Box Turtle Bulletin

S. Nevada Health reconsidering connections to Ssempa-supporting church

Top: Canyon Ridge Christian Church in Las Vegas. Bottom: Canyon Ridge's "strategic partner" showing hard-core porn at a press conference.

Several of us contacted the South Nevada Health District or signed a petition to express our concern about their partnering with Canyon Ridge Christian Church. This church has a global partnership with Martin Ssempa, the primary religious supporter of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, a legislative effort to execute HIV positive gay people and to incarcerate HIV negative gay people for life.

Michael Bussee, onetime founder of Exodus International and friend of Box Turtle Bulletin, has received a response.

Dear Mr. Bussee:

Thank you for bringing this matter to the attention of the Southern Nevada Health District. We were completely unaware of Canyon Ridge Christian Church’s partnership with Pastor Martin Ssempa or his stance on criminalizing homosexuality. The health district is absolutely opposed to the stated efforts of Pastor Ssempa and plans to evaluate and strongly consider any future partnership with Canyon Ridge based on this new information.

However, due to the timing of the testing event, and the outreach efforts that have already occurred related to this testing site, we do not feel we can cancel this venue for next week’s event. We do not condone the church’s continued partnership with Pastor Ssempa; however, we feel the immediate risk of canceling this venue just days before the scheduled event takes precedent at this time. If just one person shows up at a canceled event and decides to delay getting tested, that will be one person too many.

We share your concerns regarding this issue and remain committed to promoting testing in an environment that is comfortable for our clients. Thank you again for your input and for bringing this important issue to our attention.

Stephanie Bethel
Southern Nevada Health District

This appears to me to be a reasonable and responsible approach. Thanks to all of you who helped raise this issue with the SNHD.

Seventh-day Adventist Church threatens filmmakers

Daneen Akers comes from a long line of Seventh-day Adventists. The church was, for her, more than just a sharing of faith; it was also culture and community and a large part of identity. But while Adventists believe that “the Bible makes no accommodation for homosexual activity or relationships” and expect life-long celibacy, Daneen and her husband Stephen Eyer found this to be inconsistent their own personal faith discovery.

In 2008 some leaders within the SDA church began to pressure members to support Proposition 8, a California initiative to remove civil marriage rights from same-sex couples. As San Franciscans who had become friends with several couples whom Prop 8 would impact, Daneen and Stephen felt that they needed to be involved in Adventists Against Prop 8 to try and present a counterpoint. Out of this experience, they began to see the unique challenges which gay Adventists face.

Although there are a large number of resources available for gay Christians, from accepting mainline denominations to specific congregations of gay believers with more conservative theology, being gay in the Seventh-day Adventist church provides unique challenges. While Adventists are part of the family of Protestant Christians, they have specific worship practices, dietary expectations, and theological beliefs about eternity that set them apart from other Christians and often leave gay Adventists feeling as outsiders even within pro-gay Christian settings.

And so Daneen and Stephen decided to tell the stories, the challenges, the conflicts that gay Adventists face. They began the process of producing a small documentary film, Seventh-Gay Adventists: A film about love, sex, and eternal life.

But the Seventh-day Adventist Church got word of their project and was not pleased. Unable to stop the project entirely, they decided instead to object to a technicality, their name. The church’s law firm sent a cease and desist letter that read in part:

“Your use and modification of the SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST mark in this manner is without permission of the GCCSDA and/or the church, and is likely to cause dilution by blurring the distinctive qualities of the SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST mark and by tarnishing the reputation of the mark. Your use of the mark in this manner is also likely to cause confusion among consumers who may mistakenly believe that the Church has authorized or approved your use of the SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST mark,” the letter read.

Now, it is rather unlikely that calling your film “Seventh-Gay Adventists” is going to blur distinctive qualities or tarnish the reputation of the church. Nor is there likely to be any confusion among the SDA Church’s “customers.” Nor is it likely that any court would demand that a film about members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church have no use of the church’s name.

And the leaders and legal counsel of the Seventh-day Adventist Church know it.

But the legality of the name is irrelevant. This isn’t about protecting the trademark of the church. This is about a large, powerful and well-funded organization using the threat of legal action to bully those who dare question the consequences of their policies. This legal hassle is an attempt to silence Daneen and Stephen, to punish them for speaking up.

Ironically, this film is not an attack on the church or its beliefs. Rather it is an attempt to start a conversation, to present a voice and face for those who love the church but whom the church cannot or will not hear.

