This weeks show is “From Religion” I have two fascinating guys joining me: Michael Barnett and Andrew Wheatland (from JOY’s Spirit Lounge). A Christian and a Jewish perspective, but of course, nothing is as you might think!
They tell their very different coming out experiences, and share their stories of being gay men and how this impacted on their relationship with their religion, family and friends.
I dedicate this post to those people who believe they are more entitled to certain rights than other people.
I dedicate this post to those people who use religion to uphold bigotry and state that their god believes some people are sinful because of the way they live their lives.
I dedicate this post to those people who support those people who uphold bigotry and state that their god believes some people are sinful because of the way they live their lives.
I dedicate this post to those people who remain silent when those people who uphold bigotry state that their god believes some people are sinful because of the way they live their lives.
I dedicate this post to those people who know better and yet they remain tight-lipped.
I dedicate this post to those people who are so ideologically manipulated and brain-washed that there is no hope for them ever.
I dedicate this post to those people who believe fags should be killed.
I dedicate this post to leaders of states who don’t believe their citizens are all entitled to the same rights.
I dedicate this post to people who believe they are more worthy of certain rights just because.
I dedicate this post to hatred, intolerance, homophobia, transphobia, religious brain-washing, spinelessness and political cunning.
I dedicate this post to those people who enjoy beating a person to within inches of death and then tying them to a fence to see out the final hours of their life.
I dedicate this post to everyone who believes some people are less deserving of equal rights than other people.
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MACKLEMORE LYRICS
“Same Love”
(with Ryan Lewis)
(feat. Mary Lambert)
When I was in the third grade I thought that I was gay
‘Cause I could draw, and my uncle was, and I kept my room straight
I told my mom tears rushing down my face
She’s like “Ben you’ve loved girls since before pre-k shrimp”
Trippin’, yeah, I guess she had a point, didn’t she?
Bunch of stereotypes all in my head.
I remember doing the math like, “yea I’m good at little league”
A preconceived idea of what it all meant
For those that liked the same sex
Had the characteristics
The right wing conservatives think it’s a decision
And you can be cured with some treatment and religion
Man made rewiring of a predisposition
Playing god, aw nah here we go
America the brave still fears what we don’t know
And god loves all his children, is somehow forgotten
But we paraphrase a book written thirty-five-hundred years ago
I don’t know
And I can’t change
Even if I tried
Even if I wanted to
I can’t change
Even if I try
Even if I wanted to
My love
My love
My love
She keeps me warm
She keeps me warm
She keeps me warm
She keeps me warm
If I was gay, I would think hip-hop hates me
Have you read the YouTube comments lately
“Man, that’s gay” gets dropped on the daily
We become so numb to what we’re saying
A culture founded from oppression
Yet we don’t have acceptance for ‘em
Call each other faggots behind the keys of a message board
A word rooted in hate, yet our genre still ignores it
Gay is synonymous with the lesser
It’s the same hate that’s caused wars from religion
Gender to skin color, the complexion of your pigment
The same fight that led people to walk outs and sit ins
It’s human rights for everybody, there is no difference!
Live on and be yourself
When I was at church they taught me something else
If you preach hate at the service those words aren’t anointed
That holy water that you soak in is then poisoned
When everyone else is more comfortable remaining voiceless
Rather than fighting for humans that have had their rights stolen
I might not be the same, but that’s not important
No freedom till we’re equal, damn right I support it
And I can’t change
Even if I tried
Even if I wanted to
My love
My love
My love
She keeps me warm
She keeps me warm
She keeps me warm
She keeps me warm
We press play, don’t press pause
Progress, march on
With the veil over our eyes
We turn our back on the cause
Till the day that my uncles can be united by law
When kids are walking ‘round the hallway plagued by pain in their heart
A world so hateful some would rather die than be who they are
And a certificate on paper isn’t gonna solve it all
But it’s a damn good place to start
No law is gonna change us
We have to change us
Whatever god we believe in
We come from the same one
Strip away the fear
Underneath it’s all the same love
About time that we raised up
And I can’t change
Even if I tried
Even if I wanted to
I can’t change
Even if I try
Even if I wanted to
My love
My love
My love
She keeps me warm
She keeps me warm
She keeps me warm
She keeps me warm
Love is patient
Love is kind
Love is patient
Love is kind
(I‘m not crying on Sundays)
Love is patient
(I‘m not crying on Sundays)
Love is kind
(I‘m not crying on Sundays)
Love is patient
(I‘m not crying on Sundays)
Love is kind
(I‘m not crying on Sundays)
Love is patient
(I‘m not crying on Sundays)
Love is kind
(I‘m not crying on Sundays)
Love is patient
Love is kind
Did Tom Cruise make you gay? Do you want to pray the gay away? Invest 10 minutes in this delightful video. Contains adult themes.
