and provides for the child’s needs and when the king hears about it, the king sends the person gifts in thankful recognition. R’ Akivah continues: We are all that child to G-d. When we improve the lives of those who are suffering, it brings pleasure and joy to G-d.

G-d, as our parent, wants us to support each other and make sure that we are all provided for.

We demonstrate to G-d that we see ourselves as G-d’s children when we take care of humanity as we would our immediate family. As a society, we have a responsibility to meet the needs of all, including our transgender siblings. We must make resources available, including all of the resources of modern medicine, whenever needed. It is not only permitted to provide transgender medical procedures, but we are obligated to do so when necessary.

Continue reading at:  https://blogs.brandeis.edu/freshideasfromhbi/advancing-the-rabbinic-prescription-for-transgender-health-care/

Posted in Uncategorized. Comments Off on Advancing the Rabbinic Prescription for Transgender Health Care

Babs Siperstein, pioneering N.J. trans activist, dies at 76

February 7, 2019 — Suzan

From The Washington Blade:  https://www.washingtonblade.com/2019/02/04/babs-siperstein-pioneering-n-j-trans-activist-dies-at-76/

by Chris Johnson
February 4, 2019

Barbra “Babs” Siperstein, a transgender Democratic activist in New Jersey who’s credited with taking a lead role in pushing a pro-trans state birth certificate law for her state, died over the weekend at age 76, according to local media reports.

Siperstein died days after the law went into effect on Feb. 1. The “Babs Siperstein Law” allows individuals in New Jersey to change the gender marker on their birth certificate without proof of surgery and offer a gender-neutral option. The law was signed by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.

The first openly transgender member of the Democratic National Committee, Siperstein was appointed in 2011 to the Democratic National Committee’s executive committee and served there until 2017. Siperstein was a superdelegate for Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

Speaking with the Washington Blade at the convention, Siperstein was dubious of Trump’s pledge to support LGBT people during his speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention. (Her prediction later proved true.)

“There’s nothing behind it,” Siperstein said. “He said unequivocally that he was going to appoint the most conservative Supreme Court justices. He will say anything.”

Although she was a Democrat, Siperstein wasn’t afraid to take on members of her own party on the issue of transgender rights.

In 2015, Siperstein told the Blade she was “extremely disappointed” in Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), now a U.S. senator and a 2020 presidential candidate, for her actions as California attorney general appealing a court order granting a transgender prison inmate in California access to gender reassignment surgery.

“I would think that any political candidate, or any public servant, that would fight to prevent basic and necessary medical treatment for any person would be incompetent to serve,” Siperstein said. “How can you trust any public servant, any elected official, who fights to prevent basic and necessary medical service for any person? Who’s next?”

Sean Meloy, who served as the DNC’s Director of LGBTQ Engagement and is now political director for the LGBTQ Victory Fund, said Siperstein built a strong legacy.

“For so many in the Democratic Party, Babs was the first openly trans person they ever met and she undoubtably changed the hearts and minds of many party leaders who were not yet committed to trans equality,” Meloy said. “She was a constant advocate for the entire LGBTQ community and helped make the Democratic Party more accepting not just of trans people, but trans candidates as well. Her presence in the DNC helped prepare the party and pave the way for trailblazing trans Democratic candidates like Danica Roem and Christine Hallquist – and her impact will be felt for years to come.”

Posted in Uncategorized. Comments Off on Babs Siperstein, pioneering N.J. trans activist, dies at 76