We’re trying to make a film that captures how much people want to be a part of the church. Which means we need to show why they are attracted to it in the first place. Our critique, if you want to call it that, is simply that there exists a barrier of entry for those who are classified as “willful sinners” — in this case, gay and lesbian members who make the personal choice to be in relationships, rather than live celibately.

I believe that it is time for the Adventist leadership to invest in some self reflection, time to ask themselves tough questions about the message of Christ. Do they believe that God calls them to bully the weak, to threaten the outsider, and to expel those who are different?

If not, then they should immediately stop their challenge to the film and choose instead to listen closely to the heart of the project and voices of the GLBT men and women who want to call this church their home.

p.s. Those who wish to make a tax-deductible contribution to help towards the completion of this film may do so here.

New York passes LGBT anti-bullying bill

From the Gothamist

In a 53-3 vote last night, the state Senate passed the Dignity for All Students Act, which prohibits harassment in school based on “actual or perceived race, color, weight, national origin, ethnic group, religion, religious practice, disability, sexual orientation, gender or sex.”

“Perceived… gender” is understood to include transgender students. Such a strong bipartisan support is a sign of strong support and gives encouragement for future advances in the state Senate.

The Assembly has already passed the bill and the Governor is expected to sign it into law.

You can’t even buy a right

Two stories today reflect how issues of justice, rights, fairness, and civil responsibility are often presumed to disappear the minute that gay folk arrive. Far too often it is assumed, indignantly, that civil governments belong to heterosexuals.

Take, for example, the situation in Philadelphia.

In 2000, the US Supreme Court found that the Boy Scouts of America are a private organization and that their freedom of association allowed them to exclude gay and/or atheist boys and men from participating. And I agree with that decision; the Boy Scouts should be able to limit their membership in whatever manner that they choose.

However, if they choose to operate as a private organization, they are not entitled to preferential treatment from the taxpayers, who include a large number of gay people, atheists, and their family, friends, neighbors, and allies. In other words, discriminate however you like, but don’t do it on my dollar.

In Philadelphia the city counsel had passed protections that banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But they found that they were in conflict with this policy when it came to the Boy Scouts. The Cradle of Liberty council has been leasing nearly 2,000 square feet of office space from the city at the cost of one dollar per year. So Philadelphia said that the local group either needed to renounce the discrimination policies of the national group or they were not going to get any more freebies.

But the leadership of the Boy Scouts believe that they are entitled to have it both ways. It’s discrimination, they cried, to not give us free rent. We can exclude who we want, and to insist that we open our city funded doors to all residents is a violation of our free speech rights.

So they went to court arguing that not only are they entitle to free assembly and free speech but that they are also entitled to free rent.

And a jury agreed. (WHYY)

A jury in Philadelphia has decided the city cannot evict a local Boy Scouts group from a city-owned building because of a national policy that bans gays.

Cradle of Liberty Council lawyer Jason Gosselin says the ruling means one simple fact: the Scouts can stay in their building in Center City rent free.

Meanwhile in Minneapolis, it seems like gay people don’t have a right to assembly, even if the city isn’t subsidizing them. (Tribune)

The gay pride organization paid the city more than $36,000 for the use of a park. And they are trying to keep an evangelist from coming into the festival and disrupting the event.

But the city thinks that the preacher has a right to free speech – something that is startlingly missing from gay folk.

But Pride Festival organizers say they have the right to keep Johnson off the grounds because they paid more than $36,000 for the use of the park. Festival manager Jim Kelley says Johnson is free to preach his message across the street.

The Minneapolis Park Board is backing the activist on free speech grounds, so the festival organziers are going to court Wednesday seeking an injuction to reverse that decision.

FDA Approves More Reliable HIV Test

HIV is a very deceptive virus. One way in which it is so insidious is that once it enters a human body, it can take the body several weeks to develop enough antibodies for the infection to show up on most existing HIV tests today. That also just happens to coincide with one of the periods in the virus’ life cycle in which the newly infected person is most infectious and capable of passing it on to others through unsafe sex. Once the body produces enough anti-bodies to show up on a typical HIV test, it also has, ironically, begun to fight off the virus enough so that the individual is somewhat less capable of passing it on to others — although even then that risk is still very far from zero. What that means is that between the time of initial infection and the buildup of antibodies, that person is at one of his most infectious stages in the disease and if he is tested, his test result would likely still be negative during that early period.

