Entrevista LGBT
Daily Archives: October 6, 2014
2011.05.13 – MENY Say I Do Tour (NY) (Fred Anguera) (15)
Synod On The Family May Open Door To Changes For Divorcees, Not So Much For Gay Marriage
Synod On The Family May Open Door To Changes For Divorcees, Not So Much For Gay Marriage
The Extraordinary Synod on the Family opened today by Pope Francis at the Vatican could bring about important changes regarding the church’s position on divorcees, homosexuals and non-married couples, adapting to the ways families have changed in the modern world.
In two weeks, the Synod will come up with only an outline, since any decision will be postponed until 2015. Nevertheless, it is an extremely important moment of reflection, desired by Pope Francis himself: the assembly of cardinals and bishops will actually be discussing very delicate subjects for the church, including the treatment of divorced followers, the attitude towards homosexual couples, and the relationship between the church and society regarding family and sexuality in general.
Opening the synod, Pope Francis advised “speaking clearly” and “with parrhesia” (a Greek term meaning the freedom to speak honestly). The pope has often spoken about the need for the church to take on the challenges of the contemporary world and the big changes at the root of the microcosm that is the family; lovingly accepting those who have erred and allowing remarried divorcees to take communion, an idea which, despite not appealing to all of the cardinals, might (with certain restrictions) pass in the assembly.
This, at least, reflects the spirit of open-mindedness entrusted to Cardinal Peter Erdo, Relator General of the Synod as well as the Primate of Hungary and President of the European Bishops. “Divorcees who have remarried in civil courts,” stated Erdo, “belong to the Church. They need and have the right to be guided by their pastors.” Moreover, referring to the result of the questionnaire relating to the themes of the synod sent out in November 2013 to all of the parishes of the world: “regarding divorcees who remarried in civil courts, many reaffirm that the difference between those who are responsible for breaking up a marriage and those who have been abandoned needs to be taken into account: the pastors of the church should take care of them in a specific ways.”
Reading between the lines of the cardinal’s words, there are essentially two restrictions with allowing divorcees to receive communion: the fact that the second marriage (without an annulment) is not recognized by the church, and the solely pastoral (and therefore not doctrinal) aspect that lends itself to the debate.
Eucharist for Remarried Divorcees, with Restrictions.
Before coming up with possible solutions to the complexity of allowing remarried divorcees to receive communion, Erdo made clear some preconditions: “the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage is not coming into question as such. Therefore it is not doctrinal questions, but practical questions of a solely pastoral nature- otherwise inseparable from the truth of the faith- that are being discussed in this synod.” And “in the case of a sacramental (conjugated) marriage, after a divorce, while the first spouse is still alive, it is not possible to have a second marriage recognized by the church.”
The archbishop of Budapest then outlined two solutions: “Divorcees remarried in civil court belong to the church. They need and have the right to be guided by their pastors. They are welcome to listen to the word of God, to participate in the liturgy of the church, to pray and to do charitable works. The pastors of the church should take care of them in very specific ways, taking into account the circumstances of each person“ Erdo stated.
The first path outlined by Erdo is facilitating the annulment of a marriage, with three possibilities: “Many seem to think there needs to be a timely and efficient way of ascertaining the invalidity of a marriage bond, first of all the need for two appeals confirming the declaration of annulment of the marriage bond, proceeding to the second phase only if there is no appeal from one or both parties or from the defender of the bond within a defined timeframe.“
Second, echoing Benedict XVI, a solution outside of the judicial process, since “according to authoritative proposals, the faith of those to be married needs to be evaluated to ascertain the validity of the sacrament of marriage, according to the general principle that the validity of a sacrament requires that the party intends to do what the Church does.” Third, the case of the “Petrine Privilege,” concerning marriages of disparity of cult.
In conclusion, Erdo echoes the proposal formulated by Cardinal Walter Kasper at a Consistory of Cardinals in February, suggesting to “examine more deeply the practice of some orthodox churches, which allows for the possibility of a second or third marriage marked by a penitential character. Examining this matter is necessary to avoid interpretations and conclusions that are not sufficiently well-founded.”
