The Gaytheist Agenda

You read that right. Albania may soon surpass the United States by providing marriage equality for its citizens.

Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha has announced his party will propose a law legalising same-sex marriage.

It is an unexpected move in a country that is still one of the most conservative in Europe and where homosexuality was illegal until 1995.

Mr Berisha acknowledged the proposed law might provoke debate but maintained that discrimination in modern Albania had to end.

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It has been accepted by Mr Berisha’s Democratic Party and will now come before parliament in the autumn.

In a predominantly Muslim country with almost no open homosexual community, the announcement by a conservative PM has taken people by surprise.

Goran Miletic, a Belgrade-based human rights lawyer, working partly on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues said it was an important step forward for the country.

“(It is) encouraging for the LGBT community in Albania, bearing in mind that they are not visible comparing to some other Balkan states like Serbia, like Macedonia or Croatia.”
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The reaction by Islamic and Catholic leaders has been vehement.

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Albania, though, has set its sights firmly on the goal of European Union membership, and it seems this proposed law is aimed at showing Brussels a progressive new image.
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I certainly hope they get this bill passed. Marriage equality is a fundamental right that should be recognized everywhere.

 

The RRRW insists same-sex couples shouldn’t be permitted to adopt because the children will suffer. Their excuses are many but have never been supported by legitimate research. In fact much of the time in their attempt to vilify LGBT people the RRRW resorts to distorting legitimate research, using outdated research, or citing phony/discredited “experts” to bolster their bogus claims. I have to wonder what they’ll do with this Danish study; distort it, denounce it, or ignore it completely.

Children with lesbian mothers have a lower risk of developing psychological illnesses than children growing up with a father and a mother, a recent University of Copenhagen study finds. The study is the first of its kind in Denmark.

The study found that while five percent of children from traditional families developed conditions such as depression or anorexia between 1992 and 2008, the number was two percent among the 387 children of lesbian parents participating in the study.

The findings, according to Merete Lauberg, of the University Of Copenhagen Department Of Public Health, suggest that concerns that alternative families have a negative effect on child development are over.

One reason for the lower rate could be that their mothers have encountered more resistance in their lives than heterosexual parents have.

‘Resistance makes you stronger, and that could be passed on to their children,’ Lauberg said.
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Excellent news!

 

What an adorable little story.

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The zoo, in Bremerhaven, northern Germany, says the adult males - Z and Vielpunkt - were given an egg which was rejected by its biological parents.

It says the couple are now happily rearing the chick, said to have reached four weeks old.
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The six “gay” penguins remain at the zoo, among them Z and Vielpunkt who are now rearing the chick together after being given the rejected egg.

“Z and Vielpunkt, both males, gladly accepted their ‘Easter gift’ and got straight down to raising it,” said a zoo statement.

“Since the chick arrived, they have been behaving just as you would expect a heterosexual couple to do. The two happy fathers spend their days attentively protecting, caring for and feeding their adopted offspring.”
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There have been previous reports of exclusive male-to-male pairings among penguins, some of which have also included the rearing of chicks.

Homosexual behaviour is well documented in many different animals, but it is not understood in detail, says Professor Stuart West, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford.

Professor West says it has been suggested that homosexual activity could serve various purposes - for instance, it may relate to social bonding and establishment of dominance among bonobo chimps, while in some bird species, females may come together to rear young.
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“Homosexuality is nothing unusual among animals,” Bremerhaven zoo said on Wednesday.

“Sex and coupling up in our world do not necessarily have anything to do with reproduction.”

I know the RRRWers had their eyes shut for that part about sex and coupling not necessarily having anything to do with reproduction. As to the part about “homosexuality is nothing unusual among animals”, cue the collective screech of “we’re not animals! we’re humans made in God’s image” etc, etc. If only such ignorance were truly blissful instead of harmful.

 

First a report that Irish children were physically, emotionally and sexually abused in Catholic run schools. (Related video available on YouTube ).

Reporting from London — Boys and girls in Ireland were beaten, sexually abused and emotionally terrorized for decades in workhouse-style schools run by the Roman Catholic Church where a “culture of silence” protected victimizers rather than the children in their care, according to a long-awaited report.

For more than half a century, chronic, excessive and arbitrary punishment created “a climate of fear” in which students at schools administered by Catholic religious orders lived “with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from.”