If you’ve ever felt that the “Pray the Gay Away” approach might be helpful, or that Tom Cruise made you gay, it’s worth investing 10 minutes in watching this video by the “Queer as Fxxk” project.
When the carbon dioxide in your soda water needs to be approved kosher for passover, it’s time to realise that you’re being scammed to the max.
It never ceases to amaze me as to the level of craziness that some religions aspire to. On the Jewish festival of Passover it’s customary to abstain from food and drink products that are considered ‘chametz‘. Growing up, in the family house, I was made to observe this practice. It caused me great distress one year when as a little boy, maybe 8 or 9 years old, I went to a birthday party for a school friend, during Passover. The friend was not Jewish and Passover meant nothing to him or his family. And so the parents of the birthday boy took us all out to lunch at McDonalds, very generously no doubt.
Realising there was about to be a huge logistical issue for me, I worked up the courage to tell the parents I wasn’t allowed to eat bread, but I didn’t tell them this was because it was Passover. I didn’t know how to explain that to them. This caused a great deal of consternation for the parents and the restaurant, and humiliation for me, as I was not happy with the dilemma I had been placed in. Somehow the restaurant were able to concoct a “hamburger” without the buns for me. It was mostly meat and the salads, and probably had cheese in it as well.
The craziness of this was that my parents didn’t mind too much that the food I was eating at someone else’s party wasn’t kosher, yet they did mind that I ate bread during Passover. I’m glad my parents didn’t find out I was eating meat and cheese together. It would have been the end of the world. There is no logic to this at all. If keeping kosher matters, it should matter 100%, not partially. Not that keeping kosher is about logic either. It defies logic completely and epitomises irrationality.
Yesterday, some 35 years later, it came to my attention that the carbon dioxide gas used in making soft drinks needs to be approved by a kosher authority before it can be considered suitable for consumption during Passover. We’re talking about a substance that is a gas, that contains no solids or liquids. Yet apparently it’s possible that it can contain contaminants that are a by-product of its manufacture that would render it ‘chametz’. WTF.
No doubt many faithful will disagree but to me this is a scam of the highest degree, being perpetrated by a bunch of shonky con artists who are sucking money mercilessly out of people who could better spend it on more important things like health or education. My suggestion to those who are paying the exorbitant prices for kosher foods, especially at Passover, is to think about how gullible you are being and how you are being ripped off by the nonsense that keeping kosher is. Just go and buy an 88c bottle of soda water off the shelf at the regular supermarket and pretend it’s kosher. Your god won’t have the slightest clue. Trust me.
Kosher Australia Update
5 April 2012
Dear All,
We have just completed our investigation of the Schweppes unflavoured mineral water and soda water and found that they are chometz and kitniyos free and may be used on Pesach if purchased before Pesach (before 11am on 6/4/2012 if in Melbourne). Unfortunately the generic brands could not confirm that the carbonation sources were chometz and kitniyos free. (In fact they noted that starch based carbonation was used.)
We are still chasing down information regarding a number of medications and diet specific products and when & if information comes to hand, we will advise the community.
We remind all consumers who have yet to do so, to sell their chometz. Follow this link* to download the Kosher Australia mechiras chometz form which must be completed and faxed/email back urgently.