There are tests known as nucleic acid testing (NAT) which can detect the presence of the virus itself, but they aren’t routinely used because of their high false-positive rate. But a study published in the June 15 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine found that adding NAT testing to the current antibody-based rapid HIV testing that is commonly in use can increase detection of HIV by 23%.  Yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration announced the approval of the first HIV test to detect both the antibodies and the HIV virus itself. According to a statement from the FDA:

“The approval of this assay represents an advancement in our ability to better diagnose HIV infection in diagnostic settings where nucleic acid testing to detect the virus itself is not routinely used,” said Karen Midthun, M.D., acting director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. “It provides for more sensitive detection of recent HIV infections compared with antibody tests alone.”

The test was developed by Abbott Laboratories. The separate study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which appears to be unrelated to the FDA announcement, was funded by the National Institutes of Health, University of California at San Diego, and the California HIV/AIDS Research Program.

Lou Engle’s Uganda Sermon Endorses Country’s “Stand for Righteousness”

TheCall’s Lou Engle has been trying to have it both ways in addressing questions of whether he supports Uganda’s draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill. These questions were especially pertinent when it was announced that Engle would be putting on one of his TheCall rallies in Kampala last May. Engle issued a statement denying that he was going there to promote the bill.

We then learned through multiple sources that he had, in fact, promoted the bill at the rally. He was surrounded on stage with key supporters of the bill: Pastor Julius Oyet; the bill’s sponsor, MB David Bahati; and Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba Buturo. Engle later issued another statement saying he regretted promoting the bill at the rally, but in contradiction to eyewitness accounts, Engle protested that the bill’s promotion took place after he left.

Current TV’s Vanguard reporter Mariana van Zeller’s outstanding documentary, “Missionaries of Hate,” explored the relationship between American Evangelicals and the rising anti-gay campaigns that have been taking place in Uganda over the past year. Engle’s TheCall Uganda appeared briefly in that documentary. Today, Mariana posted an extended clip of what Engle said at that rally.

And I went through a personal wrestling in my own heart whether we should come here and join you. We know that Uganda has been under tremendous pressure in the church. We felt that same pressure. But I felt like the call was to come and join with the church in Uganda to encourage you, that in the nation you are showing courage to take a stand for righteousness in the earth. [Applause]

Jesus is a merciful savior today for everyone trapped in sin. But he is also the architect of society and the great governor of the universe. Establish marriage between a man and a woman from the beginning so that society would be preserved and read right and it would be for the well-being of the children.

And so we’ve come here to join you to pray that your government would have wisdom to uphold righteousness in this land. We are restraining, trying to restrain an agenda that’s going to hurt the nation and hurt families. Right now that homosexual agenda is sweeping into our education system, and parents are losing their rights over the education of their children. I believe there’s only one hope. Help us God! Help us! But I believe Uganda has suddenly become ground zero, not because they asked for it, but God brought you to make a statement and a stand for righteousness.

Keep in mind, Engle said this right after Oyet took the stage to call for the bill’s passage, and Engle was immediately followed by Buturo, who also called on the Parliament to pass the bill. It’s no surprise that Oyet and Bahati left the rally ecstatic in the belief that they had Engle’s full support. I don’t see how anybody watching could have walked away from the rally with any other conclusion. Engle fully supported the bill, and that his support was so strong that he he felt that “the call was to come and join with the church in Uganda to encourage you.”

And now we have Engle’s more recent statement saying he supports criminalization. The only thing he criticize now is the death penalty. But even there, he believes that the death penalty is biblically sound. That’s not exactly a rousing denunciation. Not nearly as rousing as the full-bore, no-exceptions support he gave to the people of Uganda.

Uganda’s latest American kill-the-gays bill supporter is now in St. Louis, where he has been speaking nightly at the Gateway House of Prayer on S. Lindbergh Blvd. in the western St. Louis suburb of Rock Hill. He will be speaking every night through July 12.

All the lovers – two interpretations

I think we could all use a smile today.

Australian gay icon, Kylie Minogue, has released her new song All the Lovers with a dance beat and a provocative video. (Preview embedded, full video here)

In proof that there’s always another way of looking at things, gay glamrock band The Scissor Sisters has reinterpreted the song as country. Somehow it works.

Lou Engle Supports Criminalization of Homosexuality

Lou Engle on stage with other supporters of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill at a TheCall rally in Kampala (Michael Wilkerson / Religion Dispatches)

Lou Engle, the Dominionist evangelical preacher behind TheCall, has confirmed more or less what Uganda MP David Bahati told author Jeff Sharlet: That Engle supports Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill — at least some form that is similar to the one that is currently under consideration.

