Recap of the year - Spain December 30

It was already by early December that the highest hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church called to a demonstration to be held on December 30th in Madrid. The motto of such mass movement, they said, was to promote Family.

Traditional catholic family, that is. Rouco Varela and other ultraconservative monsignori e prelatti dalla chiesa have been claiming, protesting and warning that divorce, abortion and same sex marriage only could lead to dismembration of the whole society, war, and destruction. If people were less read than we are today, Rouco would have possibly blamed famines, hurricanes, earthquakes and the whole War on Terror on same sex marriage. Not many of you, readers, may remember when cardinal Rouco claimed and shouted, just some months before July 2005, that the gates of Hell would literally open on Madrid if Spain dared to legalize same sex unions. But it's not just that issue today. Abortion (they claim to be pro-life but never moved a single finger to protest war or starvation), divorce (Roman Catholics would not recognize divorce, but the Church's got its own court where, if you have money enough, you can have your marriage removed), an educational reform introducing a new, much needed subject, Education for Citizenship, which Rouco and his adlatere find partisan and interested (they would instead teach the Roman Catholic Catechism, of course)... and their own political support for the most right-winged parties, that led to call for such a demonstration.

With invaluable support from autonomic authorities in Madrid, who are close to the Opus Dei or the Legion of Christ, the Spanish Roman Catholic Church staged a reunion of Catechism thumpers. Estimated figures ranged a lot depending on them being Church estimates, police estimates or whatever. Some people said there were more than 1 million people. According to an independent blog which took in charge making estimations for Madrid's demonstration, there were between 80,000 and 150,000 people in such demonstration. But don't worry, Jesus loves you, and will multiply demonstrators the same way he did with fish and bread.

Eventually, some intelligent guy said what must be said about such people. El Teleoperador writes, in Spanish, that:

Christians should be demanding for free abortion, for express divorce and for same sex marriage worldwide, because forbidding these things deprivates them (Christians) from proving the Lord the strenght of their faith. Christians should demand such rights first, then renounce them, and try to convice the rest of us to renounce too. That's what logic says, no? But of course which logic could be embedded within people who believe they can talk to doves?

Party for the Rights will be partying for all our rights extensively today, wishing you all a Happy New Year. Take good care, stay cool, keep safe, and do nothing we wouldn't party about.

Blame it on the teens

Incredible as it could seem, Bernardo Alvarez, bishop of Tenerife (Roman Catholic) said that "there may be, and in fact there are, teens no more than 13 years old, that not only want but provoke molesting" in the sexual sense of the word (as if it had any other), informs El Pais, in an interview on the Canary Islands newspaper La Opinion.

In less politically correct words, Bishop Alvarez says that if you're a teen in the islands and want to sing in your church's choir you'd better be an ugly, chubby boy, unless the bishop himself gets turned on by chubbies and cubs, in which case you'd have the chance to be molested by higher hierarchies of the Catholic Church.

Traditionally, April's Fools Day in Spain is being celebrated on December 28th. I'm writing this thing 30 minutes before dec 28th starts so it's no joke.

Technorati tags: Abominations and Deadly Sins, Catholic church molesters

How well do you know your world?

Hey, it's not only LGBT rights worldwide, and diatribes against organized religion. Procrastinating the World Wide Web one comes across games like this, the Traveler IQ Challenge. On my first try I scored 491,686 points as of Level 11 (and couldn't get to Level 12, buaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh). And since the guys at Travelpod are so nice that let me embed the code here, let's see if that works or not. Oh, and sure I'll be adding this one to my Facebook.

 

This Traveler IQ challenge is brought to you by the Web's Original Travel Blog 

 

Technorati tags: Gaming, Procrastinating the World Wide Web

Italian reparative therapy, and exorcising homosexuality out.

Via Vecchifroci I came to know about Davide Vari, an Italian journalist who posed as homosexual in order to enter religious "reparative" therapy circles. Though affiliated somehow with NARTH, the people involved in ex gay movements in Italy are also affiliated with the Catholic Church (Roman, that is), and Vari dissects the process and procedures of diagnosis and therapy in an article published in Liberatione, but also in his own blog. For those of you understanding Italian, this is the full text of its report. In brief, as I'm not really fluent in Italian, Davide posed as a gay man having had "full sexual relationships" with other men "both active and passive", and conducted a series of interviews with priests and psychologists, undergoing what he clearly describes as the Minnesota Test for purposes of measuring his degree of homosexuality, perceived in such circles as a deviation from natural law, perversion, or neurosis, depending on the interviewer.

