Daily Archives: September 25, 2014



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Sister Roma Gives Behind-The-Scenes Details Of What Went Down At Facebook HQ

Sister Roma Gives Behind-The-Scenes Details Of What Went Down At Facebook HQ

Facebook Drag Queens-5On a recent webisode of Tim & Roma LIVE!, drag queen and Facebook #MyNameIs torch bearer Sister Roma offered a bit of insight from behind the scenes of her recent (disappointing) meeting with Facebook brass over the “real name” requirements.

Here’s what she said:

Let’s just say we actually had a meeting with Facebook and the thing that really gave me hope was afterwards we met with members of the LGBT employees, and they hinted that people on the inside of Facebook are definitely — there’s some people on our side. Facebook is aware of this problem and they’ve had internal discussions about it, and we’re going to force them to address it. So there you go.

It would seem, though, there aren’t enough people within Facebook who are “on our side.” Roma has a protest planned for Thursday, October 2nd outside San Francisco City Hall to pressure the social network to rethink its policy.

The #MyNameIs protest, it should be noted, is being promoted on Facebook.

“Facebook is picking a fight with the wrong crowd: we know REALNESS isn’t the name we were given at birth, it’s the name we kiki with online and off! We invite EVERYONE to join us in a massive protest of this tired policy — everyone has a right to control their identity online!” reads part of the event description.

Facebook would do well to satisfy the reasonable demands of its users. In light of the “real name” issue and other mounting concerns over things like privacy and advertising clutter, many are choosing to deactivate their accounts altogether.

The new site Ello has received plenty of attention as a potential alternative to Facebook, though it has a long way to go before it can be considered a powerful competitor. Still, momentum is building and Facebook would be foolish not to be paying attention.

Dan Tracer

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/tKtFKdEAK0o/sister-roma-gives-behind-the-scenes-details-of-what-went-down-at-facebook-hq-20140925

MISC

Gay Jesuit Leaves Catholic Church Over LGBT Firings – VIDEO

Gay Jesuit Leaves Catholic Church Over LGBT Firings – VIDEO

After ten years of pursuing priesthood in the Jesuit order, Benjamin Brenkert has left the Catholic Church because of recent firings of lesbian and gay people from Catholic institutions, reports the National Catholic Reporter.

Brenkert has written an open letter to Pope Francis which reads in part: Benjamin brenkert

“I ask you to instruct the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to tell Catholic institutions not to fire any more LGBT Catholics. I ask you to speak out against laws that criminalize and oppress LGBTQ people around the globe. These actions would bring true life to your statement ‘Whom am I to judge?'”

Brenkert said:

“I can’t be a Jesuit priest because I can’t be a member of the Catholic Church right now. I can’t be an openly gay Jesuit discerning priesthood in the Catholic Church if LGBTQ employees are being fired from Catholic institutions.”

He explained that he finally decided to leave the church when a food pantry worker was fired from St. Francis Xavier Parish in Kansas City, Mo., after her same-wedding was mentioned in a local newspaper article.

He added:

“I’m asking the pope to really look at the fact that I as a gay man could become a Catholic priest, and reach the highest level of human relationship with God as a celibate priest, while LGBTQ employees that are seeking marriage and sacramental recognition of their love could no longer be employees because they were delighting in God’s love for them. Is that fair? That’s not for me to say. All I want to do is ask people to identify with my story and to ask the church to be clear about what she believes.”

In August, Colin Collette, music director at the Holy Family Catholic Community church in Inverness, Illinois, was fired by pastor Terry Keehan after Collette posted photos of his proposal to his long-time same-sex partner.

Last month, Olivia Reichert and Christina Gambaro, two gay teachers at Cor Jesu, an all-girls Catholic high school in the Affton, Missouri area, were fired after administrators discovered they had married in New York.

At least 17 Catholic Church employees have been fired, resigned, or discriminated against over LGBT-related employment disputes this year, according to The National Catholic Reporter.

Watch a report on the Cor Jesu case, AFTER THE JUMP…


Jim Redmond

www.towleroad.com/2014/09/gay-jesuit-leaves-order-and-catholic-church-over-lgbt-firings-video.html

MISC

Only One Person Has Been Cured Of HIV, And Now A New Study Could Explain Why

Only One Person Has Been Cured Of HIV, And Now A New Study Could Explain Why
By Bahar Gholipour, Staff Writer
Published: 09/25/2014 02:03 PM EDT on LiveScience

To this date, only one person is thought to have been cured of HIV — the “Berlin patient” Timothy Ray Brown. But no one is exactly sure which aspect of Brown’s treatment may have cured him.