Sarah Posner, author of God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, posted an interview she conducted with Engle for the Religion Dispatches web site. In this exchange, Engle denied knowing MP David Bahati (the bill’s sponsor) or Julius Oyet, who appears to be a major behind-the-scenes player in promoting the draconian bill in Uganda, and he denied supporting the bill when meeting with Uganda’s Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba Buturo. But he also said that “we appreciated the two guys [Bahati and Oyet] whose hearts were to bring forth a principled bill.”

Posner asked a series of questions specific to the bill. Engle denied supporting the death penalty provision, although he believed that there was a biblical basis for having one under certain circumstances. She also asked what other provisions in the bill he didn’t support:

I pressed him about which penalties in the bill he didn’t support — and he did say that although he could see someone supporting the death penalty, he did not, and he did not support “hard labor” as punishment or the requirement that churches report LGBT people to the authorities. But when I asked him if he would support a bill with less harsh penalties, he added: 

My main thing is to keep — is to not allow it to be legalized, so to speak, so then it just spreads through the legal system of the nation. So I’m not — I’m not making a statement as to what I think the penalties should be. It’s not my job to do that. I do think, I do think that these leaders are trying to make at least some kind of statement that you’re not just going to spread the agenda without some kind of restraint, a legal restraint and punishment. And I don’t know what the line is on those, but I can’t go that far as I understand that bill already said. [emphasis mine]

Engle admitted that his praise for the bill’s supporters’ “principled stand” might have led them to believe that he supported the bill. Although he insisted he did not support the bill as written, “I did support the principle of a nation saying, restraining it from coming into their nation.” He then went on to maintain that because homosexuality hasn’t been “restrained” in the United States, “I don’t think it’s going to be good for the nation, it sweeps into the education system, and the church is going to end up losing its privilege to have its own voice. Gender rights, will trump religious rights. I think it’s wrong, it’s not good for society. Those are the statements I came with, so frankly I was quite surprised to be thrown into this huge controversy.”

According to this interview, it appears that Lou Engle’s position on Uganda’s proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill is virtually identical to that of Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively. Lively, too, says that he doesn’t support the death penalty, but he finds the rest of the bill acceptable. Lively has called the bill “a step in the right direction” several times. More recently, he told Current TV’s Marianna van Zeller that passage of the bill would be “the lesser of two evils.” When asked whether that endorsement includes the death penalty, Lively had to struggle with that option for quite a long time before finally deciding that he still doesn’t support it, even as the “lesser of two evils.”

Engle now appears to hold the exact same position as Lively.

Birds of a feather ain’t flocking

Adam Hood, the ex-gay scarfboi whose “prophetic utterances” and history with both extensive drug abuse and mental illness have left me convinced that he had precarious mental health, has made quite a splash on the blogosphere lately. In fact, he’s even caught the attention of anti-gay activist James Hartline, another ex-gay whose “prophetic utterances” and history with both extensive drug abuse and mental illness have led me to the same conclusion.

You’d think they’d find common ground in, if nothing else, their shared hostility towards the gay community that took them in and sheltered them when no one else would.

You’d be wrong.

Within the past few minutes, Hartline has tweeted his opinions about Hood:

# I was informed a year ago by ministries in San Francisco regarding a man named Adam Hood who put curses on Christians he couldn’t control. 6 minutes ago

# Incompetent homosexual activists are being “hood” winked by emergent church media behind Adam Hood to help promote Hood’s hidden agenda. 11 minutes ago

What Hartline means by all this is beyond me.

Study: gay men recognize faces similarly to women

There is another study which looks at the interplay between brain use, sexuality, and handedness. (Science Blog)

The study, published in the journal, Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, examined the influence of gender, sexual orientation and whether we’re right-or-left-handed on our ability to recognize faces. It found that when memorizing and discriminating between faces, homosexual men show patterns of bilaterality — the usage of both sides of the brain — similar to heterosexual women. Heterosexual men tend to favour the right hemisphere for such tasks.

But, perhaps not surprisingly, handedness made a difference

Steeves and her colleagues also investigated the influence of hand dominance on such tasks. They found that left-handed heterosexual participants had better face recognition abilities than left-handed homosexuals, and also outperformed right-handed heterosexuals.

Hand dominance is thought to be linked with both hemispheric functioning and sexual orientation; previous studies have shown that homosexual individuals are 39 per cent more likely to be left-handed.

This can be added to the growing pile of studies that identify specific biological differences between heterosexual and gay men (and, to a lesser extent, heterosexual and gay women).