Prompted by this article, Arcigay's president, Aurelio Mancuso, issued an statement asking to the proper Health institutions in Italy to watch carefully those reparative "therapies" and reminding that as of May 1990, the World Health Organization declassified homosexuality as disease and filed it into a natural variant of sexuality.

Of course, Catholics will not stay quiet about this statement, perceived as a direct attack to the Church: Catholic World News affirms that such WHO declassification of homosexuality was a success of The Homosexual Lobby — whenever I read "Homosexual Lobby" I can't help figuring out some sort of obscure and evil council of leather daddies, smoking cigars, plotting the conversion of all the world's children into gays and lesbians over a huge plasma round screen in the middle of an oval table. It might sound funny but it's the 21st century and you can't bring up again the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, can you? — plus defending their psychologists in the worst way they could to the eyes of a former Catholic: building their academic authority in their militancy with the Legionaries of Christ.

But on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, AlterNet offers an interesting interview with Scott Harrison, who

"desperately tried to change his sexual orientation in various "ex-gay" ministries for eight years, three of them as a ministry leader in Southern California. Most of his experience with ex-gay groups — Christian organizations that see homosexuality as a choice that can be changed with proper therapy — was with Living Waters and Desert Stream, two curricula of a national ex-gay network that has more than 80 branches today. When Harrison joined in 1982, he felt ex-gay ministers were then a band of compassionate outsiders attending to the first AIDS victims. But by the end of that decade, Harrison had taken note of the movement's increasing radicalism, symbolized for him by the minister at the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in San Pedro, Calif., who performed an exorcism on him in an attempt to cast out the "demons" said to be the cause of his homosexuality. Harrison finally quit the movement in 1990 after deciding he could, after all, reconcile his sexuality with his Christian faith."

Technorati tags: Ex gay, Reparative therapy, Italy, Davide Vari

EHRC offers funding to grassroots organisations

Copypasting from Pink News due to its importance. If any reader's got a programme that can be included in these terms, go ahead and seek funding.

A grants programme worth up to £10 million aimed at funding grass roots organisations across all areas of equality was launched by the Equality and Human Rights Commission yesterday.
The funding scheme has developed three areas for priority funding.
Applicants from organisations working to promote good relations, highlight equality and human rights and case work will be encouraged.
Examples include reducing the impact of hate crime, working with the media to promote greater awareness of equality or human rights issues and providing legal advice to victims of discrimination.
In Scotland the Commission is not currently empowered to fund activities promoting human rights but will be able to fund eligible activity to promote good relations, promote equality and carry out casework in Scotland.
Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission said:
"Learning to live together is essential if we are to prosper in these times of rapid change.
"Managing the consequence of this change at a local level is essential.
"I am therefore delighted to be announcing a grants programme of £10 million to harness and nurture grass roots equality and human rights organisations.
"By working in partnership with local and community organisations we will ensure advice and support is delivered into every part of Britain."
The Commission will launch a consultation regarding its permanent funding scheme in April 2008. The results will be announced next year.
The deadline for grant applications is 5pm, February 4, 2008.
Successful organisations will be announced on March 31, 2008 and will be funded for a 12 month period commencing from April 1st.
Awards can be made of up to £120,000 per application.
Application packs along with eligibility, guidance notes, good practice examples and frequently asked questions are available online here.

City of Rome puppet of Vatican

"The city council in Rome has blocked plans for a domestic partners register for same-sex and heterosexual couples.
The Vatican, which is an independent state within Italy as well as the seat of the Roman Catholic church, had vehemently opposed the measure." From Pink News.

Now it'll be certainly curious to see how Rome, and Italy at large, complies with the newly issued European Union Chart of Rights, given that Italy doesn't have any sort of excluding signature in the same sense that Poland got it, so that rights wouldn't be applied to homosexual citizens. And given that UK civil partnerships are recognized in Spain as marriages, and that seems to be a common trend all over the countries comprising the European Union, one wonders for how long would a British civil partnership stay unrecognized in Italy or Poland. After all, it might be a matter of courts, but in the end we're going to have homosexual marriage in the European Union. Or is this just my wishful thinking?

Technorati tags: Italy, Vatican, Gay marriage, Civil partnerships

Hungary moving away from fascism

While the Budapest's prosecutor "has accused a far-right group recently established in the country of racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism and asked a court to disband it", "Hungary's parliament yesterday approved the Registered Partnership Act. From January 1st 2009 lesbian and gay couples will have almost identical rights as married heterosexual couples in common law", in accordance with the newly signed Chart of Rights for the European Union, which sadly won't be applied in Poland in full, because of Polish authorities' fear that such Chart of Rights could pave the way for homosexuals to become citizens in full.

Technorati tags: Hungary, Poland, European Chart of Rights