Armie Hammer Has His Eyes on Henry Cavill’s Nipples

Superman actor Henry Cavill reported yesterday that he’s getting some rest and relaxation in before the summer ends, and that his moustache continues to thrive…

But that wasn’t what interested actor Armie Hammer, who commented “nice nipples” in response to Cavill’s photograph.

Can you blame him?

Hammer is starring in the upcoming gay drama Call Me By Your Name. Hammer plays the story’s “24-year old American scholar spending the summer of 1983 in Northern Italy, where he attracts the attention of a 17-year-old Jewish-American boy, played by Timothee Chalamet.”

Check out the trailer and a clip for that film HERE.

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Armie Hammer Has His Eyes on Henry Cavill’s Nipples

Evangelical Leaders Aligned with Trump-Pence Launch Vicious Attack on LGBTQ People

More than 150 conservative Evangelical Christian leaders, including prominent members of the Trump-Pence administration’s Evangelical Advisory Board, released a vicious, anti-LGBTQ manifesto Tuesday attacking LGBTQ people as immoral and sinful, asserting their opposition to marriage equality and denying the dignity of transgender people.

The ugly three-page document they called “The Nashville Statement,” was released as hundreds of thousands of people in Texas and beyond continued to grapple with the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey, and while the attention of most of the nation’s religious leaders was focused on helping victims of the historic disaster.

That the so-called “Christian manifesto” was issued during a national crisis and in the wake of the Trump-Pence administration’s recent action seeking to ban transgender people from serving in the military enforces its message of intolerance.

Concocted in Nashville last week during the national conference of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the statement elicited widespread condemnation from scores of national religious and political leaders. In fact, the statement runs contrary to beliefs of a majorities of Evangelical millennials and people of faith who support affirming LGBTQ people. The release also sparked swift outrage on social media.

“While the theology espoused in the Nashville Statement is not new, the recommitment to anti-LGBT theology continues these Evangelical leaders’ violence against LGBT people,” said Eliel Cruz, HRC Foundation’s Religion Council member and creator of FaithfullyLGBT. “Christians and non-Christians alike must unequivocally condemn this statement. We cannot stand for this demonization of LGBT people to go unchallenged.”

Nashville Mayor Megan Barry was among those expressing disgust over the statement, tweeting that the “so-called ‘Nashville statement’ is poorly named and does not represent the inclusive values of the city & people of Nashville.”

Among the document’s signatories are members of President Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board, including Tony Perkins, President of Family Research Council, a designated hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center; James Dobson, Founder of Focus on the Family; Ronnie Floyd, Senior Pastor of Cross Church; Richard Land, President of Southern Evangelical Seminary; James MacDonald, Founder and Senior Pastor of Harvest Bible Chapel; and James Robison, Founder & President of LIFE Outreach International.

“A predominantly white male coalition of Southern Baptists and Evangelicals have defined human sexuality in the binary that secures their power, with a selective tortured reading of the Bible texts on human sexuality from a time when a woman was her husband’s property,” said Bishop Yvette Flunder, HRC Foundation’s Religion Council member and Presiding Bishop of The Fellowship.

“This is the same group that advocated for the ban on transgender people from the military.”

The New York Times has previously reported that Perkins, a signatory and president of the Family Research Council, had for months lobbied Donald Trump and Mike Pence to ban transgender people from the military.

“‘The Southern Baptist Convention is the same denomination that once used the Bible to condemn inter-racial relationships and to defend the “Godliness” of chattel slavery, and had to repent. They will need to repent again,” Bishop Flunder said.

In 1987, the same group denounced “secular” feminism and equality in marriages in a manifesto it called “The Danvers Statement.” 

www.hrc.org/blog/evangelical-leaders-aligned-with-trump-pence-launch-vicious-attack-on-lgbtq?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

17 Baseball Heroes Who Came Out as Gay

www.advocate.com/sports/2017/8/30/17-baseball-heroes-who-came-out-gay

Defense Secretary James Mattis Announces Bogus Panel to Study Effect of Transgender Military Service Ban

Defense Secretary James Mattis on Tuesday night stalled Donald Trump’s order expelling transgender military service members, delaying implementation of the order until further study was undertaken.