This past weekend I was at a conference where a very well-intentioned man droned on about the causes of sexual attraction. After far too long listening to him read his slides about Freud and Foucault and infant parental relationships (along with Engels’ perspectives thrown in to add credibility), I was ready to scream.

Yes, the way in which we respond to our sexual attractions, the way we think about ourselves as either individuals or members of a group, the limitations we put on ourselves, and the way we talk about our attractions are all impacted to some extent by our culture, its expectations, and our own self-identity. Of course our upbringing assigns roles and expectations that carry with us through our lives.

But you simply cannot overlook the increasing evidence that biology is also at play. All of the Freudian theories or NARTHian models just can’t get around the twin studies, brain measurements, spacial navigation, click response, pheromones, handedness, hair whorls, x-chromosome deactivation, and all the other peculiarities that appear when we decide to stop theorizing and begin measuring.

The “Not Gay” Scarfboi’s Ties to Lou Engle

Adam Hood’s two videos have gone viral throughout the web. In this video, Hood provides a bit more background to his life story. It turns out that Hood is associated with Morningstar House in the Portola district of San Francisco. He also works with the so-called “Justice House of Prayer,” the evangelical group which is often seen “witnessing” in the Castro near the Bank of America or on Harvey Milk Plaza. Engle says he sent his son to establish JHOP just a block off the Castro “where the homosexuals boast the dominion of darkness.”

A Texas GOP platform that sounds too familiar

The Texas Republican Party has a long proud history of blatant homophobia. In 1998, Log Cabin, the gay Republican group, was denied booth space at the state convention. At the 2000 Republican National Convention when gay congressman Jim Kolbe took to the podium to speak about foreign policy, the delegates from Texas, in a deliberate show of disrespect, began “praying” instead of listening. Even though Texas GOP’s favorite son George W. Bush built his 2004 campaign partly on homophobia, he looks downright tolerant when compared to his fellow Republicans back home.

But now the Texas Republicans have topped themselves. In this season of ‘who can be the looniest’, the GOP has come up with a state party platform that sounds as though it was written in Kampala. Here’s what the Texas Republicans have to say about you:

• Gay people are a threat to straights.
• Gay people are trying to impose their values through “well-funded, vigorous political and judicial attempts.”
• Homosexuality “tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases.”
• Denying civil rights and equality to gay people “promotes health”
• Schools should not be allowed to present a non-negative message about homosexuality.
• Gay people should be denied marriage.
• States which have chosen to allow gay people to marry should be forced to revoke such marriages.
• No rights or benefits should be allowed or granted to domestic partners.
• Tax laws should give preference to married heterosexuals.
• Gay people should have their children taken from them.
• Gay people should be denied health insurance.
• Sodomy laws should be reinstated.
• Those who attack gay people should not face criminal or civil penalties.
• It should be a felony to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple and for any civil official to perform a marriage ceremony for such.

I do not wish to downplay the situation in Uganda or to suggest that the level of hatred and fear in Texas comes anywhere near the extent to which our friends in Uganda are threatened. But all of this rhetoric sound far too familiar to me.

The Republicans in Texas who wrote this platform truly to fear you and hold deep animus towards you.

The section on “STRENGTHENING FAMILIES, PROTECTING LIFE AND PROMOTING HEALTH” is included after the break

Read the rest of this entry »

Stanley Cup coming to Chicago Pride

If you make it to the Gay Pride parade in Chicago on June 27, keep your eye out for the Chicago Gay Hockey Association; they’ll be the guys on roller blades “skating” down the street. And with them will be Brent Sopel, defenseman with the reigning Chicago Blackhawk, who will be marching with his family and with the Stanley Cup, the international ice hockey trophy entrusted into the keeping of the winning team each year. (Sun Times)

“I am honored to do it,” said Sopel, who will be accompanied by wife, Kelly, and his four kids, Jacob, 12, Lyla, 8, Jayla, 6, and Paul, 20, whom they adopted three years ago after Paul’s parents died within six months of each other.

“The power of the Cup is incomprehensible, and we recognize the importance of doing this,” said McDonough, who has arranged for the Stanley Cup to be flown back from the National Hockey League draft in Los Angeles 15 hours early. “It’s important for the city and important for the franchise.”

Sopel was motivated to participate by the story of Brandon Burke, a young hockey player and legacy who came out in a way that inspired acceptance within the hockey world and who died this year in a driving accident.