Now a new experiment on monkeys provides more evidence that a rare genetic mutation in the person who donated bone marrow to Brown may have had a central role in his cure.

Brown’s HIV was eradicated in 2007 after he underwent a treatment in Germany for his leukemia, a cancer of the white blood cells. In the leukemia treatment, Brown first underwent radiation to kill the cancer cells and stem cells in his bone marrow that were creating them, and then received a bone-marrow transplant from a healthy donor to generate new blood cells.

After the treatment, not only was Brown’s leukemia in remission, his HIV levels also plummeted to undetectable levels, and they have remained so ever since, even though he has not been taking the antiretroviral (ART) drugs typically used to keep HIV levels low in patients. [7 Devastating Infectious Diseases]

Three possibilities

The reason the virus remains undetectable in Brown could be that the bone-marrow transplant was from a donor who had a rare genetic mutation that renders a person’s CD4-T cells — the immune cells that are the main target of HIV infection — resistant to the virus.

Having this mutation, known as delta 32, results in having immune cells that have an altered form of a certain receptor called CCR5, which prevents the virus from entering the cells.

But it is also possible that radiation killed very nearly all of Brown’s cells that contained HIV at the outset of his treatment (and hence, the donor’s genetic mutation mattered very little).

Still another possibility is that the new immune cells (that were produced by transplanted bone-marrow cells) attacked Brown’s original cells, in what is called “graft-versus-host disease”. This could have killed any HIV reservoirs within Brown that had survived his radiation treatment.

So which is it?

Now in a small study, Dr. Guido Silvestri, a pathologist at Emory University in Atlanta, and colleaguesgave the same treatment that Brown was given to three monkeys, to find out which step in the cancer treatment might have been responsible for the eradication of the HIV.

The monkeys in the study were infected with Simian-Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or SHIV, which is a virus related to HIV that causes a disease similar to AIDS in animals. The monkeys received antiretroviral drugs for some time, to mimic the situation of HIV patients. Then, the animals underwent radiation and received a transplant of their own bone-marrow cells, which were harvested before they were infected with SHIV. [10 Deadly Diseases That Hopped Across Species]

The researchers found that radiation killed most of the animals’ blood and immune cells, including up to 99 percent of their CD4-T cells. This finding left open the possibility, at this point in the experiments, that radiation could have been a key step in curing Brown by killing almost all HIV reservoirs.

The scientists also found that the transplant resulted in the generation of HIV-free blood and immune cells within a few weeks, showing that the bone-marrow transplant experiment in monkeys was successful. If the monkeys were to be found cured of HIV, the researchers would be able to rule out graft-versus-host disease, because each monkey received its own cells in the transplant.

But after the treatment, once the researchers stopped giving the monkeys antiretroviral medications, the levels of the virus rapidly rebounded in two of the three animals.

The third monkey, who had to be euthanized after developing kidney failure, had some level of HIV in a number of tissues when it died, suggesting that none of the three monkeys had been “cured” by the treatment, according to the study published today (Sept. 25) in the journal PLOS Pathogens.

The findings support the idea that although radiation can reduce HIV levels, it’s not enough to eliminate all reservoirs of the virus, the researchers said. The results suggest that in the case of the Berlin patient, either the genetic mutation of the bone-marrow donor or the graft-versus-host disease “played a significant role,” the researchers said.

The Berlin patient’s treatment has been tried in at least two other HIV patients who also had lymphoma — cancer of the lymph nodes. However, the bone-marrow donors in those cases did not have the rare mutation in the CCR5 gene. The patients initially appeared to be free of HIV, but the virus returned after a couple of months and the patients had to start antiretroviral medication again.