Relator General of the Synod: No Discrimination Against Gays, Except for Marriage.
From the instrumentum laboris “emerge two clear aspects regarding homosexuality.” So declared Cardinal Peter Erdo,in his relatio ante discpetationem. “First of all, there is a full consensus that people with a homosexual orientation should not be discriminated against, as reaffirmed in the catechism of the Catholic Church. Secondly, it is clear that the majority of the baptized – and all the Episcopal conferences- do not expect that these relationships be equated with marriage between a man and a woman, nor is there a consensus among a vast majority of Catholics on the ideology of gender theories.”
Why Each SCOTUS Justice Might Be Avoiding the Marriage Equality Question Right Now
Why Each SCOTUS Justice Might Be Avoiding the Marriage Equality Question Right Now
The media have been universally shocked at the Supreme Court’s announcement today. Now that we have had time to read several media accounts (including our own Towleroad coverage) we should take a step back and analyze what this means from a legal, political, and practical perspective. I also would like to shed a little more light on how this may have happened and what conclusions, if any, we can draw from it.
Let’s be clear on what did not happen. The Supreme Court did not make a substantive ruling on the constitutionality of banning gays from marrying. Nor did the Court make any ruling on the justice of marriage equality. The constitutional question lives on for another day.
The Court’s denial of the petitions also has no explicit legal effect on anything other than those particular 7 cases for which it denied review and on the circuit court decisions below. It has, in the legal jargon, no precedential value: it does not compel any other court to make a certain decision in a certain way.
But it does represent the federal courts’ final word on these cases. There are no more avenues of appeal for the anti-equality forces in Wisconsin, Indiana, Utah, Oklahoma, and Virginia, as well as in the other 11 remaining states covered by the Fourth, Seventh, and Tenth Circuits that do not already have marriage equality. That means that loving, committed gay couples can start marrying in those states very soon. Thanks to Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, “soon” is now. Other states, especially those run by conservative, anti-gay governors, may try to defy the inevitable for as long as they can. But sooner rather than later, clerks from South Carolina to Wisconsin will be issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. They will be strengthening the institution of marriage in their states and throughout the country.
Many are wondering how this could have happened. Some commentators expected (more likely, hoped) that the Court would take at least one of these cases. Some expected the Court to do nothing. Back in June, I argued that there may never be a need for the Supreme Court to take a marriage equality case. I was alone in arguing that then, and there are now several commentators coming around to realize that possibility. The denials today only reinforce my point.
Follow me for one possible explanation for how and why this happened.
CONTINUED, AFTER THE JUMP…
There is now marriage equality in 24 states plus the District of Columbia. Marriage equality will soon come to 6 more states, from South Carolina to Wyoming, because those states are covered by the circuit court decisions that are now the final words on marriage equality in those jurisdictions. That is 60 percent of the states.
Twenty states will remain in a rump anti-equality dystopia. That number is special because it is quite close to the number of states (17) that still had bans on interracial marriage on their books when the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia. That case declared all such bans unconstitutional. It reflected the views of the vast majority of the federal courts through the country. It reflected the views of the majority of Americans. It was fiercely opposed, especially in those 17 states in the South, but the notion that a state could ban blacks from marrying whites is so disgusting today that it is hard to believe even 17 banned the practice.
Before it took Loving, the Court waited. It had the opportunity to hear similar cases several times before jumping on the Loving bandwagon. It could have been because of the apt name; it could have been because some justices were waiting for a liberal majority. More likely, it was strategists on the Court waiting for the right case at the right time, when fewer and fewer states retained the bans. At that point, the country would be ready.
Today, the Court helped us along that road. Soon, marriage equality will become a non-issue. It already sort of is.
But the denials still shocked many. To me, it did not seem all that shocking.
Taking a cue from one of my colleagues, who asked me to do the same: Put yourself in the shoes of one of the Supreme Court’s conservatives. Let’s say, Justice Scalia. Let’s assume that Justice Scalia opposes extending the constitutional right to marry to gay persons. Here’s what you know: You know you have four pro-equality justices against you. You have to know that Justice Kennedy is in their corner, too. So, you realize you have two options: Take the case and have five justices enshrine a federal marriage equality right in the constitution, or do not take the cases and swallow the lower court decisions. You hate the first option. The second option is somewhat better. At least, it keeps the case out of the Supreme Court.