Ilana Leeds declared war on homosexuality today. She wrote some comments on Galus Australis (here and here):
…if they want marriage and all the other things that go with it,(Like the adoption of children) they need to give up their deviant practices and return to a heterosexual lifestyle and put themselves in order.
and
…those poor sick individuals who have to follow their unnatural desires and indulge in sexual practices that are not normal.
and
No I feel discriminated against, because I am not allowed to hold the view that homosexuality is deviant sexual behaviour, which it is.
It’s easy to understand how a person so steeped in their fundamentalist religious lifestyle can hold these extreme views. It’s because she lives in an extremely blinkered world, and in that world there are a lot of people who are ignorant of understanding and accepting the diversity of human sexuality.
What’s less easy to understand is how someone so bigoted and hateful as Ilana Leeds can be genuinely concerned about the hot topic of bullying in schools. She has a background in secondary education. You can read all about it on her LinkedIn profile (PDF). Further, she seems to be so interested in the topic of bullying in schools that she felt driven to write a novel about it, as you can see on her Twitter profile. Her latest tweet was:
I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if she didn’t get past the first line.
And now “educator” and anti-bullying crusader Ilana Leeds has submitted a snide comment to my previous blog:
Only hateful sweetie pie, because you don’t like what I am saying and if it did not touch a raw chord and have an element of truth you would not react so hard. Have a nice day.
So here you have it. One the one hand Ilana Leeds calls homosexuals deviants and unnatural, and on the other hand she claims to be concerned about bullying at schools. My guess is that the part of her brain that allows her to believe in god has grown so big that’s it’s squashed the part of her brain that bestows her intelligence and reason to the size of a shrivelled pea.
Often school kids are bullied because they are gay. And often they are the most likely candidates for suicide or self-harm. Any intelligent educator would know this, or be able to easily find it out, unless they have their head firmly lodged up their arse.
Ilana Leeds is one of the biggest bullies in town and as an educator she should be ashamed of herself.
Ilana Leeds posted a hateful comment on Galus Australis:
1. Same sex marriage – I do not particularly (along with a few others) like having homosexuality presented to me as ‘normal’. It is not and while I do not advocate discrimination against people who are practicing homosexuals, I think if they want marriage and all the other things that go with it,(Like the adoption of children) they need to give up their deviant practices and return to a heterosexual lifestyle and put themselves in order. Children deserve to have a normal family situation as far as possible.
Ilana Leeds believes her god demands she say this because she’s been brainwashed to believe it.
Ilana Leeds is a narrow-minded bigot whose attitudes and beliefs contribute to the high rate of youth suicide.
Her partner in crime Shoshana Silcove is just as shameful.
I received this invitation on Facebook from Chris Jones today. He’s trying to make the world a better place. It would be good if you helped him too.
Michael.
Chris says, “Hi Michael, I manage a Liverpool based guitar band who are planning to release a single to coincide with the Pope’s visit to the UK.
The song is a comment on religion in the 21st Century and all profits from UK sales will be donated to a secular based charity that works with victims of child abuse (For example NAPAC).
The recording has already taken place. The final mix and mastering will take place next week. You can, however, listen to a rough mix of the song @ www.soundcloud.com/thegreatdivide
The song includes lines such as:
“Everyone has a God they don’t believe in, Your one true religion is another’s superstition”
and
“Shout it, sing it, shout it out loud, You don’t need a God in your life now”
If we can achieve our goal, and have a song with such lyrical content, on top of the UK charts, on the day the Pope returns to the Vatican, I am confident it would stimulate great debate and engage young people.
Similar to the Rage Against The Machine v X Factor Facebook campaign we are looking to target a specific date to download the single. Depending upon which artists are currently in the charts as little as 30,000 to 40,000 downloads could see the song reach number 1. Long gone are the days when an artist had to sell in excess of 100,000 records to reach the top 10.
I appreciate that the genre of our song will not suite everyone’s palate, but the vast majority of the general public did not download the track by Rage Against The Machine because they were appreciative of their song. The influence that both You Tube and Facebook can exert has already been proven, and I am confident it can be utilised to make this work.
Your support would be greatly appreciated.