Email Bahar Gholipour or follow her @alterwired. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

Copyright 2014 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/25/one-person-cured-of-hiv_n_5884506.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

MISC

Some Things Never Change: The Values Voter Summit and the Dubious 'Rebranding' of the GOP

Some Things Never Change: The Values Voter Summit and the Dubious 'Rebranding' of the GOP

Gop

BY DREW COURTNEY

Following the failure of the GOP to recapture the White House in the last presidential election, rebranding was a word that got knocked around a lot within party circles and in the media. In order to shore up the hemorrhaging support of women, ethnic and racial minorities, and young voters, it was agreed that the GOP platform would have to embrace less alienating positions on a variety of policy issues.

Now on the eve of midterm elections almost two years later, it’s become clear that Republican officials aren’t sticking to the plan. This weekend, conservative lawmakers including Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Rand Paul, and Gov. Bobby Jindal are slated to participate in what has become a rite of passage for presidential hopefuls of the GOP: courting the support of the Religious Right at the Family Research Council’s (FRC) annual Values Voter Summit.

VvsLurching in the opposite direction from the rest of the country, Republican officials are aligning themselves with extremist fringe groups that actively seek to put LGBT people back in the closet, quash access to legal abortion, and restrict the free exercise rights of non-Christian religious minorities. The FRC — as well as other primary sponsors of the event including the American Family Association, Liberty Counsel and American Values — has been instrumental in encouraging the GOP’s continued rightward march and carries a great deal of influence over evangelical Tea Party voters who form the core of the far right, a group that presidential contenders in the party increasingly feel the need to cater to.

A look at a few of the speakers scheduled to share the stage with leading Republican figures shows how grievously out of step the party is with the values of the American people AFTER THE JUMP…

PerkinsOne of the favored targets of the Religious Right has been the LGBT community. Tony Perkins, president of the FRC and a former Republican legislator, has attacked LGBT rights advocates by painting the equality movement as a “holocaust” against Christians, warning that those opposed to equality could soon be put into “boxcars.”

—

StaverMat Staver, of the anti-gay legal group Liberty Counsel, called the legalization of same-sex marriage “the beginning of the end of Western Civilization.” And similarly, Gary Bauer, president of American Values and a one-time Republican presidential hopeful, declared that A&E’s suspension of “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson for homophobic and racist remarks was another example of progressives waging a “jihad against America’s cultural norms.”

Sandy rios—

Along with a heavy dose of homophobia, another staple of the Religious Right rhetorical circus is uncompromising contempt for the Obama administration and its policy initiatives. Sandy Rios, who hosts a daily program on the American Family Association’s radio network, has argued that the president was born outside the country and cited a chain email to insist that one of Obama’s first priorities as president was to resettle thousands of Palestinian refugees in the U.S. and provide them with food stamps.

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StarnesAnother example of the xenophobia, Islamophobia and Obamaphobia that characterize right-wing rhetoric is found in Todd Starnes, an author and Fox News commentator who recently blamed the president for “orchestrating” the protests in Ferguson, Mo. and asserted that Obama refused to take action against ISIS to “accommodat[e] the Islamic faith at the expense of all other faiths.” 

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Jerry boykinsMany of the divisive Religious Right narratives are tied to the fear that Christianity is somehow threatened by the encroachment of LGBT equality, reproductive rights, the separation of church and state or rights for religious minorities. FRC vice president Jerry Boykin has blamed the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre on the presence of secularism in American society and called for a suspension of religious freedoms for American Muslims, advocating for “no mosques in America.”

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Benham brothersOther Values Voter Summit speakers include twin brothers Jason and David Benham, who became a cause celebre for the Religious Right this year when an HGTV show they were slated to star in was cancelled following revelations of their anti-gay, anti-choice and anti-Muslim activism. The two have been lauded by right-wing activists for expressing their unvarnished opinions, which have included calling an Islamic community center a “den of iniquity” and referring to Muslims as “the enemy” attacking America.

 These statements are just the tip of the iceberg in demonstrating the bigotry that engulfs the Religious Right and that is always present at the Values Voter Summit. The presence of GOP presidential hopefuls at events like the Values Voter Summit makes clear that they have no qualms about sharing a stage with extremists. Whether participation at the summit is cold political calculation or a glimpse at some of their core convictions, it appears that we can count on the next Republican candidate for president to do the bidding of those who seek to restrict the rights of others, enshrine their narrow views into law, and hold our country back.

Drew Courtney is the director of communications at People For the American Way.


Drew Courtney

www.towleroad.com/2014/09/gop-1.html

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