Conservatives like Scalia and Thomas do not want to touch marriage equality at the Supreme Court. Not only do they not want to lose, but they hate the idea of more federal rights, in general. Conservative jurisprudence is all about narrowing the federal Constitution, keeping people out, and letting legislatures answer problems. A federal appellate court saying gays have a federally protected right is bad enough. The Supreme Court saying the same thing is so much worse because it federalizes a right that Scalia doesn’t think is there. So, if you’re stuck with three circuits that have already rejected bans on gays marrying under the federal Constitution, you might as well let them stand with a simple denial without letting the Supreme Court “expand” the text of the Constitution.
That might explain why the conservatives didn’t want to take the cases.
Now, imagine yourself in the shoes of a moderate like Stephen Breyer. You’re cautious and approach your job with “judicial humility.” You may not think the country is ready for a nation-wide right to marry for gay couples. You may want to hear from more courts, appellate or district, and more state legislatures. You may want to wait to take a case until you absolutely have to, i.e., when you have an appellate court decision upholding the constitutionality of a ban.
And, finally, imagine yourself in the shoes of a progressive justice like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. You have strong ideas about equality. Whenever the Supreme Court acts, you want it to be a lasting decision that will never erode and not face a backlash. You also do not feel compelled to take these particular cases because you agree with what happened below. You are comfortable waiting for the right time because you are not satisfied with a five justice majority. You want at least six. You realize that Justices Scalia and Thomas are lost causes. But you think that Chief Justice Roberts, a young man, is not going to be willing to oppose marriage equality and sit on a court for twenty more years. At that time, marriage equality will be as obvious as sliced bread. You want to build support from the ground up to peel off at least one more vote for marriage equality, and you’re willing to wait to attack with overwhelming force.
Seen in this way, it is possible every justice voted against hearing these cases, but for different reasons.
***
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Ari Ezra Waldman is a professor of law and the Director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and is concurrently pursuing his PhD at Columbia University in New York City. He is a 2002 graduate of Harvard College and a 2005 graduate of Harvard Law School. Ari writes weekly posts on law and various LGBT issues.
Ari Ezra Waldman
Religious Right: Supreme Court Letting Marriage 'Burn to Ashes'
Religious Right: Supreme Court Letting Marriage 'Burn to Ashes'
That’s one of the choice quotes from the right wing in the wake of today’s decision not to take up marriage equality cases, along with calling the action the ‘Roe v. Wade of sodomy-based marriage.’
Trudy Ring
<img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/huffpost/WebOpener.jpg">
<img src="s3.amazonaws.com/huffpost/WebOpener.jpg">
Recall the famous New Yorker cover “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” by Saul Steinberg. All of America is shown from the vantage point of western Manhattan. In the distance lies the country’s West coast and not much else. New York City, naturally, is dead center.
This is the cartographic delusion that rules the art world. At this year’s Whitney Biennial — a powerful commercial launching pad for young artists, in much the same way “Saturday Night Live” is for comedians — more than 70 of the 100 or so chosen painters, sculptors, videographers and the like worked either in California or New York.
Plucked From Obscurity
The following artists all hail from a different corner of America. None of them had been exhibited outside of their region before the Crystal Bridges show.
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This “Steinbergian view of the country” is anathema to Don Bacigalupi, president of Crystal Bridges, the ambitious museum of American art in tiny Bentonville, Arkansas, founded in 2011 by Walmart heiress Alice Walton. Speaking from his vast, glass-walled place of employment, Bacigalupi discussed the museum’s new counterpoint to the Steinbergian worldview, an exhibit instantly coined “the anti-Whitney Biennial” by the press upon its opening last month. The elevator pitch for State of the Art: one hundred works, no big names and an insane road trip.
They didn’t know how to comport themselves. Many were shocked and curious as to why we’d traveled across the country.