Please join the Facebook group entitled “Emancipation from Religion” and invite your friends to do the same.
What sort of people don’t take youth suicide seriously?
The responses so far:
Luke: people who put their own self interests ahead of the safety and well-being of vulnerable, young Australians…evil, hateful people…
Leigh: The Victorian labor party! We campaigned for YEARS and they were not interested! 13 young people in our tiny area (6 country towns) died in one year and they didn’t think it was a problem.
Jason: The church
Elvira: People who don’t see youth suicide as having any correlation with glbti community. People stuck in the middle ages.
Tony: People who don’t take GLBT youth suicide, or any youth suicide seriously have their head in the sand, and it is just an ignorant, disgusting and narrow-minded stance to take.
Gregory: Amazing comments Michael – good to see some people have an idea about what’s going on!
I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine where the real problem is.
The world needs more people like Rochelle Millar and Jonathan Keren-Black.
From time to time I find myself remembering Rochelle Millar. The world needs more Rochelles. The world also needs more Jonathans. They’re decent people. The world needs more decent people.
At the end of the Noah story, Noah plants vines, makes wine, and gets drunk. After all that he’d been through, you can hardly blame him! But in his drunken state, his usual sense of modesty and decency seems to have been set aside – something inappropriate happened. It is not at all clear what it was. It involved his son Ham, who may only have seen his father naked – whatever it was though, Ham was damned as a slave for all time.
In our own portion this week, Avram palms off his wife Sarai as his sister. She goes off to be one of Pharaoh’s wives. Clearly this is again an inappropriate, at least potentially sexual, relationship. And the bible abounds with such stories, such as Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar, who he thought was a prostitute, or Potiphar’s wife trying to entice Joseph.
The bible returns time and again to the theme of appropriate and inappropriate sexual relationships. You probably heard the story of Moses returning to the Israelites – I’ve got good news and bad news, he says. The good news is I’ve got it down to ten – the bad news is number seven is still in! So we are reminded that the prohibition against adultery even made it into the ten commandments.
Just because something may have been considered inappropriate to our ancestors of three thousand and more years ago does not mean it is necessarily the same for us today. For example, they decreed that if a woman was raped in a town, she and the rapist should both be put to death. The rationale is that if she wanted to, she could have called for help. Never mind that the rapist could be threatening her with a sharp flint or knife, or that no-one else dared go out to help. The kind of argument that rightly causes a furore in the western media even today if someone suggests it.
Bear in mind that the goal of our ancestors was to build a big, strong nation – to produce as many children as possible, to successfully conquer the land of Canaan. The first commandment, given to the animals and then repeated to humans, was P’ru U’rvu – be fruitful and multiply.
If anyone felt attracted to their own sex, that was not considered normal or permissible. It would not produce new children, more soldiers. And so, right in the heart of Leviticus, we seem to have two strong prohibitions on homosexuality – one who lies with a man as with a woman should be put to death. When, at a later stage, the ancient rabbis considered the matter again, they decreed that, even if you did have homosexual feelings, you should still marry and have children. It was not in the feelings that one was sinning against God, but in the action.
Let us wind forward to 1885. In Pittsburgh, the Reform movement of America held a conference and launched the so called Pittsburgh Platform, one of the formative documents of progressive Judaism. In part it read ‘we hold that the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domain of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism, the Bible reflecting the primitive ideas of its own age…’. In other words, we do not consider the Torah to be binding on us, when it seems to conflict with our modern understanding and insight. Now in 1885 it is likely that many of those wise rabbis of the Pittsburgh platform may well have been strongly homophobic. Hopefully today we are not. When we say that all are created in the image of God, we must truly mean it. All are different, and in sexual identity, some are heterosexual, some are homosexual, and some are in between, or move over time in their sexual identity. Today we understand that some people have a mismatch between their physical and emotional sexual identity. None of this makes people better or worse, right or wrong. Progressive Judaism, progressive religions in general, should not be prejudiced against any sexual identity. We must address and check our own prejudice, and consider and treat each person as an equal creation of the one, all-loving God.