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These are some of the findings of the controversial 2,600-page report unveiled in Dublin on Wednesday after a nine-year investigation by Ireland’s Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse. Drawing on the testimony of nearly 2,000 witnesses, men and women who attended more than 200 Catholic-run schools from the 1930s until the 1990s, the commission painted a damning picture of a church engaged too often in covering up misdeeds instead of rooting out their perpetrators.
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The investigating panel found that sexual molestation was “endemic” in the church, committed by offenders who were often transferred to other institutions rather than dismissed or turned over to authorities.
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The Catholic Church sponsored scores of reformatories, orphanages and industrial schools where more than 30,000 boys and girls deemed to be delinquent or incorrigible were sent from the 1930s until the end of the 20th century. In some instances, the children’s only “fault” was to be born out of wedlock.

The commission found that corporal punishment and other forms of physical abuse were standard practice at many institutions for dealing with any perceived misbehavior.
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“One way of doing this was for children to be left waiting for long periods to be beaten. Another was when it was accompanied by denigrating or humiliating language.”
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Sexual abuse was also rife, especially in boys’ facilities, the report says. The religious authorities knew that such misconduct was a persistent problem, but children who complained were ignored or blamed for what had occurred.
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Next comes this outrageous claim from Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland, in his forthcoming memoir:

In the early years of the sex abuse scandal in Milwaukee, retired Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland says in his soon-to-be released memoir, he did not comprehend the potential harm to victims or understand that what the priests had done constituted a crime.

“We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature,” Weakland says in the book, “A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church,” due out in June.

Weakland said he initially “accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects on the youngsters: either they would not remember or they would ‘grow out of it.’ ”
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WTF? I mean, really, WTF?!? Does he really expect anybody other than his enablers and supporters to buy that pile of festering horse manure?

 
Surprised? No. Sickened? Yes. But please feel free to tell me again how religion instills moral values and the non-religious are evil by default. I need the laughs.

 

Here is another wonderful guest article by Ebon.

“What a piece of work is a man” ~ Shakespeare, Hamlet

My mother had lesbian cats.

Seriously.

I was raised by my grandmother but when I was twenty, my mother and step-father’s marriage finally imploded and they split up. My mother took their female cat, Cass, with her. When she moved in with her current partner, he already had a female cat of his own, Sam. And they became, well, lovers. Sam was old even then, half-blind and deaf as a post so Cass would go out, hunt a mouse, stun it and bring it back for Sam to play with (which somehow manages to be both horrible and sweet at the same time). They shared bowls, shared a basket and yes, for all the gutter-minds out there, they engaged in the sex act.

One of the more common criticisms thrown at gay people is the accusation that homosexuality is somehow “unnatural”. Now firstly, have you ever actually looked at nature? If humanity had stuck purely with what was natural, we would be living in a tree, eating our meat raw and dying of dental abscesses. The life of man in the state of nature is, as Hobbes said, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Most of us are not aboriginals, most of us do not know how to live in harmony with nature. Even if we allow tool-making as “natural”, how many of us know how to make a decent bow or fletch arrows, how to make gunpowder or construct a snare? I know how to do those things, maybe a few of you do as well but how many? One percent would probably be being generous. The entire history of civilised humanity is a flight away from nature, a history of adapting nature to our own ends. Many ancient cultures (including the Roma) had a tradition that a communal fire was open to anyone that turned up and that was because, in the time when communal fires were common, the darkness was full of things with big teeth that wanted to eat you. The life of man in a state of nature is not The Flintstones, it’s having few natural weapons and being eaten by things with plenty of them. What saved humanity, what has made us the dominant species on the planet (unless Douglas Adams was right about the mice) is that we adapt nature to our own ends, change and refine it until it does what we want. So let’s not have any veneration of “nature” from people living a life which is entirely unnatural.

Secondly is that they’re just plain wrong. Now, we need to be careful with our definitions here because describing animals as “gay” or “lesbian” risks imputing human thought processes upon animals which do not share them but biologists have observed homosexual behaviour (that is, choosing to engage in sexual acts with a partner of the same sex even when mating partners of the opposite sex are available) in roughly fifteen hundred species. In about a third of those, homosexual behaviour is common and well documented . In Germany and Japan, penguins often form gay couples. When the German zoo authorities attempted to break the couples up by separating them and importing penguins of the opposite sex (largely to boost breeding numbers), it simply didn’t work. The zoo director remarked that the relationships were too strong and, amusingly, German gay rights groups protested the seperation. In American Bison, homosexuality is so common that the Mandan festival of Okipa (intended to ensure the bison’s return) concludes with a ceremonial re-enactment. The Lakota have a specific word for homosexual bison: pte winkte (meaning “bison two-spirit”). Giraffes virtually follow the old Greek saying of “a girl for duty, a boy for pleasure”, being more common than heterosexual coupling. Bonobos are almost uniformly bisexual. This listing could go on for some time but the point is made. Homosexuality is widely known in the animal kingdom and thus, in nature. Therefore, homosexuality is, by definition, entirely natural.

