The 2022 Violence Against Women Act, which Congress re-authorized in March, includes the first federal grant program specifically designed to serve LGBTQ survivors of domestic and intimate partner violence. The new funding could lead to expanded trans-friendly services to which pastors and laypeople can refer
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. (1 John 4:18) Give in to love or live in fear. (Finale B, Rent, Jonathan Larson) The harm being done is real It is hard to know what to say about the profoundly
There is a right time for everything, and everything on earth will happen at the right time. (Ecclesiastes 3:1 ERV) My partner of 49 years and I did a spot of spring-cleaning in our home this morning, amongst which was the awful job of defrosting
Watching U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) skedaddle as fast as he could out of the U.S. Capitol — as the insurrectionists he had previously inspired with his famous raised fist (displayed while safe behind the lines of protection that Capitol police provided him) began destroying
So, just be happy instead A story is told of a little girl talking to her teacher about whales. The teacher told the girl that it’s physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human whole because of the size of its throat. “Well, Jonah
Recent Supreme Court decisions and state legislative actions have brought to the fore the tried and true idea that the variety of oppressions are all related. The forcing of women to give birth, the threats made by Supreme Court justices to end marriage equality and
No surprises here The recent release of that 300-page report of widespread sexual abuse and its cover-up by leaders and ministers in the Southern Baptist Convention (America’s largest Protestant denomination) is only a surprise to people who’ve been in denial about the millennia-long history of
If you want it. “I don’t want to live in this world anymore.” That’s what the voice in my head said yesterday as I learned of yet another mass shooting in yet another elementary school, taking away the precious lives of more children and those
How long, O Lord, must we listen to the totally bogus justification for marriage inequality that says: “Traditional marriage is between one man and one woman?” I suppose probably as long as we’ll hear all the other old, long-ago-debunked, bogus arguments against LGBTQ people. Historically
A personal paradigm shift Walking home alone, after speaking at my first gay rights rally in 2005, I couldn’t understand why I felt so empty and deflated. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the skills to communicate with a crowd. As a high-profile preacher in