gay Posts

It's up on the sidebar and featured on QuakerQuaker, but I want to give an added boost to my friend Kevin-Douglas' post "Why I bother with religion." I've written about the Emergent Church / Quaker experiment that Kevin-Douglass is helping to organize down in Baltimore. Check out their new'ish website, http://www.setonhillfriends.org/ Here's a snippet of today's post:

Organized religion is based in community. Being in a community challenges me. Simply hanging out with my friends and engaging my family isn't enough. The risks of such an intentional community and the support available therein offer so much more than if I just do what comes easily or go along with what exists around me. I'm challenged in community. I'm held accountable. And while it could be said that I could get this out of a gay rights group, or being part of an ethical society, the truth is that in a religious community, we all seek to go much deeper than the psychological or emotional levels. We seek to understand that Mystery -- God. We seek to understand that transformative and healing power that comes from that Mystery.

Kevin-Douglas originally posted it to Facebook earlier today and I asked if he would sign up to QuakerQuaker and post it there. There's a lot of great stuff that goes up on Facebook and it's a useful tool for keeping in touch with friends, but most posts are not visible beyond your own Facebook friends list (it depends on your privacy settings). If you post something really good about Friends or belief on Facebook, seriously consider whether you might repost it somewhere more public. If you don't have a blog handy, you can do what KD did and post it on QuakerQuaker, where every registered user has blogging capabilities (it creates a bit of a metaphysical connundrum for the QuakerQuaker editors, as it means we'll be linking QQ posts to the QQ site, but that's fine).

• Qr Agitator reviews some autism books
  Reviews Temple Grandin's "Thinking in Pcitures" and Paul Collins' "Not Even Wrong: Adventures In Autism"
  (tags: autism books)
• WIRED: The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know
  Autistics like Baggs are now leading a nascent civil rights movement. "I remember in '99," she says, "seeing a number of gay pride Web sites. I envied how many there were." This movement is being fueled by a small but growing cadre of neuropsychological r
  (tags: autism)
• NYTimes: How About Not 'Curing' Us, Some Autistics Are Pleading
  This school's program does not try to expunge the odd social behaviors that often make life so difficult for [autistics]. Its unconventional aim is to teach students that it is O.K. to "act autistic" and also how to get by in a world where it is not.
  (tags: autism)
• More substantiated rumors of immenent Flickr video from TechCrunch
  Yahoo PR and other employees are still dead quiet on the subject (I asked every one of them at the party tonight), but the buzz is growing and the leaks haven't been totally contained. Get ready for Flickr Video. It's coming. Really.
  (tags: tech tech.flickr comment)
• Google's tips for making information universally accessible
  You can think of the Google crawler as the world's most influential blind user. The content that matters most to the Googlebot is the content that matters most to the blind user: good, quality text.
  (tags: tech tech.seo tech.design)
• URL Trick in Gmail
  And my comment about how to use it with Remember the Milk.
  (tags: comment tech.organization)
• Photoset from Congo Yearly Meeting
  89 photos from two visiting British Friends
  (tags: quaker quaker.africa)

Quaker Storytelling as Religious Ed: how do you teach a religion that can't be defined?

Howard Brinton's Quaker Journals: Varieties of Religious Experience Among Friends

A guest piece from Rob of Consider the Lillies

Rob describes himself: "I’m a twenty-something gay Mid-western expatriate living in Boston. I was inspired to begin a blog based on the writings of other urban Quaker bloggers as they reflect and discuss their inward faith and outward experiences. When I’m not reading or writing, I’m usually with my friends, traveling about, and/or generally making an arse of myself."

There's lots of good commentary on the CBS/NBC refusal to run the church ad that dares to think gays and lesbians should be allowed in their church. First two Quakers, then a political commentator, the a list of links.

In this election, religious conservatives were able to craft a message making same-sex marriages look like an afront to apple pie and baseball and of course people voted against it. What if we could have somehow framed this election with the details of human suffering that these laws suggest?

Now available for the fashionable Bush-era bumper. Proceeds go to support the Nonviolence.org websites:
  

President George W. Bush has been re-elected for four more years. The man who led the United States to two wars in four years and whose policies in Afghanistan and iraq continue to create chaos in both countries will get four more years to pursue his war of terrorism against the world. Americans will not sleep any safer but will dream ever more of conquering and killing enemies. We'll continue to sow the seeds of wars for generations to come.

I was worried when Senator John Kerry unexpectedly picked up in the primaries to become the Democratic presidential candidate. In his patrician upbringing he was very much like President Bush, and they actually agreed on many of the big issues — war, gay marriage, stem cell research. But in his personality, style and temperament Kerry was too much like former Vice President Al Gore.

Yes, I know Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election and that his loss was declared by mysterious chads and a handful of senior citizen judges in Washington, D.C. But an election as close as that one should have been seen as a resounding loss, no matter what the Supreme Court verdict. As Vice President, Gore had helped lead the nation to one of its greatest economic recovers in our lifetimes. He was also clearly smarter in the President, more knowledgeable and farsighted, with more carefully articulated visions of the future. But he barely won the popular vote, making the electoral college vote close enough to be debated.

Kerry is intellectual and aloof in the same way that Gore was. And clearly there are a number of American voters who don't want that. They want a candidate who can speak from the heart, who isn't afraid to talk about faith. They also want a candidate who can talk in simple, morally unambiguous ways about war.

And what about war? Would a President Kerry have really pulled out troops sooner than President Bush will? Who knows: Democratic Presidents have pursued plenty of wars over the last century and when Kerry proclaimed he would hunt down and kill the enemy, he spoke as the only one of the four men on the major tickets who actually has hunted down and killed fellow humans in wartime.

We can make an educated guess that a Kerry-led America would leave iraq in better shape than a Bush-led America will. Kerry has the patience and the planning foresight to do the hard coalition-building work in iraq and in the world that is necessary if U.S. military power will translate to a real peace. But a Kerry plan for pacification and rebuilding of iraq could easily have followed the path that Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson's did in Vietnam: an unending, constantly-escalating war.

Did Americans officially approve the country's past two wars yesterday? It's hard to conclude otherwise. Despite the lies of mass destruction and despite the willful misleading of the American people that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks and possessed weapons of mass destruction, something over 50% of Americans thought the Bush/Cheney Presidency was worth keeping for another four years.

But there's nothing to say a popular vote grants wisdom. In the next four years, those of us wanting an alternative will probably have many "teachable moments" to talk with our neighbors and friends about the deteriorating situation in iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe those of us whose pacifism is informed by religious understandings can cross the intellectual divide some more and talk about how our faith gives us a simple, morally unambiguous way to argue against war. The country needs strong pacifist voices now more than ever. Let's get talking.

ps: ...and donating. Nonviolence.org is a nine years old peace resource guide and blog. It's time it gets regular funding from its million annual readers. Please give generously and help us expand this work. We have a lot to do in the next four years!