What is a uniquely human behaviour though, is homophobia. Again, we have to be careful not to apply human values because there is no such thing as “marriage” in most of the animal kingdom but nowhere in nature, excluding humanity, is there any kind of prejudice against homosexuality. Animals fight for all kinds of reasons; for territory, for food, for a mate or for dominance but in not one species outside humanity has violence ever occurred because one party took exception to another party shagging their own gender. Gay, straight, it doesn’t matter to them. If you can keep up with the pack, you’re fine.

When Cass died several years ago of cancer (which cats are prone to, get yours checked), Sam began to pine for her and when she died herself three months later, family tradition is that she died of a broken heart. When I think of the two of them or of my own two adored cats, Mac and Jelli (who died seven months ago and three weeks ago respectively), I sometimes wonder if they didn’t have the better deal. The life of a house cat is sleeping, playing, eating and being petted. We call ourselves an intelligent species but our feline friends don’t give a hoot about which god you worship or who you love so really, which of us are the intelligent ones?

“I think I could turn and live with animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one of them kneels to another or to his own kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one of them is respectable or unhappy, all over the earth” ~ Lord Summerisle, The Wicker Man

The Minister of Italy has decided not to prosecute Sabina Guzzanti for joking that Pope Ratzinger would “go to hell and be pursued by two big, gay and very active devils”.

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“I decided not to authorise it, knowing well the stature and capacity of the Pope for forgiveness,” Justice Minister Angelino Alfano said.
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I don’t know if I buy his reasoning. Nonetheless, Ms. Guzzanti will not be jailed for an asinine non-offense and that is a fine outcome.

 

Really, I’m not making this up.

Sabina Guzzanti, a popular actress and comic, had joked at an anti-politics rally that Pope Benedict XVI, known for his hardline views on homosexuality, would “go to hell and be pursued by two big, gay and very active devils”.

Rome’s prosecutor Giovanni Ferrara said he wants to start proceedings against her for “vilification” of the Pope under article of 313 of the penal code. Ferrara said that the offence caused by her comments went beyond satire.
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So why is it that these religious people can say all manner of hateful things about others, including condemning them to hell every little thing imaginable, but if someone does the same to them it’s grounds for legal action? Oh, that’s right. Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech only go one way with some people. Granted this is Italy and not the US, so our Constitution doesn’t apply, but apparently the unilateral nature of the principles still does.

And that “do as I say, not as I do” principle is universal, it seems.

 

I’m quite used to bigotry by now, and to the outrageous ways people act because of it. But after reading this story I could only shake my head in amazement that anybody could have such ludicrous notions.

An Italian court has ordered the government to pay 100,000 euros (£79,919) to a man who had to retake his driving test because he was gay.

Danilo Giuffrida, now 26, told doctors he was homosexual during a medical examination for military service.

The information was passed to the defence and transport ministries.

Mr Giuffrida was told to repeat his driving test or have his licence suspended because of his “sexual identity disturbance”.

Mr Giuffrida passed his test for the second time but his licence was renewed for just one year rather than the usual 10 years because of his homosexuality.

A court in Catania, Sicily, ordered the ministries to pay damages on the basis that Mr Giuffrida’s constitutional rights had been breached and that homosexuality could not be considered a “mental illness”.

The judge said the actions of the ministries showed “evident sexual discrimination”.

They actually believed that not only was Mr. Giuffrida potentially a poor driver just because he was gay, but that his license required more frequent renewals as well? Where do people get these bizarre ideas?

Never mind. I’d rather not know. I’m just glad Mr. Giuffrida got a good settlement. I also hope that, though the story doesn’t mention it, the involved employees got the shaft. They certainly deserve it.

 

Dutch Post-impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853. In addition to enriching the world with his many exquisite works of art he worked briefly as a teacher and as a missionary worker. Despite some quotes attributed to him, van Gogh likely wasn’t an atheist or even an agnostic as some believe though he may have experienced some doubts as many do. Nonetheless the world is a much more beautiful place for his having been here. So here is to Vincent van Gogh.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such— be it so; but I love, and how could I feel love if I did not live, and if others did not live, and then, if we live, there is something mysterious in that. Now call that God, or human nature or whatever you like, but there is something which I cannot define systematically, though it is very much alive and very real, and see, that is God, or as good as God. To believe in God for me is to feel that there is a God, not a dead one, or a stuffed one, but a living one, who with irresistible force urges us toward aimer encore; that is my opinion.