Mattis released a statement:

The Department of Defense has received the Presidential Memorandum, dated August 25, 2017, entitled “Military Service by Transgender Individuals.” The department will carry out the president’s policy direction, in consultation with the Department of Homeland Security. As directed, we will develop a study and implementation plan, which will contain the steps that will promote military readiness, lethality, and unit cohesion, with due regard for budgetary constraints and consistent with applicable law. The soon arriving senior civilian leadership of DOD will play an important role in this effort. The implementation plan will address accessions of transgender individuals and transgender individuals currently serving in the United States military.

Our focus must always be on what is best for the military’s combat effectiveness leading to victory on the battlefield. To that end, I will establish a panel of experts serving within the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to provide advice and recommendations on the implementation of the president’s direction. Panel members will bring mature experience, most notably in combat and deployed operations, and seasoned judgment to this task. The panel will assemble and thoroughly analyze all pertinent data, quantifiable and non-quantifiable. Further information on the panel will be forthcoming.

Once the panel reports its recommendations and following my consultation with the secretary of Homeland Security, I will provide my advice to the president concerning implementation of his policy direction. In the interim, current policy with respect to currently serving members will remain in place. I expect to issue interim guidance to the force concerning the president’s direction, including any necessary interim adjustments to procedures, to ensure the continued combat readiness of the force until our final policy on this subject is issued.

Last week, the ACLU, Outserve-SLDN and Lambda Legal, and NCLR and GLAD announced lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the ban.

NCLR’s Shannon Minter responded to the angle of a USA Today story reporting on Mattis’s statement:

The USA Today story is grossly misleading. Secretary Mattis did not make a decision to “buy time” or to “freeze” the current policy. The President’s August 25, 2017 Memorandum expressly provides that the new ban does not go into effect until March 23, 2018 and expressly states that no one can be discharged for being transgender in the meantime. There is nothing new at all here, and suggesting otherwise is terribly misleading.

This inaccurate reporting is playing into a patently bogus strategy to make it appear that there is going to be some new “study” that will legitimate what is already a forgone conclusion: the discriminatory banning of military service by transgender people, based on a characteristic that has no bearing on their fitness to serve. The August 25 Memorandum is perfectly clear: President Trump has ordered the military to ban transgender people from serving. That ban will go into effect in about 7 months, on March 23. That appalling decision is not (and cannot possibly be, given its timing) based on any hastily assembled, post hoc “study” that is being cooked up now in a transparent effort to provide a retroactive fig leaf for the President’s bigotry. This order is an act of pure animus toward transgender people. The military spent two years carefully reviewing all of the relevant evidence on this issue and concluded that there is no reason to exclude transgender people from military service. The cost of inclusion is literally negligible, and there is no evidence that permitting open service will have any negative impact on military readiness. The notion that there is any good faith “study” being conducted is a blatant pretext for unmitigated, vicious, baseless discrimination.

More than ever, we need reporters to fact check these stories and not simply repeat false information that is being used to set up an attempted cover for one of the most shocking acts of official discrimination the transgender community has ever experienced.

There is no new “freeze.” This is just what the August 25 [Memorandum] ordered — along with a permanent ban on enlistment, effective now, and a new ban on open service, effective on March 23, 2018.

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Defense Secretary James Mattis Announces Bogus Panel to Study Effect of Transgender Military Service Ban

GLAAD responds after Defense Secretary Mattis delays Trump’s ban on transgender service members: “Stories of patriotic transgender service members and veterans are the front lines of defense”

www.glaad.org/blog/glaad-responds-after-defense-secretary-mattis-delays-trumps-ban-transgender-service-members