But the Stanley Cup will not be the only sports icon at Chicago Pride. Living legend Ernie Banks (“Mr. Cub”), a Baseball Hall of Famer who was the first black player for the Chicago Cubs in 1953 and who went on to play 18 years for the franchise, will be there to represent the club. The Chicago Cubs, will be, to the best of my knowledge, the first professional sports team to sponsor their own float in a gay pride parade.

Las Vegas Church Which Supports Ugandan “Kill-The-Gays” Pastor Wants To Test You for HIV

Top: Canyon Ridge Community Church in Las Vegas wants to test you for HIV. Bottom: Canyon Ridge's "dearly beloved family and friend" wants to kill you for being HIV-positive.

A Las Vegas church wants to test you for HIV. That church’s strategic partner and “dearly beloved friend and family” wants to put you to death if you are HIV-positive.

Canyon Ridge Christian Church, which lists Uganda pastor Martin “Eat Da Poo Poo” Ssempa as an international “strategic partner,” will host for National HIV Testing Day on June 27, 2010. According to a notice on the church’s web site:

Because of Canyon Ridge Christian Church’s commitment to “be a show of compassion” to our community and an instrumental force in preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS, we will be offering FREE HIV testing from 10 AM – 4 PM provided by the Southern Nevada Health District (fingerprick test with results in 15 minutes).

That compassion to the community also apparently extends to providing continued support for on of Africa’s most virulently homophobic pastors. Canyon Ridge has defended their partnership with Ssempa despite his avid support for Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which adds the death sentence for LGBT people under certain circumstances. Ironically, one of those circumstances which call for the death penalty is simply being HIV-positive. Here is the bill’s text for that section:

3. Aggravated homosexuality.
(1) A person commits the offense of aggravated homosexuality where the

…(b) offender is a person living with HIV; …

(2) A person who commits the offence of aggravated homosexuality shall be liable on conviction to suffer death.

It doesn’t end there. The bill also mandates that those who are accused of homosexuality be tested for HIV, presumably to determine their eligibility for the death penalty:

(3) Where a person is charged with the offence under this section, that person shall undergo a medical examination to ascertain his or her HIV status.

The bill would also criminalize employers, family members and medical professionals who fail to report LBBT people to the police within 24 hours. The bill would further jeopardize HIV/AIDS prevention efforts by imposing criminal penalties on anyone who “aids and abets” homosexuality or provides accurate information on safe sex practices for the prevention if HIV infection.

That Canyon Ridge — or indeed any American Church — would continue to defend its association with Ssempa is, frankly unimaginable. But that is precisely the case here. In a post to Grove City College professor Warren Throckmorton, Canyon Ridge pastor Mitch Harrison not only refused to disassociate from Ssempa, he said that Ssempa was among his “dearly beloved friends and family.”

This dearly beloved friend has been the public face for the “Kill-The-Gays” movement in Uganda. He eagerly embraced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill since its inception. Ssempa has been the instigator behind several forced outing campaigns, and he has hurled accusations of homosexuality toward rival pastors in an attempt to improve his own standing. Since the draconian bill’s introduction in Parliament last fall, Ssempa responded to international criticism by blatantly lying about the bill’s contents on several occasions. Those same distortions have been picked up by several leading American backers of the bill as well. More recently, Ssempa has resorted to showing hard-core graphic pornography in churches and press conferences in order to stir up hatred and revulsion toward gay people.

And Canyon Ridge is providing material support for all of this activity, while simultaneously generating positive press in Las Vegas for their “outreach” to the gay community. It’s time for the LGBT community in Las Vegas to make their presence known.

[Hat tip: Warren Throckmorton]

Update: Change.org has a petition urging the Southern Nevada Health District to demand that Canyon Ridge condemn Ssempa’s work in Uganda. The form automatically sends an email directly to the Southern Nevada Health District. You can sign the petition using the widget below:

Hawaii civil unions on potential veto list

As expected, Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle has put the civil unions bill on the potential veto list. (KHON)

At a press conference where she announced the items on her veto list, Governor Lingle said the civil unions matter would possibly be the most difficult decision of her career.

If Lingle does not veto the bill by July 6, the bill will go into law without her signature. Let’s hope that in the meantime, Lingle finds herself in a hospital near a lesbian that is desperately begging to see her partner or stuck on a plane next to a gay man who has just figured out how much more he pays in taxes than his straight coworker.

Or perhaps that she finds a moment to consider the responsibility that every governor is given to do what is right and best for all of her constituents without consideration to the lobbying efforts of those who seek preference, privilege, and advantage over others.