Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyNovember 14th, 2011
TODAY’S AGENDA (THEIRS):
Opening of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference: Baltimore, MD. As the American Catholic bishops gather for their annual fall meeting, one of the issues almost certainly to be discussed is the Church’s growing antagonistic campaigns against marriage equality. According to USA Today:
The bishops’ strategy is centered around their new Committee for Religious Liberty. It was unveiled just days after the bishops’ president, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, warned President Obama that his decision not to defend a federal ban on gay marriage could “precipitate a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions.”
A group of leading American bishops took that same dire message to Pope Benedict XVI and Vatican officials this week to rally support for their efforts, which they see as key to averting an era of religious persecution.
As you can see, the tone of the conference is the claim that granting LGBT people equality under the law somehow amounts to “religious persecution,” a theme that various Catholic bishops have been taking up with increasing stridency. But this stridency can perhaps be best seen as a sign of their growing frustration and sense of irrelevance among the Catholic laity. Divorce and birth control have long ceased to be controversial among Catholics in the pews (with the exception of a very tiny fringe minority), with 78% rejecting the church’s stance on birth control and 69% disagreeing on the church’s position on divorce and remarriage. In other words, those debates are over as far as Catholics are concerned, and the bishops lost. And with about half of all Catholics supporting marriage equality, the bishops look to be set to lose yet another round.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Albrecht Becker: 1906. Albrecht Becker was an actor and production designer who lived with his parter of ten yeas in Würzburg in Bavaria. In 1935, he came under the notice of the Gestapo when they were investigating another Würzburg resident, Dr. Leopold Obermayer, a Swiss national who was both Jewish and gay. During the course of the Gestapo’s investigation, they found several photos of young men, including Albert Becker, in his possession. Obermeyer was sent to Manthausen concentration camp, where he ultimately perished. Becker was also tried under Germany’s notorious Paragraph 175 and sentenced to a three year term in Nürnburg Prison. In 1940, he joined the German army and sent directly to the Eastern front where soldiers weren’t expected to survive. But survive he did, and was able to return to Germany and work in the film industry after the war. He became an internationally recognized photographer, production designer and actor for German television. His story is one of six personal histories recounted in the 2000 documentary, Paragraph 175, about the Nazi persecution of gay men. He died in 2002 in Hamburg at the age of 95.
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G.I. Joe
November 14th, 2011
Albrecht’s life was an incredible. To overcome all this hardships -things that unimaginable for most of us – and still have the courage and energy to fight afterward… and live to age 95. That’s incredibly humbling.
TampaZeke
November 14th, 2011
Why does that picture of the Bishop’s conference look as if it the waiting room of the local mortuary? No wonder the Catholic Church is stuck in the 16th Century. It seems that most of their leaders were born in then.
Jim Hlavac
November 14th, 2011
My family hasn’t been Catholic for 600 years — since the Bishops of that time burned Jan Hus at the stake in 1415 for not being Catholic to the Bishop’s satisfaction. What that church does or does not permit or do within its teaching is its business. What any individual Catholic may or may not adhere or reject the teachings of that faith is their business. But the Catholic church wants to maintain its teachings as the law against my religious freedom and my church’s religious freedom to marry me — and the government has joined with the Catholics to deny me my religious freedom. And they’re the one’s being persecuted? They jest.
My my, go clean up your priesthood of pedophiles. As long ago as 1492 Pope Alexander VI had to issue repeated papal bulls against child abuse by his bishops, cardinals, clergy and monks. They are a kid-abuse factory of astounding proportions — and they think I’m the trouble because I won’t join their church? Egad. Never trust men in dresses who bitch about drag queens.
tristram
November 14th, 2011
Re: Albrecht Becker
Typo – “in his position/possession”?
The mention of a young man named Albrecht being sent to the Eastern Front brings to mind the German film ‘Before the Fall’ in which Tom Schilling’s character of the same name is to suffer this fate. Quite a powerful film with two very watchable actors (Schilling and Max Riemelt).
J. Peron
November 14th, 2011
What the bishops mean by intolerance is that they can’t pick the pockets of gay taxpayers and get subsidies while simultaneously refusing them the government funded social services that gay people are forced to pay for. They demand the right to “privately” discriminate, but at public expense.
http://storeyinstitute.blogspot.com/2011/11/catholicism-and-intolerance-hoax.html
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