In concert, the three elements make the exhibit nothing short of historic. For 10 months, Bacigalupi and curator Chad Alligood crisscrossed the country, dropping into the studios of 960 artists. The studio visit is a mythologized rite of passage — portrayed in movies as the moment an artist’s fortune changes — and most of Bacigalupi’s and Alligood’s hosts had never experienced one. “They didn’t know how to comport themselves,” Bacigalupi told The Huffington Post a few days after the opening of the exhibit. “Many were shocked and curious as to why we’d traveled across the country.”
With good reason. “This is not the way exhibitions of contemporary art are curated,” Alligood admitted, citing “a bit of fear” in the curatorial community and in museum leadership. The risks lie not only in the process (just try explaining a year of slow emails with “We’re not going to be in the office, because we’ll be in Idaho or Omaha,” as Alligood put it), but in shirking the typical approach to museum fundraising, where a star artist or piece is used to entice sponsors. Instead, Alligood said, “I had to say ‘Trust us.’”
Crystal Bridges, designed by the renowned architect Moshe Safdie, differs fundamentally from other museums of its size in that it is privately owned. Funded by Walton, it operates in service of her stated goal to transform a region. And indeed, Bentonville — a city nestled in the Ozarks, an area known primarily for its natural beauty — has changed around the museum. Where once the big attraction was the Walmart Museum, featuring a five-and-dime styled after Sam Walton’s original store, the downtown now brims with pint-size galleries, posh restaurants and an outpost of the boutique art-themed hotel chain 21c. A representative for the city’s chamber of commerce said that hotel and restaurant tax collection has increased by more than 12 percent each year since Crystal Bridges opened its doors.
The tourists aren’t your average art fiends. More than 1 million people have visited Crystal Bridges so far, and according to museum records, a good number of them have been real first-timers — meaning they’ve never stepped into a museum before in their lives. This statistic informed Bacigalupi’s vision for State of the Art, which he sees as a chance to do justice to contemporary art, a field he believes is unfairly maligned. “If we think about the stereotypes that attend it,” he said, “that it’s difficult to understand, that it’s something a child could do, that it may not have anything to say to us as a society — we wanted to counter all of those notions.”
He also expanded an idea he’d floated to Alice Walton while interviewing for his current post. At the time, Bacigalupi was director of the Toledo Museum in Ohio, the epicenter of “a very lively and very deeply rooted art scene,” he said. “I thought with this new museum, there might be an opportunity to focus the lens around practice happening in all parts of the country.”
The curators discuss how the artists interpret their cultural heritage in their work.
Walton is seen as something of a hawk in the art world — keen-eyed and dangerous, with a tendency to buy from insolvent institutions with beloved collections. She’s a natural disruptor, according to Alligood. Where some founders might have bristled at a long road trip toward a dream, Walton welcomed the plan. Omnipotence helps. “At other institutions, you have to convince a lot more people to make the gears turn,” Alligood noted.
From the start, the exhibit demanded a new process. Bacigalupi and Alligood canvassed hundreds of art professionals embedded in local scenes for names. From a total of 10,000 promising artists they chiseled a short list of 1,000. These they partitioned into four regions: Northeast, Northwest, South and West. Every week for nearly a year, the two men flew to a hub in one of these regions, rented a car and got going. Often, they visited a dozen or more studios in a day, capturing video and audio footage of the artist at each stop. They drove into dodgy city neighborhoods and one-road towns where the GPS didn’t work. No two studio spaces were alike, from front porches to basements to an overgrown bay in an abandoned Coca-Cola factory. The oldest artist they visited was in her eighties, the youngest a 10-year-old boy whose mother was on the list. (When he heard who was coming, he left his work out where the men couldn’t miss it, before leaving for school.) Another artist died a few weeks after the visit.
After each stop, the men composed a code they could later use to remember the work they saw, a process Bacigalupi likens in the exhibit catalogue to writing a haiku. The phrases, each three words long, describe the essentials of an artist’s work. (The catalogue lists some tantalizing ones — for example, “psychotropic video travelogues.”) The duo also scored the artists, Olympics-style, on a 10-point scale measuring qualities chosen with the audience in mind: virtuosity, engagement and appeal.
