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
Here’s a message you probably won’t hear at church this morning: You don’t need “church.” That’s right, you don’t need it. At all. You can live and do everything Jesus commanded and modeled without “church.” In fact, often better. With a steeple on nearly every
Right-wing politicians so far this year have proposed more than 325 anti-LGBTQ+ bills around the country, exceeding the previous record of 268 set last year. That’s no coincidence, as if these proposals have just arisen spontaneously from the grassroots. This is a well-funded national, top-down
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? (Hillel the Elder, first century BCE rabbi) The second [great commandment] is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ (Mark