This is why I spoke last year and again last month at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Multicultural conference. So far as we are concerned, people can be Jewish and Gay, and indeed for years we have been ordaining outwardly gay rabbis within our movement. Rabbi Zylberman kindly directed me to a website and centre at Hebrew Union College for the study of human sexuality and Judaism. There I found a prayer for coming out, and even one to use whilst taking medication for changing gender.
I am reminded of what an orthodox rabbi said at the end of the Jewish Christian Muslim conference last year: What I have to go back and explain to my congregation is that I didn’t meet Christians and Muslims, I met PEOPLE. It is the same with the Queer conference. I didn’t meet Homosexuals and Gays and Queers and Lesbians and Trans-sexuals – I met people, with cares and concerns about their lives and our world, just like everybody else. Sometimes, people like to meet in interest groups, where they share something significant and feel safe and comfortable – like AFL, or an Italian, or an Israeli, background. So we shouldn’t be surprised when gays sometimes also prefer to meet together – indeed they probably face far more prejudice from wider society than Italians or even Israelis!
I am delighted, therefore, to say that we at LBC are able to offer the Aleph group for gay Jews a home for some of their Shabbat, Pesach and New Year Havurot. And gathering together is also empowering. The more numbers, the more so. This is why the Gay Pride rallies have become so important. You might be aware of the huge battle being waged, so far through the courts, but sadly perhaps this week also on the streets, in Jerusalem.
This week the High Court finally ruled that is could go ahead, but Yaacov Ederi, the minister responsible for Jerusalem, called on police commander Ilan Franco to reconsider and to transfer it to another city given the confrontations expected. MK Nissim Zeev of Shas also called for the march to be stopped, saying that the participants should be sent for treatment. According to him 90% of the residents of the capital are against this demonstration.
On Tuesday the police arrested 14 orthodox protestors at an anti-Gay Pride demonstration. On Thursday they released 8 of them. They are not allowed to be in Jerusalem during the next two weeks.
On Thursday evening it was reported that the parade may be cancelled. If the police manpower necessary to safeguard it will interfere with general police operations, they may cancel it, says. Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter. Sounds like he’s been got at!
I don’t have the latest update – but no doubt Israel will be back in the news again this week! And of course, I hope it goes ahead safely and spectacularly. Jerusalem is the capital for all Israelis, not just the ultra-orthodox – within which also, I understand, and as you would expect, there are more than a few gay Jews to be found.
The bible, as we saw, was preoccupied with what it considered to be inappropriate sexual relationships, and, though we would no longer accept its definitions, we would concur that there are appropriate and inappropriate sorts of relationships, and times and places. Sex is ultimately a personal and private matter, as long as it is not exploitative or harmful. Perhaps it is really not the realm of religion?
Finally, I mentioned Aleph a few moments ago, but Melbourne also has a Jewish lesbian group, and one of its key members over many years was a lovely woman named Rochelle Millar who I got to meet just a few times over the past few years. Rochelle was also involved in running the Australian Gay Multicultural council that organises the conferences. Like me, she hailed from the United Kingdom, though her accent revealed that she came from across the Scottish border. She arrived here when she was 14. Michael Barnett knew her for longer than I did so I thank him for this information. He tells me that Rochelle was very proud of being a gay woman, and also of being Jewish. Through both communities she made many lifelong friends and was loyal to them all.
Rochelle had an infectious laugh and smile and a sense of humour and outlook on life that made people want to be around her.
Sadly, the pneumonia with which she was first diagnosed turned out to be aggressive lung cancer, and her health deteriorated fairly rapidly over the past few months. Yet up to the very end Rochelle had a smile on her face and a laugh in her voice. She was an amazing woman that everybody loved and who loved everybody. I believe that this was the closest to a Jewish ceremony that she had, and I am proud to be able to share it with you and with Michael and her other friends who are here this morning. I think Rochelle would be smiling, and would be proud. And I hope that we, as individuals and as a community, will all be a little more open to those who are a bit different, in some way or other, from ourselves. After all, are we not all people, and all made in the image of the one, loving God?