Bacigalupi considers this travelogue as vital as the exhibit, calling it “a database for the future about research at this moment in American practice.”
HuffPost’s look into State of the Art interweaves some of this data with our own profiles of four artists, none of whose work had been shown outside their geographical region before Crystal Bridges swooped in. Justin Favela, a Las Vegas artist, mines his Chicano heritage, as well as the high-low culture of Sin City, to produce outsized piñatas that wouldn’t look out of place in a photo shoot by David LaChapelle. In Florida, Hiromi Moneyhun uses only an X-Acto knife and memories of the paper-cut illustrations she loved as a girl in Japan to turn out large, mind-bendingly intricate structures. Twin Cities artist Andy DuCett turns the old trope of “Minnesota nice” into performance art, with a cast of actual moms. And Vanessa L. German makes “power figures” from trash for the children in the depressed Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where she lives.
The concerns of these artists are at once regional and global. Together, they form what Bacigalupi calls “a truer image of the country.” Even Saul Steinberg might agree: It’s a fine view.
To explore all of the 102 works in State of the Art, visit the exhibit website or download the museum’s dedicated app, available for Apple or Android devices.
www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/02/crystal-bridges_n_5923320.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices
Boy Has Wisdom Teeth Removed, Can’t Cope With Beyonce Not Showing Up To Congratulate Him
Boy Has Wisdom Teeth Removed, Can’t Cope With Beyonce Not Showing Up To Congratulate Him
What’s with people getting their wisdom teeth out and thinking they’re going to finally meet their celebrity idols all of a sudden?
First there was this girl, who in her post-anesthesia haze told her mother, “I want to have sex with Ryan Gosling,” adding she “wants to fuck white dick.”
Now there’s this video of a very confused young man driving home from the dentist. He was so brave and did such a good job, he’s naturally very upset that Beyonce didn’t show up to serenade him with praise. She could have at least given him a call, such a verse from “Drunk In Love,” something.
The strangest part of the video is that his mother (presumably) is filming him while driving the car. She also seems to be having a great time laughing at her son’s delirium. But we suppose it is pretty funny.
Here’s the clip:
Dan Tracer
Mormon Church Responds to SCOTUS Decision: 'Only Marriage Between A Man and a Woman Is Acceptable to God'
Mormon Church Responds to SCOTUS Decision: 'Only Marriage Between A Man and a Woman Is Acceptable to God'
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has issued a response to the Supreme Court’s decision today that let stand the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling overturning Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage.
Read the statement, in part:
“The succession of federal court decisions in recent months, culminating in today’s announcement by the Supreme Court, will have no effect on the doctrinal position or practices of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is that only marriage between a man and a woman is acceptable to God.
The statement went on to say that churchgoers should continue to reject “persecution of any kind based on race, ethnicity, religious belief or non-belief, and differences in sexual orientation.”
U.S. Senator Mike Lee also weighed in on today’s news, calling the Supreme Court’s decision to not review the appeals “disappointing.”
In related news, Utah Governor Gary Herbert and Attorney General Sean Reyes held a press conference this afternoon with Herbert conceding, “We are a state and a people who believe in upholding the law of the land and that has been determined for us today in a way that may be not satisfactory for some, but it is the law of the land.”
You can watch a clip of Reyes speaking at the press conference, AFTER THE JUMP…
Previously, “WATCH: Gay Couples Tie the Knot in Virginia, Oklahoma, Indiana, Utah, and Wisconsin” [tlrd]
Kyler Geoffroy
2014 LGBT COMEDIAN OF THE YEAR
2014 LGBT COMEDIAN OF THE YEAR
Thank you for ALL voting for me and making the LGBT COMEDIAN OF THE YEAR at the 5th Annual Get Out Awards!
PHOTOS: Antigay Wing Won't Give Up in France, Hosts Huge Rally
PHOTOS: Antigay Wing Won't Give Up in France, Hosts Huge Rally
Ultra-rightists in France are crying vive la difference over parental rights for straight versus same-sex couples.
Thom Senzee
www.advocate.com/world/2014/10/06/photos-antigay-wing-wont-give-france-hosts-huge-rally